Over the last week every gaming site on the internet asked some variation of this question: how can 2024 ever hope to match up to 2023, one of the greatest years for games ever? It’s a silly thing, as 2023 wasn’t some pivotal year for the medium, and many of the popular games that make people think it was weren’t high on everybody’s radar at the start of the year. Who knows what surprises 2024 will bring, from already hyped games greatly exceeding expectations, to total unknowns coming out of nowhere and blowing everybody away? We don’t really know what 2024 will manifest in the world of videogames, just as we don’t really know how any year will turn out only five days in. The best we can do is look through the mass of games already announced for the year and single out the ones we’re most excited for. Paste‘s games team—senior editor Garrett Martin, assistant editor Moises Taveras, and assistant TV editor and games contributor Elijah Gonzales—have done just that. Here are their most anticipated games of 2024
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Release Date: March 24
I’m waiting with bated breath for the next time I get my hands on Dragon’s Dogma 2, if only to see how much further I can push the bounds of its emergent capabilities. I reckon the story of the game, which I got zero insight into, isn’t going to be what keeps me going. Instead, jumping more minotaurs, and maybe even finally riding a griffin, sounds like a much more appealing way to get to know the game. Maybe even get to the bottom of whatever ghost killed me at the end of my warrior playthrough. I want to see how much weirder it can get and how much more I can make its elements collide and what fun new surprises it might yield. Based on my hour with Dragon’s Dogma 2, I wouldn’t discount how wonderfully out of hand things can get, and finding out is one reason it’s one of our most anticipated games of the year.—Moises Taveras
Earthblade
Platform: PC
Release Date: TBA
Knocking it out of the park with a game like Celeste makes any follow up to it a tall order. Earthblade, the next game from Extremely Ok Games, has hardly been seen since its announcement, and in that absence, I’ve only grown more insatiable for it. The relatively little bit that has been divulged points to yet another beautiful, 2D platformer (this time in the vein of Metroid) that’s taking some cues from one of the best games of the generation—The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild—in its approach to music and exploration. 2024 has been the intended target since the game was announced, hopefully meaning that the silence around the title will soon give way to a deluge of information and a release in the near future. Expectations are high, but if there’s a team capable of meeting and even rising above them, it’s this one.—Moises Taveras
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
Platform: PlayStation 5
Release Date: February 29
Like many of us, I’ve spent too much of my adult life thinking about Final Fantasy VII, and the latest chapter in the remake trilogy guarantees this won’t change any time soon. The previous game featured one of the best translations of turn-based combat to real-time action that Square Enix has ever cooked up, which sets up a strong foundation for this sequel. But perhaps even more impressive was that despite shouldering a legacy heavier than Midgar’s upper plates, Final Fantasy VII Remake largely handled this burden with grace as it fleshed out the characters and details of this corporate dystopia. Whether Rebirth will be able to pay off the metatextual threads established in the 2020 release remains to be seen, but the studio has accomplished the impressive task of making me excited to learn what comes next, even though I should already know how this story ends. Can they pull off a minor miracle twice and continue successfully riffing on one of the most seminal narratives in the medium, or will it all come crashing down in a convoluted nest of Compilation nonsense where we need to know what happened in Final Fantasy VII G-Bike to understand what the hell is going on? Only time will tell, but I couldn’t be more eager to find out. —Elijah Gonzalez
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Platforms: TBA
Release Datee: TBA
Digital Eclipse’s follow up to 2023’s excellent The Making of Karateka is devoted to Jeff Minter, the legendary game designer who’s been making idiosyncratic games about llamas, camels and psychedelia since 1979. This interactive documentary includes 42 of Minter’s games from 1981 through 1994, from early Sinclar ZX81 and Commodore VIC-20 games like 3D3D, Hellgate, and the seminal Gridrunner, up to ’94’s Jaguar release Tempest 2000—the best (and maybe only) reason to own a Jaguar. There’s also a reimagined version of Gridrunner, which will be roughly the umpteenth version of that game. Minter has a purity of vision rarely seen in games, and if you connect with what he’s doing—classic ’80s style arcade action with psychedelic music and visuals—it’s easy to become obsessed with his work. We don’t have a release date yet for this second installment of the Gold Master Series, but it’s definitely one of our most anticipated games of 2024.—Garrett Martin
Princess Peach: Showtime
Platform: Switch
Release Date: March 22
Nintendo’s first big release of 2024 shines the spotlight on Princess Peach for the first time since a 2005 DS game. Despite the concept of “vibes” becoming a defining aspect of 2020s culture, Showtime swaps out the vibes of Super Princess Peach (seriously: it took place on Vibe Island and had a “vibe meter” and the play was built around Peach’s different vibes) for a conceit where Peach transforms into different roles that change how the game plays. Expect a swashbuckling Peach with big feathered hat and sword, a karate master Peach in a purple gi, a pastry chef Peach who presumably attacks the enemies with shortbread or piecrust or something… just a whole mess of jobs for Peach to cycle through as she tries to solve a mystery and defeat a bunch of evil grapes. I can’t think of any videogame description that could possibly interest me more. It sounds like a riff on Kid Chameleon with an adorable aesthetic, and since Nintendo often does its weirdest and most adventurous work outside of its major tentpole franchises, Princess Peach: Showtime could be something special.—Garrett Martin
Skate Story
Platform: PC
Release Date: TBA
Skate Story has existed on my periphery for the last several years, occasionally tre-flipping onto my timeline via the latest work-in-progress clip of Sam Eng’s skate odyssey and impressing the shit out of me. To be clear, the game has always been a moody and visually stunning skating game, which is why it earned the audience it’s steadily built over the years of glimpses. But when Skate Story was essentially re-revealed in late 2022, it was like seeing an entirely different game. The trailer is, at least in circles of mine, something of a cultural reset. The text in the trailer that reads, “You are a demon made of glass and pain, and yet you must skate” goes so insanely hard. The music by Blood Cultures (who is soundtracking most of the game) has been burned into my head ever since. And the visuals…I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s a thing that simply has to be seen for itself. Skate Story is a game that needs to be played, and one of our most anticipated games of 2024.—Moises Taveras
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chernobyl
Platform: Xbox Series X|S
Release Date: TBA
Years ago, I played Metro Exodus and found something unexpected: a hugely polished microcosm of a game I didn’t necessarily know I could love called S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl. Though I’ve never played it, the title is as infamous for its bugginess as it is famous for its innovations in emergent open worlds. Exodus seemingly sanded off some of the charm and edge with its polish, but the explicit weirdness and uneasiness of venturing into S.T.A.L.K.E.R‘s “Zone” felt alive and well in that game and now looks to continue in a proper sequel. Though the project was dormant for many years, and then temporarily stalled by the war in Ukraine, GSC Game World seems intent on delivering a survival game and emergent first-person shooter unflinchingly true to S.T.A.L.K.E.R‘s harsh spirit and immense legacy, and I for one can’t wait any longer for it.—Moises Taveras
Tekken 8
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Release Date: TBA
Based on a hands-on demo at the end of 2023, Tekken 8 seems to nail what matters the most for a fighting game: the actual fighting experience is excellent, the story mode appears to be slickly produced and full of the stone-faced absurdity Tekken fans expect, and when my three hours with the game were up I wasn’t ready to stop playing. A subsequent demo released in December offers only a small slice of what I played earlier that month, but it should be enough the whet the appetite of any fighting game fan. I’m no expert on the long, twisty history of the Tekken universe, but based on what I’ve played Tekken 8 is easily one of my most anticipated games of the year.—Garrett Martin
Thrasher
Platform: Quest, PSVR
Release Date: TBA
If you know anything about my work here at Paste, I hope it’s this: that Thumper is one of the greatest videogames of all time, and that anybody with even a passing interest in games, music, or interactive art should play it. Half of Thumper‘s design team, Brian Gibson (who also plays bass in the crucial noise band Lightning Bolt), has teamed up with fellow former Harmonix employee Mike Mandel (Fuser, Fantasia: Music Evolved) to make Thrasher, a spiritual successor to Thumper that will launch for VR headsets this year. Based on the first trailer, Thrasher shares an aesthetic with Thumper but with a more freeform style of play that isn’t constrained to rails. It’s hard to tell what’s actually happening in the trailer, but it does look a little bit like the snake game, with that wispy, cyber-gossamer central figure absorbing objects around it. The VR-only debut is a little bit of a bummer for those of us who don’t really truck with VR, but Gibson and Mandel say it’ll eventually be released for flat-screens, and if Thumper is any indication, Thrasher could ultimately wind up on basically any device that plays videogames. Hopefully that doesn’t take too long, but in the meantime I might have to look into buying one of them newfangled headsets.—Garrett Martin
Unicorn Overlord
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, PlayStation 4
Release Date: March 8
As a fan of both tactical RPGs and many of Vanillaware’s previous efforts, it’s easy to get excited about Unicorn Overlord. Their most recent release, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, was arguably their best, a title that excelled thanks to ambitious sci-fi storytelling and a gorgeous art style. While the studio has never tackled this type of tactics game before, and George Kamitani, who helmed 13 Sentinels, isn’t the lead for this effort, the strength of much of their past work still makes me eager to check out their latest. Instead of directly pulling from popular tactics games like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, this one seems to be leaning into a hybrid real-time and turn-based approach that bears more resemblance to Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. It’s an underutilized angle for this style of experience that has quite a bit of promise. Additionally, their trademark aesthetics are well on display in painstakingly realized fantasy designs shown in the trailer, and thankfully, it doesn’t seem to feature the type of oversexualized designs present in some of their previous titles. If Unicorn Overlord can deliver on the studio’s existing strengths and channel the appeal of its inspirations, it could end up something special. —Elijah Gonzalez