Games: Simon Parkin’s five best of 2024

1. Balatro
LocalThunk
Built using basic hands of poker, Balatro warps, twists and refigures the classic card game into something transgressively loose and unique to the video game medium. You build a deck of modified cards that enable exhilarating combos, while thinking about how the choices you make in the current game may affect the 10 that follow.

2. Dragon’s Dogma 2
Capcom
This freewheeling fantasy game has a rompish feel undercut by the perilous trips you must take through the rolling landscapes that connect its ye olde cities and settlements. Out there, in the brush, you might happen upon a cave troll who, if you’re not careful, might follow you into a dragon’s clearing, to produce a chaotic, towering, unscripted battle unique to your experience. A wonderfully idiosyncratic adventure.

3. UFO 50
Mossmouth
A collection of 50 vintage games that never were, UFO 50 is a lavish tribute to early video-game aesthetics, underpinned by modern game design sensibilities. The hit rate is stratospherically high: many of these games are mini-classics on arrival – no surprise, as co-creator Derek Yu is one of the brightest lights in the indie game firmament.

4. The Rise of the Golden Idol
Color Gray Games
Explore crime-scene dioramas to collect clues – rendered as names and nouns – then deduce the whodunnit, whydunnit and wheredunnit in a series of interlinked scenes. The pleasure of slotting the right words into the holes in a summing-up denouement is exquisite, as are the 1970s vibes and the way the game’s discrete incidents build into a cohesive mystery.

5. Animal Well
Billy Basso
Seven years in the making, solo developer Billy Basso’s debut – for which he worked as artist, writer, composer and programmer – is a mystical dive into a warren of gloaming caves, filled with puzzles and secrets that must be prised open using a combination of dexterity and logic. A mesmerising trip.