Presented in no particular order.
Home Safety Hotline – Night Signal Entertainment
HSH is an incredible entry in the ever-expanding “analog horror” genre, and like all the best horror games, it completely avoids jump scares and “screamers.” You play a remote worker who takes phone calls from individuals and has to identify what household hazards from which they may be suffering – starting with things like bed bugs, house flies, and frozen pipes, before gradually being introduced to stranger phenomena. HSH really knows how to mess with the player and keep them on their toes.
Riven: The Sequel to Myst (2024) – Cyan Worlds
One of two remakes that made my list this year, Riven has always been a memorable entry in one of my favorite game series of all time. The problem, though, is that the original Myst entries’ 2d slideshow format has become less and less fun to play – puzzles that should be rather simple are made infuriating because, for example, it’s simply hard to tell what direction you’re facing, unable to map out a puzzle in your mind. With this fully real-time remake (and partial re-imagining) though, I’ve finally been able to fully experience this game without all those technical frustrations, and it was easily my favorite puzzle and environmental storytelling game this year.
Judero – Jack King-Spooner, Talha Kaya
I’ve followed Jack King-Spooner (jackspinoza on itch.io, a fantastic resource for free and indie games) for around ten to twelve years. His games tend to combine a DIY claymation/stop-motion aesthetic with the uncanny power to absolutely smother the player in a specific combination of moods and emotions. Judero, his latest game, is based on Scottish folk history and is a great starting point into his work.
If you’re not sure this game (or his games in general) would be right for you, his itch.io page has some *very* cheap earlier games of his – I highly recommend Blues for Mittavinda as a short mor(t)ality tale, or Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time In History if you want some absolutely bonkers sci-fi (which a friend once described as “cat drugs”).
Also: I haven’t found it yet, but my voice is in the game for almost a full second!
Silent Hill 2 (2024) – Bloober Team
I’ve been waiting for years for Bloober Team to make as good a game as I knew they could make, and they finally did it! Their previous titles like Observer and The Medium have displayed some absolutely incredible audio/visual effects work, but you also had to deal with jump scares and/or stretches of not-great storytelling. This remake, developed alongside some of the people who worked on the original Silent Hill games, is an absolute masterclass in environmental design and conveying a dreamy, oppressive tone.
This remake is worth it even if you’ve never played a Silent Hill game before – it’s weird, charming, and the grime. So much grime. This game has taken the championship belt (from the first Max Payne and perhaps the original Silent Hill 2) for most effective (and just most) grime in a game. The sheer volume and loving detail of grime had me just staring at decayed couches and rotted floorboards for hours.
Warframe – Digital Extremes
Warframe is an absolutely massive and intricate science fiction game with a lot of moving parts (and more than enough bugs), and it’s weird. The character designs are weird, the plot is weird, and you have a weird room in your personal space ship that’s made of meat. It’s the kind of weird that turns my brain upside down in a really great way – each new story beat doesn’t just add new maps or weapons, it often changes the nature of what the game is, who you’re even playing, and expands your capabilities in extremely unexpected ways. It also has the least exploitative free-to-play system I’ve ever seen – Digital Extremes has made huge changes since I’ve been playing to reduce or eliminate FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), a plague on bigger free-to-play games like Fortnite. I never feel like I’m missing something important while I take sometimes years-long breaks from the game – I can always just catch up when I feel like diving back in. You can also, if you’re cool, paint all your Warframes and weapons and spaceships into loud Nerf colors that irritate self-serious players you wouldn’t wanna be friends with anyway.
You know what? I don’t think it’s a shooter game. You do shoot in it, you shoot a lot, but shooting itself is rarely the end goal. Warframe is more like a farming game, in that the shooting is always in service to collecting what you need to create something new. The only downside to Warframe is that the vocabulary it teaches you to use will make you sound absolutely coconuts to anybody who hears you use it.
Shadows of Doubt – Colepowered Games
Shadows of Doubt is a very intricate detective simulaton – your main job is to solve crimes, murders and missing persons, etc – but the game presents you with an absolutely detailed gothic, anachronistic city environment in which to do so. Every room of every building is accessible (via legal and illegal methods), and all the inhabitants have their own schedules and habits – from where they live/work, all the way to where they drop their keys when they get home at the end of their day. The game also doesn’t supply you with a direct route to solving crimes – you have to observe for yourself, and create your iconic bulletin board with red thread stretched between different pieces of information.
You don’t even necessarily have to solve crimes, you can do odd jobs or just explore, or just exist in that space. It’s got lots of janky mechanics and bugs, but the developer is still putting out fix patches regularly, several months past its release out of early access. The patch notes themselves betray just how complex the simulation is – I saw one during early access that noted fixing a bug in which NPCs wouldn’t be able to find or reach the keys they had set down the previous night so they couldn’t lock their home on their way to work. Those people often just never left their apartment again, and I feel that.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Machinegames
I never thought we’d see another game like this again. Several of the developers who worked on this got their start at Starbreeze which, before its unfortunate fall, developed two of the best licensed video game titles ever: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, and The Darkness. Both of those games included a wonderful mix of exploring social hubs, talking and interacting with other characters, a really fresh mix of combat/exploration/stealth, etc. Those games felt great to play – the mood was really fun (if oppressive) and I was disappointed when Starbreeze moved away from that type of game.
Machinegames is most well known for their recent alt-history take on the Wolfenstein series, linear games with optional stealth and a lot of nazi-killing, which I liked in concept (and story) a lot more than I felt engaged with the execution of its game mechanics. Indiana Jones and the Big Ol’ Circle marks a return to the fun mixed-genre first person gameplay that put them on the map, and I am so grateful. The characters are great, the hub worlds are incredible (wandering around the Vatican and unexpectedly finding myself in a pixel-perfect Sistine Chapel was a very memorable experience), and of course you have a cool whip you can use on anything/anyone. You also still get to punch and hit a lot of fascists and nazis, which is a studio trademark about which I am not at all upset.
Pacific Drive – Ironwood Studios
A lot of games in the survival/crafting genre, even the good ones like Subnautica bounce me off of them for several reasons, be it their slow/repetitive pace or their inability to show me a world full of anything interesting. Some of these games feel more like they’re content chasing a successful genre than building something inspired. Pacific Drive is not that – not only have they added a lot of quality-of-life features to the item collecting/crafting aspect of the game to make it far less tedious, they also have developed a really interesting world that I actually want to learn more about. You get to drive a very customizable beat-up station wagon around a STALKER-like exclusion zone in the Pacific Northwest, dealing with anomalies that – get this – don’t always just kill you. There are floating clumps of garbage that will pick you and your car up and drag them around, there are creepy mannequins that don’t attack but do move erratically when you’re not looking, and that’s just the start.
Harold Halibut – Slow Bros.
I ended up having some problems with some of the tedious objectives later in the game, but in terms of story and tone and audio/visual design, Harold Halibut is something I’ll remember forever. 3D-scanned claymation characters and environments, Brazil-like whimsical oppressive bureaucracy, and a quietly engaging main character all come together to make a mood piece worth sinking into.
Star Trucker – Monster and Monster
Like Pacific Drive above, I’m a sucker for games with, for lack of a better term, “mobile bases.” I like the idea of a game where I can drive/fly/sail my home around with me as I explore and engage with the world, and Star Trucker is exactly that. You fly around a series of star systems in what looks like a big rig with rocket engines attached to it. You’re slow, lumbering, and need to manage power and fuel as you lug cargo across the game world. Just check it out if you like games that give you time with your own thoughts!
[Editor’s Note: Authors were told to approach their game of the year lists however they wanted, including listing their favorite games they personally played this year regardless of release year.]
