Summarizing 2024 is like looking into the gaping jaw of a lion, hoping that there are at least one or two points of light inside the all-consuming darkness. It’s rough out there, especially for trans folks! To make matters worse, 2024 was the year when all my social media related stress became a legitimate health problem. I’m suffering from severe GERD, which I keep in check by tossing back Tums like that one, acid reflux-afflicted student in Wind Breaker. Will that cause future, even more complicated medical issues down the line? I fucking hope not!!
Still, I believe that joy is important to hold onto. That is especially true for 2025, but it also helped me get through 2024 in one piece. And hey: there’s at least something to like in a year that gave us a brand-new, menu-based detective adventure game with an actual budget. When we’re not being beaten down by current events, gaming is still filled with moments that make my heart soar with wonder. And I’ll hold onto that sense of wonder for dear life, for as long as I can.
10. Slitterhead
The tenth slot almost went to something else, because let’s be real: Slitterhead is not a pleasant game to play. Your movement is ambling at best, which makes chasing down fleeing monsters a true ordeal. The combat, while uniquely grotesque, consistently lacks the impact you’d expect from your typical character action fare. As of this writing, I still haven’t figured out the secret objective it wants me to complete before I can progress.
And yet…
Slitterhead is bold, bizarre, and helmed by one of my favorite designers around, Keiichiro Toyama. You can see lessons from Siren and Gravity Rush interspersed throughout, offering a strange mix of horror and vigilante heroism. The average citizens of Fake Kowloon that you possess are a fragile, disposable resource, and the game makes a point of pressing on your inevitable discomfort to inflame it. Slitterhead values friction and unease, emphasizing it wherever they can. And even when that friction occasionally results from a misfire, I value what it’s trying to accomplish, especially when too many of its contemporaries are focused on sanding themselves down to reach mass appeal.
9. Murders on the Yangtze River
Hey developers, here’s one weird trick to get on my good side: include a list of works that inspired your own story as an option on the main menu.
Murders on the Yangtze River wears its influences on its sleeve, and is all the better for it. Mixing Ace Attorney style investigations and trials with classic mystery literature, this steamboat trip through 20th-century China drew me right in. The trappings might be overly familiar to anyone who’s spent time with a certain, spiky-haired defense attorney (including the overly excitable assistant and no-holds-barred rival prosecutor), but they’re deployed well enough that the game still feels fresh and exciting.
That said, there’s one major caveat that kept me from placing Murders on the Yangtze River further down the list. The multilingual mix of English and Chinese voice acting is excellent in theory, especially since you have a handful of British characters staying in Shanghai. But there’s one major British character with a performance that’s uniquely stilted and robotic, to the point where I’m convinced it was generated with a computer. Worse, I can’t tell whether it’s good-old-fashioned, PC text to speech (which would be perfectly fine) or AI-generated voicework (which would suck)!
I hate to live in a world like this, where I can’t tell whether something as simple as a character’s voice work contributed to our current, environmental catastrophe. But I also can’t rule out that I’ve made an incorrect assumption (especially when I’ve never seen anyone else discuss this), and the bizarre English performance in an otherwise excellent game is completely harmless! So here it sits, at number 9.
8. Dungeons of Hinterberg
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of Six’s favorite games, and I can’t deny that it’s quite special. However, every time I think about that game’s dungeons, I can’t help sighing with resignation. The Divine Beasts simply can’t hold a candle to the tried and true 3D Zelda dungeon, introduced with Ocarina of Time and polished to a mirror sheen in subsequent adventures. Solving a Zelda dungeon felt like you were working your way through a highly detailed puzzle box, slotting everything into its right place just to hear the satisfying click as it opened right up at the end. In contrast, moving your way through a Divine Beast is like wrangling the world’s fussiest physics object while you’re standing in a small cage: they lack the expressive personality their earlier games brought to the table, and bum me out to no end.
It looks like it’ll be some time before Nintendo makes a new, fully-3D Zelda that goes back to their classic puzzle structure. In the meantime, I’ve got Dungeons of Hinterberg, which is nothing but classic Zelda dungeon action. The quaint, alpine town of Hinterberg gives the ski resort treatment to fantasy dungeoneering, complete with circles, squares, and the dreaded black diamonds denoting “course” difficulty. The dungeons themselves are all quick affairs, but the game balances out length with volume, handing you a startling number of courses to get through before the credits roll.
Its plot is a little too shallow, attempting to tell a story about the destructive nature of tourism economies without putting in the necessary character work to make it land. That said? Few games from 2024 managed to delight me quite like Dungeons of Hinterberg. When it was firing on all cylinders, I could trek out to another dungeon for the day, then spend the evening at a bar, befriending a snarky magazine journalist who felt ashamed about the quality of his work. When the magic clashed with the mundane, it just worked to a degree that I never expected. And it was just enough to give Hinterberg an identity of its own, even as I treated it as a stand-in for a classic Nintendo series.
7. Dragon’s Dogma 2
I had my fill of Dragon’s Dogma 2 earlier than I’d expected, but that doesn’t mean I felt let down or burned out: on the contrary, I loved almost every minute spent in Vermund and Battahl. When I say it’s easy to put down, I mean it as a compliment. Sure, there is an overarching plot about Pawns, Chosen Ones, and political skullduggery in service of stealing the crown if you want it! But more than any other RPG I’ve played in recent memory, DD2 encourages you to make your own fun, wandering out into the wild and seeing what happens.
With the various monsters acting on their own accord, no trip from Point A to B feels like a sure thing. Travel on your own two feet, and you might run headfirst into an ambush. Take a fast-travel cart between cities, and there’s a not-insignificant chance that you’ll be interrupted by a rather imposing beast. There’s even a collection of elevated “ropeway” carriages that transport you across tall chasms in Battahl. Every time I stepped into one, I prayed that a griffon wouldn’t notice me. Suspended in the air, with no feasible escape point, all it takes is one divebomb to break your shit and send you careening to your death.
Nothing is safe in Dragon’s Dogma 2. Even the two major cities occasionally suffer from an ogre wandering right in, causing strife for the residents. Even your Pawns, your ever-helpful companions, can catch a Genocide Disease, killing the majority of Vermund’s people while you’re in bed! Every step you take outside of your inn’s door is a risk in its own right, but it never feels too overwhelming. Instead, every moment feels like a genuine, rails-free adventure, a journey through the unknown that always manages to keep a surprise or two up its sleeve. It’s unlike anything I’ve played before, or since. That I found myself satisfied before the credits rolled only speaks to how uniquely satisfying Dragon’s Dogma 2 can be.
6. Riven (2024)
Released in 1997, the original Riven is one of the very best games ever made. Having offered up a loosely connected set of worlds and puzzles in Myst, Cyan sought to take an entirely different approach for its sequel: build one world, made up of five interconnected islands, where every single puzzle feels like a natural extension of the world. And by god, they did it.
27 years later, the original director came back for a remake meant to be more like a revisit. Riven is different now: some changes are subtle, others are gigantic, but they represent an attempt to give the Rivenese people more agency in their own story, as well as expand on a few, fun mysteries without resolving them. And it looks utterly stunning doing it too! Creating a real-time version of pre-rendered 1997 backgrounds doesn’t sound all that impressive, but after spending countless hours in the original, seeing it from all-new angles was truly something to behold.
Sadly, they also decided to replace the FMV actors with typical, 3D characters that cannot hope to match the world’s own fidelity. It’s a damn shame, since everything else works so well, but watching someone do a motion-captured pantomime of a deceased actor’s performance left a sour taste in my mouth. As-is, we now have an impressive recreation of Riven, but it still can’t hold a candle to the real thing itself. That said? Falling short of “one of the best” still leaves plenty of room to be excellent.
5. Mouthwashing
“I hope this hurts.”
Mouthwashing, boiled down to its most essential parts, is a game about an awful person trying their best to be good. This person inevitably fails, and said failure leads to catastrophe after catastrophe. In the tradition of great space sci-fi, it’s also about blue-collar workers trapped in a hopeless situation by their penny-pinching overlords. These two plots, brought together through the crew’s ever-expanding delirium from consuming nothing but alcohol-heavy mouthwash, leads to a terrifying, depressing, occasionally hilarious trip through space.
Fuck that one sneaking section, though.
4. Crow Country
Presented as a love letter to survival horror classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, Crow Country quickly proves that it’s so much more than a retro throwback. The eponymous, run-down theme park is just as humorous as it is unnerving, the product of a rich old man’s strange, often-incorrect assumptions about what might entertain a kid. Yes, it’s filled with grotesque enemies to shoot, but those enemies are wandering around attractions like a family-friendly torture dungeon, or a haunted house guarded by a dinky owl animatronic. The goofy nature of the park helps dull some of the scares, leading to a far more soothing take on the genre than what I’m used to.
I also need to give a special shoutout to Ockeroid, the composer for Crow Country’s soundtrack. Filled with memorable, unnerving melodies that fits each location to a T, it also includes one of the very best “safe room” tracks I’ve ever heard in a video game. Given the number of horror games I’ve played through, that’s no small compliment.
3. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
After years of confused bumbling and canceled games, Prince of Persia finally found its groove again…only for Ubisoft to disband the team responsible months later, leaving the series in an uncomfortable holding pattern yet again. Ah well.
Still, Ubisoft’s self-sabotage can’t take away from The Lost Crown’s sheer excellence. Melding the acrobatic action of Jordan Mechner’s original classic with the 2D action-platformers it later inspired, this game is a brilliant marriage of the old and the new. Tight, reflex platforming and side-scrolling combat has rarely ever felt this good (though the bosses get a little too tank-y by the end). An instant classic, one where its few problems would’ve likely been resolved were the team given a chance to make a follow-up. Alas.
2. 1000xRESIST
In their debut effort, Sunset Visitor blows the fucking doors down. 1000xRESIST may be narratively inconsistent, ending in a way that doesn’t quite match what the beginning (seemingly) set out to do. But the results are still magnificent. This thoughtful tale frequently upends your expectations, mixing the grandiose scope of sci-fi dystopia with the personal tale of an Asian-Canadian child growing up in an unwelcoming country. I have my own issues with the way it wrapped things up, but this is still phenomenal, a must-play for anyone who can appreciate a narrative-heavy game.
1. Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
Who would’ve thought that Famicom Detective Club, a decades-old duology that converted cheesy whodunits into playable video games, would come roaring back in the 2020s with a remake by the visual novel powerhouse Mages? Who would then suspect that they’d team up with Yoshio Sakamoto, the original creator, and release a brand-new sequel in 2024 that would take the series in a much darker direction? Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club shocked fans and casual onlookers alike, offering up the incredibly rare sight of a Nintendo game sporting an M rating. Adult themes? On my Mario machine? What a surprise!
That’s the framing the general public has latched onto, anyway. As a fan of menu-based detective games who actually played the damned thing, I think the general response this game received is slightly off the mark. It’s so much more than a game that’s mature by Nintendo standards: it does the unthinkable, taking a series known for cheesy Boy Detective Adventures (characters literally call him ‘Tantei-kun’ at times, bouncing between affectionate and mocking reasons) and deciding to tackle topics that even other large publishers steer clear of.
How does a middle-schooler react to the death of their classmate, which may be their very first exposure to the concept of death itself? How do you express the value of living to a child who just had life devalued in front of their very eyes? What can a teacher do when one of their pupils places them in a dangerous, previously unthinkable situation? Can you cope with the righteous vitriol pointed your way when you treat another family’s loved one like they are potentially a criminal?
Emio – The Smiling Man asks these questions, knowing that several of them don’t have clear answers to begin with. Sometimes, all you can do is take a deep breath, do what you can, and hope that it’s enough. This game tackles mature topics, and does so with a level of maturity seldom seen in this industry. That, in itself, is worth all the praise in the world.
