The Ultimate Countdown: Ars Technica’s 20 Must-Play Video Games of 2024

-Kevin Purdy

Sixty Four

Oleg Danilov; Windows, Mac

I strive to refrain from contemplating or discussing games through the lens of “cost to joy ratio.” Titles frequently decrease in price over time, each individual relishes them uniquely, and they are also considered art in addition to being a business. Nevertheless, come on: $6 for Sixty Four? If you engage with it for just an hour and manage to grin a few times at its quirks and miniature cubes, that sums up to less than an upscale city latte or beer.

However, it’s highly likely you’ll find yourself playing Sixty Four for more than just one hour, and probably many more if you appreciate games with intricate systems, construction, and resources. You design and position machines to gather resources, utilize those resources to finance newer, superior machines, rearrange your setups, and ultimately devise exquisite workflows that run mostly on autopilot. Why do you engage in this? It’s an entertaining, enigmatic conundrum.

The visuals are splendid in their SimCity 2000/3000-style presentation. It can prove mentally demanding, yet you can’t truly fail; you can even leave the game window operating in the background while persuading your superior or remote work software of your productivity elsewhere. It’s a surreal experience I would endorse to nearly everyone, unless they fear a repetition of numerous lost hours to games like Factorio, Satisfactory, or even Universal Paperclips. In that scenario, simply add it to your wishlist; what could possibly go awry?

-Kevin Purdy

Tactical Breach Wizards

Suspicious Developments; Windows

How can you enhance turn-based strategy, a relatively established genre?

Tactical Breach Wizards introduces foresight, temporal manipulation, and hex-casting wizards, for starters. It significantly refines grid-based combat, incorporating window-smashing and door-locking elements while offering adversaries a broader selection of attacks beyond the typical area-of-effect types. Lastly, it wraps this all in a creative sci-fi storyline, featuring an intriguing narrative, characters that unveil themselves one witty phrase at a time, and an overall atmosphere of fascination within a delightful, quirky realm of militarized sorcery.