The 15 Best Video Game Surprises Of 2024

It’s hard to remember a time before Balatro, but it did exist. In February, the poker-themed roguelike card game launched with no extended hype cycle or years of marketing. It practically appeared out of nowhere and became one of 2024's best games. Truly a wonderful surprise.

The wait for Elden Ring was long and led to a lot of people desperately awaiting any news or teases at every video game show and event. For about three years, after its 2019 announcement, people waited and waited until 2022 finally came along and let them play Elden Ring. I think most assumed a similar wait would follow for a sequel, but instead, a spin-off co-op sequel was announced in December and will be out in 2025. Nice!

While you always hope a new video game will be good, sometimes it’s hard not to get nervous or cynical. That was the case with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle ahead of its December release.

While I wanted the game to be great, I was nervous. How would a first-person Indiana Jones game work? I wasn’t sure. Then I (and others) played Great Circle and discovered a really special game that plays more like Dishonored or Hitman than Call of Duty or Uncharted. Great stuff! Here’s hoping for a sequel after that story DLC next year.

I expected 2024 to be a big year for Sonic’s beloved antihero, Shadow the Hedgehog. He was going to be the villain in the series’ next live-action movie, after all. However, what I didn’t expect was for Sega to make an entire event out of finally giving the brooding black hedgehog his due.

In April, Sega announced that 2024 would be the Year of Shadow. This included a dedicated merch line, in-person events, mobile game crossovers, an animated mini-series, and a new game starring Shadow packaged in with a Sonic Generations remaster. All of this culminated in Keanu Reeves starring as Shadow in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which opened up at #1 at the U.S. box office.

Sega had done Shadow dirty for nearly 20 years. After the series made a hard pivot away from its ensemble cast to focus mostly on Sonic and his inner circle, Shadow had become a bit player in most games. Seeing Sega do right by him and make such a grand spectacle of it was easily one of the biggest surprises for Sonic fans this year. And hey, it looks like he’ll be part of the live-action movies in the future as well, so Sega can’t just abandon him again. - Kenneth Shepard

Last year, I was excited to see Rockstar bring the original Red Dead Redemption to modern consoles. But it was still annoying that the legendary open-world game wasn’t available on PC. That finally changed this year, with a solid PC port of Red Dead Redemption. At last, you can play this classic game at high framerates and long draw distances. Oh and you can mod it and make it even better, too. Fantastic!

When Good Old Games launched in 2008, the number one issue on PC games players’ minds was DRM. Digital Rights Management was throttling video games, making official, paid-for games work far worse than pirated versions, and it was a whole, grisly mess. Good Old Games launched from the studios of CD Projekt in Poland as a store that revived classic games, got them to work on modern machines, and freed them of all DRM. And the people celebrated.

As time went on, the store shifted to selling more modern games alongside classics, and dropped the name in favor of its acronym, GOG. While it maintained the no-DRM rule (beyond a couple of controversies), it also somewhat lost its purpose. This year, GOG announced a sort of philosophical rebranding, to focus on one of the bigger issues of 2024: games preservation.

There’s an initial commitment to a list of 100 games, which GOG promises to maintain in perpetuity, and the company intends to add more as time goes on. And, even when a company like Blizzard announces it’s pulling classic games from GOG, the Polish company made clear it would continue to support the games anyway. If they stick to it, if the commitment is for real, this could set a new standard that other companies may feel compelled to follow. - John Walker

It’s always been an odd, contentious thing in the Legend of Zelda fandom that the series is named after its titular princess but she rarely plays a starring role. There was hope up to the eleventh hour that Tears of the Kingdom would let players actually inhabit Princess Zelda as they explored its open world, but it wasn’t meant to be.

However, in 2024, we finally got a mainline Zelda game that lets you play as the leading lady.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is one of the last big hurrahs for the Switch as we head into next year and Nintendo releases the long-awaited successor. The game is a bit divisive, replacing protagonist Link’s typical sword-and-board gameplay for a magic-based “echoes” system used more for puzzle solving than scrapping it up. But hey, fans had been asking for a Zelda-led Zelda game for ages, and hopefully, this is a sign that more could come in the future. - Kenneth Shepard

This year was the 30th anniversary of PlayStation. Sony did a few different things to celebrate the big milestone, but the best was easily the quiet PS5 update the company did on December 1 that added new themes inspired by the PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS4. The update also added a retro PS1 boot-up for the PS5. All of this is awesome, yet Sony plans to remove all of this eventually, which sucks. Don’t do that!

Technically, Stalker 2—an open-world wasteland FPS RPG sequel to 2007's Stalker—was announced 14 years ago. But that version of the game was canceled in 2012. Then a new version started development in 2018 and, for a few years there, it felt like the game would never see the light of day. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, the country where Stalker 2's dev team is located, and it seemed even more unlikely that the sequel would ever launch.

But it did! On November 20, Stalker 2 launched on Xbox and PC. Sure, it’s not perfect and will need a few more patches to make it more stable, but hey, it still made it out and is a mostly cool game that people seem to like! I’d call that a happy ending.

In another timeline, this entry would have been filed in this post’s companion piece as one of the biggest disappointments of 2024. In May, Microsoft announced it would be closing four developers under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. Among them was Tango Gameworks, the team behind the beloved surprise hit Hi-Fi Rush. According to Microsoft’s own metrics, the rhythm-based action game did well, even as a day-one Game Pass offering. And yet, it wasn’t enough to save the studio from the claws of corporate greed.

However, the story has a happy ending. In August, PUBG publisher Krafton acquired the studio and the Hi-Fi Rush IP, bringing back old talent to work on the next entry in the series. A lot of game developers lost their jobs in 2024, and thousands of people are still looking for work as the industry eats itself alive. But in all that darkness, there was one bright spot for a studio whose work had been widely celebrated just a year before its demise. -Kenneth Shepard

Many words have been written about Astro Bot, Sony’s latest PS5 exclusive blockbuster, so I won’t write too many more here. Odds are you’ve played the fantastic platformer or at least know about it. It’s really good. One of the best games of 2024, too. And its wild to remember that Astro Bot was announced in March and launched just six months later in September. Now that’s how you do it!

When it was announced in 2020 that Amazon was making a Fallout TV show, the online reaction was a mix of caution and fear. The Fallout universe seems like a perfect fit for a TV show, but how well would the violence, satire, retrofuturism, and quirks work in live action? Turns out, pretty well!

To my surprise, the Fallout TV show was great. Like really good! It even got 16 Emmy nominations and won two of them. I did not foresee that happening back when I first heard about Fallout becoming a TV show.

In 2024, 2K began shutting down its bad PC launcher that made playing the publisher’s game cumbersome if you bought them on Steam. Also in 2024, EA updated It Takes Two and removed the need to use its very confusing launcher to play the game on Valve’s storefront.

Even better, when Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived in October on Steam, you didn’t need to touch EA’s launcher at all. This is all good news and hopefully this trend of publishers ditching bad PC game launchers continues into 2025.

I enjoy owning an Xbox. But, based on data out there, Microsoft’s consoles aren’t selling well compared to those from Nintendo and Sony. That means some great games are stuck on Xbox. That’s starting to change, however, and in 2024, Xbox brought more games to more platforms while also advertising the idea that, thanks to cloud streaming, any device can be an Xbox.

All of this makes me nervous about the future of Xbox hardware, but considering how many developers and publishers Microsoft owns, it’s nice that these games (like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) will eventually be available on PlayStation 5, Switch and elsewhere. Now, will Halo ever be playable on a PlayStation console...hmmm.

PlayStation has been slowly opening up to the idea of bringing its games to new platforms. Sony has released several of its first-party games to PC in recent years, even if those versions have rarely launched at the same time as the games have hit PlayStation.

However, this year the company did something some might have thought unthinkable: It released a game from one of its big first-party franchises on a Nintendo platform.

Sony has brought some of its games to Nintendo consoles before. The last three MLB The Show games have been released on Switch. But Lego Horizon Adventures launching on Nintendo’s console is surprising because it’s much less common for Sony to put something from one of its tentpole series on a competing platform. Sure, this isn’t Horizon 3, but it does suggest that PlayStation may be open to expanding the market for its big names.

The Game Awards, aka Geoff Keighley’s annual winter E3 trailer-extravaganza (with some awards shoved in between the ads), has been going on for a decade now, which makes me feel really old. And to his credit, the show has gotten better over time. And this year’s event was easily its best yet.

That was thanks to a nice mix of big and small trailers, some genuniely wonderful moments involving real people, and a sequence in which two crotchety Muppets yelled at Geoff for a few minutes. Yes, the show is still too long and the awards are still not given enough of a spotlight. But by the end of 2024's show, I wasn’t completely bored and angry. I was just slightly bored, somewhat entertained, and a little annoyed. That’s progress! Hopefully The Game Awards in 2025 are just as good, if not better.