As soon as I played its first episode, I knew Anthology of the Killer would have to be my game of the year. I mean, episodic gaming— remember that? I love the idea of episodic games! Games as episodes of a TV series, or chapters of a serialized novel, or, most appropriately here, issues of a zine. Games that can dive into one topic, explore it briefly and intensely, then move on before they overstay their welcome. Games that can gradually depict a larger universe and flesh out relatable characters without having to deliver “one big story” that knocks your socks off. I love that part of what Anthology of the Killer does— and I love its off-kilter perspective on the ennui of modern urban life, its garishly endearing art style, its wry humor and surreal tangents… Anthology of the Killer is the kind of game that makes me grateful games exist.

A game can be just nice and beautiful. To climb, to discover new vistas, to contemplate. Art clearly inspired by Mœbius, gameplay inspired by the climbing in Shadow of the Colossus, Breath of the Wild and, I’m sure, real life. A marked departure for the creators of Life is Strange; a journey well worth taking yourself.

I was introduced to the games of creator Yames via a collection of dithered, distorted gifs on tumblr— writhing humanoid shapes, strange terminology, corrupted graphics. It looked like if you tried to run a game intended for SVGA graphics on a CGA monitor, and the game was about some sort of dissection experiment, possibly being undertaken by the subject of the experiment itself. It was Discover My Body, a short, disturbing free game, which led me to Yames’s most recent and largest commercial game, Growing My Grandpa! The game is phenomenal, crossing Cronenberg’s body horror and fascination with medical and scientific experiments with a deep interest in folkloric rites and shamanism. The game is in something like the form of an early-to-mid-’90s point-and-click adventure with prerendered elements (perhaps a bit like The Dark Eye, but with less saturated colors and less outright claymation.) Yames’s games are such a pure lens into one person’s esoteric obsessions, and I couldn’t love them more for that. Follow his Patreon for updates on his next games, Father Turned Me Into Trees and Rivers and Plastic Spouse Interrogation. I mean, the titles alone…

I don’t know if there’s ever been a good Russian Roulette game before, but there is now. And really, it’s a perfect topic for a video game: the rules are simple and familiar; there are obvious ways to add power-ups and other modifications; and it’s the kind of thing that almost no one is going to do in real life (for good reason) but that is safe and transgressively fun to explore in digital form. And Buckshot Roulette really pulls it off with panache. It leans into the grimy, edgy nature of the concept with cheeky aplomb and serves up an addicting game of chance and strategy that’s hard not to love. Its dithered, lo-fi graphics, tiltable odds-based gameplay, and gritty edge were among the many direct inspirations for the first entry in the Fullbright Presents series; I’m glad people are making weird stuff like this, so I can make weird stuff like that.

The localized semiotics that video games are capable of creating are such a beautiful thing. Sure, gamers know that whenever you see a red barrel, it carries with it the affordance of exploding when damaged. But some games, like Animal Well, temporarily reconfigure our brains so that seeing a platform in a certain arrangement with a switch underneath it obviously means that what you need to do right now is deploy your yo-yo. A slinky, a frisbee, a bubble wand; in Animal Well, they transform from children’s toys into specific tools with specific applications, translating the gameworld itself into a system of signs that communicates to us what we can, and should, do, at any given point. The way that gaining an understanding of a game’s mechanics can turn any given frame from a static image into a complex set of functional instructions for how to interact with it is truly a glorious thing.

Quake, but make it Soviet! Many games that hark back to FPS titles of the 1997 vintage try to correct what are now seen as outmoded tropes: too brown, too punishing, too much reliance on searching for keys. HROT says: no! Browner! More punishing! More archaic! It shows that sometimes the old ways are still the best ways. And, fascinatingly enough, many of the locations in the game are based on real places in Prague and the Czech Republic, meaning that HROT qualifies as edutainment.

What if poker, but for nerds? Poker with power-ups? Poker, but using the magic of computers to completely break the game, and by doing so, win. Who knew that a clever, funny, surprising, geeky, self-assured super-mutation of one of the most familiar card games in history would become one of the indisputable games of 2024?

A short, first-person sci-fi narrative game where a handful of crewmembers are stranded after a space disaster and must try to figure out how to cope and survive the fallout. They’ve been made obsolete, one of the last manned crews in the void; they have become expendable. As you explore where the crew lives and works you’ll discover what makes them tick, and have a hand in what their fate might be. You’ll be shocked to learn, dear reader, I liked it. There’s a layer of bleak, twisted surreality that suffuses the entire game, and lo-fi Dreamcast-era graphics accented throughout with some truly impressive shader effects. A messed-up, engrossing, memorable game, and just an aesthetic experience worth having, if you’re ready to get your hands dirty.

It seems like it just wouldn’t be one of my GOTY lists at this point without some entry by David Szymanski, and here we are. Squirrel Stapler takes one of those deer hunting games you’d see sold in cardboard sleeves piled in a bin in the electronics department of Walmart and, well, turns it psychotic. Follow your delusion as you hunt for pelts to dress your blushing bride. It’s demented… it’s fantastic. And Butcher’s Creek is only a demo so far, but it’s a straight-up throwback to Condemned: Criminal Origins, hands-down the best melee-focused first-person action game ever, taking those Se7en-esque serial killer vibes and shoving them into a filthy basement under a shack in Appalachia. It’s pretty much Condemned, but yuckier, and I’m here for it. Thank you David, for making the pixelated nightmares I adore.

Fictions within fictions: 50 fictional 8-bit games, created by a fictional game development studio, released on a fictional game console. But the true story behind it is heartwarming: two real-life childhood friends grew up making simple 2D video games together, and now, having become successful professional game developers in their adult lives, they pulled together a group of collaborators to create this expansive, inspired collection of wildly varied retro game experiences. Platformers, brawlers, shooters, a point-and-click horror adventure, head-to-head competitive games and quiet single-player puzzlers, UFO 50 has something for everyone. If you pick it up, be sure not to miss Fist Hell (more linear than River City Ransom, more systems-y than Double Dragon), Night Manor (an Uninvited/Shadowgate-like with Clock Tower vibes), Party House (a semi-indescribable strategy-puzzle game with randomization elements and a Maniac Mansion NES visual style), or Valbrace (a classic Wizardry-style dungeon crawler with Punch-Out-like combat mechanics.) Just like when you were renting NES games from the local video store as a kid, you won’t love them all, but I guarantee you will find something to love.

I’m late on this one: it’s not a 2024 game, it’s not even a 2020s game; it’s a 2017 game. And I did play the first chapter of it when it first came out, but I got out into the world map and I guess just fell off my horse and never got back on. Until now, that is. And I’m damn glad I did, because West of Loathing is one of the funniest, most joyful, silly, heartful games I’ve played, probably ever. The black-and-white stick figure art is often unexpectedly quite lovely to look at, and the humor has a kind of Mel Brooksian wackiness, but with a knowingly sardonic tinge that makes it land just on the right side of goofy. I loved it, every minute, and if you messed up and missed it first time around like I did, now’s a great time to go back and see how the west was fun* :)

*An example of humor that would never make the cut in this game.

Well I’ll be danged, pardner, if we ain’t got another Western game on our hands! I didn’t actually know about Wild Bastards til I saw its 9/10 review in Edge Magazine* and so, being a huge fan of Void Bastards and Blue Manchu in general (founded and run by the co-founder of Irrational Games and lead developer on BioShock, Jon Chey), I snapped Wild Bastards up in a heartbeat. And I really, really enjoyed it. It takes the 2.5D brilliance of Void Bastards as its base and mixes in a kind of single-player Overwatch-y hero shooter approach? Throughout the game you’re doing the classic thing of rounding up your posse for the big final showdown, and each of the crew you gather has their own unique weapon and special power that they can fire off to turn the odds in their favor. It might be converting damage into healing for a limited time, it might be randomly deleting one enemy from the playing field (cross your fingers it’s the big armored tank and not one of the piddling little ankle-biters), and you can bring any two of the crew into battle and swap them out at will. The mechanical space is really enjoyable, and there are at least a couple of the characters you’ll likely develop a real fondness for. If you’re into combinatoric, -Shocky first-person combat and rogue-lite progression through a procedurally arranged Old West galaxy far, far away… well golly, pardner, have I got the game for you.

* Did you know they still make those? Print magazines? I resubscribed to both PC Gamer and Edge this year, and it’s been really lovely finding nice surprises like these in their pages.

In a slightly unorthodox move we have an entry that’s not a game at all, but a physical guidebook for a game that pointedly does not exist. Vermis I is heavily inspired by From Software’s oeuvre reaching back to the King’s Field days and through to Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, but with a wretched, black metal, corrupted-pixels aesthetic that brings the experience of paging through this tome to another level. There are some really clever game design ideas in here; there are certainly some points reading through that you’ll wish this were a real game you could play. But perhaps, like so many games we read about in magazines and preview articles growing up, the Vermis we imagine is better than the Vermis we could play would ever be.

While I haven’t completed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 yet, but I did play the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on release, and loved it, and made it to the end credits (no mean feat, frankly, considering its legendary jankiness and brutal difficulty spikes.) I’m loving S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 so far as well, and I know I’ll love the many more hours I’ll be putting into it. There’s just something it captures, the feeling of being a lone agent in an uncaring Zone filled with desperate characters out for riches and glory but who are also somehow the most downtrodden sadsack sons of bitches on the face of the Earth. Wide open fields, treacherous anomalies, thrilling freeform firefights in and around the rusted skeletons of the Zone’s crumbling infrastructure. It is the survivalist’s dream of what systems-driven first-person RPGs, immersive sims and what they’ve inspired (particularly Far Cry 2) have wrought. It is desolate. It is unforgiving. And somehow it is often strangely beautiful.