Shacknews Top 24 Games of the Year 2024

#1 Game of the Year 2024 - Balatro

Over the decades since video games were introduced to mainstream pop culture, developers and artists have come up with increasingly complex ways to enjoy them. They can capture the imagination with lore-filled worlds. They can tell tales of complex heroes and anti-heroes, stories that make people relate to the human experience in new ways. They can be bombastic summer blockbuster-like packages that can be enjoyed with like-minded fans around the world. One thing that the best games all have in common is that their joy can be expressed and shared with others around the world. Balatro hits those heights with a deceptively simple presentation.

"It's only poker," some might say. That is to minimize the impact that Balatro can have over a prolonged period. Developer LocalThunk took some of the greatest elements of the roguelike genre and imagine a myriad of ways that it can fit into the realm of poker. Can players go on high scoring runs with a basic deck of 52 cards? What if some of those decks have special properties? What if it's possible to increase the multipliers on certain hands? What if the opposition imposes special rules designed to test, challenge, and frustrate the player into wanting to try one more time?

What else is core to the gaming experience? Exploration and discovering new things. Balatro makes the simple act of discovering new Jokers and experimenting with them a wondrous loop of trial-and-error. Can a player get lucky enough to encounter the Joker they need to best enhance their starting deck? Is it possible to come up with a nigh-unbeatable combination of Jokers and enhanced cards? It's as fun to try as it is flabbergasting to run into that one Boss Blind that crushes your strategy in its tracks.

At its core essence, however, Balatro is about the basic rush of watching numbers rise. Scoreboard go BRRRRRR! The simple dopamine infusion caused by watching numbers rise, multipliers trigger, and the minimalistic 'ding' sound that hits as scores go into triple digits, quadruple digits, and even quintuple digits and beyond. This is what video games can and should be. When approaching any game, the question always arises, "Is this fun?" The best games are not only an emphatic yes, but drown players in enjoyment to the point that they've stopped thinking about that question entirely.

Balatro represents something exceptionally rare in gaming. It's one thing to stand out over some of the biggest titles in the mainstream space. It's another for an indie developer to do it on their first time out. Balatro is LocalThunk's debut. This industry has rarely witnessed anything like this. Balatro will bring joy for years to come, just as LocalThunk has the potential to craft it for a lifetime. For this incredible effort, Balatro is the Shacknews Game of the Year for 2024.

Check out the Shacknews Game of the Year 2024 - Balatro article to read more!

Balatro is available now on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Apple, and Android platforms. 

That's the Shacknews Top 24 Games of the Year 2024. What games should have made the list? What games should be ranked higher or lower? Let us know in the Shacknews Chatty comment section below. Congratulations to all of the games that made our list this year! 

Be sure to read over the rest of the Shacknews Awards in our Year of the Games: 2024 feature.

Shack Staff

Shack Staff stories are a collective effort with multiple staff members contributing. Many of our lists often involve entires from several editors, and our weekly Shack Chat is something we all contribute to as a group.