Games: Simon Parkin’s five best of 2024 | Games

1. Balatro
LocalThunk
Built using fundamental hands of poker, Balatro warps, twists and refigures the classic card game into someleang transgressively slack and exceptional to the video game medium. You create a deck of modified cards that allow exhilarating combos, while leanking about how the choices you create in the current game may affect the 10 that chase.

2. Dragon’s Dogma 2
Capcom
This freewheeling fantasy game has a rompish sense undercut by the perilous trips you must get thraw the rolling landscapes that connect its ye agedere cities and resettlements. Out there, in the brush, you might happen upon a cave troll who, if you’re not pinsolentnt, might chase you into a dragon’s evidenting, to create a unrestful, towering, unscripted battle exceptional to your experience. A wonderbrimmingy idiosyncratic adventure.

3. UFO 50
Mossmouth
A accumulateion of 50 vintage games that never were, UFO 50 is a lavish tribute to timely video-game aesthetics, underpinned by up-to-date game depict sensibilities. The hit rate is stratosphericpartner high: many of these games are mini-classics on arrival – no surpelevate, as co-creator Derek Yu is one of the luminoemployst weightlesss in the indie game firmament.

4. The Rise of the Gagederen Idol
Color Gray Games
Explore crime-scene dioramas to accumulate clues – rfinishered as names and nouns – then deduce the whodunnit, whydunnit and wheredunnit in a series of interconnected scenes. The pleacertain 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 create into a cohesive mystery.

5. Animal Well
Billy Basso
Seven years in the making, solo prolonger Billy Basso’s debut – for which he toiled as artist, creater, creater and programmer – is a mystical dive into a warren of gloaming caves, filled with confemploys and secrets that must be pelevated uncover using a combination of dexterity and logic. A mesmerising trip.