The best video games of 2024 so far

After a 2023 packed with generation-defining games, it felt like 2024 might be more of a comedown. There weren’t a lot of big new releases scheduled to drop outside of a busy first few months, and heavy hitters like Grand Theft Auto 6 aren’t arriving until 2025. Traditional wisdom would have you thinking that gamers were in for a very slow year with few highlights.

Now halfway through the year, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In reality, 2024 has been every bit as exciting as 2023 so far, though in more niche corners of the industry. We haven’t gotten a lot of massive action-adventure games that mainstream audiences seem to gravitate toward, but it’s been a historic year for RPGs and independent games especially. This May alone has seen the release of several phenomenal indies that have completely taken over my own personal, in-progress list of the year’s best games. To keep our readers up to date, we’ve assembled an early list of our favorite games of 2024 so far. We expect this to shift around a lot before our final year-end list, but this should give you a temperature check on what we’re enjoying so far. Play these games now before you find yourself wading through a massive backlog later this year.

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10. Indika

It’s my belief that games don’t always need to be traditionally fun. If a game is dealing with heavy subject matter, the gameplay should match those themes. That’s what the unapologetic Indika does so well. The narrative adventure game follows a nun during her crisis of faith, one where the literal devil on her shoulder tries to get her to reckon with the logic of Christianity. How do you quantify sin? Is God truly righteous? Is all of her devotion worth it? Indika presents those challenging questions with at-times antagonistic gameplay. One scene has the nun slowly filling a bucket of water for nearly 20 minutes before