From huge titles like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to the more niche indie ones like Himegashima Island, 2024 has seen a ton of releases. As usual, our team has gone through everything we’ve played this year, and many of us have chosen our Game of the Year 2024 to tell you a little about.
Much like our Yearly Top Visual Novels lists, these are our subjective choices. They don’t necessarily need to be the highest-rated games, but the ones we personally enjoyed the most. And if you’re looking for the Top Visual Novels of 2024, you can find them here.
Think we might have missed something? Just want to let us know your thoughts on the best games of 2024? Ping us on X (Twitter) or our Discord.
ISAIAH PARKER – Shiren The Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island
2024 was a year filled with plenty of strong gems, including new favorites from the likes of Sonic and Ys. Every month, it felt like there was some big new thing to enjoy. Indeed, it was a close race on what came out as my favorite game this year… Or at least it would be, if my favorite game wasn’t already decided on the very first title I reviewed this year. Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is a game that, and I say this with no hesitation, has no peer or equal within its genre. It’s the best Mystery Dungeon game that money can buy.
Greater qualities of life and old-school mechanics combine to make for an experience with broad and creative layers of play. Even subtle changes to dungeons and enemy variety create lots of distinct interactions, to the point that I was never able to “solve” the game even after reaching triple-digit hours. Months later, and here I am still shadowboxing with the game’s traps and high difficulty, thinking of ways to escape its dastardly mechanisms even when away from the screen. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
Please check out our full review of Shiren The Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island.
THOMAS KNIGHT – Metaphor Re:Fantazio
I had high expectations for Metaphor: ReFantazio, but Atlus still exceeded them. To me, it wasn’t just the best JRPG of 2024, but the best game outright. It builds up an interesting world, has a story that kept me wanting to see what’s next, and uses both the main story and the bond events to get to know some rather likable characters well.
One area where it particularly does better than other JRPGs is just how engaging the gameplay is. While there are a few snags with its extensive class change system, I enjoyed customizing builds. The battles were just the right level of challenge too, where using the systems properly is needed and feels rewarding. There were lots of little touches in the dungeon and quest gameplay that I appreciated too.
Metaphor: ReFantazio feels like it’s taken the best parts of the Persona series and Shin Megami Tensei, and then used them to create something even better. A short summary isn’t really enough to get across why, but hopefully this has interested you enough to go and pick it up or read the detailed review.
Please check out our full review of Metaphor: ReFantazio.
WES PLAYFAIR – 1000xRESIST
First off, it’s pronounced “one thousand TIMES resist”, because even when forced from your home or at the edge of humanity, nothing can silence the stories and experiences that made you. 1000xResist is a narrative adventure set in a future society composed entirely of clones of a single woman–the only person immune to a deadly virus that wiped out the rest of humanity. It’s a strange society, ruled by the cult of the “Allmother” through a rigid hierarchy. Playing as Watcher, whose role is to record and remember the story of the Allmother, you slowly unravel the circumstances under which this society formed and ultimately make choices that will determine its future. There’s just enough world-building to bring the setting to life without bogging things down, and the nonlinear narrative makes bold and effective use of its audiovisual and interactive elements. 1000xResist is imaginative, thoughtful, and compelling–everything good science fiction should be.
But 1000xResist is also a story about our world. It’s a story of the intergenerational trauma of those forced from their homeland during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests. It’s a story of the sacrifices forced on the most vulnerable among us during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a story of a society that grinds people down to nothing to fuel progress and comfort for its elites. And yet, it’s also a story about how, despite all this, we can love our flawed world, speak our truth, and fight for change. We can resist. The way 1000xResist deftly weaves these threads into its science fiction mystery, explores its wide-ranging themes with maturity and nuance, and ultimately crafts a story that is both personal and universal make it stand alongside luminaries like Kentucky Route Zero as a masterpiece of video game storytelling with a voice that demands to be heard.
DANIEL JOSEPH – Unicorn Overlord
Of all the games I played this year, Unicorn Overlord stands out as the most well-crafted and complete. Vanillaware’s foray into the tactics RPG genre pulled me in with the studio’s signature visual flair and gorgeous presentation, and its flexible, engaging gameplay and structure kept me hooked for the entirety of its masterfully paced campaign. It is rare to find a game as precisely and perfectly put together as Unicorn Overlord, though Vanillaware certainly seems to have a talent for that.
As the year has marched on I have found my thoughts constantly drifting back to Unicorn Overlord. There is no game I am more excited to return to when time allows. Vanillaware is an adventurous studio, constantly moving forward with new ideas and IPs, and that’s an approach that is working beautifully. It is unlikely that we will see a sequel to Unicorn Overlord, but if the studio were to break with tradition in this case I would be thrilled. You can’t just drop one of the best games in a genre and then move on, can you?
ROB MACINTOSH – Astro Bot
In what ended up being a big surprise to a lot of people I feel, Astro Bot emerged as one of the shining gems of a rather stacked year for gaming. For all the great and expansive stories this year, the game I found to be the most consistently excellent game I played ended up being the game with next to no text at all. Astro Bot feels like a celebration not just of the PlayStation brand it attaches itself to but of video games itself.
Astro Bot is a game of near-unmitigated joy, full of charm and life for nearly its entire duration. And while nostalgia is a part of its appeal, it’s full of its own brand of fun, whether it be melting enemies with your feet lasers or turning yourself into a sponge. Every level has something neat to offer, and the game’s lulls are few, far between, and fairly shallow. If you own a PS5 and consider yourself something of a PlayStation fan or even just someone who likes platforming video games, Astro Bot should be right up your alley.
Please check out our full review of Astro Bot.
JOHN RAFAEL – Strinova
If I’m not reading something from my never-ending backlog of visual novels, I’m usually playing a multiplayer game with friends to pass the time. One particular game that was released this year that I’ve found myself constantly thinking about is the third-person shooter Strinova. I’m not really big on arena shooters, but between the very attractive art style and the several available modes for both casual and competitive play, it’s been a really fun month of just getting home and instantly booting it up for a nice, relaxing session with the boys. I never thought I’d be heavily invested in getting better in an FPS game, but here I am, watching various videos on Youtube to help both my movement mechanics and map knowledge.
My favorite part of Strinova is probably how it fully embraces the idea of ‘2D is superior’. No, I’m not talking about the well-supported notion amongst anime fans that 2D wives and husbands are better than 3D ones, but the fact that having only two dimensions to your body greatly enhances your fighting capabilities in a shooter. The game’s unique mechanic centers around the ability to “stringify” your character, which essentially means you can turn into paper while you shoot bullets, stick to walls, and even glide on wind currents if there are any available!
Some arena shooter fans might have a pretty frustrating experience when starting with the game though. Relative to other games of its kind, Strinova has a pretty high time-to-kill (TTK), which means that it takes you a lot longer to down someone. This is further aggravating in modes like Demolition, where downing someone does not guarantee a kill. Instead, similar to how Fortnite and Apex Legends do it, the downed character is given ten seconds to move near a teammate to initiate a revive, essentially bringing them back to the battle for a second run. It highly emphasizes team play, so if you’re more of a lone wolf type of gamer, you might have a bit of a rough time adjusting to the game’s pace.
Overall, I find Strinova a fun, chaotic mess of a shooter that gives a nice twist to the standard FPS game. If you’re craving some sort of new experience in the genre, I highly recommend trying it out!
Conclusion And Honourable Mentions!
While we’ve already told you our favorite titles of 2024, we’d also like to take the time to briefly mention a few other 2024 titles worth looking at.
The Rise of the Golden Idol, the follow-up to 2022’s outstanding The Case of the Golden Idol, takes the titular golden idol into the 1970s. It spans 25 cases full of sinister twists and satisfying deductive reasoning puzzles.
Balatro has been all the rage in 2024 and with good reason. Built on a foundation of classic poker, it’s easy to learn but hard to master, boasting a huge amount of depth and replayability wrapped in an addictive gameplay loop that will keep you coming back for “one more run.”
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was already one of the most delightful JRPGs ever made, but the 2024 remake brings even more life to this classic. While ultimately a very faithful remake (and thus is largely a repeat of an old experience) with some minor performance issues, the way it brings out the strengths of the already beloved classic makes it a worthwhile addition to the Switch library, especially if you didn’t get the chance to experience it for Gamecube way back when.
Persona 3 Reload is somewhat similar to Paper Mario TTYD as listed above in terms of being a remake, albeit with quite a few more changes to bring it in line with modern sensibilities. Still, it goes to great lengths to maintain the ethos of what made Persona 3 such a transcendent and beautiful RPG/social sim hybrid even within its own series while polishing out just enough to keep it in line with the improvements Atlus has steadily made to one of its flagship series.
Himegashima Island lets you experience a slow life adventure on a summer island, with some charming characters and a surprisingly touching story considering that a primary attraction is its less than innocent type of content. There are certainly some issues around progression and the odd technical issue does pop up, but it makes up for it in other ways, including an addictive bug-catching and raising minigame.
While there were plenty more great titles released in 2024, if you missed out on these, we hope you’ll give them a try.
Want to see some of the best games in previous years? Check out our previous GOTY lists. More into visual novels? We have top visual novel picks for each year too!
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
