The Best Video Games of 2024 (So Far)

How does the video-game industry follow up 2023, a year that went down in history as one of the best ever for actual releases and one of the worst ever for its thousands of laid-off workers? By continuing both trends into 2024 with a similarly intense energy. Sticking to the good news, we’ve already enjoyed one bona fide game-of-the-year contender, a dragon-slaying epic with truly devious design, and a handful more titles that have caused no end of delight. What stands out between this disparate bunch is the medium’s transportive potential: a Hawaiian sojourn with a motley crew of lovable weirdos; gardening in the outer reaches of the cosmos; a time-stricken Persian fortress. During a year in which the world has been going through it, these games have felt like the most sacred, necessary of things: a sanctuary.

Ultros

(PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5)

The second Metroidvania on this list elicits a strikingly different emotional register to the first. Yes, Ultros can make you feel acutely alone as you plot a route off its abandoned spaceship (here called the Sarcophagus), and it will likely inspire glee through its wonderful, viscera-slicing combat. But slowly, these feelings make way for something more nourishing. Ultros is also a game about gardening: You plant seeds in the ground, they yield fruits, and, more tantalizingly, they begin to alter the environment. The game’s great trick is that it doesn’t go out of its way to explain how this alien shrubbery works. So you experiment and hybridize, sometimes doing little more than letting time pass to ensure the bizarre flora can blossom into its true form. By the game’s end, the Sarcophagus is a tangled web of bioluminescent roots, shoots, and foliage — so pretty that you might not actually want to hop into the escape pod.

Balatro

(Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X)

The roguelike deckbuilder, a genre mash-up of the run-based roguelike and old-school, physical deckbuilders (like Magic: The Gathering), has long made a strong case for being video games’ most compulsive genre. Balatro takes it to the next level with the introduction of a fiendish new element: poker. At first, the game plays a lot like poker in the real world: two pair? Fine. Full house? Even better. A flush? Now we’re talking. Between rounds, however, you get to spend your winnings in the shop, accruing modifying cards that flare the action off in genuinely bizarre directions. These might be holograph, steel, or gold versions of cards that confer multipliers or additional chips. Heck, tarot cards are even part of this unruly equation, transforming your deck in strange and interesting ways. Within a few rounds, Balatro becomes a kaleidoscopic blur of numbers and color. It’s poker, then, but not quite as you know it — poker that feels nearly psychedelic.

Pacific Drive

(PC, PlayStation 5)

Pacific Drive is destined to become an all-timer with a very specific type of video-game fetishist. It pairs crafting busywork with white-knuckle car rides through meteorological maelstroms, all while summoning an exquisitely quiet, lonely atmosphere reminiscent of the great Half-Life 2. It’s a weird mix — fitting, really, for a game that’s also clearly indebted to the weird fiction of authors like Jeff VanderMeer. But it hangs together beautifully: Crafting is satisfying and meditative; driving is utterly exhilarating; and the presentation is simply ravishing (both the weather effects and your car’s gorgeously tactile dashboard). It adds up to a consistently absorbing and strangely alluring nightmare. You can practically smell the car fumes.

Dragon’s Dogma 2

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X)

Unlike FromSoftware’s Dark Souls games, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is not necessarily a challenging game so much as one that demands effort. Sure, you’ll get pummeled by giant monsters, from griffins and ogres to lumbering cyclopses, but more than honing your combat skills, the game is all about internalizing its airtight logic and acting accordingly. Use the day-night cycle to your advantage, preparing while the sun is down, navigating when it is up. Talk to absolutely everyone, because quests do not just fall into your lap. Listen to what they say, because quest markers, for the most part, simply do not exist. Throw in the ambient multiplayer of the pawn system, one that lets you create a secondary character and download those of your friends’, and you have a clockwork set of mechanics that summon, with bravado, ingenuity, and no shortage of flair, the most highly coveted of interactive experiences: pure adventure.

➽ Read Lewis Gordon’s full review of Dragon’s Dogma 2.