Staff Picks: The Best Video Games of 2024
Retro games, deck-builders, a Russian Roulette simulator, and more
Welcome back to our Staff Picks, the annual ranking of our favorite media of the past year, compiled by the staff here at Ani-Gamers. This year we begin with video games, since we didn’t have enough manga picks to do a full post for them. Our anime lists will be up tomorrow, and we’ll follow up with a Patreon-exclusive list of our favorites of “Everything Else” (movies, music, you name it) in two days.
We didn’t have a lot of clear-cut winners this year, in part because our Nintendo fan staff didn’t have many tentpole Nintendo first-party releases to coalesce around. But the result is a wide variety of great games across lots of genres, from indie deck-builders to puzzlers to Metroidvanias. And of course, a highly anticipated re-release of one of the greatest JRPGs of all time (and the only game to appear in two separate lists)!
Enjoy our picks, and let us know your favorite games of the year in the comments, via our Discord, or on social media!
David Estrella
#3: Buckshot Roulette
It might be an internet meme game about playing Russian Roulette with a shotgun but that doesn’t take away from the excellence in design. For $2.99, you can experience one of the most immersive and nerve-racking 30 minutes spent with a computer short of diffusing a bomb. Partially a game of chance, a sure shot at a clean sweep of the game’s three rounds can collapse in moments thanks to a single misjudgment between a blank and a live shell. The grimy lo-fi aesthetic and dead-simple play mechanics harmonize to bottle up the stress of making critical decisions that will either lead to the player’s victory or a complete and utter defeat. This is an anxiety game for people dealing with too much ambiguity in life and craving a cheap thrill.
#2: Mario vs. Donkey Kong
Even with Mario on the cover, this one might have gone under the radar for people who ignore the spin-offs that don’t involve either kart-racing or brother-smashing. Mario vs. Donkey Kong for Nintendo Switch is a remake of a Game Boy Advance title released in 2004. MvDK might be a 2-D platformer but it shares a lot more in common with the classic Donkey Kong arcade game than the action-centric titles that Nintendo puts out in recent times. The focus on puzzle-solving along with the jazz soundtrack and understated graphical presentation elevate the game to a more methodical pace than players are used to for a Mario game. The later stages make up for the breezy introductory levels and completing the game unlocks new worlds with significantly more challenging puzzles to solve. As much as I appreciate Super Mario Wonder, it’s also great to get a game as distinctly different from the traditional side-scroller as Mario vs. Donkey Kong.
#1: Dragon Quest III HD-Remake
DQIII HD-Re is the second remake on this list and easily the most monumental release this year for fans of classic RPGs. The original DQIII is widely hailed as one of the best RPGs of the era, a genre-defining masterpiece that has been iterated upon for decades and rarely surpassed. Featuring a robust job system and a storyline that hides a fair amount of sophistication for an 8-bit title, DQIII is characterized by its ambition to set the course for what RPGs would become in the future that we’ve seen come to pass. Playing it now, the remake avoids feeling like a history lesson thanks to all the quality-of-life improvements that sand off the rough edges from design decisions made over 30 years ago. The craft and respect for the source material seen here sets a high bar going forward for modern remakes of classic games.
Extra notes: Shout-outs to all the games not released in 2024 that I played for the first time this year. Notable examples include Armored Core (1997), Metal Wolf Chaos (2004, 2019), King’s Field (1994), Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia (2023), and Omori (2020). Special thanks to the games I replayed for the first time in a long time, including The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2003) and Final Fantasy (1987).
Inaki
#3: Age of Mythology: Retold/Stormgate
This year gave us two RTS titles where everything old is new again: one that was all but guaranteed to be a favorite of mine, and one that I and a lot of other people were somewhat skeptical of.
Let’s be clear: they would have had to have fucked up an Age of Mythology remake pretty damn badly in order for me to not like it. And indeed they haven’t, putting a nice sheen of polish on my favorite ever RTS and delivering lots of new features for long-time fans and newcomers. I have a number of non-trivial issues with it as I outlined previously but honestly I’ve spent way too much time playing it since launch. This game is just so much fun, the campaign is fun, laddering is fun, even the new stuff they’ve added in like Arena of the Gods are great ways to spend more time with this game. It’s such a pure expression of the RTS, the language of it and why it’s so appealing, and if it’s your first time with the genre I honestly can’t think of a better entry point.
Which brings us to Frost Giant’s Stormgate, promoted by its creators as the true heir to the throne of StarCraft II, the greatest esport (if you want to read a bit more about the state SC2 check out our “Everything Else” picks in a couple of days, which will be Patreon exclusive). I’ll admit I was suspicious, and the early previews of the game just didn’t grab me with its aesthetics or its mechanics. But then I actually picked it up and played it, and you know what? I was pretty impressed. Stormgate is a real “kitchen sink” RTS, taking inspiration from the long and dynamic history of the genre, both Blizzard titles but shockingly (at least to me) many different RTS games. Stormgate is, then, systems on top of systems on top of systems on top of systems, which ends up pretty much working. I do have a number of issues with it but a lot of them are inherent in an early access game which is still figuring itself out. The foundation of a really interesting experience has been laid.
So we’ve got the past of RTS, its present and it’s bleeding edge, something to show the future of this genre and what it’s capable of. Both really impressed me this year and I’m interested to see where it goes.
#2: 1000x Resist
What an awesome game! The less you know going into this one the better, which I know is a very tedious thing to read in a written review, so please forgive me.
Having said that, 1000x Resist is the only work I’ve experienced which successfully attempts to grapple directly with the pandemic era (which we’re still living through for all intents and purposes five years on). Many works have desired strongly to ignore it; Many have also attempted to capture the enormity of it, what it felt like, what it meant, but none have actually succeeded. But 1000x Resist is far from a game about only one thing, looking over a variety of important and difficult issues that affect us every day, like the watery apocalypse at the heart of its narrative.
Of everything I played this year, and everything I’ve played the last few years if I’m being honest, 1000x Resist feels like it’s using the interactive medium to the full realization of its possibilities. There are so many different mechanics and things to explore, something at every turn keen to fully explore what a video game is, what a video game can and should do for a player. This is such a refreshing thing to play in 2024 where games are live service nightmares with six different in-game currencies and fifty different nonsense tasks all making up the hours and hours of cOnTeNt we as the audience are supposed to be so desirous of.
And it’s also extremely weird and uncompromising in its creative vision. It’s completely confident that the player will desire strongly to be enticed into its world, push past initial weirdness of its constructed jargon and achronological story beats to discover more and find out what this world has to offer. You’ll yourself immerse in its world, you’ll find yourself wanting to say its made up phrases (hekki ALLMO!). And you will not play anything more incisive about pain, trauma and sense of self, or anything with a bigger love of science fiction than 1000x Resist.
#1: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
My most anticipated game of 2024 delivered in every way possible, and I loved every second of it. As a huge fan of Simogo I was determined to go in to their new game completely blind, and my reward for doing so was the studio’s most impressive experience to date. A puzzle game for people who adore video game puzzles, and similarly to 1000x Resist a love letter to the interactive medium, pulling out as many little tricks and different modes of input as possible to immerse you in its world.
A hard, but, importantly, an exceedingly fair puzzle game, it contains no use-the-dog-food-with-the-rubber-band leaps of logic. And a completely gorgeous game: I love the stark, black-and-white visuals with harsh outbreaks of bright maroon as the middle-of-the-previous-century aesthetic is intruded onto. As you progress deeper and deeper into the game, you get lost in the murky history it presents as Lorelei attempts to figure out … well, aren’t we all just trying to figure out the answers in life? Everyone who plays this game comes away with a vastly different idea of its themes and ideas, which I think is beautiful (you may read my own, personal take here on AG.) Suffice to say the many different parts of this game really speaks to people.
To stand at history’s crossroads, looking back and looking forward, to reflect on your mistakes and those of your parents, grandparents, to see art and capital, life, death, stories, truth, fiction, and, of course, to see it all through laser eyes.
Evan Minto
#3: Animal Well
One of my favorite video game moments is when you learn the “shine spark” in Super Metroid: stuck at the bottom of a pit, the player has to pick up context clues from nearby creatures to discover a new movement ability that, it turns out, they’ve been able to perform all game if they only knew the right buttons to press. Appropriately for a game called “Animal Well” (likely just a coincidence but a boy can dream), Shared Memory’s new indie Metroidvania is what happens when you make the whole game out of moments like that. With zero in-game explanation, you explore an eerie underground cave network filled with spectral animals, picking up seemingly ordinary items — a frisbee, a slinky — that hold all sorts of secret abilities. This is a game that encourages you to break its systems; in fact there are tons of puzzles that require you to exploit quirks in the physics to move in ways that initially seem impossible. Animal Well is best experienced with no spoilers, but I’ll say that when I discovered one particular exploit I had something close to that Super Metroid moment.
#2: Balatro
Another year of saying “I’m not a deck-builder guy,” another year where a deck-builder makes it onto my list. As soon as I played it I understood: Balatro has got the juice. No narrative, no lore, you simply make poker hands to reach higher and higher scores while modifying the rules and your deck using increasingly bizarre joker cards. A baseline knowledge of poker is helpful to start, but to my delight as a poker skeptic, Balatro very quickly becomes much more of a roguelite about creating an optimal build than it is a poker game. Want to “level up” your flush hand, add a score multiplier when playing hearts, and then flood your deck with nothing but hearts? Go for it. Add bonuses when you play 10s, then add an extra 10 of spades to unlock the mythical “five of a kind” hand? Sure! Balatro is a less-is-more indie game that starts with a simple, genius concept and mines it for all it’s worth, revealing complexities as you spend more time with the game.
#1: UFO 50
This isn’t fair. UFO 50 is a collection of 50 (that’s right, FIFTY) 8-bit games supposedly created by the “ahead-of-their-time” studio UFOSoft in the 1980s. In fact, they were developed right here in the 2020s by indie game luminaries — including the creators of Spelunky and Downwell. And these aren’t WarioWare-style microgames, they’re full games, complete with title screens, attract modes, credits, and in-universe development backstories (some games are sequels or spin-offs of others in the collection). UFO 50 captures so much of the creativity, constraints, and yes, difficulty of the 8-bit era, and does it all while almost entirely avoiding creating clones of any famous titles. The games are consistently surprising, from the golf/RPG mash-up Golfaria to the baffling experimental platformer Mooncat. Plus a diving-based Metroidvania and a Western-themed JRPG! There’s something so delightful and satisfying about jumping back and forth between all of these games, losing yourself in the world of UFOSoft. If I ranked every one of UFO 50’s games as its own entry, a few would make it into my top three games of the year on their own. Put together, it’s not even a contest. This is an astounding achievement, one of the most impressive and engrossing indie games I’ve ever played.
And since you asked, I’ve listed my Top 3 UFO 50 games below. For writeups of all 50 games, check out my impressions posts on Patreon!
- Porgy
- Pingolf
- Party House
Patrick Sutton
#3: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is one of the most under-appreciated titles of the year from a major publisher. Ubisoft gave a smaller team the opportunity to make Prince of Persia into a Metroidvania and they knocked it out of the park. It’s an original story that was inspired by Persian mythology and was even dubbed in Farsi. The team behind the game clearly respected the world they were using for inspiration and it shows in the final product. If you’re a fan of modern Metroidvanias like Hollow Knight you will love The Lost Crown. Movement and combat feel fluid and responsive as you traverse the world. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a success and the team wasn’t able to get a sequel greenlit, but don’t let that stop you from going back to play it.
#2: Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake
Dragon Quest III is one of the most important games ever made and whenever I go back to it I can see why. Even in remake form you can see why this would have been a watershed moment. Dragon Warrior 3 on the GameBoy Color was my first Dragon Quest game. It was much tougher back then but I still loved it and thought it was super cool. Getting to re-experience it again in this form made it feel new again while also being nostalgic. It respects the past while making it feel like a modern game, even if sometimes that might make it feel a little too easy.
#1: Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Kunitsu-Gami feels like a game out of the PS2 era. It’s a combination action game/tower defense. It’s strange on paper and takes a moment to wrap your head around but it works extremely well. The story is simple: guide a priestess down a mountain past monsters so you can cleanse the area of corruption, but it gives you all you need to drive you forward. Mechanically it’s excellent, with engaging challenges that encourage the player to think through the environments of each level as you work to guide the priestess and work with your army of villagers to protect her. It’s a video game-ass video game and we need more of those.
People love to post on Twitter about how they want smaller/shorter games with worse graphics. Well, Kunitsu-Gami and The Lost Crown were smaller/shorter games that respected your time. Both launched at $50. And both apparently failed to hit their goals. I just wish we saw more success for games like these.