The 10 Best Games of 2024 You Probably Missed
2024 was dominated by Black Myth: Wukong and Elden Ring DLC headlines. Meanwhile, ten genuinely exceptional games came out and just about nobody covered them properly.
2024 was a strong year for games. The headlines went to Black Myth: Wukong, the Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, and whatever Ubisoft was saying that week. Meanwhile ten genuinely exceptional games came out and received a fraction of the coverage they deserved. This list exists because finding the good stuff is genuinely infuriating without a guide.
I played all of these. None of them had PR budgets that got them in front of mainstream outlets. All of them delivered more interesting experiences than the majority of $70 AAA releases from the same year.
1. Balatro | $14.99
I know Balatro was not exactly ignored, it won Game of the Year and sold millions of copies. I am putting it first because the full implications of what it represents are still being under-discussed.
One person made this game. In their spare time. For $14.99. It beat every $70 AAA release in its year on both critical reception and sales relative to investment. Concord had eight years and $400M. Balatro had LocalThunk and several evenings per week.
The poker-based deck-builder with a modifier system innovative enough to find genuinely new ground in a genre everyone thought was solved. The one-more-run pull is among the strongest ever designed into a game. I have looked up from this at 2am on work nights more times than I can justify.
Balatro -- $14.99. Buy it. Tonight.
2. Mouthwashing | $9.99
Two to three hours. One of the most disturbing games of the year. A horror game set on a stranded cargo ship revealing what happened through a non-linear structure. No monsters. Just people in crisis with the constraints of normal society removed. I finished it, sat quietly for several minutes, and thought about it for days.
This is the entry point for people who think they do not like horror. Nothing jumps out at you. The horror builds from what people do when they are alone and desperate and have already made the decision they cannot take back.
Mouthwashing -- $9.99. Short. Essential.
3. Animal Well | $24.99
The best Metroidvania since Hollow Knight. One developer, Billy Basso, published by Bigmode. Denser with secrets than any game I have played, the lore community was still actively discovering things a year after release. I finished it feeling like I had understood perhaps half of what was there.
Animal Well -- $24.99. Play it blind. The discovery is the point.
4. Neva | $24.99
Devolver Digital. An action game about a woman and a wolf in a corrupted world. The combat evolves as Neva grows, which functions as both a mechanical arc and an emotional one. Around six to eight hours. Nothing padded. One of the most visually distinctive games of the year.
Neva -- $24.99. Beautiful and difficult in equal measure.
5. Tactical Breach Wizards | $19.99
A turn-based tactics game about wizards breaching rooms. Every puzzle has a perfect solution and the game actively wants you to find it rather than just any solution that works. Funnier than the premise suggests. Better designed than anything in the genre this year. Criminally underplayed.
Tactical Breach Wizards -- $19.99. The most underplayed tactics game of 2024.
6. Caves of Qud | $29.99
The most complex roguelike ever made, finally in full release after years in Early Access. Dense, systemic, will kill you in unexpected ways for the first twenty hours and then reveal itself as one of the most generative game worlds ever built. Not for everyone. If you are the person it is for, nothing else touches it.
Caves of Qud -- $29.99. Hardcore roguelike players only.
7. Hades II | $29.99 (Early Access)
Already better than most finished games. Supergiant does not ship things before they are ready and the early access content demonstrates this completely. Everything I expected from a sequel to the best narrative roguelite ever made.
Hades II -- $29.99 Early Access. Play the original first.
8. 1000xRESIST | $19.99
A narrative game about memory, identity, and survival in a post-apocalyptic future structured around a cult-like organisation. One of the most ambitious narrative games of the year. Received almost no mainstream coverage. Deserved substantially more.
1000xRESIST -- $19.99. The most overlooked narrative game of 2024.
9. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story | $12.99
A documentary game about one of gaming's most eccentric and important developers, with 42 playable games spanning his career. The best game preservation project ever made. Unique in ways that are genuinely rare.
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story -- $12.99. Essential game history.
10. Arranger | $19.99
A puzzle adventure where the protagonist moves in rows and columns along with everything else on the screen. The most original puzzle mechanic of 2024. Charming presentation. Precisely designed. The kind of game that gets overlooked because it does not fit a familiar category.
Arranger -- $19.99. The most original puzzle mechanic of the year.
The Point
These ten games cost a combined $220 at full price. Every one of them delivered more interesting, more replayable, and more memorable experiences than the majority of $70 AAA releases from the same year. The publishers do not want you to know that. The algorithm does not surface it. Now you know.
Work through this list. Start with Balatro.
The games on this list were not made by studios with massive marketing budgets. They were made by small teams with clear creative vision, and they found their audiences through word of mouth rather than pre-release hype cycles. That origin story is not incidental to their quality. The conditions that allowed them to be made without compromise are the same conditions that made them worth playing.
The most reliable signal that a game will be worth your time is a passionate small audience rather than a large pre-release buzz. The small audience has played the game. The pre-release buzz has played the trailer. Trust the people who played the game.
Something worth saying about the 2024 releases specifically: it was a year where the AAA sector had a difficult time commercially. Several major releases underperformed. Several were delayed. The gaming press spent substantial time covering these struggles. Meanwhile, the smaller releases that made 2024 genuinely excellent for players who knew where to look received a fraction of that coverage, despite delivering significantly more interesting experiences.
The attention economy in gaming coverage is structurally biased toward expensive things. A $200M game that disappoints generates more coverage than a $2M game that delights, because the budget created a prior that audiences would care. This creates a persistent gap between what gets covered and what is worth playing. The list above exists in that gap. Everything on it received far less coverage than it deserved and far more enjoyment than the games that received more coverage.
The best thing you can do as a player interested in actually playing good games rather than culturally relevant games is to develop independent sources of recommendation from people who have played a lot of games and have developed taste. Those sources exist. Reddit communities, YouTube channels, and writers who play broadly rather than chasing the release calendar. Find yours. The games worth playing are findable. They just require slightly more effort to find than the games with the biggest marketing spend. That effort is worth making. The list above is one place to start making it. The small audience has played the game. The pre-release buzz has played the trailer. Trust the people who played the game.
Every game on this list has that small passionate audience. Every one of them was underplayed in 2024 relative to what it deserved. If you play one and love it, tell someone. That chain of recommendation is how these games continue to find players years after release, and it is worth maintaining. The games that defined your taste probably reached you through someone's recommendation rather than through an algorithm. Pass it on.
Balatro on Steam -- $14.99. Start here. Then come back for the rest.