VG247’s best games of 2024 that aren’t actually from 2024, because we’re all time- and money-poor these days, right?

I’ll cut to the chase: 2024 has been a great year for gaming. Just look at the various GOTY pieces that’ll be going up over this week and into the beginning of 2025: each of the writing team here at VG247 has written three pieces – one about our actual GOTY, one about something that we feel has been criminally under-rated over the past 12 months, and one about something we’re really looking forward to in the new year.

But there is a cost of living crisis right now. Most territories that play video games are seeing living costs rise and rise whilst wages stagnate. Games are expensive, and they’re only getting pricier.

With that in mind, I have asked the team to each write about something they’ve been playing this year that isn’t actually from this year. Many of us have chosen to write about games that we’ve picked up on the cheap because they’re getting on a bit, or downloaded as part of a subscription service since the publisher has relaxed limitations on licensing for them since they’re showing their age.

I think it’s important to show some love to the backlog, especially when many of us can’t really afford to pick up a new $70+ game per month. With that in mind, here is the full list of what VG247 has been playing in 2024 (that isn’t from 2024).

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James Billcliffe is still playing… Frogwares

My most played genre this year is Frogwares.

On the PlayStation Store, they sell bundles of The Sinking City, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One and Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened for ridiculously cheap whenever there’s a sale on. That equals 60-ish hours of gentlemanly intrigue, investigation and mystery.

As a set, it’s perfect: you get to play Cthulhu, then Sherlock Holmes, then Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu – what more could you want?

Frogwares games are almost faultless in concept if not execution – a pulpy mixture of atmospheric role-playing and exploration that’s unbeatably cozy, even when the game’s supposed to be spooky. These are good, old-fashioned games: designed to be vibrant and ambitious and surprising and, above all, fun – even if the more technical aspects can’t match up to some bigger budget releases.

Because of the quality of life improvements introduced with each game, I’d recommend playing them in release order, starting off with a bang in the squelchy open-world of The Sinking City, where an aristocratic orangutan man welcomes you onto the dock and it just gets weirder from there.

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One next is a delight with a surprisingly detailed open world and tons of fascinating and twisty cases to solve, but the smaller-scale Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is best to close proceedings as the shortest, and most modern, entry.

Dom Peppiatt is still playing… Inscryption

So, I’ve just wrapped up watching Rivals on Disney+, and it was one of my favourite TV series of the year. And that’s not because of its raunchy sex scenes, not because of its diligent, poet-souled Irish lead actor in the form of Aiden Turner, and not because of David Tennant’s spectacular turn as a ruthless 80s baddie. No. I was obsessed with it because, at no point during its eight episode run, could I accurately predict what was going to happen next. The show intentionally toys with your expectations and subverts tropes with deft ease.

I feel exactly the same about Inscyrption; a game that initially appears to be a weird hostage situation in a log cabin with a mystical card game very, very quickly reveals itself to be something else entirely. The game is absolute madness – literal and figurative, it turns out – and side-swiped my expectations consistently. Not an hour of in-game time went by without me saying ‘wait, WHAT’ out loud, a big labrador grin plastered across my face.

It’s hard to talk about the finer points of Inscryption without spoiling things, so I’ll keep this brief: I think it’s one of the most subversive and interesting games I’ve played in years. Decades, maybe. It’s an inky black card-based odyssey that’s part deck-building roguelike, part escape-room hell, part-Stanfod Prisoner Experiment. Daniel Mullins Games – who you may also recognise from Pony Island and The Hex – absolutely perfected its craft with this one, and I’m very sad I didn’t play it closer to release in 2021. I’m very glad it’s on PlayStation 4 and 5, and via PS+, no less.

Connor Makar is still playing… Buckshot Roulette

This year I’ve spent a lot of time playing various multiplayer games with some IRL friends in Discord, which breathed life into an excellent indie that I had a lot of fun with a while back. You’ve probably already seen Buckshot Roulette! A shady, gritting spin on its Russian counterpart in which you enter a game of life-or-death chance in the hope of snatching the cash. It’s a wonderful solo experience. Then, literally last month, the wonderful Mike Klubnika dropped a multiplayer update! If a game wins me over once, it’s great. If it wins me over twice? Then it deserves a spot in articles such as this.

Kelsey Raynor is still playing… Stardew Valley

While 2024 has had plenty of stellar releases, as well as some I’d rather forget, there are a couple of games from pre-2024 that I’ve been spending a good portion of time with this year. Namely, Stardew Valley.

Stardew Valley was released back in 2016, which I can’t quite believe, and the updates for it have not stopped coming since. Just earlier this year, developer ConcernedApe released the 1.6 update. Yeah, the fella is supposed to be hard at work on Haunted Chocolatier, but folk like me have such an affection for Stardew Valley that ConcernedApe simply cannot leave the game alone for more than five minutes. I can’t blame him, and it meant that once the update hit consoles, I started yet another run of the game.

I’ve lost count how many farms I’ve started and abandoned once the Community Center was completed. This time around, I am determined to reach Perfection on my current save, but you’ll have to check in with me again next year to see if I got any closer to achieving that, because that’s probably how long it’s going to take.

What’s better is that while I’ve been revisiting Pelican Town, my friends have simultaneously been grinding in the mines and foraging like their lives depend on it. Comparing our progress on a regular basis (or celebrating each Prismatic Shard one of us finds) has been one of the ‘little things’ that has certainly helped make an otherwise chaotic year much more bearable. I have a lot of love for Stardew Valley, the wonderful community ConcernedApe has helped shape, and mostly, getting to share my love of this game with my friends.

Rebecca Jones is still playing… Honkai: Star Rail 2.0

You can’t exactly accuse Honkai: Star Rail of being some overlooked retro gem: it launched less than 18 months ago and has been yet another highly lucrative gacha hit for developer miHoYo ever since. But we’re here to talk about the already-released games that we loved in 2024, and there’s no denying that Honkai: Star Rail – thanks in large part to its stellar (pardon the pun) 2.0 update in February – has fit the bill for me this year. The Penacony chapter whisked the Astral Express crew along the silver rail to their next stop: a swanky diplomatic retreat at a faux-Jazz Age dreamland theme park with (insert shocked gasps here) a sinister underbelly.

Everything about this latest storyline represented an impressive refinement on HSR 1.0, despite the launch version of the game already being one of my favourite new releases of last year. It was simply so good that I’m not even mad we didn’t get many new hints as to March 7th’s real identity… although if my MVP amnesiac daughter could get her long-deserved narrative payoff when 3.0 launches in January, that’d be lovely.

Mark Warren is still playing… Elden Ring

Psst. While 2024’s not looking, I’ve got a secret to tell you. It’s a big one. Certainly not the kind of thing you could have known about if you looked at the homepage of a certain website in, say, July. You know, not that long after a certain DLC came out. I played Elden Ring for the first time this year. Ok, so I cheated by using a mod that made me a living god, because I’m a coward, a wimp, a weakling, and definitely not worth your time.

But here’s the thing – even though I did that, I still came out of my playthrough feeling like I’d gotten a proper understanding of why Elden Ring is the masterpiece people (my coworkers included) have long been telling me it is, even if getting slapped up by Malenia’s not necessarily my gaming cup of tea. Oh, and I’ve finally given Fallout 76 a try, as well as the Katamari series via the remasters. I’m not sure which is the better thing about hoarding. Ok, it’s Katamari.

Sherif Saed is still playing… Diablo 4

When it comes to ARPGs, I am a man of simple taste. If clicking on demons and killing monsters feels great, and the dopamine hit of power and item acquisition is consistent enough, you’re going to find me playing a lot of whichever one of them delivers – and I probably won’t stop talking about it. Even as scarred as it was at its launch in 2023, Diablo 4 immediately delivered on the former, and made a decent enough attempt at the latter that it was all I needed for my interest to be sustained throughout that year.

Diablo 4 started off 2024 on a really sour note, with what’s undoubtedly been its worst season yet. We were months off from the release of its first major post-launch expansion, too, so to see my favourite ARPG run out of steam that early into the year was alarming. Whatever inner awakening took place at Blizzard in 2024, it has been responsible for some of the best content the game had seen yet. Most of that work has been squarely aimed at making a compelling case for the endgame. The entire structure of loot and itemisation was entirely overhauled, and Blizzard later even turned the entire levelling system on its head. With almost every season, a new endgame activity would be introduced; a new boss to fight for targeted loot, or some much-needed quality of life updates to keep up with the ever-growing game.

Ironically, a lot of that work has been more impactful on the core game than the paid expansion. Vessel of Hatred, however, I am a little less hot on. Judged solely on the value (and volume) of the content it brought to the game, it’s a solid expansion. The new Spiritborn class is incredibly fun, and brings a new style of play to set it aside from the base five. The new zone has fun enemies, new endgame activities, and well, it’s a new landmass to gallop around in. Narratively, however, it was the most egregious waste of time I may have ever seen from a Diablo, well, anything. There is a shocking, and immediately apparent, drop to the quality of writing. The campaign fails at establishing a threat worth fearing or a spinning a tale worth following.

My grievances with that aside, all of the work that went into Diablo 4 got me to finish many of the year’s battle passes, getting multiple heroes into the endgame, and finding new ways to enjoy my favourite ARPG. So here’s to another year of creating a new character every damn season and finding joy on the treadmill once again.

Alex Donaldson is still playing… Cities Skylines 2

Cities Skylines 2 was always brimming with potential, but when it first landed back in October of last year it was a bit of a mess – and that’s me being extremely charitable.

In the pre-release period I didn’t even notice the problems as much – playing for a limited amount of time, and on a pimped-out, cutting-edge rig, I just recognized that this was a game pushing for a deeply granular level of simulation that left CPUs burning hot and PCs struggling – though I saw its potential as a project that’ll be played for the next fifteen years, not merely the next two.

Once Skylines 2 was in more people’s hands, however, it quickly became clear that this wasn’t just teething problems – this was full-on edentulation. The teeth were straight-up falling out. You may think I’m stretching the dental analogy to breaking point, and you’d be right – but know this: one of the things that was breaking the game and melting PCs was Skylines 2 rendering NPC’s teeth in graphic detail even when the camera was zoomed out by miles.

2024, then, has been a year of apology and improvement. Publisher Paradox Interactive has basically spent all of 2024 eating a dump truck’s worth of humble pie across multiple projects, and in Skylines 2 that’s manifested as a shed load of patches, free DLC, and an indefinite delay for any possible console version. Quietly, slowly but surely, that PC release has been getting more reliable and more acceptable. And in the end, I’ve played a lot of it – over 150 hours this year. That’s probably only behind Street Fighter 6 and Balatro.

Games shouldn’t release as broken disasters, and Paradox deserved the public flogging it got for the state of Cities Skylines 2 at launch. But as it keeps improving, it inexorably edges closer to being what it should’ve been: a worthy sequel to one of the greatest city builders ever. I look forward to continuing to check in on it every couple of months in 2025.