2024 Games of the Year

So now that I've posted the 2022 and 2023 top 10 lists, and my previous years' games I played this year, here's the new one! I'm changing my rule about free games because there were a lot of memorable ones this year.

From this list it looks like I just played puzzle games, but the last list is mostly not. It's more that this was a really strong year overall, and I've been especially keeping up with current puzzle releases so I could follow streams/discussion.

Honorable mention that doesn't quite hit the top 10 is Bird Game of the Year: Just Crow Things. Flying around is cute, the races that make you do little hops from point to point are cute. I really should play Untitled Goose Game at some point, since that's what this and some other games in this space are drawing from.

Chroma Zero draws a lot from Outer Wilds, to the point of namedropping [redacted] early on: it’s a puzzle game where your progression mostly comes from learning more about the world and how to interact with it. It’s much more of a pure puzzle game than Outer Wilds’ puzzle/story/spaceflight shenanigans, but the puzzles are good and weird. (As the name would suggest, the puzzles are largely color-related, so colorblindness could be an issue; it wasn’t for me, and there is some colorblind support in the game, at least.)

Animal Well's a big puzzly Metroidvania. What's most interesting about it as a Metroidvania is that all its items are weird: some of them might accomplish similar things as the "traditional" 'vania tools, but it's not obvious which ones or how, so it requires some experimention to figure out what they're good for. Plus there's some hidden puzzle stuff, which appeals to me personally. I'm not a huge ARG person, so I didn't get too into the puzzles when they started getting ARG-adjacent, but disregarding that part of the game it's still solid.

Isles of Sea and Sky is one I’ve been eagerly awaiting ever since a demo and Kickstarter several years ago: a nonlinear Sokoban-like where solving puzzles lets you collect items to unlock both more puzzles and powerups that affect how you solve other puzzles. The full game wasn’t as solid as the demo, unfortunately: in the later game the powerups are so strong they let you skip early game puzzles outright, and there are some later areas that were incomplete on launch. Still, I appreciated the non-linear exploration the format allowed, and I’m a sucker for the Game Boy-era Zelda aesthetic.

Satisfactory, reductively, is 3D Factorio, and I like the factory-builder genre in theory, but I don’t make it to the end of a lot of these games. I (nearly) did in Satisfactory due to a few design decisions it made: a prebuilt world allowing for more bespoke exploration, the 3D being relatively generous about where you placed stuff and letting belts and pipes “just work”, and some powerful QoL features unlocked relatively early on that were added with the 1.0 release. Those things have downsides, and I could see people not enjoying them, but the combination worked for me.

Rise of the Golden Idol is the sequel to Case of the Golden Idol, and it's got more of that reviewing scenes to identify names and understand what's going on. It's got a more elaborate ongoing story than the first, which makes tying it together more satisfying though sometimes at the expense of the individual cases being less out there. They've already announced DLC next year, so maybe we'll see some of the weirder stuff in there.

Leaf's Odyssey is a puzzle game in the tradition of Deadly Rooms of Death: defeat monsters by understanding and outwitting their predictable behavior. Leaf is different enough to distinguish itself if you're a fan of the genre, and a good entry point if you're not: it has six monster types as opposed to DROD's 20 or so, and it changes a few core mechanics like "the player can't move diagonally" that change up the puzzles. The base campaign's quite fun, and there's a fair amount of player-created levels which I've only scratched the surface of. Plus, you're a cute little ferret who does a little bounce when you hit the wait button.

Leap Year is a cute little platformer about exploring a space to collect calendar pages and discovering mechanics along the way. It's hard to get into too many details without spoiling the game's surprises, but it's got quite a few surprises for its size, especially the ending.

Special bonus category of Best Game Released on May 9 is Rabbit and Steel, a co-op raiding/bullet hell/roguelike. It's an odd combination of genres, but the core is pulling the sort of raid mechanics you'd see in Final Fantasy XIV into a lighter-weight format, and it works. Solo is more bullet hell, multiplayer relies more on coordination mechanics like spreading everyone out, pairing people off, etc. There isn't anything else quite like it.

My Puzzle Game of the Year (for Sickos) is I Wanna Lockpick. It's a puzzle game about keys and doors: the red key unlocks the red door, the blue key unlocks the blue door, open the doors in the right order. It's simple enough to start, and then you get the doors that take multiple blue keys. And then the doors that require you to have exactly zero blue keys. And then... the cursed mechanics continue to pile on, and while a couple of the really huge levels were too much for me to sort through, I was still able to see the really interesting stuff in the "part 2" content added this year and get to the "main" ending. There's also some nice musing about game and puzzle design in there that was helpful for me personally.

My Puzzle Game of the Year (for Non-Sickos) is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. It's more on the adventure game/escape room side of the puzzle genre, and the puzzles aren't as difficult as some but still generally satisfying. I also found it interesting how it takes inspiration from early horror games like Resident Evil with things like manual saves, but implements them in as modern-friendly a way as possible. On the other hand, some quality of life things are tied to solving puzzles, so if you miss those puzzles you might miss out on those features.

I played a lot of new stuff in 2024, and there were a lot of games fighting for those last few slots. So I'll briefly shout out 14 Minesweeper Variants 2, Bee Magic, Home Safety Hotline, Islands of Insight, Mario Party Jamboree, Maxwell's Puzzling Demon, Project RyME, Reliquia Park, Star Stuff... The Thinky Games/thinky puzzle games community has me spoiled for new high-quality indie stuff, in addition to everything else.

There's not much on my 2025 radar puzzle-wise other than Blue Prince and maybe new Layton, but I'm sure there will be some surprises. In terms of more mainstream stuff, Monster Hunter Wilds and Hades 2 (full release) are the ones I'm keeping an eye on.