It’s January 2025 and we’re still thinking about all the best games and moments of 2024. We’ve looked back on our favorite games of last year, the characters who stuck with us throughout the last 12 months, and the various highs and lows of the industry. While we’ve celebrated the best games at large and the moments that defined them, the cool plays, mechanics, and story beats that really solidified each of them as standouts. We’re here to celebrate some of the individual moments we loved in 2024. Some of these will contain spoilers, so skip over those if you’re worried about any specific game.
2 / 17
Astro Bot is a nostalgia-driven game. Yes, it’s an excellent platformer in its own right, but it is tugging on the heartstrings of everyone who’s ever owned a PlayStation console. While you run, jump, climb, and skate through Astro Bot’s many planets, you find robotic versions of characters from throughout PlayStation’s history. This collectathon is at the core of every platforming challenge you navigate, and you likely have memories associated with at least a handful of them if you’ve ever played a PlayStation-exclusive game. But nothing quite beats finding your favorites scattered across the galaxy. Finding Sly Cooper trapped in a jail cell, presumably for his kleptomaniac crimes, playing as a robotic version of God of War’s Kratos, and seeing Joel from The Last of Us labeled as a “Dependable Smuggler” who “tells the occasional white lie” is the kind of referential bit that makes Astro Bot delightful.
3 / 17
Hades 2 keeps its predecessor’s stylish reimagining of Greek mythology going with a boss fight against Scylla and the Sirens. Portrayed as a rock band who fight with their music,, the Scylla and the Sirens boss fight is a challenging battle and an impressive display of sound design. The music correlates with the attacks the Sirens use, and if you take one out, their instrument will disappear from the backing track. Each foe you take down strips the song of its violent texture until all that’s left is deafening silence. Hades 2 is still in Early Access, and if the rest of the game is on the level of the Scylla fight, Supergiant has another hit on its hands.
4 / 17
Some of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s best moments are hidden and completely optional. That includes a conversation with Mythal, an elven god who has become an important figure in the Dragon Age universe ever since the series dove into elven history in 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. Reaching Mythal in The Veilguard is buried under a collectathon, multiple sidequests, and a few group therapy sessions as your party unpacks some massive lore bombs. By the time you actually reach her, it’s made very clear that you’re unraveling the very fabric of the Dragon Age universe, and you best tread lightly.
Mythal can either be a willing ally or a begrudging asset by the end of your conversation with her. You can gain her favor in multiple different ways depending on your character’s background and what they’ve accomplished in their journey thus far. I’ve yet to talk to two people who recruited her in the same way, and it’s one of the few examples in The Veilguard that’s evocative of Origins’ persuasion checks. The Veilguard is full of memorable choices, quests, and characters, but in its dash to a more streamlined, Mass Effect-style RPG, it lacks the complex dialogue trees of its roots. So when you get one as impactful as the conversation with Mythal, it stays with you.
5 / 17
Hitting a Nazi in any context is a good moment worth spotlighting, but Indiana Jones and the Great Circle lets you do it multiple times with a myriad of items at your disposal. It’s one of the benefits of fighting Nazis in an immersive sim format. You can just bonk their stupid little heads with whatever you have on hand, be that an acoustic guitar or the butt of your gun. Swing away, Indy. Swing away.
6 / 17
One of the most memorable moments in Metaphor: ReFantazio builds off of an early moment in Atlus’ latest fantasy RPG. A few dozen hours before you reach the end of the game, you learn that the protagonist you’ve been playing is essentially a character the prince envisioned and made corporeal. He is a projection of the hero the prince wants to fight for a better world made real. Many hours later, you learn that More, the enigmatic guide who has helped you throughout your journey, is the physical manifestation of the king’s own hope, but turned to nihilism, escaping into a fictional paradise that sure does look like a modern-day Tokyo.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is gradually working its way to this moment. The game uses its fantasy world as a mirror to ours to illustrate that escaping into a fictional world where things are better is a defeatist mindset. People use escapism to survive, but it means they will leave the world outside their window behind. The Tokyo reveal is the end stage of escapism. Someone who once had the power to steer the world in the right direction decided to instead bury himself in a world where the work was already done and he never had to fight for anything. Metaphor’s story of collective action can’t end until our hero has stared into the fictional utopia he’s been aspiring to create and still decided to go back to reality and fight for a better future. It is a poignant, haunting moment masquerading as a mundane, modern-day metropolis. More’s imagined world is possible, but only if we make the effort to reach it. And defying his easy answer is when Metaphor: ReFantazio truly gets to the meat of what it’s trying to say.
7 / 17
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket can be a deflating drag if you’re not paying money for it. I open my packs every day and oftentimes feel like I’m getting junk pulls compared to all my friends. Then, I got my first “God Pack.” These are booster packs that include nothing but rare cards. Admittedly, my first one was a bit disappointing because it had a threepeat of the same rare Misty card; but it also came with a full-art Pikachu card I had been looking for since launch. If I were weaker-willed this would have activated something in me and made me a sicko for cracking daily packs in hopes of finding another pack of this nature. But it had the opposite effect. It gave me the card I was looking for. So I comfortably closed the app and haven’t looked at it in weeks.
8 / 17
For a game that is light on the whole gameplay thing, Mouthwashing makes the most of its simplicity with some memorable moments. Giving painkillers to Curly, the captain of your crashed spaceship who was burnt beyond recognition when the freighter went down, is one such moment in Wrong Organ’s horror game. Mouthwashing has you painstakingly open his bandaged mouth as his one eye stares at you, then push the pills down his throat with all the awful sounds that come with it. The first time you do it, it’s incredibly unnerving, and with each subsequent time you do it, you start to become desensitized to it. It’s just a routine thing to do as you explore the ship and unwrap the mysteries of what happened here. But when those mysteries are exposed like the burns underneath Curly’s bandages, force-feeding him those pills takes on new meaning. There’s a lot of horrifying shit that happens in Mouthwashing, and the sounds Curly makes as you force him to swallow some pills aren’t even close to the worst of it. But they sure set the tone for how hard the rest of the game is to stomach.
9 / 17
When you first boot up Dragon’s Dogma II, you might think you accidentally turned on the wrong game. The main menu screen simply says “Dragon’s Dogma” with the II conspicuously missing. But no, what appears to be an error or perhaps an attempt at branding the sequel as some kind of reboot of Capcom’s long-dormant RPG is actually an intentional tease of what’s to come. You can go through the entirety of Dragon’s Dogma II without seeing the sequel’s true title screen, as its true ending takes a little bit of work and climbing around a boss-level dragon to reach. But if you’re able to put yourself on the path to the true ending, you’ll find yourself in a secret, distorted place called the Unmoored World. Once there, you get a late title screen complete with the missing II.
A title screen signifies the beginning of something, so when it shows up, even after dozens of hours of adventuring and monster slaying, it’s important. When one is as deliberate as Dragon’s Dogma II’s, it shows that everything that’s come before has just been child’s play compared to what is to come.
10 / 17
1000xRESIST is all about sharing perspective and wisdom through virtual simulations of the past. As you reach the final chapters of Sunset Visitor’s adventure game, you’ve learned some harrowing truths about the science fiction world inhabited by clones. But those truths are weapons wielded by those in power. In most stories, if your player character known as the Watcher were to die, those truths would die with her. But in 1000xRESIST, memories and information are not tied to one person, as everyone can live through each other’s past through VR communions. 1000xRESIST puts Watcher through hell as she fights to free her sisters from the forces that have kept them subservient for their entire lives. She gives her life to be a revolutionary spark of inspiration for someone else to follow. Sometimes that’s all any of us get to be. We’re a catalyst for someone else’s growth that pushes them to fight. But even if someone is gone, their impact and ,in the case of 1000xRESIST, their memories, persist, even as someone else takes the reins. “There is a you…That remains and remains.”
11 / 17
In the age of TikTok and Twitter, everyone is hoping to get a viral clip of them and their friends doing some wild shit. Content Warning is that feeling turned into a video game form. You and a group of friends take a camera and some props into what is essentially a haunted house full of scary motherfuckers who chase you around, all in hopes that the clips of your escape will yield comedic results. Sometimes you go down into the content mines and come out with slop. Other times, you find gold.
12 / 17
Helldivers 2 has plenty of weapons and tools to use as you engage in galactic warfare, but none is quite as, well, explosive as a Hellbomb. What makes these bombs so memorable isn’t just the massive amount of hellfire they bring upon your enemies, but how much of a spectacle Helldivers 2 makes of setting one off. You have to enter a code to get the ball rolling, pressing your d-pad in a specific sequence you’d never pull off by accident. It’s a small detail that adds to the weight of what you’re doing as you set this bomb up to annihilate enemy forces. After you’ve punched in the code, you’ve gotta run out of the blast zone, and every second between activation and explosion feels like a full minute. Then, the bomb goes off and you level an entire area. You’ll reflect on the implications later, but at the moment, it feels pretty fucking cool.
13 / 17
Marvel Rivals’ Team-Up abilities are one of the main differentiating factors between it and Overwatch. These are character-specific perks that team members get when other heroes are on their team. Some examples include how Namor gets an ice turret when Luna Snow fights alongside him and Star-Lord can revive himself when Adam Warlock is on his team. But one of the best ones is when the gun-toting raccoon Rocket and his sentient tree best friend Groot are on one team. The dynamic duo team up with Rocket riding on Groot’s shoulder, which looks cool and nets them a passive damage reduction perk. Rocket can just pump Groot full of healing orbs and the tanky tree becomes a near-unstoppable force of damage and disruption. It’s such a fun team up because both characters’ cooperation feels so tangible. A lot of Team-up abilities in Marvel Rivals are passive perks or things you can set and forget without fundamentally changing how you play. Rocket and Groot’s team-up, however, feels like two players becoming a powerful unit, relying on each other to fulfill a new combat role. If either player doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain, Groot and Rocket can be bled dry in seconds. When a competent Groot and Rocket work together, though? They’re nearly unstoppable.
14 / 17
Much of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s ending is drowned in deliberate obfuscation and theatrics, so when it does actually present something raw and honest, it sticks out above the nonsense. As Cloud and company descend further into the Forgotten Capital, there is a point where each of them faces a trial drawing from a difficult moment in their past. They’re forced to reexperience the trauma that has pushed each of them to this point in their journey, including Aerith. The last of the Ancients is forced to relive the night she lost her mother. The entire sequence is devastating on several fronts. Watching Aerith’s mother, clearly nearing the end of her life, trying to soothe her daughter’s anxiety by talking about them going on an adventure is gutwrenching. You’ll then play as a young Aerith pleading with uncaring adults in Midgar as she tries to find help, only to see her break down again as she realizes she’s powerless to change things. Final Fantasy grounds so much of its fantasy in raw human emotion, and Rebirth loses all sense of that in a convoluted multiverse play. But it is nice to look back at one of the most memorable scenes in the game that took place only a few hours prior and remember that when Final Fantasy stays grounded in those feelings, it fucking hits.
15 / 17
Balatro, the poker-based roguelike that took everybody by surprise in 2024, is known for being habit-forming, and there’s nothing that forms habits in video games like numbers going up. But what if when your numbers went up you also saw the UI catch on fire? That is the itch Balatro scratches when you have a hand good enough to overcome a challenge, even as it’s still calculating your card’s value. Seeing the fire ignite on the screen means you can already start celebrating, and it’s an instant hit of dopamine.
16 / 17
Indika, an adventure game following a nun’s integration into the church while she also has some kind of connection to the Devil himself, has some pretty mundane moments. One of the most memorable has very little to do with the church or God. There’s a segment when Indika is asked to fetch pails of water. This means walking back and forth through cold slush as you slowly lower a bucket down a well, dragging it to a barrel, and doing it all over again until it’s full.
Once you do that, another nun in the monastery just walks outside and dumps the barrel onto the ground. The entire process can take around 10 minutes, and all your hard work gets tossed aside in a matter of seconds. Plenty of games waste your time through poor design decisions or intentionally obtuse grinding, but Indika makes you do something incredibly monotonous, then spits in your face as a reminder of your place in its world. It is maddening and mean-spirited, and when all is said and done, all you can do is laugh. Or cry.
Those are just a handful of memorable moments we loved in games in 2024. For more of Kotaku’s year-in-review coverage, check out our most-read stories from last year.
17 / 17