Garrett Martin’s Top 10 Games of 2024
This is like the sixth intro I’ve written to a “best games of 2024” list this month, and this is definitely not the kind of thing that gets easier the more you do it. It’s the exact opposite, actually; I’ve already said what I have to say about 2024 and videogames and what it all means, and if you haven’t read any of that yet, just know that it’s generally not an uplifting tale. Layoffs, mergers and acquisitions have taken tens of thousands of jobs off the table, wiping out wide swaths of the artistic base this medium depends on, and directly hurting the artists and creators without whom games literally wouldn’t exist. Journalists and critics—the people who report on the business and help make sense of the games it makes—were hit hard, too, with media dying at a record clip. Harassment of game developers and journalists continued apace, egged on by online grifters and basically emboldened by the corporations that ignored—tolerated, even—their abuse. It was hard to get excited about any games in such a depressing environment. That’s the job, though, and so I still have to be able to sit down in front of a screen and give my undivided attention to an actual game and not the terrible conditions in which it exists. If I couldn’t do that it’d be unfair to the people who made those games, and hell, even to you, a largely imaginary reader. Occasionally I’d play something that drowned out all the noise surrounding this medium, and here are the 10 best of that lot. Thanks for your time, and may 2025 have mercy on us all.
10. Clickolding
Strange Scaffold’s Clickolding is clearly a bit of a gag, born out of the old typographical trap where printing an uppercase L and I too close to each other would look like a U. (It’s why old comic books tried to avoid words like “flick” and “Clint,” although the last one didn’t stop Marvel with Hawkeye.) In this short, direct, tense little gallstone of a game a man in a weird wooden mask forces you at gunpoint to press a clicker to satisfy his sexual fetish. It’s far from the first game to mock the vacuity of clicker games, but the cuckolding aspect makes it a deeper commentary on the relationship between games as a medium (and game designers) and their players—with one side being fulfilled by making others click to accomplish intangible and ephemeral goals, and the other willingly subjecting themselves to mindless repetition to see what happens at the end. (Oh shit, that’s just called “life,” isn’t it?) No game I played this year was shorter than Clickolding, and yet almost none were as memorable or thought-provoking.
9. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
A rewarding puzzle game indebted to point-and-click adventures and midcentury European art films (tell me that screenshot isn’t right out of 8 1/2 or some Resnais movie), Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is cryptic, confounding, and completely captivating. If you miss the days of trying to crack obscure solutions to elusive puzzles, and can resist the siren’s call of the online walkthrough, Lorelei will be your latest obsession, ably filling the point-and-click-shaped hole in your gaming heart, but with three dimensions, direct controls, and a sense of style and a cool aloofness you’d never find from Sierra or LucasArts. I don’t want to discredit Lorelei with imperfect comparisons, though; yes, it’s puzzling, but it’s more than a puzzle game. It’s creepy and unsettling, but it’s not really a horror game. It tells a smart, thoughtful story, but it’s not what people refer to when they use the clumsy phrase “narrative game.” It is arty, though, and is an art game, but then thousands of games are art, from Space Invaders and Ms. Pac-Man on down. We can spend all day talking about what Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is and isn’t, but that time’s better spent playing the damn thing, so let’s get to it.
8. Arctic Eggs
Sure, throw some cigarettes in that frying pan. Put some fuckin’ bullets in there too. Who gives a shit: the world’s toast and there’s almost nothing to eat and we’re all just playing out the string. From that grim starting point spins the absurdist minor masterpiece that is Arctic Eggs, a surreal cooking game about frying eggs (and cigarettes, and bullets, and sometimes even bacon) at the end of the world. Your skillet skill tests are prefaced with bracingly odd dialogue and require mastery of the most over-responsive game physics ever, with the various bits of garbage often thrown in there with your eggs complicating everything even more. Fatalism is rarely this fun.
7. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
The Gold Master Series—Digital Eclipse’s ongoing excavations of gaming history in the form of interactive documentaries—brought us a bounty of riches in 2024, from additional Atari 50 DLC to an interesting (if familiar and incomplete) look at the history of Tetris. Its best new entry, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, is also one of the best games of 2024, with many of its games ranking among the best of the years in which they originally came out. Game designer Jeff Minter has been refining his own idiosyncratic aesthetic since the early ’80s, combining classic arcade concepts with psychedelic art and music that aim to create a sense of synesthesia. The documentary gives insight into the mind of one of the medium’s true artists, while the lineup of games doesn’t just let us experience classics like Grid Runner and the iconic Tempest 2000 again, but also tracks how Minter’s approach changed over time as technology grew more advanced. It’s an invaluable collection of games and an illuminating exploration of game design as an artform.
6. Ultros
Speaking of psychedelic games, Ultros starts off as another Metroid-inspired platformer, albeit one that stands out due to a gorgeous, distinctive art style that resembles the psychedelic comics of Brendan McCarthy. It gradually reveals itself to be far more complex and inscrutable than the flood of games it might initially resemble, as twisty and mind-bending as its visual aesthetic. Its esoteric mysteries can be very frustrating, but when you do unravel them you’ll feel like a new level of consciousness has been attained. Be prepared to feel lost, confused, discombobulated, and totally entranced, in the best psychedelic tradition.
5. Balatro
I had to stop playing Balatro after a few months because it didn’t go well with my drinking problem or my jazz problem. That was the routine for almost four months: I’d play Balatro deep into the night, Eric Dolphy or Albert Ayler or Rahsaan Roland Kirk on the turntable, downing drink after drink while trying to clear every deck. I mean, going through a half-gallon of rum in five or six days, for months on end. The pandemic made me a functional alcoholic and four years later Balatro briefly made me into a regular old unfunctional one, while also making me a regular at a nearby record store’s half-off jazz Sundays. The talk about whether Balatro is “healthy” has focused on its theoretical proximity to gambling, which is pretty absurd to anybody who’s actually played the game and realizes it is deeply unlike any Vegas card games and has absolutely nothing to do with gambling, but Balatro actually was unhealthy for me because it poured gas on some risky behavior I was already struggling with. (And what behavior is riskier than listening to Unit Structures on repeat, right?) But that should show you how brilliantly designed this game is: its weird roguelike riff on poker is so perfectly calibrated, so ingeniously crafted to maximize our engagement while regularly snatching victory away from us during that crucial eighth blind, that it created a feedback loop with other, far more serious and compulsive addictions. I’ve broken the circuit and can now play Balatro (and listen to Joe McPhee’s Nation Time) without needing a half-dozen drinks, but I’ll always associate Balatro with my own personal lost weekend.
4. 1000xResist
If sci-fi isn’t ultimately about feelings and what philosophers, artists, and theologians call “the human condition,” what’s the fucking point? 1000xResist is as sci-fi as it gets on a conceptual and aesthetic level, and it’s all in service of a deep psychological study of one woman that dives into the tremendous weight of family and community, our responsibility to our loved ones and the world at large, and the challenges of the immigrant experience. (That description obviously bears some superficial familiarity to Everything Everywhere All at Once, but there are almost no other similarities between the two.) There’s also a pandemic that basically destroys all civilization, so it’s in keeping with the apocalyptic mood everybody’s jiving on these days, and which fuels a couple other games on this list. Compared to the comic fatalism of Arctic Eggs or the pointed capitalist critique of Mouthwashing, 1000xResist is a wide-ranging, emotional epic, using the collapse of everything we know as a prelude of sorts to both an in-depth character study and a broader exploration of what ideas like “community” and “civilization” even mean at this point. Brilliant, powerful, heartfelt and heartbreaking… so many adjectives I could spill right here. Just go play it, already.
3. Thank Goodness You’re Here!
Normally the least funny videogames are the ones that try to be funny. I won’t name names, but there’s a long list of supposedly hilarious jawns out there that are absolutely unplayable due to their terrible sense of humor. Thank Goodness You’re Here is the real deal, though—a game that’s genuinely as funny as any movie, TV show, or stand-up special I watched this year. Extremely confident and entirely focused on punching through videogames’ all-encompassing cloak of self-importance, Thank Goodness wrings laughs out of the inherent ridiculousness of the medium, while also making room to lovingly mock small-town British culture. It also knocks all of this out within a couple of hours or so, so it’s as lean, hungry, and fat-free as it is funny. It’s basically a perfect game, which really tells you how great the next two games on this list must be.
2. Mouthwashing
Work sucks, the companies we work for ultimately want to kill us, and although people can make the day-to-day better they can also make it a lot worse, while also ruining the long-term, too. Mouthwashing‘s bleak future feels all too plausible, its depiction of the persistence of humanity’s worst traits within a system utterly indifferent to our safety and survival an extension of what we’re already living in. In this short sci-fi story we play as a small group of long-haul space-truckers effectively owned by their employer, who provides them the bare minimum to get through the 24/7 job and docks their pay for literally anything that disrupts the schedule. And the five-member crew can rarely find solace in each other’s company, as all the hatreds, cruelties and abuse humanity has gotten pretty good at are locked up inside that spaceship alongside them. Yes, Mouthwashing is not a particularly happy game (although it can be funny when it wants to be). It also shouldn’t seem remotely far-fetched to anybody living in our real-life world today, where we’re all basically resigned to the planet being destroyed by the companies that reluctantly pay us scraps until AI and robots catch up and steal away our jobs. Play it as the A picture in a double feature with Arctic Eggs if you’re looking for a miserable but artistically impressive night of gaming.
1. UFO 50
UFO 50 might be a collection of 50 retro-style games made by a fictional 1980s game studio, but it isn’t on this list because of mere volume or nostalgia. Yes, there’s obviously an overwhelming amount of game on here, all of it marked with various degrees of prefab nostalgia. What makes Mossmouth’s pseudo comp such a towering achievement is the quality and ingenuity of those games, as well as the carefully constructed history of the nonexistent developer UFO Soft and its LX console that is mostly just hinted at throughout. UFO 50‘s games can be annoying, infuriating, and straight-up bad in ways that anybody playing games in the ’80s will recognize, but every one of them has at least one novel, inspired twist that would’ve made a notable impact on the trajectory of game design if they really were released in the ’80s—and there are also a solid dozen that would qualify for our best of 2024 list if they were released individually today. Hell, even the failures fit perfectly within the game’s metanarrative as rough drafts that inspire later games that get it right. An impossibly deep package that only grows stronger and better the more you explore it, UFO 50 reconstructs an era when the games business was braver and less cynical, and when games themselves were generally richer, more playful, and more mysterious than at any point sense.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.