As I sat down to start thinking about my Game of the Year list for 2024, I quickly realized just how packed this year was with great games. While there were a few big AAA games that caught my eye, this was mostly a year of amazing smaller experiences grabbing my attention.
Given the sheer volume of games that came out, even highlighting ten on a best of the year list is going to cause some great games to fall through the cracks. With that in mind, here’s a list of some of the more under-the-radar games of 2024 that are worth seeking out.
But first, a handful of Honorable Mentions…
- Dread Delusion by Lovely Hellplace (available on Steam)
- FLATHEAD by Tim Oxton (available on Steam)
- Mullet Madjack by HAMMER95 (available on Steam, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series)
- Indika by Odd Meter (available on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series)
- Clickolding by Strange Scaffold (available on Steam)
10 Dead Doves
Everyone gets caught up in GOTY hype at the end of the year, catching up on games they have been meaning to get around to, so it’s very easy to let December releases sneak by unnoticed. One December game you definitely shouldn’t miss is 10 Dead Doves, the debut game from Duonix Studios. It may look like just another old school low poly horror game, but it sets itself apart with a strong sense for cinematic surrealism and a grounded, naturalistic sense of humor.
10 Dead Doves tells the story of two friends hiking in Appalachia trying to find a mysterious urban legend called the Ant Farm. It definitely leans into the more narrative side of the genre, focusing mostly on navigating densely packed areas from a fixed camera perspective while doing some light puzzle solving. This game has one of the strongest low poly art styles I’ve seen in a while, with facial ‘animations’ handled by swapping between different textures of digitized photos, creating a wonderfully strange and dreamlike effect. While all the ins and outs of the weird occurrences going on around the duo are enough to intrigue you, what drew me in most was the great rapport between the two leads, who are written as two lifelong friends that you could easily see in your social group. It does take a lot of influences from games that came before it, but it has a unique personality that sets it apart from the pack.
10 Dead Doves is available on Steam.
Children of the Sun
What a singular vision of the game this is. Children of the Sun sets you on a road trip from hell where you’re taking out members of a cult using a sniper rifle and a telekinetically controlled bullet. While it sounds like a shooter, it plays like a puzzle game where you’re trying to guide this bullet, which can be redirected every time it kills someone, into every enemy on the map in one go. It adds just enough wrinkles throughout to keep things interesting, creating a great combination of brain teasing puzzles and precision reflexes.
While the mechanics are rock solid, the style is what really elevates the game to another level. It’s a dreamy, neon drenched nightmare landscape with an aggressive UI that announces your victories in the most bombastic way possible. Sound effects combine with extreme zoom and camera angles that punctuate every kill, making for an experience that overwhelms you with sights and sounds. The three to four hour runtime is the exact right length for something like this, and if you enjoy it, you can always replay levels to chase high scores on the leaderboards.
Children of the Sun is available on Steam.
Sniper Killer
From the developers behind Night at the Gates of Hell and Bloodwash, Sniper Killer is a clever low poly crime thriller where you jump between various perspectives as you piece together the mystery of the titular serial killer. You’ll play as investigator, victim, and even the killer himself as the bodies pile up throughout the three hour-ish runtime. It’s fun to see perspectives shift like this, leaving you to try to figure out exactly what’s going to happen to your character by the end of the chapter. Will this character find a key clue to the mystery or be just another corpse to be investigated later?
Most of the characters you play as have pretty linear gameplay, moving you between story beats, but the sections where you play as the sniper are more complex. You’re given a mission by someone over a staticky radio, who claims you’re acting on behalf of the United States government, and this can play out as simple as “here’s the description of the target” to “find the target and make it look like an accident.” It’s never overly complicated, but it’s a nice mix of a shooting range of enemies and puzzle solving. The story keeps you on your toes, adding some surreal elements when you least expect it. I ran into a few bugs while playing, so the experience can be rough, but if you’re looking for a sleazy detective story where you play both cop and criminal, Sniper Killer will keep you thrilled for its bite-sized runtime.
Sniper Killer is available on Steam.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
As much as I love soulslike games, one thing that can keep me from them is their length. Don’t get me wrong, Elden Ring is an excellent game, but the time commitment makes it hard for me to want to revisit it. Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, aims to provide a “souls-lite” experience, giving you the same thrills as other titles in the genre within a 15 hour campaign. You play as Nor, a woman who is trying to fight back against the gods that have unleashed armies of the undead upon her lands. Accompanying you on your journey is a mysterious fox-like creature named Enki, who gives you access to magical abilities.
Not only is it neat to have a smaller scale version of a soulslike, there are some clever wrinkles added to the standard combat. There’s a push your luck mechanic that gives you multipliers for consecutive hits, but if you’re hit that drops back to zero. This multiplier is cashed in with a press of a button, so figuring out when to do so can be crucial to making sure you’ve got enough currency for upgrades. Like Bloodborne, you use a gun alongside your melee weapon that can stun foes, breaking them out of their attack patterns. I was also very impressed by the movement in this game, which has more verticality in the level design than I’m used to the genre. It doesn’t feel as deep or expressive as Elden Ring, but a strong focus on animation makes sure the tight combat feels appropriately impactful.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is available on Steam, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series.
Grunn
I certainly didn’t have “creepy gardening simulator meets Outer Wilds” on my 2024 bingo card, but that’s the best way to describe Grunn, the newest game from Tom van den Boogaart of the Sokpop Collective. The game drops you off at a person’s house who asks you to clean up the garden, but when you go looking, all the tools are missing. Your search leads you to some wonderfully strange places, constantly keeping you guessing as to what’s going to happen next.
Every time you die, you start over from the beginning, but you’ll learn little shortcuts as you go that allow you to repeat what you did quicker and quicker in order to move you towards your goals. The only thing that persists between runs is photographs that you find around the various areas you explore, which give you clues to the puzzles that you’ll run into. It can get a little repetitive to do some of these steps over and over, but it’s such a delight every time you discover something new. While it’s never outright terrifying, there’s a very uncanny surrealness to everything going on that’s delightfully unnerving. I’ve become really enamored with this type of open-ended puzzle game design, and Grunn was one of the most surprising entries in that genre.
Grunn is available on Steam.
Vampire Therapist
I’m not always into visual novels, but every once in a while one really sinks its teeth into me (pun intended), and Vampire Therapist is one of those lucky visual novels. It takes typical vampire-related topics like immorality and ennui and focuses them through the lens of real cognitive behavioral therapy concepts. You play as Sam, a Wild West gunslinger who is trying to help out his fellow immortals as a therapist in the modern day. Throughout the story, you’ll meet a wide variety of vampires who are all looking for help dealing with their existence.
Vampire Therapist plays like a standard visual novel where you’re making dialog choices as you interact with characters, but the bulk of the ‘gameplay’ part of it involves listening to your clients and correctly identifying the cognitive distortion they’re displaying. It’s a clever concept that actually feels like it’s teaching you something while successfully pulling off a story that’s well written and excellently voice acted. There’s a lot of humor and heart to be found here, so if you’re looking for a new visual novel, schedule an appointment with Vampire Therapist.
Vampire Therapist is available on Steam.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
Don’t Nod is a really interesting developer that does a wider variety of things than you might realize. The game of theirs that stuck with me the most was Vampyr, which found clever ways to link narrative and mechanical consequences throughout. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden seems to be them going back to that well, telling the story of a man who specializes in dealing with ghosts as he contemplates how to handle the spirit of his recently deceased partner.
While there’s some solid combat mechanics involved, allowing you to switch between the main protagonist and his ghostly lover in the middle of combat, the main draw of the game will be the consequential narrative decisions you make. As a titular banisher, you’ll be investigating ghosts that are sticking around in the 1695 colony community of New Eden and deciding what to do with their spirit. These choices will not only matter for the side characters involved in the investigation, but also the main narrative of the central pair, making each decision feel weighty thanks to solid writing.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is available on Steam, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series.
Threshold
Much like Mouthwashing, Threshold, from solo developer Julien Eveillé, is a first person, low-fi horror game that takes a small environment and uses it to tell a psychological story about the horrors of mundane work. At the beginning, you start your job, which mostly consists of blowing a whistle into a horn to keep a train going at the optimal speed. Of course, air is limited in the area, so you need to keep grabbing tickets that can be redeemed for oxygen canisters that you bite into to keep you alive.
Since the game only runs a little over an hour, I don’t want to go into too many plot details, but it somehow manages to get even weirder from there. Eveillé does a great job of building the world with unique little details, and the story ends up going to some really surprising places. It’s the type of game that will give you just enough details to feel satisfying, but will still leave you with a lot of mystery by the end, which is the right balance for a short story, in my book.
Threshold is available on Steam.
1000xResist
Trying to summarize the experience of 1000xResist is difficult. At its most basic core, it’s a sci fi narrative game with gameplay mostly consisting of exploring areas and talking to characters, making some dialog choices to help add your own spin to the interactions. But what is it about? It’s about generational trauma, memory, forgiveness, community, religion, the immigrant experience, revolution, and so much more. A lot of the fun of the game is slowly unpacking the complex narrative as it’s doled out bit by bit, revealing layer after layer of world building and character development.
The most basic pitch for the game is that you are living in a future where humanity is nearly wiped out by a disease. The only remaining people left are clones of a woman now known as ALLMOTHER. As Watcher, you dive into ALLMOTHER’s memories and learn the history of what happened to the world and how your complex society came to be. It feels like it shares a lot tonally and thematically with works like Signalis, Nier: Automata, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, but never feels like it’s mimicking those works. Like the best sci-fi, 1000xResist grounds its complicated world in a deeply personal tale, telling a heartbreaking, and often disturbing, story that will constantly surprise you with profound revelations and breathtaking imagery. I do wish there was a bit more ‘gameplay’ to it, but it’s hard to be mad when the narrative is as impressive as the one presented here.
1000xResist is available on Steam.
[REDACTED]
Even though it’s set in the game universe as the generally disappointing Callisto Protocol, [REDACTED] could not be more different than its predecessor. It abandons the grimy Dead Space-like aesthetic for a colorful comic book-esque presentation and switches the gameplay from the third-person melee horror of the original to an action roguelike reminiscent of Hades. This hard turn made me skeptical at first, but the Hades formula is a strong one so I decided to give it a shot despite my hesitancy. While it does pretty much copy Hades in both its combat mechanics and power up acquisition, it feels great in play and adds some substantial wrinkles to the genre.
You play a guard trying to escape Black Iron Prison in the midst of the same chaos of Callisto Protocol. You’ll battle your way through rooms from an isometric perspective, selecting from upgrades or currencies each time you complete a room. If you die, you start back over, keeping some of the currency for upgrades that can be used each run. The decisions you make between improving your run’s build or trying for resources to buy permanent upgrades is always a compelling one, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.
Aside from the extremely tight and responsive combat mechanics, the real shining star of the game is the rivals system. Other people are racing to the same escape pod you are, and you’ll need to sabotage them or defeat them in order to be the first to get out. These rivals act as minibosses that add variety to the standard set of bosses that you encounter each time on your runs. These rivals have great personalities that compliment the fun style of the game. This was easily one of the biggest surprises for me this year, and I always find myself making time for one more run.
[REDACTED] is available on Steam.
