Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been reflecting on the best video games of 2024. You can read personal stories about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, check out our top 10 games of the year, or learn why this year didn’t need Hollow Knight: Silksong. We’ve already name-checked a lot of heavy hitters, but as is the case every year, there’s much more to explore. The truth is that we’re always left with a list of genuine hidden gems that we’re eager to recommend to anyone building an end-of-year backlog.
This year, we’re not going to keep those games to ourselves. Instead, we want to put some fantastic games on your radar that deserve to be revisited during a quiet final few weeks for new releases. Many of these games are short, too, which makes them perfect for your holiday commutes. Sure, your backlog may already be at capacity, but we promise that these little treasures are all entirely unique experiences that highlight just how creative the entire gaming landscape is, right down to its most eccentric fringes.
Arctic Eggs
Depending on how tuned in you are to gaming, Arctic Eggs is either a totally foreign title or a phenomenon. The $10 Steam hit is a bizarre game about a fry cook who can only escape from Mount Everest by cooking for enough people in a dystopian sci-fi mountain outpost. That’s no easy task. The frying controls are intentionally maddening, calling back to games like Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. Successfully frying an egg requires a very delicate flick of the joystick or else you’ll send your egg flying. And that task is made even more complicated when you’re asked to fry them up with cigarettes and cockroaches. What does it all mean? That’s the exact question you should be asking right now. Arctic Eggs works as a sort of absurdist one-act play about mundane futility (“Can you fry an egg on top of Mount Everest?” it asks). It’s like if Samuel Beckett designed a Nintendo Wii game.
Grunn
The less you know about Grunn going into it, the better. If you need a one-line description to pique your interest, I’ll say that it’s a gardening game that isn’t quite what it seems. I’ll leave you to discover exactly what that means, but what I will say is that Grunn is an exceptional piece of design that takes the right notes from Outer Wilds. While the goal initially is just to tend an unruly garden over a weekend, the suburban setting is full of unsettling secrets that reveal themselves in each attempt. It’s a small-scale deduction game about finding the secrets hidden underneath a peaceful garden and crafting the perfect plan to solve that mystery in two days. I hope you like gnomes.
Indika
A 19th-century acid trip and a Christian crisis of faith rolled up into one, Indika remains one of the the most arresting games I’ve played this year. The narrative adventure, about a nun traversing a Russian no man’s land with the devil on her shoulder, picks at complicated questions about religion through hostile gameplay that’ll test players’ patience. That’s best exemplified by an early sequence where players have to very slowly fill up buckets with water, a long task that ends with all that work being entirely meaningless. What was the point of it all? Are the designers just trying to punish you? Those antagonistic moments fuel a thoughtful philosophical debate about blind faith and all the trials it brings with it.
Isles of Sea and Sky
The best top-down Zelda game of 2024, in my opinion, wasn’t Echoes of Wisdom. I’d argue that it was Isles of Sea and Sky. The indie puzzle game draws its inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and offers a dreamlike adventure through a series of tropical islands. However, players don’t swing a sword or slay bosses. Instead, it’s a world made up solely of box-pushing puzzles. That concept opens the door for a retro-inspired, open-ended Sokoban game that’s all about figuring out the puzzle logic of its world. Think of it as a pixel art take on The Witness, but created through the lens of classic Zelda puzzle design. It’ll push your brain to its limits, but that makes it all the more satisfying once you hit those eureka moments that unlock the world.
Judero
If you only have the time to play one game on this list, make it Judero. The latest game from experimental developer Jack King-Spooner is a positively bizarre and beautiful adventure game inspired by folklore from the Scottish Borders. It’s eye-catching for its distinct art style, which is made up of stop-motion animated action figures and crude drawings. Locals speak in a mix of wacky one-liners and straight-up poetry. There’s a flying pink bunny companion that speaks in a cartoonishly high-pitched squeal and misshapen clay dinosaurs roaming about. But below those layers of surreal nonsense lies a strangely moving story about one man’s quest to cure villagers of their problems and bring peace to a world marred by conflict. I didn’t know what I thought of it all until the credits rolled, but I haven’t stopped thinking about its final moments since.
Minishoot’ Adventures
If genre mash-ups are your thing, Minishoot’ Adventures should be near the top of your backlog. The charming indie combines Zelda-like adventure tropes with twin-stick shooting to create a colorful little gem that’s as fun and inventive as the best Nintendo games. It may not break much new ground, but it’s the kind of formal experiment that has fun imagining how many ways genres can be mixed and matched to create something new. It’s one of the most pleasant experiences I had playing a video game this year, right up there with Astro Bot when it comes to pure entertainment value.
Mouthwashing
In a fantastic year for horror games headlined by an excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, the fact that Mouthwashing stands on top of the genre mountain is impressive. The bite-sized story about a delivery crew trapped in space is a haunting story about sinners who are desperate to be judged. They yearn for punishment that may wash their misdeeds away like mouthwash wiping out bacteria. It’s a claustrophobic, terrifying, and poignant piece about finding redemption in pain. It’s no surprise that it has already become a bit of a cult classic among horror fans.
Starstruck: Hands of Time
I’ve described a lot of strange games already on this list, but none of them quite reach the bizarre heights of Starstruck: Hands of Time. Even trying to explain its basic premise will make me sound like I’m making a game up. It’s an Earthbound-inspired story about an astronaut who goes back in time to save the future by sending his disembodied hand to a small town, where it knocks down obstacles in Katamari Damacy-like minigames. Also, there are Guitar Hero rhythm game interludes. If that sounds bizarre already, just wait. Starstruck goes in some truly radical directions to deliver a psychologically distressing story about imposter syndrome. I’d describe it as Earthbound meets Evangelion, but even that feels reductive. You just have to play it.
