Kotaku’s 15 Best Games Of 2024, Ranked

Trying to sum up 2024 in video games in an entirely celebratory way would feel somewhat dishonest. In recent years, our efforts to recognize the best video games of the past 12 months always come with a caveat: Yes, great games undeniably come out, but things are bad for the industry. The world makes another trip around the sun and things only seem to get more dire and precarious for people who make the video games we know and love. Workers are laid off at an unsustainable frequency, if their studios and projects aren’t shut down entirely. All that we have left to celebrate is the work that talented developers still manage to create in the midst of all this instability, and that’s what we’re here to do. It’s remarkable that even under such circumstances, so many games worth celebrating are still being released, and they deserve to be heralded with as much enthusiasm as ever, if not more. It’s games like these that keep reminding us of how vital, relevant, and extraordinary this medium can be, even if some of the people running the industry are making it so much harder for such games to be made.

Here’s how we arrived at this ranking: Each member of the Kotaku staff submitted a top ten list, with each game being allotted a point value depending on where it was placed. If someone ranked a game as their favorite of the year, it would receive 10 points, with the second-place game receiving nine, the third getting eight, and so on. Once the results of those ballots were tallied, there was some deliberation about the presence and placement of a few games, and in the end, we landed here. Without further ado, here are Kotaku’s top 15 games of 2024.

1000xRESIST is so dense and rich in themes that trying to sum it all up here in a few paragraphs feels like a disservice to just how much developer Sunset Visitor’s narrative adventure explores in its dozen or so hours. What starts off as a sci-fi exploration of identity in a society made up entirely of clones ends up interrogating so many ideas that its thesis could be articulated in as many ways as its diverging clones view the world. Despite everything it explores, 1000xRESIST feels singular in its vision, building upon its most basic ideas to deliver anime-inspired melodrama that leads to out-of-this-world conclusions grounded in the human desire for connection.

So much of 1000xRESIST is depicted through the memories of one woman, with her clones viewing and interpreting it all through their own eyes. Even then, however, they are limited by her perspective. 1000xRESIST ends on a note that suggests history can be defined by the victors in any conflict, no matter how just one’s cause might be. Its final moments ask you to remember what it means to hold that power and decide what to do with it. As much as 1000xRESIST juggles, it’s all in service of making you understand the position you’re put in during that final segment. You can resist something a thousand times over and not know what to do when you’ve finally won. 1000xRESIST’s ability to concisely reach that conclusion is a testament to what Sunset Visitor achieved. Lesser games would have caved under the weight of communicating so much narrative and thematic depth in such a short experience. — Kenneth Shepard

Wrong Organ’s psychological horror game Mouthwashing excels at packing heaps of mental anguish into a small space without once losing its grip on the point it’s trying to make. Its excruciating two hours tell the story of a delivery crew shipwrecked in space not losing their humanity, but rather facing the worst parts of what it means to be human.

Mouthwashing has been a hard game to sit with since I played it in November. It deals with the unbearable weight of the human condition while showing how the corporate machine grinds us into the worst versions of ourselves. But it never gives the worst person in its story the space to divert the blame for their actions, even as they try. Is every person’s life boiled down to the worst thing they’ve done? Are we not pieces of every person we’ve met and every experience we’ve been through, pieced together to form something that looks like a person? Can the pain we’ve caused be wiped away by painkillers shoved down the throats of those we’ve hurt?

Take responsibility. — Kenneth Shepard

I love a game filled with profound or thought-provoking moments. I also love having fun. Infinite Wealth fits the bill on both counts, but it puts the emphasis on fun with its zany, absurd antics, rewarding turn-based combat, and an endearing protagonist who serves as a great reminder that we should strive to see the positive side of difficult situations. My time spent with Infinite Wealth also reminded me that I don’t always need to find some emotionally overwhelming or intellectually fascinating reason to be enthralled by a game, I can just have goofy fun with loveable characters in relatable situations.

Read More: Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth: The Kotaku Review

Well, as relatable as the life of ex-Japanese gangsters can be. Infinite Wealth does have some serious elements, such as the protagonist’s complicated relationship with the world around him and the strange, uncertain conditions of his birth. But it also navigates perfectly innocent and silly stuff, like a first date gone wrong, the absurdity of the gig economy, and being inebriated with friends.

Infinite Wealth is also a hell of a good RPG. Combat in particular is excellent, fusing turn-based actions with real-time positioning that allows you to do things like line up attacks and send enemies flying into one another. The game also handles its side content particularly well, with objectives and activities that are more than happy to get out of the way of the main story if you’re not interested in tackling them. But if you do dive in, you’ll find some wildly satisfying and engaging elements to engage with, such as an entire resort management sim, a Pokémon-like collect-and-battle mini-game, and more.

As a newcomer to the Yakuza series, I was also delighted to find the story very approachable. On occasion, the game would reference previous events in the series that’d largely go over my head, but on the whole, the game was plenty capable of delivering a coherent, if remarkably silly, tale of ex-gangsters trying to survive normal life without getting sucked back into the hell of it all. — Claire Jackson

If you had a time machine and warped back to 2022 and told me that the Bloober-developed Silent Hill 2 remake would be not only good, but one of the best games of the year upon its release, I’d laugh. (Well, first I would ask you about the time machine, then I would giggle.) Nobody outside of Bloober and Konami had any confidence in this project and yet, when it finally launched in 2024, it ended up being a triumphant, confident, interesting, and worthwhile adaptation of the original PS2-era release.

In some ways the remake plays it safe, while in others it experiments with puzzles and pacing (not always successfully…), and the result is a remarkably faithful, sometimes predictable, but always engaging horror game that Silent Hill 2 veterans will enjoy. And even more impressively, newcomers to the franchise are likely to not only admire Silent Hill 2’s remake but walk away from it wanting to play the original version, too. And importantly, the Silent Hill 2 remake is fucking scary in a way other modern horror games sometimes aren’t. A remarkable game that will be talked about and played for years to come. — Zack Zwiezen

I was not ready for where Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 was going to take me. This narrative-driven game about a troubled woman tasked with solving impossible challenges for herself and those around her warranted a number of playthroughs for me, and it continued to live on in my mind for countless hours afterwards. In fact, it still does. While many might rightly critique Hellblade 2’s combat and its sometimes-mediocre puzzle sequences, Hellblade 2 remains a gripping, emotive experience if you come for its imposing, dark aesthetic and stay for the harrowing themes of struggle, perseverance, and mental illness.

Read More: Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2: The Kotaku Review

Hellblade 2 is as much a journey through the wilds of Iceland as they’re under siege from powerful, mythical beings as it is the tale of protagonist Senua’s struggle with her own self image. Many of the game’s moments can be examined from multiple angles, including the conclusion, which throws many of Hellblade 2’s fantastical elements into a contemplative place of uncertainty. What even is real? What are the heroic deeds on display in this game? Is it a vanquishing of giants? Or is it something deeper, more internal? Hellblade 2 invites this kind of thought.

And while the first game was rightly celebrated for its unique depiction of mental illness through the use of binaural audio which brought the voices in Senua’s mind to life (making headphones for it and this sequel a must), I found that this game takes that aspect further, with the voices in Senua’s mind persistently raising doubts in ways that really get inside your head. As someone who struggles daily with complex anxieties and traumas, I found Hellblade 2 deeply relatable. Though I don’t experience the same kinds of mental illnesses Senua does, the game accurately gives voice to what it’s like to wrestle with your own thoughts in complex, obsessive ways.

It may have a short runtime, and it might have made some sacrifices to the gameplay that made its predecessor so beloved, but taken on its own terms, Hellblade 2 is a memorable and powerful experience. — Claire Jackson

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is like a 17th-century Baroque painting: grand, ornate, ostentatious, and confounding. Why is the game so long even while so little happens in it? Why is it so gorgeous even as it spends so much time surrounding you with bland brown deserts and grey cliffs? How come there’s an open world if everything in it is heavily scripted and repetitive? What is the point of all those freaking minigames? Endless minutiae rendered with the flare, expertise, and grand designs of ancient masters.

FFVII Rebirth is a game that I found relentlessly engaging despite these questions. “It makes no damn sense…compels me though,” I thought to myself so many times while playing. Some games are greater than the sum of their parts. FFVII Rebirth’s parts are greater than the sum of most other games. It’s not quite a faithful, one-to-one remake of the middle section of the original game, nor is it a risky and bold departure. Rather, it’s a maximalist walking tour through a rich sci-fi fantasy world, blown up in evocative, beautiful, and occasionally heart-wrenching detail.

The card-based minigame Queen’s Blood is amazing. The flow of combat and the incredible camera work, especially during summons, represent the height of interactive spectacle. I can almost forgive the Cait Sith Shinra Mansion crate sequence because of Chocobo Racing, the Junon parade, the Gold Saucer VR play, and every other mini-game/ quick-time event hybrid that didn’t suck. But where FFVII Rebirth excels most is in giving timeless video game avatars the space to grow into regular people and break out hearts all over again. — Ethan Gach

A staggering achievement and, for my money, the year’s most surprising, captivating, and incredible game, UFO 50 is actually a collection of 50 games, all released in the 1980s by developer UFOSoft. The thing is, however, that UFOSoft never actually existed. Instead, these are new games, a wonderful smorgasbord of games in different genres—role-playing games, platformers, side-scrolling action games, games in which you explore interesting worlds and find nifty upgrades, and more.

Diving into UFO 50 is a wonderfully stimulating and sometimes bracing experience: you come across both the intimately familiar and the unfamiliar, games that require you to take a step back and grapple with their various elements as you come to grips with them. Some players have found this frustrating, or even called it evidence of bad game design. I couldn’t disagree more. Perhaps it’s that I’m old enough to remember the games of the 1980s vividly myself, and to recall how, in that era, running up against mechanics or systems you didn’t immediately understand was commonplace. For me, this process is often part of the fun; it feels like a real process of discovery, tinkering with a game until just how it works and what it’s asking of you becomes clear. It’s a kind of discovery that’s become quite rare in games today, but UFO 50 embraces it.

Of course, that wouldn’t matter much if the games in UFO 50 weren’t good enough to make all that experimentation worth it, but they are. Particular favorites of mine include Grimstone, a JRPG with an Old West-themed setting; Valbrace, a first-person dungeon-crawling RPG that switches to third-person action for combat; and Barbuta, UFOSoft’s “first” game, a slow-paced, mysterious adventure ostensibly from the early 80s. Each new discovery in Barbuta was a wonderful revelation, and eventually completing it (without looking up hints on the internet) was my most rewarding gaming achievement of the year. Alongside those, I also adored some of UFO 50’s breeziest and most accessible action games: Cyber Owls fuses the thematic zaniness of games like Battletoads to an assortment of gameplay types, from top-down, Metal Gear-esque infiltration to Bad Dudes-style side-scrolling punch’ em up; and Seaside Drive bathes you in glorious, summery vibes as you shoot down everything from attack helicopters to giant, flying wizard-sharks while speeding down a coastal road in a red sports car. UFO 50 is a thrilling reminder of how varied and creative video games can be, and it’s the one game this year that, more than any other, reminded me why I love this medium so much. — Carolyn Petit

A key moment I remember distinctly in Star Wars Outlaws was flying over to Tattooine, landing, and then walking into the famous cantina seen in the original 1977 film. Moseying around its iconic bar was incredible. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do since seeing the original film as a kid. And then, I left the bar and kept walking out into the rest of the city. And then past the city. Into the dunes and rocky cliffs; areas never seen in any Star Wars movie or show before. That was maybe even more mind-blowing. Finally, I had a giant, photorealistic recreation of Star Wars and I was free to wander about it, discovering both iconic locations and spots never before seen. That’s when I knew Outlaws was one of my favorite games of 2024.

Sure, the game’s story is very Star Wars-y and I like it a lot. Yes, the gunplay feels wild and loose in a way that reminds me of the barely choreographed action of the first film. And of course, I adore Nix—your in-game pet. All of that stuff is great. But a lot of Star Wars Outlaws isn’t. The forced stealth sections, the space battles, the clunky speeder bike, and the janky open world.

But whatever, I don’t care about any of that stuff because I was able to mingle through a crowded market on Tatooine and grab some sci-fi street food at a nearby vendor, all while recognizable Star Wars aliens walked by me. Star Wars Outlaws lets me truly immerse myself in a franchise I love so much, and that’s enough for me. — Zack Zwiezen

Half the games on this list are giant releases that are trying to give you a little bit of everything. Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is a bite-sized gem that repeatedly riffs on the same core concept, and doesn’t stick around long enough to trip over itself. Thinking back on developer Furniture & Mattress’ sublime puzzle-driven adventure, I think it’s been long enough now since my first playthrough that I no longer remember all the solutions to its environmental puzzles and complex boss fights, and it was so magical the first time through that I’m seriously contemplating a revisit.

Arranger is the type of game that can be described with words but is best understood in motion. There’s something intuitive about how its grid-like paths shuffle around as you move through them. So many of its puzzles can be solved just by feeling your way through its world as it shifts beneath your feet. By the time you’ve spent just a few minutes with Arranger, you come to understand how to navigate its terrain and manipulate it to your needs. One sign of good puzzle design is that you don’t need a giant text bubble to explain it, and Arranger is at its best when it just lets you exist in its ever-moving space and figure it out. Doing so remains one of the most satisfying experiences in the genre, and if the clever puzzles weren’t enough, the heartfelt writing woven into every challenge keeps the world fresh beyond its moving floors. — Kenneth Shepard

Some games are overwhelming in their scope and intricacy; others, like Helldivers 2, are pretty straightforward but manage to get a ton of mileage out of doing a few things extremely well. Arrowhead Game Studios managed to take a very simple idea—shooting tons of aliens in open fields—and turn it into one of the most tense, funny, and memorable experiences of the year. Other multiplayer games might get in their own way, clogging up the gameplay-to-fun pipeline with all sorts of unnecessary and overcomplicated junk. Not Helldivers 2.

While it’s stayed fresh for almost a full year now thanks to a scary cadence of new updates, patches, and immersive in-game storytelling and content drops, the core appeal is the same as it was on day one: drop down onto a planet, meet some randos, and run, laugh, die together. No other game in recent memory has made scraping through hell and high water feel quite so exhilarating, earned, and enduringly surprising no matter how many times you keep doing it. Helldivers 2 is precise, punchy, and endlessly entertaining. It’s a masterclass in modern live-service gaming, but with all of the heart, artistry, and joy of an old-school arcade classic. — Ethan Gach

Metaphor: ReFantazio really couldn’t have come out in a more appropriate year. Atlus adapts Persona’s social sim management mechanics to a medieval fantasy setting with a practiced hand, and the result is the creative team’s most impactful and consistent RPG yet, one that shows it’s not willing to simply rest on its laurels after years of success.

Building off of Persona and the broader Shin Megami Tensei structure, Metaphor: ReFantazio finds Atlus nailing its tried and true formula but with a better sense of scale. It’s as if Atlus let a skilled editor loose on Persona, and they both trimmed down the bloat that has made these games so hard to parse over the years, as well as helping to alleviate longtime issues with the studio’s treatment of certain characters and its handling of political themes.

Metaphor maintains the tough-as-nails turn-based challenge of Shin Megami Tensei while adapting Persona’s high school social-driven loop to the process of running a political campaign. There are fewer people to meet than in the studio’s other games, but Metaphor focuses its energies on establishing a strong thematic throughline that unites the characters, and Atlus achieves that here more effectively than it ever has in the past. Each conversation you have, mission you take on, and battle you face feed into that goal, and it makes every moment of Metaphor feel like it matters in a genre that has typically thrived in the meaningless mundane.

But its overtly political story of fighting prejudice and injustice isn’t just about being ideologically opposed to those ills. Metaphor’s greatest achievement is in how it manages to weave threads about political activism and fantasy-based escapism together to create a pointed story about how we retreat into fiction when shit gets hard. Even if it’s lacking in subtlety and has its moments of poor judgment (looking at you, Catherina subplot), we need stories like Metaphor: ReFantazio when things are bad. We can’t retreat into fiction and call it activism, but we can use it as inspiration and encouragement for the real action we must take. — Kenneth Shepard

Poker sims have been a stalwart of gaming for as long as I can remember, going back as far as those pixelated demos on magazine coverdiscs for Deluxe Strip Poker II. Almost none have been worth playing, not least because CPU players are incapable of understanding the game and playing it with anything resembling human skill or behavior. It turns out the solution was hiding all along: change all the rules and make it about cheating.

I think it’s indicative of just what a major impact Balatro has had that it feels so much like a game I’ve been playing forever that I have checked at least three times to be sure it should be on this list. Surely it at least came out in 2023! But no, its triumphant release was indeed in February of 2024, and it’s certainly been the one game I’ve come back to most frequently since.

Balatro takes the rogue-ish elements of a deckbuilder like Slay the Spire, but puts them into a deck made up of traditional playing cards, eschewing all the usual dressings of a fantasy setting. It’s poker rules, kinda, except where in the right conditions you can make a straight with just four cards and that skips over a number. Or the much-coveted five-of-a-kind.

Something that most interests me about Balatro is how—aside from wrinkles introduced by the numerous rule-changing Jokers that can be found—the main adjustment that’s made to your game between attempts is within you, rather than via a tweaked deck. You get better at it. You develop new tactics and approaches, adapting on the fly based on the opportunities that come your way on any given run, and inevitably grow more skilful. That’s so much more rewarding than the game essentially getting easier because of unlocks you added, as is often the case in this genre.

It’s also stupidly clicky, and the “one more go” factor registers dangerously high. It’s such a pleasure that what could have been a minor indie hit has instead gone on to become one of the most popular games of 2024. — John Walker

There is a genre of indie games in which it’s all about the impossible cleverness of the developer, layers of irony folding into one another, online communities picking apart secrets buried within secrets, and the whole thing just seems exhausting. Animal Well is the antithesis of all this, while being better at delivering the same!

Animal Well is a wonderful platform game in its own right, even if you “only play it once,” or choose not to continue after you reach its initial ending. You will have a very satisfying experience in a fascinating pixel world, solving intricate puzzles, learning the game’s unique mechanics, and rewardingly fathoming how to access new sections of a Metroidvania that seems to defy linear space. You could play it like that, and walk away happy.

Or you could become intrigued by all those eggs.

This is a game you literally cannot fully complete without out-of-game collaboration, one that requires shared knowledge and discussion. As you peel back the layers, you not only realize that it just keeps getting deeper, but also that the layers you peeled were far more meaningful than you’d recognized at the time. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, a seven-year creation by a solo developer, that wants to reward you more and more the further you want to dig.

But, crucially, it’s also a stunning puzzle-platformer within all that clever-clever framework—so much so that once you’ve finished that core game, you’ll likely be so desperate for more you won’t be able to help but start delving. — John Walker

After 10 years away from the series, BioWare had a lot to live up to with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The fourth RPG in the fantasy franchise makes a hard pivot into action and succeeds brilliantly, delivering fast-paced, expressive, engaging combat which rivals that in many of its contemporaries. It also brings in an almost entirely new cast of memorable companions while trying to wrap up over 15 years of story, and somewhere in the midst of all that, it has to make good on a cliffhanger that has been hanging over the franchise for a decade. Somehow, The Veilguard manages to pull off all of the above with a level of refinement not seen in anything BioWare has done before. The Veilguard has been divisive, but even so, here I am, writing about it as #2 on our 2024 Game of the Year list.

I came into The Veilguard jaded, feeling that BioWare had lost the plot in its constant attempts to make Dragon Age an anthology series, each with a different protagonist, even as it focused on presenting a world influenced by your heroes and their decisions. Some of The Veilguard’s greatest failings are in its inability to marry an anthology structure with the choice and consequence BioWare has become synonymous with, but what it loses in a lack of carryover from decade-old games—importing only a handful of decisions from its direct predecessor—it makes up for in being probably the best foundation for a brighter future the series has had since Dragon Age: Origins.

The Veilguard is all about wrapping up loose ends and paving the way for the next generation of Dragon Age heroes. Some of the game’s most moving moments are ones in which it feels like you’re watching an origin story unfold as the heroes of before pass the torch to the next young whippersnapper doomed to save the world. New hero Rook is one of the best-realized heroes BioWare has ever created, giving you some of the most thorough tools yet to define who your character is in ways that extend beyond how they fight and what they look like. But despite how much wonderful specificity and detail you can bring to your own Rook, their story is universal for long-time fans of BioWare’s fantasy series. It’s not all great, as there’s an unnerving sense at times that Rook isn’t the one who should be here to watch history be uncovered. But the long-hidden truths they unearth about the world of Thedas are by turns satisfying, thrilling, and shocking, and The Veilguard manages to wield the uncertainty about Rook’s worthiness to pave the way for one of BioWare’s best finales.

Each tale it tells on the way to its climactic battle, whether it be Neve Gallus fighting for the city she loves or Davrin uncovering Grey Warden history, feels like a fresh start for this world. Given Dragon Age’s past, it’s hard to tell if The Veilguard is setting the series up to finally shed the weight of its long, overarching lore, or if it is ready to finally use it to its advantage with more forethought. But for the moment, The Veilguard did exactly what it needed to do. It put BioWare back on track with Dragon Age to do what it does best: create worlds for us to inhabit and define who our heroes are. We’re given a space to create, destroy, fall in love, hold violent grudges, fight for what we believe in, support those around us, and ultimately save the world we’ve helped define. — Kenneth Shepard

Astro Bot combines the best of 3D Mario platforming and Crash Bandicoot’s arcade-y death gauntlets into a gorgeous, whimsical, and fun adventure through an elaborate, sci-fi amusement park. It feels like a much bigger game distilled and refined down into its most important, impactful, and revelatory parts. Each moment is designed to spark joy, from the simple pleasures of pulling on a string and having what it’s attached to explode into a cloud of confetti to elaborate, multi-stage boss fights against giant octopuses and robot genies.

Platformers are an old genre born of the limits of long forgotten hardware, and they aren’t always breeding grounds for surprise and innovation. But even constrained by familiar frameworks, Astro Bot works tirelessly to insert clever ideas and extract maximum satisfaction from them before quickly moving onto the next carefully crafted setpiece. The results can sometimes be so effortless, it almost feels like you’re gliding through the game rather than actually playing it. And that’s when Astro Bot gets smashed, zapped, or popped, waking you from your comfortable slumber so that you can experience the delight of eventually slipping back into the game’s well-worn grooves like a marble gliding through a Rube Goldberg machine made from bubble gum plastic and fond memories. — Ethan Gach