2024 has quietly become the year of cheap masterpieces

We've had many epochs over the years in gaming: the Year of Luigi, the Year of the Bow, and now, in 2024, it's the Year of the Cheap Game. Now, “cheap game” is a title that still carries with it memories of shovelware, dubious titles shoved out to drain wallets and leave gamers unsatisfied across the world. Lest we forget those old CDs that you would seemingly only stumble across at car boot sales and the like, bearing titles like “1000 Games in 1”! The best we ever got was low-cost re-releases of classic games by labels like Sold Out Software (and yes, I am acutely aware that I am showing my age).

I come from the mountaintop to tell you, however, that in 2024, it is no longer like this. After 2023's big budget blowout that saw me banging the drum for Baldur's Gate 3, Street Fighter 6, Armored Core 6, and even, whisper it, Diablo 4, the four games of 2024 that have really stuck with me cost barely £30 altogether. Part of this sprang from necessity – I left my full-time job back in late June to freelance, and my wallet's been lighter – but mostly, it's just because this year's seen a string of incredible indies.

Ace(s) in the hole

There was, of course, Balatro, a game that siphons time from me like a Vegas casino drains money. I put 100 hours into that game in just a few weeks, and I continue to go back to it. It's the best deckbuilder since Monster Train, by far, and challenges Slay the Spire for the title of best deckbuilder, frankly, of all time. The weird wobbly music, the slightly unsettling grin of the game's jokers, the thrill of utilizing maths to spin out combos that rack in millions of points, it all comes together to sing in synthesis and create a superb video game. It's a truly unique game, meshing poker and deckbuilding together in a way that, retrospectively, seems obvious.

Now, Balatro alone would be enough for this year to hang its hat on, but that doesn't even begin to cover the panoply of low-cost games that have hit our digital shelves, SSDs, and dopamine centers of our brains this year. Yet before Balatro was even a glint in a joker's eye, we'd already been blessed with Home Safety Hotline. An unabashedly weird game that meshes 112 Operator and the SCP foundation. You are, as the title implies, a lowly worker for the Home Safety Hotline, and must instruct callers how to respond to various entities (as well as more benign issues) in their homes and gardens. Often creepy, sometimes funny, this little game is a short but wonderful experience that's stayed with me throughout the year.

It was, however, not as creepy as the next game on my list: Buckshot Roulette. You know how Inscryption kind of trails off after Act 1? Buckshot Roulette is the tension of that game's first act shoved into a shell atop a wad and some gunpowder then shot into your face. It, like Balatro, is simple. You play Russian roulette against some otherworldly monster thing, but with a shotgun, loaded with either blanks or buckshot. Items can assist you, but it's mostly a game about probability. It costs £2.49, but I played it for hours. Then, rounding the year off, we have Halls of Torment. If, like me, you adore Vampire Survivors, and would like it to be more goth, you need to soak up Halls of Torment. It's Vampire Survivors crossed with Diablo (original Diablo, at that): all shonky voice acting, basic but compelling graphics, and that same old sensation of being a sentient cloud of murder.

It's wonderful to see that the indie games scene has had such a good year. Particularly given that in 2023, when Unity mooted some, ahem, controversial pricing changes (which they did promptly withdraw, after an uproar) it looked like certain indie devs wouldn't be able to survive. Indeed, only one of the aforementioned games, Home Safety Hotline, uses Unity, with Balatro using Love2D and Buckshot Roulette and Halls of Torment both using Godot. For years now, we've seen indie games rise in price, which isn't necessarily a bad thing – often these games are worth just as much, if not more, than AAA titles. For someone who was brought up on a steady diet of Sold Out Software and PlayStation Platinum, it's great to see that there are still incredible games out there for those with lighter wallets. As we saw with the great indie boom of a decade or so ago, indie titles are once again ruling the roost when it comes to innovation, creativity and pure expressiveness: I can't wait to see what 2025 brings.

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