The Best Games I’ve Played This Year Have One Thing In Common

Usually, when I assemble my list of the best games of the year, I have difficulty finding any commonalities between my picks. Take my 2023 GOTY list, for example. Baldur's Gate 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom took the top two spots, and there are some similarities there — they’re both expansive systems-driven RPGs — but once you get down the list a bit, that cohesion begins to dissipate. Resident Evil 4, Alan Wake 2, and Amnesia: The Bunker are all survival horror games, sure, but they sit alongside Venba, Cocoon, Pikmin 4, Hi-Fi Rush, and Spider-Man 2. What do these games have in common? Well, I liked 'em.

Variety Is The Spice Of Lists

A good GOTY list should have this kind of variety — huge triple-A game action games sitting next to tiny indies about the immigrant experience and solving puzzles by traveling into marble-sized worlds. Gaming spans two budgetary extremes, with occasional double-A exceptions, and my lists tend to pull from all along the spectrum.

But this year, my current top five are nowhere near as diverse. The best games I've played at this point in 2024 are: 5) Harold Halibut, 4) Fallen Aces, 3) Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain, 2) Crow Country, and 1) Anger Foot. Those games don't share too many surface level traits, but it's extremely unusual for my GOTY list to be this indie heavy. Once you get outside the top 5, I've got a spot for XDefiant, but 7-10 are all indies, too, and I'm eager to see if the trend holds through to the end of the year.

2024 Is An Incredible Year For Indies

The thing about playing a lot of indie games is that you don't feel like you're playing similar games at all. As much as I liked Dead Space, Resident Evil 4 and Alan Wake 2 last year, they were fundamentally similar games that controlled in similar ways (and, also, two were remakes). As different as Tears of the Kingdom and Spider-Man 2 are, they're both third-person open-world games with main quests, side quests, and side activities.

I’ve Never Played A Game With Better Graphics Than Harold Halibut

Harold Halibut's stop-motion world is a sight to behold.

But the indies I've loved this year have almost nothing in common aside from their budget and scale. Celeste 64 is a platformer you can finish in an hour that feels like a GameCube game. Fallen Aces is an immersive sim in the vein of Thief or Deus Ex that has a Golden Age of Comics art style. Crow Country is a survival horror game in the mold of PS1-era Resident Evil. Anger Foot is a speedrunning first-person shooter that looks like a '90s NickToon where you use your powerful green foot to dispatch goons. And Harold Halibut is a point-and-click-style adventure game with a stop-motion aesthetic unlike anything I've ever seen in a game before, and which I doubt I'll see again soon.

I know this article's headline told you that the best games I've played this year have one thing in common, but I was being intentionally misleading. The one thing these games have in common is that there's nothing else like them on the market right now. Their commonality is that they are all one of a kind, and I hope I get to play many more games with this same quality before the year is over

Anger Foot Feels Like A Violent ‘90s NickToon

The Angry Beavers and CatDog are alive in Anger Foot.