Despite playing very little of the big hitters this year, I’ve found it hard to define the top of my list. I know where the bottom lies, next to a certain Prime Minister from the 80s, but we’ll get to that. As usual, you’ll hardly find Hellblade 2, Helldivers 2, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Persona 3 Reload, or even Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, maybe even Shadow of the Erdtree. While everyone else was playing remakes and sequels, I’ve had very few of them on the cards, with maybe 3 remakes and 3 sequels (unless you count WWE and Farming Sim) being all that I managed to find the time for. I won’t mess around, let’s get to my honorable mentions and top 3.

Honorary mention – Supermarket Simulator/TCG Card Shop Simulator

If 2015 was the year of the RPGs with The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Undertale, Bloodborne, and so on. Some have argued that 2024 is the year of sequels, reboots, and remakes. We saw it with Tomb Raider I-III, Final Fantasy VII: Bi-Regeneration, Persona 3 Reload, Silent Hill 2 (remake), and so on. However, I think 2024 is the honorary year of the [shop] simulator. It started early with Supermarket Simulator, which captured not only fans by the hundreds but as we so often see, many imitators – and none better than TCG Card Shop Simulator.

A simple concept that has shockingly not been overexposed, it could be argued that Gas Station Simulator is the start of the genre, but this explosion of titles didn’t happen until Nokta Games’ BiM Sim. One such example of the explosion being OPNeon Games’ refinements and refreshing take with TCG Card Shop Simulator. Both look at bit underwhelming visually, both work off the same formula, and generally, they both work off of similar ideas, but I think they complement each other most in this weird subgenre.

Supermarket Simulator is a bit slower with updates, though is trying to be a bit more ambitious. While OPNeon Games is quickly firing out updates despite its late-game performance not exactly being perfect. Realistically, I’d say both are enough that you could lose hundreds of hours just calmly stacking shelves, swearing at people for trying to pay in pennies which means I can’t use the number pad, maybe enjoying some music or a podcast, and in the case of TCG Card Shop Sim, shouting at the smelly pricks that don’t wash before coming out into polite society. Pikachu says, “Use soap you smelly prick!”

3rd for Game of the Year – Sumerian Six

I’ve said it a lot this year, especially with an article we’ve got coming up on Wednesday, but I’ve had a lot of trouble placing anything in the top spots. It has been a really good year, and admittedly I am a very indecisive person. However, the more I think about it, I just can’t put Microbird Games’ Dungeons of Hinterberg quite there in the top three, I have to give that to one of the games I had the most fun in as I made Nazis into unwitting suicide bombers in Artificer’s Sumerian Six. An isometric, occult take on an alt-history Indiana Jones ‘em up, Artificer made a real-time tactics game as if the studio’s name was Mimimi Productions.

From Boris the Bear (Wojtek) to super-Nazis in mech suits, the clock-work-like mechanism to decipher that is common in stealth games is brilliant as it offers player freedom and a massive amount of fun doing so. My favorite is still Rosa as she’s basic game-breaking 101: Not only can you dissolve bodies like you’re Walt Witman’s number 1 fan, blow them up like it was a trailer for a late 2000s COD, or indefinitely stun them, you can even throw out a cloud of stink bombs forcing the NAZIs to disperse. She’s quite literally a glass cannon, but one that’s so overpowered it is fun again.

This is all before we get to the whole Sumerian gods and such. Sumerian Six is as if someone thought of Wolfenstein crossed with an old Commandos, but said that wasn’t weird enough, let’s put the story of Gilgamesh in there and while we’re at it let’s put in colorful maps that make the game visually exciting. A true delight of the year, especially for fans of the “stealth” genre. Well, as stealth as going into a NAZI base and magically strapping explosives to their guts.

Honorary mention – Balatro

If there was one thing I had to complain most about when it came to the Game Awards this year, it was Astro Bot getting Game of the Year. Did you know that Astro Bot is the 5th game in the series? A series that started as a tool to help you know what to do with your PlayStation Camera in 2013, which you balled up and threw in that box you keep with spare cables. The series is specifically made to showcase and give you direction on how to do things with your PlayStation. Astro Bot is great and has several interesting ideas, but it is a marketing tool for PlayStation’s 30th anniversary. Not a bad choice on a personal list, but on something so “definitive” and after Swen’s speech, I was shocked LocalThunk’s Balatro didn’t win.

“Well, it isn’t that complex or it doesn’t…” I don’t care about the excuse, I think if the Game Awards are going to be the “definitive” of Game of the Year in a lot of people’s eyes, complexity isn’t the issue. I think Balatro speaks more to the wider audience outside of this “get gud,” “Hardcore Gaymer ™” audience that argue that something like Black Myth Wukong should have won. I think on a personal list, every one of those games nominated should have won for different people.

Balatro’s basic concept of “Poker, but weird” I think spoke to a broader market that absolutely won a lot more people over than were decrying it. I know it holds about as much weight as a dead pope carrying an elephant up a hill (which is to say it doesn’t), but Steam lists it as Overwhelmingly Positive, reviews up and down the board love it, and more than 3.5 million people have downloaded it across multiple platforms. As a game it is simple, you are given a hand of 5 cards and must hit a certain number of points to win.

Each hand you play gains you points, while Jokers and other strange things can multiply or play with that score. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel that is Poker, but it plays with it and makes it weird. For example, you can get a Joker that will +4 to whatever multiplier you have active for that given hand. Say you have two pairs, the base multiplier gets another 4 resulting in your hand being massive. What makes it interesting is you aren’t playing with 52 cards.

Adding to the deck, you are getting cards that have their own effects, sometimes doing really weird and wonderful things. It isn’t Binding of Isaac levels of depth, but the degree of depth at play, and with the hands you can modify, it all becomes far more interesting than what I can describe in a paragraph. I think as a snapshot of the year, looking beyond those that play more than the median number of games a year (4 according to Steam), Balatro spoke more to what people were playing on a bus going to work than a showcase of IP that Sony has or once had as a console exclusive.

Dishonorable mention of the year – Broken Roads

There is a point at which you don’t mess with a formula too much, or you will muck up your own success. Broken Roads tried to reinvent the wheel as it were when it came to the success of CRPGs. The kind that Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and others have tweaked the formula of without messing with it. Those games were done so well with vast depths to their stories without compromising their gameplay. Drop Bear Bytes’ Broken Roads wants to turn Mad Max into a classic Fallout or a Baldur’s Gate. It fell short with a moral compass that failed to capture the atmosphere it desperately wanted to have.

Set in the Australian outback, some ideas and stories work, though they are mostly for boring people like me who enjoy hearing some stories from that part of the world. The gameplay and the world itself don’t last long when it comes to holding your attention, with the typical Irish RPG fodder of Fetch Quests ‘O Plenty. I hear old Fetch Quests likes Guinness – if you’re going to make a joke offensive, you might as well offend everyone. Despite playing the extremely depressing Finnish game Rauniot, there is far more going on there (which isn’t very much) than there is throughout Broken Roads.

Honorary mention – Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft

Pointy boobarella and I have tangled a wonderful weave throughout my time playing video games. Originally released in 1996, a month or so after I was conceived (oh look, you have some extra lore), I’ve bounced around and locked an old man in the fridge for more than half my life. The Tomb Raider series holds a very special place in my heart, not because the conventionally attractive polygonal lady has big breasts but because the young Lady Croft is my favorite character.

Seeing the games that started my love, seeing the remaster of the PS1 game I have sat next to me in my office, blown up to 1080 and running at 60 as I can finally play on a controller on the couch? I’m in love. The art style doesn’t change too much either. If you don’t look up the original or swap to the original’s graphical style, your rose-tinted oggle boxes will think those teal-tinted tips were always this round and had a proper shadow under them. The titanically chested woman aside, the gameplay feels almost unchanged, provided you haven’t played the classics recently or used the “classic controls.”

Thanks, Aspyr, dig the grave for me at least. The fact at least one of these games is depressingly closer to 30 than I’d like out of the way, this is what a remaster of these ’90s games should be. Sure, have your remakes full of fancy, sexy ray-tracing, and water wetter than an otter’s pocket. However, if you’re trying to remaster, do the art style in a way that tricks you into thinking this was how it always looked, give a slightly better control scheme, and leave the mechanics alone for the love of god. The perfect trinity: mostly because Blade 3 is awful.

2nd for Game of the Year – Duck Detective: The Secret Salami

“Oh, a baby game!” listen, if I want to be beaten around the testicles with a rubber mallet I have the choice of your parents or playing a FromSoft game. Sometimes I just want to play a simple word puzzle game with a duck that has a voice like sticky toffee pudding going in your ear, and a very attractive sticker book-esque art style. No more than a couple of hours long, the story of Eugene McQuacklin is one that fell right out of a noir novel or film. His wife left him, he’s addicted to the bread, he lives on a mattress in the corner of his office, and the job is the only thing he’s got left.

The colorful and sometimes dark Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a pure joy to play for a bit. Similar to other story-focused puzzle games, it is mostly a one-and-done affair. Similar to your Golden Idols or Return of the Obra Dinn. No, it is absolutely not on the same level of mind-bending wonderfulness that I can’t help but come back to and finally discover the solution. The truth is, not everyone has had a fantastic, wonderful, all-round perfect year (or so). Some of us have had crappy and depressing ones, something that a little ray of sunshine in the form of a duck-shaped detective solves for a short while.

Honorary mention – PlayStation exclusives on PC

I’m cheating, I know. I also know that was slagging off Sony’s Game of the Year win not more than 1000 words ago. That said, I am going to say that I had a massive amount of fun playing Ghost of Tsushima, God of War Ragnarök, and still absolutely adore Until Dawn (2024 remake/remaster) as the best horror game from a major publisher in years. Recent Resident Evil aside. All three have a case of the big budgets about them, trying to showcase how much power you truly need to make something look this pretty, have worlds load this quickly, and on occasion have you fill your undercrackers with a yule log.

In the case of Ghost of Tsushima, it gives you a Samurai fantasy by way of Akira Kurosawa. For Dad of War: No Really, We Mean There Is War This Time (they should name these things better), it is about completing a story though bloated as it is. For Until Dawn, I can’t help but love how it perfectly executes that crappy 90s horror/teen-slasher flick down to the very T. In their own way, they are all beautiful and are games that I certainly couldn’t stop thinking about when it came to looking over what I played this year.

I just can’t give any of them one of the top spots for multiple reasons. Yes, originally releasing in another year or being a remake aside, none of them topped the top three for me when it came to thinking about them afterward. As much as I still think about running around, slicing up the invading hordes, and chasing kitsune around, Ghost of Tsushima only does enough to make me enjoy the world. The story itself falls in the realm of bland-ish.

Honorary mention – The Early Access to Full Release titles

Two in particular, mostly to save my editors from wanting to jump up and down on my fingers so I don’t write too much this year. The first of which I thought about putting in as my game of the year, but there was just too much that was standing out more. This is odd to say given Satisfactory is never off of at least one PC in my house. Goat Simulator developer Coffee Stain Studios’ first-person Factorio ‘em up was released into early access back in 2019, and even before then, I knew this colorful title was going to be something special.

MASSAGE-2 (A-B)b has been the home of my many nuclear disasters, or it would be if I could get that far more often. It is very colorful, thankfully has a passive mode, and is mind-numbingly simple. It is also the type of thing you could play with your dad and even he could understand and enjoy it. A whole lot of satire about environmentalist vs corporate colonialism aside, you’ll go from hammering a chisel into iron and have created a Beffrey Jezos factory that might have a Space Giraffe problem.

The second game in here has to be some people’s favorite thing to complain about this year, a game that was released out of early access before the bugs were completely gone. Some are still there. Am I excusing ColePowered Games’ release of Shadows of Doubt with bugs? No, but I think saying a developer doesn’t know when a game is feature complete is a hard thing to do, and I say this as someone who “drags” (as the kids say) We Happy Few and No Man’s Sky. Though the latter did fix itself.

I will say, some role-playing mods make Shadows of Doubt a much more fantastic experience, but there are mods for that so go and install them if you want it. I’ve found a lot more enjoyment in the 1.0 release with those mods than I had found before the early access release. There are still bugs, I lost a diamond that I was looking to sell because it fell out of the world and I spawned without a home PC password. It is as rough as a badger’s… I think you know where I’m going. Nonetheless, there is something special about Shadows of Doubt that I think is finally being realized post-launch/full release.

Even if you find crafting games deplorable (many of them are), Satisfactory stands out from the crowd. It spawned copy-cat releases such as Channel 3 Entertainment and Paradox Interactive’s Foundry or even Fire Hose Games’ new 1.0 release, Techtonica. Yet despite copy-cats following Satisfactory and even Supermarket Simulator, nothing has quite done the same or similar to Shadows of Doubt. A truly unique, procedurally generated detective story that can sometimes be hampered by a case-breaking bug or millions. Of the 1.0 releases this year, these two stand out for a reason.

That and I can’t say Ready or Not because it was released just before our break last year.

I also want to take a moment before I get to what I thought was the game of the year to highlight those I didn’t mention. I loved my time with Dungeons of Hinterberg and I thought it might be game of the year, but once I was done I rarely thought about it afterward. The same could almost be said of Children of the Sun from René Rother. I loved my time putting a magic bullet through cultists, and I loved playing the game too, but in the end auteur nature and short-lived experience in my mind only go so far. I played after the review, but not very much.

Farming Simulator 25, of course, as it took over my life and maybe has me writing down on a small note-pad a planting calendar in Japanese. If I’m roleplaying, I’m roleplaying damn it! I also want to highlight both Toy Trains VR and Été because they were fun, unique toys but not everyone’s cup of Ted Lasso’s favorite drink. The last thing I want to highlight is Tom Francis’ Tactical Breach Wizards, a fantastic little story and tactical game that I just didn’t have enough time for this year. Beautiful from top to bottom, I want to play more during our break.

1st for Game of the Year – Nobody Wants to Die

I had a lot of trouble deciding on this one, mostly for exactly what I said about Happy Broccoli Games’ Duck Detective: The Detective Salami to a degree. Quite short, you’ll play through Nobody Wants to Die once and if you’ve adored Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element since you were a child, maybe a hint of Blade Runner in there too, you’ll adore this dark and twisted tale of detective James Karra. The first game from studio Critical Hit Games, with first-time (I believe) director and designer Grzegorz Goleń and first-time lead writer Marcin Grembowicz, the two along with Eliasz Waszczuk create a beautiful, depressing world and story.

Of course with art direction that is stunning coming from Andrzej Marszałek, there is something about the noir that has enraptured me this year. Though the gameplay elements of Nobody Wants to Die did falter, I fell in love and so desperately want more of this world with its 1930s, great depression, retro-futurism with that The Fifth Element… element. To return to my point that I made about Astro Bot and Balatro a little under 2000 words ago, this isn’t everyone else’s game of the year, and that’s the point. I don’t expect everyone to have played it, and I don’t want everyone to play it.

“Don’t you argue against gatekeeping?” Yes, however, I know that not everyone will enjoy Nobody Wants to Die, so I’m not going to ask those people to play it regardless. By all means, tell me how I’m wrong and that Sony’s sponsored marketing tool or some multiplayer thing I’ve no interest in should be everyone’s game of the year. I’m not saying Nobody Wants to Die is perfect, but its writing enhanced the worldbuilding and concept, its style and substance is great, and I think given more time or a slightly more experienced team, its issues might have been buffered out a little.

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