A follow-up to 2022’s breakout detective game, The Rise of the Golden Idol continues to impress by empowering you to solve its crimes with hands-on detective work. Set in the 1970s, it presents multiple diorama-like crime scenes in each chapter, demanding you to gather clues via close observation and then piece together exactly what happened. Rarely are the actual events as simple as they seem, and the truth can only be deduced from spotting minor things such as an empty gun chamber or the hidden subtext in an angry note. It’s a “puzzle” game that’s not simply about finding the right button to push, with an artistic presentation uniquely its own.

Runner-Up: Animal Well

2D pixel art platformers can feel like they are a dime a dozen these days, but Animal Well is different. That may sound like a cliche setup, something you’ve heard before about plenty of other games, but it really is true here. Animal Well wears the skin of a puzzle-driven metroidvania while also twisting all the usual trends that come along with that structure.

You aren’t fighting your way through waves of enemies or upping your missile capacity here, in part thanks to Animal Well’s almost complete rejection of violence. Instead you’ll find bubble-blowing wands that can produce floating platforms, frisbees that can tame ferocious dogs, and firecrackers that illuminate the dark to reveal the hidden platforming challenges ahead.

The real joy of Animal Well, though, is realising that there’s far, far more to each item than their obvious use. And then you begin to realise that there’s far, far more to each location than the obvious objectives. And as you begin to peel back the layers, you soon discover that what initially appeared to be a five-hour metroidvania is instead a gargantuan puzzle with enough secrets to discover that they could fill an actual well. It’s an innovative and endlessly enticing take on otherwise well-worn territory.

Runner-Up: Satisfactory

After nearly five years in Early Access, Satisfactory’s 1.0 update arrived this year to cement it as one of the absolute best automation games around. It’s a game all about building assembly lines and laying down endless miles of conveyor belts, which is much more of an immense joy than it may initially seem. The subsequent tech climb that sees your factories become faster, more efficient, and inevitably more complicated always keeps you looking forward to that next big breakthrough.

The sight of spaghetti-like factories that span a thousand acres can seem intimidating at first, but don’t let that put you off: Satisfactory’s well-constructed web of objectives helps you build confidence in your engineering capabilities. Within just a few hours you’ll have graduated from novice conveyor belt enthusiast to an automation veteran, capable of troubleshooting catastrophic malfunctions as if they were minor inconveniences.

But while the factories are your primary concern, Satisfactory is much more than the end result. This is also a Minecraft-style open world in which you must delve into caves, survive deadly gas clouds, and stripmine rock formations in order to gather the materials needed to both fund and fuel your colossal creations. Throw in a few friends working together in co-op to pave over every inch of green on this detailed alien world and you’ve got a recipe for “blink and an hour has passed” captivation that rarely quits.

Runner-Up: UFO 50

UFO 50 is an almost incomprehensible achievement. The concept of an old-school gaming system being miraculously unearthed and made available today is a cute one already, and I wouldn’t blame you if you assumed the catalogue of 50 games that came with it were largely just quant minigames that make for an amusing but fleeting distraction. But that’s simply not the case.

Each and every entry in this library is essentially the size of an entire retro game of its own, many of which would have surely been standout hits in their era if they actually existed at that time. But this isn’t a collection of games made in the 1980s, and the deeper down the rabbit hole you go the more obvious that becomes. The games of UFO 50 are smart. Like, modern day indie darling smart. Each one weaves excellent new ideas into the canvass of a retro classic, resulting in games that feel like toys of yesteryear but play like a 2024 Steam top-seller. Echoes of No Man’s Sky, Hotline Miami, Into The Breach and more can be found between the scan lines, but each game is more than just a de-make of its inspiration. UFO 50 is essentially a playable examination of the past and present of video games.

There’s just so much to dig into here, with an almost alarmingly consistent level of quality. UFO 50 could have been half as big as it is and it still would have been impressive – instead, it’s borderline stunning.

Winner: Balatro

If you’ve already played Balatro, you probably understand why it’s here. In fact, odds are good you might still be playing it right now. And if you haven’t, I’d recommend you do, but the kinder thing might be to tell you to run. Because once you’ve jumped into its smart mix of roguelite deckbuilding and digital poker, you might find your free time slipping away and the sun creeping up during what was supposed to still be night. But then again, it sure is worth it.

There’s something about Balatro that effortlessly hooks you, the “just one more turn” syndrome distilled into its purest form. Everything about its fairly simple presentation is tuned perfectly to be endlessly satisfying, bringing delight or destruction with every card you play. While on the surface it’s a poker game that’s approachable for anyone who can tell their flushes from their full houses, don’t be fooled into thinking you need to know the rules of the classic casino game to play. In fact, this isn’t actually poker.

Balatro is an entirely original idea, and while poker hands may be at the centre of the screen, the real centre of the experience is building wild game-breaking decks that can send your score multiplier skyrocketing. Each round allows you to tweak and improve your collection of cards, switching out suits to more easily achieve better hands, or using celestial powers to assemble literal wildcards. The options are unbelievably deep for those who then want to break the intuitive tropes open with smart modifiers – you may have put together a four-of-a-kind in your day, but play a five-of-a-kind for the first time and you won’t ever want to go back.

This is the truly impressive trick of Balatro, making you think you know what it’s doing at every step of the way, then teasing you in deeper as more game-shifting Jokers are discovered, more decks are unlocked, and the scores you consider impressive start stretching from the thousands into exponents so large you need a degree to decipher them. Wrap that up in a lo-fi presentation as deceptively well designed as the card game it houses, and you’ve got a game we’re undoubtedly going to be playing for years to come.

There is a soft limit to how useful this is, as most cards don’t need more than three or four energy to use their most powerful attacks. but that’s all about to change. A handful of cards including Stage 1 Pokémon Vaporeon were revealed in the Mythical Island trailer, and it’s this card that could turn those several successful coin flip turns into practically an instant win.

Vaporeon has an Ability called Wash out, which lets players move around an unlimited number of water type energy between their Pokémon. This means the several energy created by successful Misty turns are no longer trapped on one Pokémon and can instead be spread around evenly.

At its most extreme, players on Turn 3, the opening player’s first chance to attack, could therefore play a Misty and have a board with Starmie ex and two Articuno ex all capable of unleashing their strongest attacks; players would have, say, eight energy at their disposal instead of the two provided to most.

This exact play will be the exception and not the rule, but it will almost certainly make those already annoyed by Misty even more frustrated.

Vaporeon could still be an incredibly strong card outside of these major Misty moves too, as being able to move around energy freely offers myriad new solutions to old problems.

If an Active Pokémon is near a knock out, for example, players could shift all its energy to another Pokémon so the replacement is immediately ready to fight next turn, or transfer energy the opposite way to allow it to retreat and not damage the player.

It therefore could be enough to bump the Starmie ex above the other meta leaders, though with more than 80 new cards coming to the game in Mythical Island, the entire player versus player scene could be due a mix up.

Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived October 30 and is a certified hit for Creatures Inc. and The Pokémon Company, having earned an estimated $200 million in its first month across more than 60 million downloads.

This huge amount of money comes as Pokémon TCG Pocket follows the standard mobile and free to play game model, flooding players with rewards in the first few days before soon drying up, with spending real world money the only real way to re-experience that early thrill.

Completing Genetic Apex, the first set of cards which totals 226 officially but also contains 60 rare alternate art cards, will take players not spending money around two years according to one estimate, while those looking to make it rain can wrap up the collection after dropping around $1,500.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.