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Top Ten Games of 2024!

So, let’s do some housekeeping. First - the candidates for this list are the 38 games that I beat in 2024, which I’ve been chronicling over on my Twitter - future lists are going to be on Bluesky. What does it mean to beat a game, I hear you ask? Whatever I want it to mean. Most of the time it means finishing off some kind of main campaign or story mode, but not every game has that kind of neat final boss into end credits combo. Essentially, I’ll stop when I’m satisfied with having seen most of what a game has to offer.

Second, there are going to be some notable omissions from this list. I’ve decided to disqualify the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, despite it being one of my favorite games of all time. That’s because I didn’t beat those games for the first time this year, not really. As remakes, they weren’t new enough experiences to warrant inclusion here - without much new content other than changes to character names, it wasn’t something on the level of, say, Persona 3 Reload.

And then I didn’t include Reload anyway. I really thought I would for most of the year, but… I dunno. I guess I feel weird about putting a remake of a game I already played on my best of the year list even if it has a ton of new (and really good!) stuff. So… off it goes. And speaking of new stuff, depending on your definition of spoilers, there may be spoilers in the following list. Be careful.

Third, you could probably ask me again in a week and my ordering on this list will change. I played a lot of great stuff this year. I’m lined up to play even more next year. For the sake of completion, here’s the list of all 38 candidates for my game of the year:

Buckshot Roulette	Persona 5 Tactica	20 Small Mazes
Tekken 8	Balatro	Persona 3 Reload
Princess Peach: Showtime!	Hades	Super Mario Bros. Wonder
FFXIV: Dawntrail	Transistor	Gorogoa
HITMAN	A Little to the Left	Persona 4: Dancing All Night
HITMAN 2	HITMAN 3	Tactical Breach Wizards
Cuphead	Gunpoint	Elden Ring
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth	Heat Signature	Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight
PowerWash Simulator	Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight	DREDGE
Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit	Street Fighter 6	Metaphor: ReFantazio
The Sexy Brutale	Lies of P	Dusk Diver
Baldur's Gate 3	Slay the Princess	Murder By Numbers
Neon White	Wizard With a Gun

Okay, got it? No more questions. Here’s my list of the 10 best games I beat this year.



I’ll be on the level with you: I’m a blonde white lesbian who likes pink and got my first handheld when I was five. Princess Peach is like Captain America to me. This game would have had to do a lot to make me hate it, and it didn’t. What I wasn’t expecting is how much it did to make me love it.

This is not a complicated game. You hop in a level and explore around a bit, find whatever the level’s gimmick is, and then use it to complete a series of challenges. There’s ten different costumes that each have their own kind of special deal - some are more combat focused like the Swordfighter or Kung Fu Peach, and some are more platforming challenges like Dashing Thief Peach or Figure Skater Peach. Some are even puzzle based! But it’s just a series of levels each exploring a specific gimmick. It’s basically the distilled essence of video games. A lot of the appeal does come from Peach finally getting a starring role in her own game and all the fun outfits she gets to switch into and do all kinds of genre action in. Nintendo lets their lead lady stop train robberies, hurl UFOs into larger UFOs, and perform ninjutsu at different points throughout her adventure even as she also does more classic Peach activities like baking cakes or… I dunno, singing?

It feels a lot like the sort of Barbie appeal. You put her in an outfit and she can be any profession, gaining all the powers and skills of that archetype. And though the levels themselves aren’t particularly hard, there is a bit of fun to be had looking for secret collectibles that unlock new dress patterns and colors to wear for both Peach and her new assistant. If I was disappointed by anything, it was the Detective Peach levels, but you could just chalk that up to me being a weirdo investigation pervert looking for some Columbo in my Scooby Doo. End of the day: it’s fun, it’s charming, and it better not be another 19 years before she gets to be the title character again.



For those of you who aren’t following the fourteenth mainline installment of the Final Fantasy series - uh, hold on. For those of you who aren’t following the seventeenth mainline installment of the Final Fantasy series - well… It’s the one that’s an MMO - no, not that. I’m talking about the one with the big XIV after the title. Yeah. No, wait, the one after that. Right, okay. That’s the one. I hope.

For those of you who aren’t following Final Fantasy XIV - A Realm Reborn and all of its subsequent expansions, Dawntrail is the fifth of those expansions and the first after the major overarching plot wrapped up in 2021’s Endwalker. This gave it some pretty big shoes to fill in two directions - being good enough on its own, while not falling back into the previous expansions’ characters and plotlines too heavily. That’s a delicate balance to walk and a lot of cases could be made for how exactly Dawntrail did with regards to that, but many of them lose the forest for the trees. The forest, in this case, is that FFXIV’s writers know what they’re doing. The new characters hold their own and some underappreciated older cast members get a much-needed turn in the spotlight.

Of particular note is the idea that the Warrior of Light (FFXIV’s generic term for the player character) isn’t really the protagonist of this expansion. That honor goes to newcomer Wuk Lamat, the adopted princess of Dawntrail’s Tural setting and shonen protagonist extraordinaire. The Warrior of Light simply aids in Wuk Lamat’s journey to prove herself worthy and learn what it means to be a leader of a nation, all while trying to hold her own against her competition. This is where something subjective comes into play pretty quickly, but my particular Warrior of Light is someone who prefers a role in the shadows, uplifting the movers and shakers. What that means is that Dawntrail may have been the best possible kind of story for my character in particular, so it gets high marks. And if that’s not your kind of story, that’s fine. People have been gleefully ignoring what happens in the main quest of FFXIV for fifteen years now, so go right ahead! But for me and my WoL, Dawntrail is up there among the best of the expansions.



Ah, Elden Ring. As is tradition with Souls games, I found myself beating each boss and then messaging my friend Lexi to say ‘okay, so who the hell was that?’ I’ve always been more interested in the fights than the lore when it comes to Fromsoft’s most popular offerings, which is not something I’m alone on for sure. And the fights, for whatever it’s worth, are pretty good. This is what Fromsoft does. I enjoy the freedom of being able to pick how I approach my character, even if it means I run the whole game with basically no health, and beating the bosses themselves is satisfying as always.

If I had to nitpick - and I do, because it’s number 8 on a GOTY list - I just didn’t care much for the open world part of it. Did this really need to be such a colossal setting, or is this just another echo of the general industry pivot to everything needing to be sprawling? One of the coolest parts of the original Dark Souls was the way the map was tight and claustrophobic and interconnected, always popping up in an old area from a new angle and unlocking shortcuts with careful observation. That connectivity feels like it’s fallen to the wayside somewhat when it comes to Elden Ring, which is a shame. But at the same time, it led to the introduction of a double jumping horse companion, which is sick enough for me to let it slide. Good work, Fromsoft! I’m probably not playing Shadows of the Erdtree anytime soon, though.



I feel like constantly comparing things back to older games from the same developers can often be… reductive. However, sometimes it’s entirely necessary to express what a game truly is. So I’ve thought through what I’m saying when I say that Metaphor: ReFantazio is swords and spells Persona 5 in the best way possible. It’s got the sheer sense of style, the strong characters, the sharp battle system and - let it not go unsaid - a lot of the plot beats. But it also prunes a lot of the parts that have been plaguing the Persona branch of the SMT tree while also managing to feel as new as it is familiar. Less half-assed romance and weird, creepy fanservice and more compelling overall plot. They even gave this protagonist some real voice lines!

With that aside, Metaphor is a good game whether or not you’ve played Persona. Or Devil Summoner. Or Etrian Odyssey. Or Soul Hackers. Even with a ton of little references to Atlus’ other properties, the game stands alone. And although the title is actually a little misleading (really, it’s more of an allegory than a metaphor if you want to be super pedantic (which I do)), it’s a game that wears its heart on its sleeve after ripping it out of its chest. Of all the games I beat this past year, this is the one that made me go holy SHIT or no way. more than almost any other. The companions are a delight, the fights are cool, and the presentation is great - what more can you ask for?



Last year, I combined Persona 5 Royal, Strikers, and Q2 into one spot on the list because I couldn’t decide which I wanted to highlight and the latter two didn’t work without the first. This year, I’m combining three games into one because the developer or publisher or whoever did it for me.

The reboot of the Hitman series is maybe the most successful I’ve ever seen a game reboot of an older series be. Granted, I’m not too deeply emplaced into the Hitman community, but that hasn’t stopped me from hearing about problems with reboots in other games. Maybe that’s because diehard Hitman fans are a relatively small group on social medias. Maybe that’s because the pair of movie adaptations took all the heat.

Or maybe it’s because they’re pretty damn good games. It helps that World of Assassination doesn’t Surf Dracula like some other reboots. You load a level and get right to hitting men, with as many frills about it as you want there to be. Whether you want to engineer elaborate accidents and stage downright supernatural disappearances or you’d rather just get in there and crack the target over the head with the nearest object with a contextual button, the world - or at least a few acres of the world - is your oyster. And while there are more than a few preplanned and guided sequences to steer the targets right into your sights, there’s also plenty more of methodologies just off the beaten path to make your contract killing experience varied and fun.

However, with three games that are pretty much exactly the same in terms of mechanics, the real question is if this trilogy can keep the same rigamarole from getting stale. And, at least in my opinion, it can. New escalations to the formula and new settings do a lot to make things stay fresh, even when the actual nitty gritty of what you’re doing is the same. Of particular note is Hitman 3’s Apex Predator level, taking place in and around a run down Berlin factory repurposed as a nightclub. The central premise in this one is that Agent 47 himself is the target, and you’ve got to work against a highly trained team of enemy operatives aiming to take you down without any intel about who they are or what their game plan is. There’s also the Dartmouth level where you can get by entirely by solving a murder mystery, or the New York level where Agent 47 can have his very second job interview ever…

This is one of those games that can spawn stories to trade with friends. How did you do this, how can I do this, here’s just what happened - it’s an endearing quality that is hard to successfully pull off while still maintaining a good quality game.



The concept of difficulty in a game is so strange to try and talk about because of how incredibly personal it is. It’s like the concept of intelligence - any attempt to quantify it or put it on a universal scale only winds up making more people angry, and it’s really not all that useful to do in the first place. Much ink, digital and physical, has been spilled over the balance between making a game accessible to as many players as possible and the place that challenge has in the narrative, themes, or overall artistic vision of the work. Video games as an art form have the capability to push back on the audience in ways you can’t get anywhere else outside of starting fistfights at the local community theatre production of Legally Blonde. But what right do artists have to restrict the experiencing of their art? What right does the audience have to insist upon their experiencing it? What would movies be like if they could prevent you from viewing them should you fail a- hold on, I just spilled my soda all over my desk.

Where was I? Oh, Lies of P. Yeah, that one’s pretty good.

Look, if you were to ask me how difficult Lies of P was, my genuine reaction would be ‘kinda.’ It wasn’t breezy by any stretch of the imagination but I don’t think I really ran into much trouble outside of two of the last three fights. I’m someone who values being pretty seriously challenged by a game and a lot of the boss battles in this weren’t all that tricky by my reckoning, but what they were was a lot of fun. This ‘we have Bloodborne on PC’ setup with Sekiro parries is like the perfect distillation of what I like in a Souls-style combat system, but I knew this game was making the list once a boss did the old Punch-Out!! thing of reeling back for one final attack before letting the stun happen. I love stuff like that, playing with established mechanics and timing in order to show a character’s strength or skill. And I love Punch-Out!! too, so.

Really, this one came down to Lies of P versus Elden Ring for this spot on the list. I made a little chart of some things I value in these games and went case by case to see which game did them better. As it turns out, Lies of P completely swept. It had a more engaging story, tighter world design, more fun and memorable bosses… to be entirely honest, it did so well that it kicked Elden Ring all the way down to spot 8. I’m looking forward to whatever they’re teasing about a DLC or sequel or whatever it is next… but for the love of god, can we get Bloodborne on PC already?



You’re on a path in the woods. And at the end of that path is a cabin. And in the basement of that cabin is a princess. You’re here to slay her. If you don’t, it will be the end of the world.

Slay the Princess is grim. It’s dreadful in a deeply compelling way that tangles the stomach like pasta and grates the nerves like a fine garnish. It’s visceral and gruesome. It’s horrible, it’s romantic. It’s really fucking funny. It’s monotonous and unexpected.

If the Princess lives here, slaying her would probably be doing her a favor.

I’m not much of a horror person, although I find myself having to add more and more caveats every time I say that. I’ve been playing more and more horror-leaning games recently, from Little Goody Two Shoes to Resident Evil 4, and loving them a lot. But at the same time, I had to bow out of a recent viewing of The Thing on account of The Thing, so there’s clearly some separation. That being said, here’s the biggest caveat of all - if this is a horror game, then I might just be into horror games.

And of course it is! What else would it be? A visual novel, sure, but those have a long history of overlap. It’s also an examination of narrative and intent, of authorial voice and analysis that changes the meaning of the work. It’s about abuse, about relationships, about partings, about sorrows. Slay the Princess is about what happens when two people meet, when they fall in love, when one drives a shining steel knife-blade into the others’ sternum. The self and the other and the imperceptible but very real line that divides the two, and the experiences that shape what they look like… it’s all here. It’s the monomyth. Or a monomyth, anyway.

This is a love story.



Ah, Persona. For better or worse, it’s become one of my favorite series of games out there. The deep sense of style that runs through the games is downright infectious and, for as many adventures as the Phantom Thieves have been on, Tactica ranks up there as one of their best.

The shining stars of this spinoff are, as usual, the new characters who we’ll probably never see again. Just like Labrys, Sho, Kanami, Metis, Sophia, Zenkichi, Ichinose, so on and so forth - Atlus just seems downright allergic to bringing their side casts back into the limelight. There may be some reasoning for that - after all, with the mainline games being such separate experiences, it may hurt their presentation to reintroduce old cast members. But my whole heart and soul for a game where these one-offs get to reprise their stellar roles.

Anyway, I digress. The new additions this time are Erina and Toshiro, and for wildly different reasons, they immediately shot to the top of my favorite characters in the franchise. Erina is a driven, badass, and powerful fighter who’s just as capable of being goofy as she is being hardcore, and Toshiro is a mid-late 20s career politician who will take every opportunity he can get to try and talk the Thieves out of doing whatever reckless bullshit they’re currently gearing up to do. He’s one of the few adults in a Persona game who seems to recognize that the main cast are teenagers and use this not to belittle them but to drive himself to protect them. He settles into a mindset of ‘I can’t stop you, so I’ll do what I can to make sure you’re doing this safely’ and becomes a tactician for the group. And he has a really, really bad day the entire time.

Erina, on the other hand, clicks with the Thieves straight away. She has one goal - free her land from the oppressive yoke of a marriage-crazed dictator. And once that’s done? Onto the next downtrodden people to save. These spinoff characters work best when they interact well with the new mechanics - Erina, despite not having a Persona, is more than capable of hanging among the Thieves’ best fighters and styling on their foes with the new Triple Threat All-Out Attacks. She also slots right into the group dynamic socially, recognizing herself in the Thieves’ relentless (and seemingly never ending) struggle to determine their own fates.

Very few games can get the jump to another genre right while preserving the same style as the original, but Tactica absolutely nails it. That classic ‘you’ll never see it coming’ feeling you get from landing All-Out Attacks is preserved excellently in Tactica’s Triple Threats, especially when you set up a string of enemy knockdowns to run one of your units all the way to the far side of the field so that the ensuing triangle catches every single foe. The format being a more tactical isometric strategy game than a stand-in-a-line RPG lets it feel even more like you caught your enemy off guard when you neutralize their cover or send them flying with a Persona ability. It also leads to more interesting boss mechanics, akin to FFXIV raids - making the fights feel almost more cinematic than ever before.

We might never get another Persona game like Tactica but god, I hope we do. And I hope Labrys is there.



It’s incredibly unlikely I’m the first person you’re hearing about this from, but Balatro is very good. Maybe it’s all the virtual fake Texas Hold ‘Em I played on my first smartphone when I was a kid, but I latched onto Balatro straight away the moment I heard about it. I don’t even remember where I heard about it. Maybe it just manifested in my Steam Library one day spontaneously. That would seem right for this game.

If I had to describe Balatro in one word, it would be ‘efficient.’ There’s not a wasted pixel or melody or word at any point. It doesn’t need a long tutorial or some overarching story - here’s your cards, get these chips, go. And yet there’s incredible depth to the mechanics - being able to squeeze an extra hundred thousand out of a hand by just changing the order in which they’re laid on the table or tripling your score by throwing a random nine of hearts in with your four of a kind kings. The game is subtle and grandiose at the same time in the best way, with a small change meaning the difference between getting those sweet sweet fire effects on the score count as you blow the windows out of the hardest challenge the game’s got and having the only real character call you a bigger joker than they are.

My friends will confirm that I'm a sucker for clever naming, and that's one area where I have to laud Balatro in particular. Pretty much every joker has some kind of witty name to match what its unique effect is - from ‘Riff Raff’ spawning two common jokers to ‘Gros Michel’ and ‘Cavendish’ combining to reference the near extinction of the humble banana. Whether you're burning spare cards for warmth with ‘Campfire’ or reusing your worst material with ‘Hack,’ every aspect of Balatro's jokers was thoughtfully designed for maximum sensible chuckles.

The biggest testament to the game is that I keep taking a break from writing this to play another round.



Sometimes there needs to be an amount of deliberation when picking a game of the year. There's a lot of games, it's only fair. But sometimes, the game of the year blows open the door with strategic breaching spells and secures the number one spot before the first real level has even begun. Tactical Breach Wizards is such a good game that I finished it, immediately reopened it to 100 percent it, and then proceeded to look into every other game the developer has ever made. It’s a smartly written, smartly designed puzzle strategy game with incredibly cohesive and well-implemented character writing integrated into its mechanics and combat. It’s funny, it’s gut-wrenching - I figured I would like the game, but I didn’t realize just how much of a chord it would strike with me.

To dig into some more specifics - and I really can’t recommend you play it enough - Tactical Breach Wizards is about a ragtag group of high-powered mages on a mission to take down the Michael Jordan of spec ops sorcerers. Because their target has the backing of a PMC with the net worth of a medium sized industrialized nation behind her, the only five assholes trying to do anything about her have to be quick, quiet, and efficient - setting up scenarios where they break into police stations, raid cargo trains, and delegitimize state religions just to get the slightest advantage over a woman who can kill every single one of them in the blink of an eye and proceeds to do so at her earliest convenience. The pressure is palpable for nearly all of the game’s runtime, a strained urgency seeping into the characters’ dialog as a grim humor and deadpan anxiety that builds and builds and builds and builds. Seeing each character’s reactions to the inordinate amounts of stress they’re all under is the heart and soul of Tactical Breach Wizards’ tight characterizations - what do they choose to joke about, what do they want to talk about, what do they want to ask about each other in their moments of brief reprieve from the ever-looming threat? Perhaps more tellingly, what do they ask themselves?

One section of the game in particular has stuck in my mind since I played it. In it, pseudo-protagonist Jen asks a new addition to the team about her spiritual beliefs. This new addition tells Jen that the main thing that grounds their faith is love for the lost. She says “Go far enough back, and someone I love loved someone who loved someone you love. I show my respect to them by respecting you.” She talks about her late partner and how she asks him for help sometimes, how he responds in flashes of insight about a problem she’s having. She says “I used to carry his belief around with me like a torch. It lit up all the things I could do. Now I carry it like a combustion engine.”

When Jen says ‘he sounds great,’ her only response is ‘he is.’

Tactical Breach Wizards is my game of the year. Is the writing Whedonesque, sometimes? Sure, but Buffy had some great stuff in it and TBW’s quips and jokes don't compromise the heart of the piece like so many of the imitators before it. From front to back, it’s a game with heart - and it’s a game so good that I immediately had to go find and play both of the other games from the developer, Gunpoint and Heat Signature (which almost made it on the list itself). This is a game that hits where it hurts and where it heals. It’s precise. It’s surgically funny. It’s… tactica- eh, you get it.

Who’d have thought that my game of the year would have been a game from this year? Not me.

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