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506 games released in 2024 and reviewed here, best first.
506 reviews
A terraforming survival-crafting game that turns a barren world into a breathable one in front of your eyes — beloved for exactly that transformation, and honestly criticized by a consistent minority for being addictive without offering much real friction or danger.
8 / 10
A minimalist build-by-day, defend-by-night strategy game from a two-person studio that became a genuine indie hit — reviewed on its full post-1.0 record, including an achievement curve that maps exactly where players stop, and the small, sold-off, still-supported story behind it.
8 / 10
A VR-only mech-punching roguelite that reviewers routinely call one of the best physics games the headset has, praised for locomotion so smooth it solves VR's usual nausea problem — reviewed here as a genuinely mature release, since Steam's own patch history shows it's still being actively expanded two and a half years after launch, multiplayer included.
8 / 10
A tactical fantasy RPG where you never actually give a combat order — you write a standing set of instructions for each unit and then watch your army carry them out, which makes it one of the closest things a big-budget console release has come to an automation game.
8 / 10
A minimalist top-down Souls-like that strips the genre down to timed dodges, stamina management and hard-won shortcuts, earning near-universal praise for its distillation of the formula while a real minority of even its own fans admit the moment-to-moment feel never quite clicked for them.
8 / 10
A solo developer's cheap, charming bullet-hell roguelite about a shrimp who is inexplicably also a wizard — a near-unanimous crowd-pleaser backed by an unusually sustained fourteen-plus-month patch cycle that kept adding real content even after the developer announced a new game.
8 / 10
A cheap, addictive bullet-hell roguelite whose enemies genuinely follow the rules of Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata — a rare, intellectually distinctive hook backed by persistent weapon enchanting, let down only by camera jitter some players find physically uncomfortable and a few specific upgrade-timing frustrations.
8 / 10
A polished, full-featured Klondike solitaire with undo/redo and a hint solver, whose drag-and-drop touch controls were verified by computing a real legal move from live board state and confirming it landed exactly right.
7.9 / 10
A clean, well-built Othello/Reversi built on Frank Force's LittleJS engine, with a tap-to-place-a-disc control scheme that is close to the ideal touch interaction this shelf looks for — confirmed working identically across phone taps, desktop mouse clicks and full keyboard shortcuts, correct flip logic, and a real AI opponent with a visible thinking indicator.
7.9 / 10
A faithful, no-nonsense Wordle clone with daily and random modes, whose full on-screen QWERTY keyboard was confirmed to type and submit guesses correctly by touch.
7.9 / 10
A NZ$4.99 sandbox life-sim RPG about being a cow — juice anything, weave anything into a basket, burn everything, and grind 13-odd skills across a warm, sincerely queer world. Small review sample, but a startlingly consistent one.
7.8 / 10
Freedoom's free, original-content second episode, played through the unofficial Dwasm WebAssembly port of PrBoom+/PrBoomX - confirmed working correctly on both desktop (keyboard) and phone, with a genuinely functional on-screen touch control layer, one of the only fully touch-native FPS control schemes found in a wide sweep of similar games.
7.8 / 10
A Wordle-style puzzle where you guess a hidden 16-bit hexadecimal number instead of a word, with a full on-screen hex keypad confirmed working correctly on a real touchscreen after a hidden third-party hit-counter was stripped out.
7.8 / 10
A solo-developed guild-management tactics RPG that Steam's own reviewers keep comparing to Final Fantasy Tactics, Darkest Dungeon and Fire Emblem — deep, generous with content, and wrapped in an art style its own fans describe as looking like a 2000s Flash game.
7.8 / 10
A polished Connect Four with a genuine minimax AI opponent, player-vs-player, and even an AI-vs-AI spectator mode, with tap-to-drop touch controls confirmed working straight out of the box.
7.7 / 10
A clean, well-built word-categorization puzzle in the style of the NYT's Connections - sort sixteen words into four hidden groups of four - with tap-to-select and submit confirmed working correctly by touch after a broken Next.js export was fixed.
7.7 / 10
A clean Atari Go (first-capture) variant on a 9x9 board with a genuine AI opponent, whose tap-to-place stone controls were confirmed working by reading the exact board state before and after real touch input.
7.6 / 10
A tight, no-frills block dominoes game against a genuine alpha-beta search AI, with tap-to-select-then-tap-to-place touch controls that work correctly on a real phone.
7.6 / 10
A colourful, competently-built Bejeweled-style match-3 whose drag-to-swap touch controls were verified with a real computed winning move, confirmed against the live score and grid state.
7.6 / 10
A clean, modern nonogram/picross build with three board sizes and a deliberately dual touch-friendly control scheme - quick tap to fill, long-press to mark empty - confirmed working correctly on a real touch device.
7.6 / 10
A genuinely excellent, critically acclaimed remaster of the beloved 2002 fantasy RTS, undercut by a pattern of anti-consumer decisions that has nothing to do with the strategy game underneath it — an always-online requirement briefly forced onto single-player campaigns, and gore content stripped at launch only to be sold back later as paid DLC.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed turn-based platformer that resolves combat by physically aiming and shooting arrows under real gravity and enemy movement, wrapped in witty writing and a catchy soundtrack, whose genuinely inventive mechanic earns near-universal praise, tempered only by a handful of specific, addressable frustrations around inventory limits and a couple of unfairly-gated challenge areas.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, gentle puzzle game about coaxing forgotten Victorian-era plants back to life inside a stately English manor, critically acclaimed and BAFTA-nominated — with a value complaint so consistent across its own reviews, positive and negative alike, that it's less a criticism than the single thing almost everyone who's played it agrees on.
7.5 / 10
