Did 2024 leave me on the twenty twenty floor, or leave me wanting twenty twenty more? Find out!

#10 – Mouthwashing

If I were to give you fifty guesses on what the genre and setting of this game is based entirely on the name alone, I would be the most surprised person on the planet if you even got close. Mouthwashing is (obviously) a psychological horror game set on a space freighter, with graphics reminiscent of the first PlayStation era. Why is it called Mouthwashing? Well, that will become apparent as you make your way through this short, but gripping (and often disturbing) experience. The lo-fi graphics do a great job of adding the unsettling ambiance of the freighter, and the relatively small cast of characters are all compelling despite having no voiced dialogue (or even walk animations). If you have a few free hours (I finished it in about two-and-a-bit hours) and an appetite for psychological horror, then absolutely give Mouthwashing a look. Maybe don’t play it right before going to sleep though.

#9 – Satisfactory

After spending more than five years in early access, Satisfactory finally received its 1.0 release in 2024. Another one of those efficient factory wish-fulfilment sims I’m sure you’ve heard about, I did actually buy Satisfactory back in 2019 and played enough of it to decide that there was going to be something special about this game, so I put it aside until they were ready to put out the full “finished” version. Now what I will say is that I definitely do not possess the beautiful mind required to spatially visualise and plan out a complicated and efficient factory, but the great thing about Satisfactory is that it gives you plenty of little objective milestones that make you feel like you’re accomplishing things even when you’re doing everything sub-optimally. Then when you have the benefit of hindsight, you’re free to demolish and rebuild anything you’ve done with almost no penalty. If you’re like me and you played during the early access period, I can confidently say that it’s now definitely worth revisiting, with an absolute mountain of new buildings, vehicles, quality-of-life updates and many more features that have been added now that the game has hit version 1.0. And if you’re someone who’s never touched, or maybe never even heard of it (or Factorio or other games like it), but you think you’re the kind of person who might derive pleasure from organising a production line to run as efficiently as possible, then give Satisfactory a look.

#8 – The Rise of the Golden Idol

A couple of years ago, The Case of the Golden Idol hit the scene, grabbed me by the arm and hauled me back into an era of early PC adventure gaming that I couldn’t have imagined would ever get revisited. And, if it wasn’t obvious, it did so very successfully. Now its sequel is upon us, taking us forward in time to the 1970s, where the eponymous Golden Idol has again resurfaced. This time around The Rise of the Golden Idol takes on a non-linear approach to depicting the events that surround the idol and those who come into contact with it. In addition to this, the interface has been overhauled to make it more intuitive and easy to navigate, and the graphic style of the game has been updated. While I’m not a huge fan of the visual change, the general feel and flow of the game are otherwise improvements on The Case of the Golden Idol, one of my favourite games of 2022. Now The Rise of the Golden Idol sits amongst my favourite games of 2024, with plenty of DLC add-ons planned for 2025.

#7 – Astro Bot

After the success of Astro’s Playroom, the expansive tech showcase that comes pre-installed on the PlayStation 5, it seemed like it would be only a matter of time before Astro Bot got its own fully-fledged traditional game release. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, this is actually the fifth game to feature Astro Bot, and if you have been, well done on owning a PlayStation Camera or a PSVR, I guess? For the rest of us, this is a fantastic extrapolation on what made Astro’s Playroom great. As good as the platforming action of Astro Bot is (and it is great), where the real charm of this game lies is in its celebration of absolutely everything to do with the history of PlayStation. From the fact that the mothership you’ll spend the game rebuilding is literally just a giant PlayStation 5, to the other bots you’ll be rescuing that cosplay as famous to obscure characters going right back to the original PlayStation era. Astro Bot is just an overall delightful game that for the most part won’t really challenge you (save for the very last level), but will almost always charm you.

#6 – Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

It’s been a while. After having a Yakuza game making it into my top ten games in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, finally we’re back again in 2024. Picking up where 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon left off, the story again follows Ichiban Kasuga, this time in his quest to Hawai’i to track down his biological mother (who he thought was dead after he was left in a coin locker as a baby, but got mistaken for another baby who was also in a coin locker at the same time… it’s a whole thing, I won’t go into it). As is the way with Kasuga, his naivety and willingness to trust complete strangers immediately lands him in trouble shortly after touching down in Honolulu, but his willpower and charisma see him fight his way through to inevitably uncover an elaborate international conspiracy involving a religious cult and the Yakuza. Also along for the ride this time is our old friend Kazuma Kiryu, who has apparently all but given up on the pretense that he’s meant to be officially dead and not supposed to be seen in public.

While it’s overall probably the weakest overarching story of any of the Yakuza games I’ve played, the individual character moments you get along the way more than carry this game for its 80+ hour duration. That’s not to mention the sub-stories which make up some of the most well-written and funny parts of the game, and the myriad side activities which also sees the glorious return of Sujimon (the Pokemon-adjacent weirdo-collecting mini game). If you haven’t been bitten by the Yakuza bug yet, then I’m not sure if this is going to be the one to convince you (and if you’re Yakuza-curious, I still recommend Yakuza Zero as the best point to jump in), but if you’ve played and enjoyed a Yakuza game previously, there’s plenty here to enjoy in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

#5 – Tactical Breach Wizards

I’m going to start by defining a word that you may or may not be familiar with: defenestration. Defenestration is the act of throwing somebody out of a window. I know this word because someone much, much smarter than me once guessed that was the word I was trying to draw for him in a game of Telestrations, apparently not stopping to question whether this is actually a word that was likely to appear on one of the prompt cards. Needless to say, if it’s a word you’re unfamiliar with, then that’s not entirely surprising.

Now, there’s a developer named Suspicious Developments, headed by a former games journalist named Tom Francis, who has put out three games: Gunpoint (2013), Heat Signature (2017) and now Tactical Breach Wizards. These three games all have one major thing in common.

That’s right. Defenestration.

What led Tom Francis to form this unhealthy obsession with throwing people out of windows is anyone’s guess, but his latest defenestration simulator, Tactical Breach Wizards, is easily his best yet. It’s somewhere between a turn-based tactics game and a puzzle game, with gameplay that will immediately remind you of XCOM, but with the ability to rewind time and re-do turns an unlimited number of times (with in-world justification). The characters and writing are by far stand-out parts of this game, meaning I was often looking forward to the inter-mission dialogue more than I was looking forward to the next mission itself. The premise of “imagine SEAL Team 6 except it’s made up of wizards and necromancers” sounds kind of dopey on the surface, but the writing is so strong that it sucks you right in, and some of the exchanges you get between the characters are genuinely some of the funniest pieces of writing I’ve seen in any game. On top of that, the great part about the game itself is that every shot you take is guaranteed to hit, so you don’t have to worry about missing on a 99% shot like you do in XCOM.

#4 – Metaphor: ReFantazio

A game that does itself absolutely no favours with how it’s been named, Metaphor: ReFantazio is the latest RPG offering from Atlus, makers of the Persona series. If you’ve played any of the Persona games, you’re going to find things get very familiar very quickly here. The game is broken up across days that are split into afternoon and evening activities, the characters awaken latent powers based on the virtues they embody, you build up relationships to enhance said powers, and the user interface is stylised out the wazoo. Basically every trick from the Persona playbook has been rolled out here, just this time in a high fantasy setting.

Funnily enough, that last point is what initially gave me pause with Metaphor: ReFantazio. The touchpoint of the real-world setting contrasted against the insane fantasy worlds you dive into is what makes the Persona games so engaging to me, whereas here it’s just all just one big fantasy setting. While I definitely wasn’t having an awful time at the beginning, it actually took quite a while for the story of this game to really get its hooks into me. And when I say a while, I mean I was pretty much 50 hours into the game when I finally hit the point of the story where one of the big twists revealed itself, and I was completely on the hook from that point on. The good news there at least is that the game ended up taking 105 hours for me to finish, so I had more than half the game to go after it had completely captured me.

Is it completely unreasonable for me to say that my fourth-favourite game of 2024 takes 50 hours before it gets really good? Yeah it probably is. And I don’t think I’d ever try and convince someone to play this game if they don’t already have some experience with other Atlus RPGs. But if you are in that camp, then I would encourage you to give Metaphor: ReFantazio a go. The first 50 hours might not grab you, but the second 50 surely will!

(If anyone from Atlus is reading this, please feel free to use that last quote on the back of the game box)

#3 – Balatro

The hype surrounding this deceptively simple roguelite card game was almost completely unavoidable this past year, so it’s probably no great surprise that it’s ended up inside my top three. But if I’m being completely honest, Balatro didn’t really grab me at first. I was struggling to make much progress into the higher level antes, let alone beat the main boss blind, and after a month-or-so I had mostly put it aside. It then spent most of 2024 hovering around the edges of my running top ten list.

But then something happened: they released Balatro for Android and iOS. Suddenly, I was seeing it in an entirely new light. The ability to play with touch controls on the couch, in bed, or most importantly, on an international flight, now had me completely obsessed with Balatro. The wide range of jokers to unlock and use, the secret hand types you could find, the sheer pleasure of building a combination of jokers that give you such a ludicrously high score that it feels like you’ve cheated and broken the game. It all made sense now, and before long I was reliably beating the main boss blinds and experimenting with new strategies.

Even though it is literally the same game that was released on PC at the start of the year, the phone and tablet versions of Balatro genuinely felt like a lightbulb moment, like it’s the way it was always meant to be played. The biggest struggle now is resisting the temptation to install it on my phone, because at that point I imagine my productivity at work will hit an all-time low.

#2 – Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

After only coming out on the 9th of December, this was a genuine buzzer-beater to get on to my list this year. However, so strong is the impression this game makes in the opening hour, I knew that I absolutely had to finish it before I wrote anything. To get right to the point here: Machine Games have managed to put out something that is not only one of the best games of 2024, but in my opinion one of the top three products, be that game or movie, to ever have the name Indiana Jones attached to it. Now, granted, the two most recent movie entries aren’t really much to compete against, but I’m also saying that this is a better product than Temple of Doom (fight me on this if you want, but that movie was average in its time and has aged incredibly poorly) as well as the previous best video game entry, The Fate of Atlantis.

Where other attempts to bring Indiana Jones into the video game world have failed, The Great Circle succeeds mainly by having you focus on the stuff that Indiana Jones would conceivably be doing. That is to say, uncovering lost ruins, punching Nazis, solving ancient puzzles, punching Nazis, avoiding snakes, and of course, punching Nazis. A lot of the best parts of this game feel like they’ve come straight out of an Uncharted or the more recent Tomb Raider games, so in a way I guess we’ve come full circle since Indy walked so Nathan Drake and Lara Croft could run so Indy could run slightly faster.

The globetrotting plot hits all the right notes for an Indiana Jones story, with the main antagonist, a rival Nazi archaeologist named Emmerich Voss, fitting the bill perfectly as your cartoonishly evil adversary. Also worth highlighting is Troy Baker’s performance as Indiana Jones, which is so good that I was convinced that they’d used some sort of AI-driven voice modulation trickery to make it sound more like young Harrison Ford. But no, turns out that was just 100% Baker. 

If you’re solely a PlayStation user, you’re going to have to wait a few more months before this game comes out for the PS5. But I promise if you’re a long-suffering fan of Indiana Jones, then The Great Circle will be well worth the extra wait (and if you do have a PC or an Xbox, I don’t know what you’re waiting for, go and play this game right now).

Game of the Year 2024:
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

(Story spoilers for this game below if you are intending to play it)

I’m not really sure how I wasn’t ready to be as blown away by Final Fantasy VII Rebirth as I ended up being, having already been completely blown away by Final Fantasy VII Remake four years earlier. I guess part of me expected it to just be more of the same, just following along the formula that they’d set up into the next part of the original Final Fantasy VII story with a few new twists and turns. But it ended up being so much more than that.

Much like when you leave Midgar for the first time in the original game, the world opens up in a way that is almost overwhelming to begin with. The amount of freedom to explore, customise your party, and take on oh-so-many sidequests is immediately noticeable when compared against Remake. The sheer enjoyment I got from the real-time combat continues to be an unmatched benchmark in any other RPG to date, made even better in Rebirth with the addition of new party members (each with their own unique play styles and mechanics) on top of the characters you were already familiar with from Remake. And, once again, the direction and voice acting are absolutely top notch, bringing characters I’ve known and loved since 1997 to life in a way that I could have only dreamt of when I was playing the original as a teenager.

But then there’s the twists that we were expecting to come. After the insane re-writing of the story at the end of Remake, the question coming into Rebirth immediately became “are they now going to undo one of the most iconic story moments in the history of video games?”, of course referring to the moment Sephiroth kills Aerith. I won’t go so far as to spoil the outcome of that question, but I will go so far as to say that the build up to and the resolution of that moment at the end of Rebirth was so wild that it immediately put the end of Remake to shame. I’ll be completely honest, it was so wild that I had to read multiple Reddit threads and go back to re-watch the ending multiple times on YouTube to try and pick up on all the details that I missed.

I am now completely at a loss to even try and guess where the story of part three of this Remake trilogy will go next. Yeah, I know what the main story beats are going to be, but in terms of where it will all ultimately end up, I couldn’t even begin to guess. There’s every chance that I’m going to be disappointed. It’s a tale as old as time where part two of a trilogy ends on such a cliffhanger with so many dangling questions, that the conclusion can’t possibly stick the landing in a satisfactory manner. But for now, I’m going to live in that glorious Schrodinger-esque middle period where the possibility that the conclusion is going to be completely amazing still exists in a quantum state.

That’s it for 2024’s list! Stay tuned to see Tim and Shay’s lists, as well as our collective Deadpan Cooperative Game of the Year!