Depends what you’re looking for.

Adventure/RPGs: Oblivion remaster and Avowed both came out with pretty good ratings overall. Ghost of Tsushima was also a big hit last year, came out in May 2024.

Multiplayer indies had a good year as well - Repo, Peak, and Escape from Duckov have been popular.

Cozy/niche games: Hello Kitty Island Adventure, Deltarune, Slime Rancher 2.

Niche games I’ve personally enjoyed and/or want to get: Mudborne, Cryptmaster, Dungeons of Hinterberg, LAN Party Adventures, The Lonesome Guild, and Little Rocket Lab.

I’ve had my best video game experience since a long time with Arc Raiders. An extraction shooter with interesting players interactions.

If you like building things, I’ve been playing the hell out of “Mars First Logistics”.

Basically, you build custom mars rovers to move increasingly ridiculous shipments across the red planet. And the whole game has the visual style of a Lego instruction manual.

Hi-Fi Rush was released before that time, but it was Denuvo-encumbered until about a week ago.

Hollow knight: Silksong Deltarune chapters 3&4

If you like arcade twin-stick shoot-em-ups, Sektori is one of the best the genre has seen. Hard though: if one doesn’t know the genre, play Waves and Assault Android Cactus first.

Nine sols. A metroidvania with parry-based combat and insanely good plot.

Satisfactory 1.0 released.

Hades 2

Welcome back! BTW, there were some users wondering whether you’re okay some months ago: https://pawb.social/post/33129287

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is excellent.

Warsim.

Path of Exile 2

I specialize in finding obscure good games.

Alice’s World - Mix between Doki Doki Literature Club and an adventure game.

Astro Colony - Satisfactory in space.

Days Without Incident - Fun small game made by the same guys who made Nightmare House 2.

I also recommend keeping an eye on Fractured Blooms, The Oversight Bureau, Cycle of Struggle Ardengrad, and Advent Dawn. They’re only demos at the moment though.

Megabonk!

20% sale too right now. 8 euros for this masterpiece is a steal.

I’m mostly an RPG/FPS person so that’s what I’ll mention.

We got a remaster of Oblivion that was excellent, The Outer Worlds 2 was a lot better than the last one, and we got Dragon Age: The Veilguard which Dragon Age fans didn’t like because it was more like Mass Effect and YouTube “personalities” didn’t like because there was an option to establish your player character is trans when establishing their backstory. As a Mass Effect fan I absolutely adored it though, so I’m playing through it again right now. STALKER 2 finally came out, and it didn’t have A-Life for some reason, but it does now… it’s also has mod support now too, even on console.

Oh! Speaking of games with mod support on console, we also got Arma Reforger on both PC and console, so that’s opened up mil-sims to a wider audience. and while we’re talking about military shooters, Black Ops 6 came out and it was terrible, and they just kept making it worse all year to the point where even the CoD fanboys didn’t even care when the beta for Black Ops 7 came around. Activision panicked and made a bunch of changes that the community had been begging for years for, but it was too late and when BO7 came out most people didn’t care. Especially since the campaign was Co-Op only and weird. Multiplayer is solid but nobody cares and ActiBlizz is in full panic mode. This whole situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Battlefield 6 had a beta that managed one of the top concurrent player counts on steam because it was so well received. The multiplayer of BF6 was well received on launch, but people complained that the maps are small (they are) but with the first season they released a BR called RedSec and it’s just okay, but it came with a couple new big maps and also every update to BF6 makes it worse in some way so now people are kinda souring on the game.