Podcast episode discussing these games is here, while my 15th-6th games of the year are over on Giant Bomb dot com.
I can’t remember the last year I played so many games with exemplary entries across every genre I typically touch. I loved my time with Tekken 8, celebrated the return of College Football 25, and admitted to everyone within earshot that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is one of the best times you can have as long as you turn off stranger voice chat.
When I sat down to narrow the field for my favorite five games of the year, one major truth stood out to me: the best games of 2024 were not even close to what I expected them to be in 2023.
So, without further ado, here are the official VGBees Games of the Year 2024.
Astro Bot
Astro’s Playroom was a smart little PlayStation 5 pack-in, huh? Snappy platforming and a sense of whimsy you normally don’t see from developers that aren’t Nintendo adorned the demo that remained my favorite PlayStation 5 game until recently!
Still, it was shallow enough to make me believe the full-bodied follow-up Astro Bot would fall a little flat. How far can the PlayStation oeuvre really take you, after all?
Turns out I wasn’t really asking the right question! I think Astro Bot‘s commitment to running through the history of PlayStation through its robots in cosplay was its weakest feature, as expected. What I didn’t expect, however, was the sheer joy in each level of Astro Bot. Though certainly more gimmick-forward than your average Mario, Astro Bot still managed to delight me in ways I simply haven’t expected from other developers making 3D platformers.
Playing with scale, playing with physics, playing with expectations from other entries of the genre…Astro Bot absolutely has the goods and knows it. I don’t normally reward technical mastery, but when it’s wielded so beautifully it’s easy to recognize.
If smaller indies are stuck mimicking the most famous plumber in the world from a safe distance, Astro Bot instead has invited himself to the party and acts like he’s been there before. That mix of confidence and spectacle gave me some of my favorite hours in gaming in 2024.
Balatro
When I was four, my grandmother Billie and her mom conspired to buy a Nintendo Entertainment System for me against the wishes of my mother. Billie also bought my mom’s first Beatles record, so she was always a force for corruption. I played Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt that morning and it turned into the rest of my life, but what I didn’t know until I was a little older is my mom, Bev, would drop me off at my first year of kindergarten and then come home to play Tetris for hours.
She’d tell me that she’d have dreams about the blocks dropping around her and she’d sometimes zone out thinking of her next run or a good run she had the day before. I never understood Tetris‘ appeal until I was older. There was always something very “adult” about a game where all you do is manage the weight of the world at increasing speeds until you can feel the molecules of it start to merge with yours. Seemed above my pay grade.
Well, I’ve dreamed about Balatro a lot this year.
Described by some at its release in exactly a way to get me not to care, the “poker roguelike” from LocalThunk grabbed enough folks in my orbit it became easy to see the game would be more than that.
From the title screen, Balatro invites you to sink into the swirling, inky abyss of its mechanics and rhythms through a dazzling combination of familiar 52 card game trappings and the game’s signature Joker modifiers. Even though the onboarding teaches you the most basic ideas of the game, only experimentation and experience can ever possibly show you how completely bananas Balatro can get.
And I’m not even one of those crazy score sickos! I don’t have a calculator-breaking run yet to my name, but it doesn’t even register as a complaint or anxiety for me. I just love the act of playing Balatro. The soundtrack is one of my very favorites of the last decade. Developer LocalThunk and composer Luis Clemente did the brilliant work of having five distinct song layers that merge seamlessly together as you zip through hands and menus.
All of these things…the strategy-building, the unforgettable music, the soundfont springing to mind unprompted every day, the iconography, the feeling of discovery…all of them form the kind of impression Tetris left on my mom 35 years ago. Balatro is my favorite game of 2024 because I’m always playing it.
Crow Country
For my money, there wasn’t a better looking game in 2024 than sublime survival horror throwback Crow Country. There’s a moment where you solve a puzzle early by looking at a reflection in a small pool of water to see where you need to interact with the world above the surface. This invitation to look deeper at the meticulously-detailed tableaus of Crow Country‘s incredibly goofy haunted amusement park was such a called shot deep into the rafters.
Daring the player to look ever deeper into the world they’ve built for you. Delicious. Again, confidence. It’s a recurring theme in 2024.
Crow Country never matched the punishing difficulty of similar nineties survival horror throwbacks but did pack in plenty of clever puzzles in its short runtime.
Path of Exile 2
By far the biggest surprise of 2024, Path of Exile 2 was a late entry but a powerful one. I’ve always wanted to like Diablo. Ever since a coworker of my dad’s set me up with a secret copy of Diablo on his work PC when I was stranded and bored while he was in meetings, I’ve wanted to be good at Diablo. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about.
Through four numbered Diablos I tried and failed to care. In ten minutes of early access Path of Exile 2, I’m a true believer. My chaos witch is already amassing a power that should scare me, but instead I can’t wait to explore every nook and cranny of the game’s hilariously massive passive skill tree.
I haven’t even hit the endgame yet, but barring any massive changes to the formula, Path of Exile 2 will be one of my favorites well, well into 2025.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
I’m already on record to say Thank Goodness You’re Here! is one of the funniest games ever. What I’ll reemphasize here is the value of a perfect exit.
Through the game’s brisk runtime, you’ll slap your way to usefulness for the colorful citizens of Barnsworth. You’ll hear Matt Berry deliver wonderfully Matt Berry-like lines. You’ll see flowers experience love, loss, and love again. You’ll discover a secret mouse kingdom. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, the game ends with a perfect musical number.
If comedy is mostly timing, Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a master class and one of the very best games of 2024.
