The best 3 video games of 2024: Games are once more being strange! Don’t get us wrong, 2023 was great. We got new Mario and Zelda. Armored Core and Baldur’s Gate came out of their deep freeze. Alan Wake rose from its grave in the Video Game IP Cemetery, while Street Fighter 6 acted like it didn’t happen at all. But even though 2023 was a memorable year for famous brands, it wasn’t a big surprise.
Nintendo, FromSoftware, and Capcom were all taken seriously. The year 2024, on the other hand, has been wild! Among our favorites are a Pokémon spoof with guns, a surprisingly popular sequel in a genre very different from its less-played predecessor, and a huge RPG where a reformed yakuza recreates Animal Crossing with perverts and garbage dumps.
The best 3 video games of 2024
Yes, we’re sickos, and this is the year for us. The ones whose skin crawls and eyes get bigger when they see “7/10” at the bottom of a review. This is the type of person who doesn’t want a perfect remake of Final Fantasy 7. Instead, they want Final Fantasy 7 thrown into a cosmic mixer and poured down their throat.
We don’t mind if it takes ten years before we see another year like 2023. When a new, popular franchise movie doesn’t come out every month, there’s room for the weird, the new, and the unexpected.
This list of games will be put in reverse chronological order, which means that the newest games will always be at the top. We also have a short part at the end for late 2023 releases that we didn’t have time to look at for last year’s list. When we updated, Animal Well, Princess Peach: Showtime!, Summer House, Stardew Valley 1.6, and Against the Storm were added.
Animal well
In the middle of the TV show Twin Peaks: The Return, a scary character reads a creepy little song.
The show never goes into more detail about this; it’s just one of many strange things you see. You might find an answer that makes you happy. You might not do it. Still, you won’t forget it.
This is the best way to understand Animal Well. This is Billy Basso’s mysterious low-fi dream (or nightmare?) of a game. It’s a maze of unforgettable sights and incredibly smart puzzles that make you wonder what it all could mean, if anything at all. Take a full drink and go down. —Joshua Rivera
Princess Peach: Showtime!
Peach finally gets her big screen debut in Princess Peach: Showtime, which feels like a long time ago. She is the main character of Nintendo’s March release, and she also finds herself in a theater full of bad guys.
To save the day, she has to play the lead role in each play. Princess Peach: Showtime! is a simple adventure game that stays fun by changing Princess Peach into different characters with different skills.
Sometimes she’s a detective or ninja, and other times she’s a pie cook or cowgirl. This is the kind of game I wish I had played as a child, and it still makes me happy and charming now that I’m an adult. —Nicole Carpenter
Dragom’s Dogma 2
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a follow-up game that came out 12 years after the first one. It builds on and grows the world and ideas of the first game. It’s an interesting mix of action-RPG and party-based MMO, but it’s not too rigid like most of those types of games.
As a player, you can change your job (class) whenever you want. You can then add pawns, which are non-player characters that you can switch out whenever you want, to your party to fight with you.
In Dragon’s Dogma 2, you and your pawns go out and experience the huge world. This world is even bigger because there isn’t any easy fast travel. A short trip to the next town over turns into a journey. As you drive between big towns over and over, you get used to the roads. It brings the world back to life.