What was missing from our best games of 2024?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
Earlier this week, The A.V. Club published our list of the 15 best games of 2024. And while I, as the editor of that list, stand by our selections, it's in the nature of gaming—where it can sometimes take more than 100 hours of play to see everything really special that a game has to offer—to have something worthwhile fall through the cracks. Even in the weeks since we began assembling our list, there have been last-minute outliers that have popped up in the periphery, as well as games that demanded just enough attention to tip over into the must-play category. (There was, for instance, a first draft of our Best Of that didn't feature Sunset Visitor's excellent 1000xResist, simply because our gaming schedules had been too glutted to get to what turned out to be one of the best-written games of 2024.) At some point, of course, tabulation has to stop, and decisions made, but it still has me wondering: What games do you, our readers, feel should have been on our list, but weren't?
From my personal library, it's easy to pick out a few possibilities: I celebrated finishing the list by loading up Red Candle Games' Nine Sols, which has been tantalizing me from the Game Pass library for a few weeks now. As someone who considers "parrying" my favorite verb in a video game—frequently irritating my friends by going to bat for deflection-heavy titles like Sekiro, Sifu, and Lies Of P—I knew the 2D combat-and-exploration game would probably scratch that perfectly timed itch. More surprising was the way I've been charmed by the hand-drawn, fluid look of its animation, and its surprisingly rich science fiction story. (That latter being a fault on my part, having not immediately connected the studio to previous works like their deeply affecting horror titles Detention and Devotion.) I'm only a few (occasionally frustrating) hours into Nine Sols, so I can't say definitively that it deserves a position on a list of the year's best games, but it's the kind of polished offering that's easy to see making the grade.
Or take Rise Of The Golden Idol, a sequel to one of my favorite games of 2022, and which I simply didn't get around to before it was time to put together my picks for the list. (There were a lot of games that came out this year, some of them more considerate of human time than others.) I have no doubt that I'll get some joy out of Rise's update to Case Of The Golden Idol's bite-sized take on murder and deduction when I get around to it, and possibly kick myself for excluding it from consideration simply because I was being a lazy bones with how I spent my gaming time. But such is the life of the list-maker.
That's to say nothing of games I did play, and raved about, and which simply didn't make the cut: René Rother's Children Of The Sun would have fit perfectly into the theme of "focus" that eventually built up around our actual picks, for instance, with its sniper gameplay building on a single idea and then taking it to ever more absurd (and bloody) conclusions. Or the hilarious Thank Goodness You're Here, which failed to secure a list by dint of aging slightly more poorly in the memory than other games with more staying power. And that's not even getting into Hades II, which provoked conversations about whether a game in Early Access—even an Early Access as robust as Supergiant Games has put together with its sequel to the mythological classic—could be said to be one of the best games "of 2024."
And these, of course, are just the examples I can think of, powered by hindsight and a good-faith effort to play as many of 2024's gaming offerings as I could. I know there are blind spots here, both in curation and taste, that are keeping me from games well-deserving of recognition; after all, I played enough of the Stellar Blade demo to know there was some kind of good video game in there, despite the general tone and tenor of the people screaming defenses of it online. Which is why I have to turn, as ever in the space, to you, the readers: What was missing from our list of 2024's best games? What were the hidden, unsung gems of what turned out to be a pretty great year for gaming? Help a gamer out.