I’ve been tracking the games I play each year in a spreadsheet for the last 6 years, partly because I’m a giant nerd, and mostly because I have a terrible memory, and reflecting on my year through the lens of statistics and insights brings me a lot of joy. It also acts as a ‘carrot’ for me to do things like finish more games I start.

This isn’t a “best of 2024” list, I’m a patient gamer by nature, so while there were a fair number of new releases I did play, this list will focus on things old and new, that I got around to playing this year.

Tracking platforms

Up top, I really want to acknowledge how good the Steam Replay feature was this year. It’s my favourite gaming-related wrap up service so far. That being said, while my Steam Deck usage is up an astronomical amount this year (21% last year, to 59% this year), it still isn’t a complete picture.

Someone pointed me in the direction of Backloggd last year, which I’m sure I’d checked out before, but it seems to have evolved quite a lot under some active & passionate development since then. It’s unabashedly “Letterboxd for games”, and while it looks promising, and I plan to start using it more actively, it’s not going to replace my spreadsheet just yet. Definitely give it a look though.

Totals

To the numbers! In 2024 I played 108 games (for at least 1 hour) across 6 platforms. I rolled credits on 62 of these. As an active husband and father, I’m honestly not sure how I managed this. A lot of Steam Deck in the car while waiting for my son’s gym class to finish is definitely part of it.

At more than 1 game finished per week, this is way up from any previous year. Hopefully I can chill out a bit in 2025 though…

The year of the Steam Deck

I upgraded from my launch Steam Deck to the OLED model at the start of the year, and it surged ahead of the pack for the first year ever, absolutely dominating my time. The improved battery life, and screen brightness meant more places I could realistically play it. It’s mostly due to a huge number of really great short indie games (see honourable mentions later) that lend themselves really well to that pick up and play anywhere experience.

Plenty of time was spent on longer, deeper experiences such as Medieval Dynasty, and Luma Island however. I don’t see this trend slowing down in 2025, as I still have a backlog of 85-odd Steam games to get through.

The increase in Steam Deck usage also means the number of purchased games vs subscription games has gone up too (I hope we one day get Gamepass natively on Steam Deck without streaming). No free to play games really resonated with me this year, I finally put down Marvel Snap early in the year, and felt a giant weight lifted from my shoulders (which I then promptly filled with Balatro).

Patience is a virtue (but shiny things are shiny)

I sure didn’t keep up with all the big releases through the year, but a combination of well-priced indies, and day-one Gamepass drops kept me relatively current.

My favourites of the year

Ok, despite what I said at the start, I believe these are all actually 2024 releases, which is a first for me in this format. As I like to spotlight lesser-played games, I’ll throw some honourable mentions in at the end.

5. Caravan SandWitch

The anti-woke mob came hard at this delightful little non-violent French sci-fi game and review-bombed it, before it even had a chance to find an audience to defend it properly (Characters in the game are gay, can you believe? *clutches pearls*). It’s bounced back a bit a year later, but I expect that hit it hard sales-wise.

You play as Sauge, a colourful character in search of their mysteriously-disappeared sister, in a small open-world map that you traverse on foot and by van, exploring, finding bits of tech to upgrade your vehicle, and building relationships with the local townsfolk (who are occasionally frogs). The art style is totally on-point for a first game, and while some of the dialog feels clunky, and some edges could be sanded down gameplay wise, it was always compelling enough to keep pulling me through. There’s a central sci-fi story involving an ecological catastrophe likely caused by corporate negligence (while trying to build a dyson-sphere-like energy capture mechanism around the local star), which gives the whole place the vibe of an abandoned factory town. The core of the story is quite optimistic however. It’s about how people move on and build communities and lives after the company cuts them loose.

There’s some light puzzling and light 3d platforming, with none of it too challenging or taking away from the cozy vibe its trying to evoke. I can’t wait to see what these developers make next.

4. Arco

Arco is criminally under-appreciated and you, yes you specifically, need to play it. At its core is a rich tactical combat system, a mix of turn-based and real-time elements, but not grid based. It has some similarities to the fantastic combat system in Midnight Suns, but with its own flavour. You play as a different protagonists per chapter, in a fictionalised and beautifully pixelated Mesoamerica.

The stories, which share a strong anti-colonialist theme, are all beautifully written, funny, and heartbreaking. It’s easily the best pixel art of the year, and portrays a sense of scale that’s rare in games with this art style.

The combat got a little too difficult for me towards the end, but there are accessibility options that let you focus on the story if that’s what you want. It’s around 12h, which is close to perfect.

3. Cairn (Demo)

This is the first time a demo has made my 5 favourites of the year, but it made a huge impression. I’ve been a climber on and off since I was 16 years old, and every time a climbing based game comes around, whether it was Crytek’s great VR series The Climb, or last year’s Jusant, I find they capture different elements of climbing really well.

Cairn is the first climbing game that’s really accurately figured out how to do limb placement (specifically legs) and the balance/tension that results. Cairn’s control scheme is awkward and a bit janky, but in a way that is way more fun and funny than it is frustrating.

It has the trappings of a survival game, having you manage various health, food, hydration bars, and making the fantastic choice to show stamina not primarily as a bar, but in how much your limbs shake while you’re trying to make a move.

You start in an indoor climbing gym, learning the basics via a series of numbered routes, and I immediately felt so at home that I just stayed in that space for ages, trying to complete them all, and find the little secrets hidden throughout the space. Much like in real climbing there are marked or more obvious routes, but there are no ‘right’ ones, and you can adjust your difficulty by the route you choose on the fly.

The inventory system is the first of its kind I’ve seen, which is a delightful physics-based backpack, which as it turns out, is how backpacks usually work.

This one is releasing later in 2025, and I can’t wait for the full experience.

2. Balatro

I think this is the only game this year that I bought twice. Once in steam after its initial release, and again on Android when it launched there later in the year. The mobile version is definitely the best way to play, assuming you have the willpower to put it down and continue talking to your friends and family when out and about.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said. This is video poker as an aesthetic, but contorted into an incredible numbers-go-up solitaire game (with no gambling or micro-transactions) with near-infinite replayability due to the 150+ joker cards which each add a new rule to the game. If you want value for money, you can’t really go wrong with this.

1. Animal Well

Animal Well is my favourite Metroidvania in quite some time. It has tight precision-platforming worthy of being in conversation with Celeste or The End is Nigh (though less is required of you here). It has the mystery and exploration of Hollow Knight, the layers of puzzles upon puzzles of Tunic or Fez, and a healthy dose of pre-internet nostalgia with upgrades and tools based on children’s toys and a beautiful CRT post-process filter giving everything a bit of a glow.

It captured my imagination for 20+ hours and left me totally satisfied, despite there being many, many mysteries still to be solved in my play-through. The less you read about this one the better, so I’ll keep it short. If you like puzzle platformers, this is easily one of the best ever made.

Honorable mentions

In no specific order, here are some other games worth mentioning, and some themes I noticed while reviewing all this data.

Solo devs and small teams

I don’t think I’ve ever played so many games by solo devs or very small (2–3 person) teams.

Balatro, Animal Well, Mouthwashing, Night Stones, Mind over Magnet, Smushi Come Home, The Exit 8, Mail Time, The Axis Unseen, Pools, Pepper Grinder, Minishoot’ Adventures, Nodebuster, Mars after Midnight, Oom, Dystopika, and Tiny Glade all fit into this category.

I find these games massively inspiring, especially as someone who is struggling to ship a game by myself. I’m also aware that there is a ceiling on how sustainable and achievable this is for the games industry generally, and even with so many games, the vast majority don’t make their money back and the few that do represent a fraction of a percentage of the solo games developed in any given year. There are problems with the cost of games vs player expectations of value, and I think it’s going to take a while (and a lot of efficiency and tooling improvements) to get the industry to a more healthy place.

In the meantime, I do my best to try and support small teams with wishlists, purchases, reviews, and spreading the word when I can.

Flintlock: Siege of Dawn

I loved A44’s previous game, Ashen, and tried to get many people to give that a shot. The art style carried the less refined gameplay in that well, and they took a big swing with Flintlock, with a new art style and new, more ambitious combat system. Like almost everyone it seems, I love Elden Ring, but the parts I love about it aren’t the same as the Dark Souls crowd. I love games with a sense of exploration, and interesting traversal and Flintlock nails both. Exploring the alleyways, cliffs, and rooftops and finding things placed there just waiting for you is a feeling I’ll likely never get sick of. The combat difficulty didn’t scale well for mend I dropped it to easy to get through the boss fights, which is very un-dark-souls of me. It’s OK that this isn’t necessarily a great Souls-like, it can be good at other things. This was on my top 5 until I played the Cairn demo, but it deserves a shout-out. I really hope A44 get to make more games.

The Planet Crafter

The Planet Crafter is a small team attempting to make a subnautica-style survival-craft game, where the twist is that the planet you’re on changes over time as you go through the stages of terraformation. You start on a desolate mars-like planet, and slowly explore the hand-crafted world, finding resources and crafting things to help you create more atmosphere, plant life, and animal life and create a habitable paradise. It’s cozy, as long as you don’t build your base in the middle of an area that will later become a lake. Later in the year they released a complete second map, which I’m looking forward to jumping into after a bit of time away.

Stories Untold

There are only a handful of games I consider to be UI-centric (In Other Waters, Observation, Duskers, Don’t touch anything), and this entry oozes atmosphere. It’s an anthology game with a central narrative tying the chapters together. It explores various 80’s inspired interfaces, from early PC text-input adventures, through to anything with a dial, knob, or slider. All the UI is diagetic, and is a lot of fun to learn to use.

I ran into a few technical issues on my laptop, and it falls into many of the standard text-adventure traps in the first chapter. Because of this, I’d actually recommend playing the console version, which has some quality of life enhancements to the text input that probably make it a bit more fun when you are close to being stuck.

If you like Stranger Things vibes, but want something a little more mature in its themes and story, please check it out.

That’s it! Sorry this one was a bit late, life got real busy last year and hasn’t let up :) I wish I had a compelling update to give on my playdate game, but sadly I do not. Happy I didn’t put a date on the trailer, but regretting using the word “soon”.

For better and worse, Spotify has popularised the “wrapped” format of reviewing your consumption for the year with a bunch of statistics and insights, and this year has been particularly weird for the format’s popularity.

Not only have I got a wrapped-style yearly recap for my non-Spotify music service, but Xbox, Steam, and Playstation separately, plus my Podcasts app, my bank, my sporadic exercise, even my keyboard launcher.

All these platforms are trying to show me how much I use them, so that I see them as valuable, and continue paying them. That’s all understandable, but I don’t view my hobbies per-service, I view them as a whole, and I want a complete picture, so for the last 5 years, I’ve put that together myself for my gaming hobby.

Totals

In 2023 I played 75 games (for at least 1 hour) across 6 platforms. I finished 37 of these. I think this is the most number of games I’ve played in a year, though this is bolstered from a lot of small games for the Playdate console early in the year (their first season is 24 small games you can play over the course of 12 weeks).

Across all platforms, I played games for roughly 1012 hours, which averages about 2.7 hours a day, every day. This is way up from last year, which I put down to deeper play, having 5 games with over 50 hours played, and two games with over 100 hours each, which were Starfield, and Marvel Snap. Now, Marvel Snap doesn’t track time played, but I played religiously, doing my dailies for about 8 solid months of the year, and at 30 mins a day (which is actually fairly conservative), I estimate I put in about 180 hours making it easily my most-played game this year.

I played more recently released games than usual, due in large part to the entire Playdate catalogue being from the last two years, but also a lot of great day-one releases on Gamepass (Jusant, Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield, Cocoon, Coral Island).

Even with so many 2023 releases played, I missed a bunch of HUGE games, in what’s been one of the best years for game releases, innovation, and quality in decades (and one of the worst for industry jobs). I imagine in 2024 I’ll get around to Alan Wake 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Spiderman 2, Mario Wonder, Chants of Sennaar, and Sea of Stars.

Purchases vs Subscriptions

With the usual disclaimer that “hours played” does not equal “value” (as you’ll see in my favourites of the year list), Gamepass continues to be the best deal in gaming.

I played more hours of Purchased games this year (415 hours) vs Gamepass (320 hours), but dividing the overall cost by hours played, Purchased games work out to £1.44 per hour, and Gamepass is a shockingly cheap £0.28 per hour this year for me.

I’m still really happy with Gamepass as a service, and my mindset for choosing where to play something will often be “Is it on Gamepass? Do I think it’ll likely come to Gamepass in the next few months? If not, Steam Deck.”

Year of the Deck

As the year played out, the Steam Deck started becoming my preferred platform, due to the flexibility of being able to play while out, but also on the couch while my kid is playing on the Xbox, or while my wife’s watching TV.

Steam sales are both amazing and a curse, and like most people with a long-standing steam library, I have no shortage of backlog games to keep me busy.

The “big” AAA games I put a lot of time into on deck this year were Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. The year ended with upgrading to an OLED Steam Deck, and putting in 30 hours of House Flipper 2 between Christmas Day and New years day.

Playdate

After roughly 18 months of waiting, my Playdate (a little yellow console, with a crank) arrived in early January. This thing completely captivated me for the first quarter of the year, and I seemed to spend way more time with it than the Steam Deck early in the year, as I worked my way through their season 1 of games. This thing is SO easy to take with you in a pocket, and can be played outside in bright sunlight (arguably best played there). It also has games and game styles no other console has, so the uniqueness factor was off the charts.

It made such an impression, that I actually started developing my own game for it, learning how to code in Lua, working through design iterations, building levels, play-testing, etc. I put it down for the second half of the year, but I’ve picked it back up over Xmas, and plan to release it later this year. It’s called Spinshot and it’s a little arcadey circular block breaker. More info later in the year.

My favourites of the year

As a patient gamer, usually these are my favourite games that I played in the calendar year (regardless of release date), however, it just happened to be that with the exception of one, they are all 2023 releases.

Dave the Diver

This is NOT an indie game (it’s developed by Nexon). But it has the heart and feel of a wildly successful early access indie game. The heart of the game is going spear-fishing and exploring an under-sea world by day, and by night using the fish you’ve caught to run your own Sushi restaurant. It’s a similar conceit to one of my favourite under-rated gems from a few years ago, Moonglow Bay. While these are the most fleshed-out mechanics, the sheer number of gameplay types in this game is staggering. You’ll find yourself being introduced to an entirely new mechanic every hour and a half or so, right through to completion. I won’t spoil them here, as discovering them is a bunch of the fun (the end credits even introduce a new mechanic).

Season: A Letter to the Future

It’s possible this is the game I think about most on this list in years to come. Season is a story about witnessing the end of the world, and your character is tasked with cycling around a valley, recording what life was like before this cataclysm. You do this by compiling a scrapbook of photos, illustrations, stories, and audio recordings. The game gives you just enough guidance to make it easy to know when you’ve done enough to move on, while also giving you a lot of freedom to be creative with your compositions. The lore and the world they’ve built is a beautiful one to uncover, with a mix of grounded familiar concepts, with a sprinkling of fantasy elements that give it a really unique flavour.

Dredge

Look, this is a true indie game, developed by a studio in New Zealand. As a Kiwi, I have bias here for sure. With that out of the way, Dredge is unique in its blend of chill fishing management game, and Eldritch horror. It’s definitely the most relaxing Eldritch horror game I’ve ever played (though Call of the Sea is close).

Again, it’s very similar to Moonglow Bay (play this if you haven’t), but the tone is so different, and the mechanics they’ve added to inventory management work brilliantly. Your inventory resembles your fishing boat’s shape, and you have to place things spatially like you do in immersive sims like Deus Ex. Everything you need to put in your inventory are Tetris-like shapes, whether fish, treasure, or equipment. There’s a push-pull of how equipment you can equip taking up slots that could be used for fish/loot, and a nice upgrade tree to work through over 8–10 hours or so.

When you crash or take damage, squares of your inventory become damaged, often in the position you collided with something, making those squares unable to be used to store things until repaired, and losing any cargo that was using that space.

I loved exploring the seas, while trying not to go too insane after midnight.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

The only 2022 game from my list, this one missed a lot of the game of the year roundups, due to being released so late in the year. It’s half board-game-style turn-based combat, focussed around distances, radial area of effects, and the never-gets-old mechanic of bashing bad guys into other bad guys to deal them both damage. I’m not a huge turn-based combat fan, but this worked perfectly for me.

The other half of the game is walking around the Abbey grounds that act as your home base, having conversations with the wide array of Marvel heroes, and taking them on dates (sorry, ‘hangouts’, there’s no sex in the Marvel universe). Go bird-watching with Iron Man, attend Blade’s book club (as he tries to woo Captain Marvel), Meditate with Dr Strange, etc. This stuff worked stupidly well for me, someone who’s new to this type of thing (that I believe is common in Persona and Fire Emblem games?). It’s weird as hell, but it works. The main problem with this game is it’s just a bit too long, but YMMV.

Jusant

The only game this year I got all achievements for (despite only spending 6 hours with), Jusant is extremely a game “for me”. It’s a relaxing rock-climbing game in a fantasy world, visually and tonally reminiscent of Journey, one of my favourite game experiences of all time.

The core climbing mechanic is similar to The Climb, where you hold left and right triggers to grip each of your hands. The way they’ve transitioned this to a 3rd person controller is extremely intuitive and just forgiving enough to be interesting. They layer on additional mechanics and surfaces you can climb with a nice regularity over each of it’s chapters, and when it was done, I felt totally satisfied.

I sincerely hope it does well enough for the studio to consider a sequel, which I think could lean even more into route flexibility, and world exploration.

Honorable mentions

I can’t stress enough how good a year it was. Picking a top 5 was really hard. I had great times with so many more games than are mentioned here.

To call out a few more stand-out experiences:

Viewfinder

A mind-bending puzzle game in the vein of Portal, you take polaroids of the environment, hold them up in front of you, and the photo becomes new 3D level geometry, replacing whatever was behind the photo. It’s crazy that this mechanic even works, let alone the interesting directions they’re able to push it in.

Hi-Fi Rush

Easily the best first-party Xbox exclusive release this year, and it was shadow-dropped out of nowhere. It’s a 3rd person rhythm brawler, mixing Comic influences, Devil May Cry, and Guitar Hero. It‘s also the most effective implementation of comic-book styling in any game to date.

Medieval Dynasty

This is a game I only put a handful of hours into, as I started a few days before Starfield came out. It’s a first-person settlement management survivalcraft game, that sees you building out a small village in a medieval setting. It has clear Skyrim influences in its dialog and quest systems, but the focus is really on the building and management side. You survive seasons like in Stardew Valley, and trade with other villages. I feel like this one is way under the radar. Co-op just released in a patch in October, which is probably a great way to play, though certainly not required.

While gaming is a hobby I’m passionate about, I don’t write about it all that much, so don’t follow me if that’s what you’re looking for. If however, you’re interested in design systems, product design, tech, and leadership, then I write about all those things occasionally via my newsletter Clip Content. Thanks for reading!