Top 2024 Games: Early Favorites
- Destiny 2: The Final Shape is a triumphant conclusion to the franchise's story.
- Another Crab's Treasure is a standout soulslike with a comedic touch.
- Hades II continues to impress with its depth and early access content.
- Senua's Saga: Hellblade II offers an emotional and visually stunning experience.
- Tales of Kenzera: Zau combines precise movement with a poignant story.
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Discover the best games of 2024 so far.
From Hades 2 to Elden Ring DLC, here are some of the best games of the year.
We're halfway through 2024 now, and this year has carried over two significant trends for the video game industry from 2023 into 2024: a lot of excellent games are coming out, and unfortunately, the people who make them are suffering.
We've gotten some fantastic new games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the surprise hit Balatro to keep us playing for hours on end.
We're also seeing major updates to beloved games like Destiny 2 and Elden Ring give us a reason to go back to old favorites.
On the flip side, developers are still struggling as mass layoffs have affected thousands of jobs in the first half of the year.
At the very least, we can pay tribute to some of the great games these talented developers have put out.
We'll continue to update this list accordingly, just like we did our best games of 2023 collection.
Here are some of the best games of 2024 so far:
Destiny 2: The Final Shape
Destiny 2 has been a fixation of mine for the last several years.
The entire franchise has been since it debuted, so when Bungie announced that it was actually concluding the story I'd been playing since high school, expectations naturally skyrocketed.
Bungie has been rocked by layoffs and controversies that have worried and continue to worry me about its wellbeing and future, but The Final Shape has alleviated some of those concerns.
I won't sit here and call it perfect, but it sure is a triumph.
It moves away from this mode of storytelling Destiny often engages in, which places emphasis on big proper nouns and increasingly entangled background storytelling, and relies instead on big messy feelings about endings and change.
It's operatic and pulls on exactly the strings you expect it to, and it moved me to tears time and time again.
After the conclusion of The Final Shape's story, I took a bit of a break before diving into post-campaign shenanigans, exotic hunting, and endgame prep, which ultimately culminated in a tremendous raid I finally got to complete the other day.
Perhaps I can best sum up my feelings about The Final Shape by sharing how I felt at the end of the raid: I was left in awe at the repeated ingenuity of the folks at Bungie who put that immaculate thing together.
Despite it being long as hell as well as occasionally infuriating to the point of madness, I'd run it back any day.
Another Crab's Treasure
Another Crab's Treasure is still the feel-good experience of the year to beat.
In a year that's bound to be dominated by talk of that other big Souls thing, I want to take up space and shout at the top of my lungs about what a great game Another Crab's Treasure is.
I have rarely played a funnier game, but just because it lets me have a laugh every now and then doesn't mean it shouldn't be recognized for the real-as-hell soulslike that it is.
I had a comically avoidable hard time with Another Crab's Treasure to begin with, and it only alleviated because I finally unlocked the mechanics that tapped into its ahem, potenshell.
Its soft exterior and comedic demeanor only complement this finely tuned souslike that is fathoms deep, and coming up with different shell combinations for my armor and weapon never stopped being a good time up until the very end of the journey.
In true Souls fashion, ACT's story is also a cutting critique of the decay of our own society.
At the heart of your struggle is the death spiral of the ocean brought about by the incessant carelessness and literal pollution that unchecked capitalism spawns.
It turns that rot and decay into a literal force eating crustacean society alive, and the bad guy at the end is an opportunist who thinks he can be the one good rich person but actually makes things a million times worse instantaneously.
It's a fable for our times wrapped up in one of the most appealing packages you can find in 2024 and is almost assuredly one of the year's best offerings, full stop.
Hades II
I likely don't need to tell you this, but did you know that Hades II is really damn good?
It seems only natural that the follow-up to 2020's best game feels practically flawless out the gate, but I'm still too stunned by the fact that it exists to think too hard about that.
It's just sitting on my desktop waiting for me to make another run at Chronos or actually make some headway above ground in Greece, and I hear the siren call of Scylla and her band calling me to the game at literally all times.
Hades 2 isn't even complete, and yet it feels like everything I could've possibly asked for.
There is so much depth to the current version of the game that I still haven't tapped into, and there are probably still gorgeous characters to swoon over and beautiful regions to gawk at.
While we've all obviously got ideas of where Supergiant will go from here, the most exciting thing about the game right now is actually not knowing the twists it will continue to take throughout the early access period it's currently in.
So many people I trust were on the ground floor for the original Hades and got me excited about the journey that I'm now taking with Hades 2.
Well, I'm sat and ready, Supergiant. Your move.
Senua's Saga: Hellblade II
Senua's Saga: Hellblade II certainly isn't for everyone.
But as it's shaping up to be my favorite game of the year, I simply must advocate for it to be included in our best of 2024 picks.
While the combat and puzzles weren't everyone's cup of tea, the emotional contours of Senua's second game combined with a cryptic narrative that bends myth and metaphor made for entertainment and so, so many tears from yours truly.
Of course, I expected Hellblade's sequel to deliver an emotional journey.
But I didn't expect it to hit so close to home, dealing with themes of self-doubt and interpersonal conflict, issues that have been particularly salient in my daily life recently.
But just as Senua would push on to find her way through the maze of reality-bending environments, fighting off many of her own demons, so too would I find the courage to work my way through my own mental labyrinths.
Hellblade was inspiring, deeply affecting, and continues to live with me in my daily life long after its brief five-hour runtime.
It is also a remarkable technical showcase with generation-defining visuals and performances that breathe such life into this game that even writing about it now, there I go getting a little misty-eyed yet again.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau
Tales of Kenzera: Zau is the type of game that just feels good to play.
Yes, its Bantu-inspired aesthetics, music, and storyline are enough to hook you, but its precise movement punctuated by its gorgeous visual effects make an excellent first impression.
The slick mechanics make moving through the game's world a joy, but its poignant story on grief and the various forms it takes kept me going.
Zau is a lovely tribute to a culture, a genre, and the people we have to leave behind, and it has been unfairly at the center of made-up controversy.
But it serves as a reminder of how games can let us inhabit new perspectives and how the industry is better for it.
Selaco
What's more surprising to me than someone making a new video game using Doom's aging tech is that this new FPS, Selaco, is one of the best shooters I've played in years.
Sure, the novelty of a new game built in Doom engine is cool and all, but what makes Selaco worth playing is that the retro-themed FPS is actually really, really good.
It features some nice world-building, impressive level design, frantic combat, and even some puzzles too.
Sure, it might not support 4K hyper-realistic visuals, but when you have gunplay this good and action this fun, who cares?
I only hope that somehow the small team behind this new game can figure out a way to port their hard work to more platforms because I want more people to play Selaco.
Isles of Sea & Sky
If you'd asked me, I'd have told you the world needs more block-pushing puzzle games like it needs more billionaires.
But I'd have been wrong. Not about the billionaires thing—they all need to go.
But Isles of Sea & Sky proves that there is definitely room for more Sokoban-inspired puzzling.
This enormous game is a collection of islands, each made up of 25 screens that contain unique and quite brilliant puzzles, sometimes multiple overlapping challenges that become increasingly interesting as you gain new abilities, Zelda-style.
The result is a deep sense of RPG underlying the puzzling surface, making for a game with vastly more substance than your standard block-shoving sim.
That the puzzles are quite so clever is the icing on the cake of a game that has gone almost unnoticed in 2024 but deserves to be everywhere.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
I've said it twice before, and I'll say it again: FromSoftware could have released Shadow of the Erdtree back in 2022, called it Elden Ring, and it would have still won GOTY.
The sheer scope of this expansion, coupled with all of the different ways you can customize your build and the slew of new enemies you'll face, is enough to stagger you—but you'll be floored before you even get to all of that.
Merely stepping foot onto the Gravesite Plain, the first area in the DLC, will wow you—the massive Scadutree in the distance, the hulking Golem in front of you, the impossibly large map you can procure with a press of a button.
And as you work through all the difficult bosses and see the strange, almost-stagnant beauty of this world, you'll experience hours upon hours of new wonders, struggles, victories, and more.
There's just so much here, so much to do and see and fight and read that it can get overwhelming.
In those moments, I find myself walking to the nearest cliff edge to stare out at FromSoftware's beautiful skybox and wonder what happened to this world and the gods and monsters within it.
Then I see a player message scrawled on the ground, step over to read it, see it just says "but hole," and remember that this game is beautiful, absurd, silly, and stupid.
And then I go back to try that boss for the 68th time. This time I'll get it.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Remake
My recollection of Paper Mario's GameCube outing from 20 years ago was that it was almost too good to be true—a game with writing so sparkling, funny, and heartfelt that I wanted to absorb every word, a saga that's both adventurous and poignant, and gameplay that remains delightful to the end, never losing a sense of playfulness and discovery.
Surely, I thought, this was a case of rose-colored glasses tinting the fond recollections of my relative youth.
But no. As my time revisiting it on the Switch has shown me, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is that rare classic you can return to decades after its initial release and find its charm, elegance, wit, and power undiminished.
The papercraft visuals, already wonderful on the GameCube, only look more vibrant and captivating today.
The RPG fundamentals still strike a perfect balance between approachability and depth.
And the writing remains as endearing and hilarious as ever.
Nintendo's been leaning pretty hard into its back catalog to give the Switch's final year as its flagship console some big releases, but it's hard to complain about that when what you get as a result is an even better version of a game so timelessly wonderful it hasn't aged a day.
