The 15 best PC games of 2024: From Indy to Kratos, samurai to outlaws, and everything in between
From Indiana Jones to the return of Elden Ring, it was a great year to be a PC gamer.
While console gaming platforms felt as though they were stuck in a mid-to-end of cycle holding pattern in 2024, the PC gaming scene was in the rudest of health over the past 12 months. With the component shortages that had characterised recent years fixed, cloud gaming going from strength to strength, and PC gaming handhelds stealing the headlines, there were more ways than ever before to play your favourite computer games.
And what a line up 2024 offered! From quirky and addictive indie titles like Thank Goodness You’re Here and Balatro to giant AAA epics like Indiana Jones and The Great Circle and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the breadth and variety of what was available to PC gamers was incredible. It was also a great year for comebacks — whether that was with remakes like Silent Hill 2, remasters like Red Dead Redemption, or fan-made expansions to classic titles like the Fallout: London mod.
And we played them all! Well, enough to confidently pick these, our top PC games for 2024, at least!
We played all the games listed here on a gaming PC equipped with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics card (Gigabyte’s Eagle OC 16GB edition, to be precise). Keeping in mind it’s not even Nvidia’s top-tier GPU, it absolutely tore through everything we threw at it below, at high resolutions and high graphical settings, delivering top-notch frame rates. You can see more details of our test rig at the bottom of this article to get an idea of how your personal machine might perform when pitted against our picks.
With that out of the way, stretch those pinkies and don that headset: in no particular order, these are the best PC games of 2024.
The 15 best PC games of 2025
1. Thank Goodness You're Here!
Imagine if Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer teamed up with the Viz art team, and decided to make a video game. That’d be the closest jumping off point to describe the funniest, quirkiest game of the year, Thank Goodness You’re Here! A uniquely British slice of absurd humour, it’s a walking simulator pretty much solely created for delivering visual gags. Short, sweet and unlike anything else you’ll have ever played, this one can’t be missed.
2. Helldivers 2
Taking the original Helldiver’s top-down twin-stick action and turning it into a third-person squad-based blockbuster, Helldivers 2 tasked players with defending the galaxy from a hostile alien species. The twist? A healthy dose of humorous satire, revealing that the human race in this dystopian future might be the true, fascist, hostile force to be fearful of. Teamwork is crucial as players drop into dangerous environments, tackle missions, and survive intense gun battles featuring robots, bugs… and the friendly-fire of your own teammates’ nuclear armouries. Chaotic co-op action, it’s the Starship Troopers game you’ve always dreamed of — and that’s saying something, considering there was an easily-forgotten official Starship Troopers game released in 2024, too.
3. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle
Though the first-person viewpoint initially raised eyebrows, it turns out we had nothing to fear: Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is the best Indy adventure in decades — movies included. Beautiful to look at with a transformative performance by Troy Baker stepping into the shoes once filled by Harrison Ford, it’s a deftly-balanced mix of bruising combat, brain-teasing puzzle solving and globe-trotting exploration. Indy’s back, baby.
4. Red Dead Redemption
We had to wait nearly 15 years for it to make the jump from consoles to PC, but Rockstar’s first open-world cowboy adventure was more than worth the wait. Red Dead Redemption immerses players in the final years of the Wild West, taking the role of John Marston, a former outlaw seeking that titular redemption. It’s a more direct and action packed adventure than its eventual epic sequel turned out to be, but Red Dead Redemption is no less captivating for that. A solid port that avoided the pitfalls of the recent GTA trilogy remaster, it’s the best the game has ever looked and, for our money, tells a tighter gunslinging tale with more action-per-minute than its successor. And that’s before you even hit the excellent Undead Nightmare expansion element, which fills the frontier with shambling zombies and mythical steeds.
5. Star Wars: Outlaws
An open world Star Wars game with not a Jedi in sight? Red Dead with blasters, droids and aliens? Sign us up. Outlaws introduces a new cast of characters navigating the underworld of a galaxy far, far away. It’s had its critics, but Outlaws does a great job of letting you live out that ‘do anything, go anywhere’ Star Wars gaming dream. And development juggernaut Ubisoft has made good on addressing early bugs and criticism, tightening up gunplay, stealth and other core systems in a series of significant updates for the title. If you missed it at launch, it’s better than ever, and great fan service for Star Wars die-hards.
6. Balatro
If you’ve played Balatro, we’re surprised you’re sitting here reading this. Arguably the breakout game of the year, it’s so addictive you’d be forgiven for devoting your life to it. Taking the core idea of poker and turning it into a devilishly compulsive rougelite adventure through the addition of game-modifying joker cards, it felt like the entire world was hooked on Balatro at times in 2024. The fact that its simple 2D graphics mean it’ll run on basically a baked potato of a PC only broadened its appeal.
7. Animal Well
A hidden gem, this one — in Animal Well players explore a mysterious, atmospheric world inhabited by strange creatures. A pixel-art Metroidvania with no explicit objectives, the game encourages discovery and exploration, with an eerie art style that beguiles and intrigues as you dig deeper into the game’s weird world. Like the layers of an onion, Animal Well becomes only better once you’ve ‘finished’ the main quest — at which point the real game begins, as a vast new level of secrets opens up in front of you. This is the sort of game that Reddit fan theory message boards were made for.
8. Fallout: London
What’s that you say? “How can a mod be considered a game of the year pick?”. Hush — we make the rules here, and it was impossible to ignore the resurgence in interest in the Fallout franchise following the mega success of Amazon’s accompanying Fallout TV show. This long-in development and massively ambitious mod was the closest we came to an all-new Fallout in 2024, and was shone a nuclear-powered spotlight on the unsung heroes of the modding scene, with the hardworking Fallout: London team reworking Fallout 4 so as to recast the game as a British-based adventure. Set in an alternate timeline where Britain was isolated after the Great War, Fallout: London offered a fresh perspective on the post-apocalyptic world. New factions, new weapons, new quests — but with the game’s dark humour intact — you’d be forgiven for thinking this was made by the core Fallout team at Bethesda rather than a team of hobbyists. Best of all, it’s free to play and install if you’ve already bought Fallout 4.
9. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
Call of Duty remains a juggernaut of the first-person shooter genre, and the spin-off Black Ops franchise had a showstopping 2024. Call of Duty Black Ops 6 delivers a single-player campaign that’s varied, engaging, and perfectly paced, a massively revamped Zombies mode that’s more addictive than ever before, and an innovative new Omnimovement system that breathes new life into the competitive multiplayer. This feature allows players to sprint and slide in any direction, adding a subtle but effective layer of fluidity and strategy to multiplayer combat. It’s a small change, but it revitalizes the frenetic pace of multiplayer matches, making them feel faster and more dynamic. For the PC crowd, Black Ops 6 also delivers a host of graphical improvements and optimisation options. The game takes full advantage of modern PC hardware, supporting high frame rates, ray-traced lighting, and ultra-wide monitor support, ensuring that the experience is as immersive as possible.
10. Dragon Age: The Veilguard
If you’re a fan of the Dragon Age series, it felt like you could only watch the development of sequel Dragon Age: The Veilguard from behind your fingers, such was the turmoil it went through with developers BioWare which saw the game scrapped and rebooted entirely at least once. Thankfully, Dragon Age: The Veilguard turned out to be the best thing BioWare had made since, well, the last Dragon Age game, Inquisition. With a more stylised art style and a combat system more directly focussed on arcade-like action, it retained the series’ reputation for great storytelling with a high-stakes plot and excellent character and romance subplots.
11. Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2 was scary enough in its blurry, blocky PS2 form — a full-blown remake from the developers at Bloober (whose previous releases already seemed like it was building a CV to get this very gig), was enough to have us scrambling for fresh underwear. Though it doesn’t massively mix up the original formula, some smart twists, modern quality of life improvements and increased fidelity to the visuals make this the most terrifying release of the year.
12. God of War: Ragnarok
A couple of years after its initial PS5 release, God of War: Ragnarok joined its predecessor on PC in 2024. And, like that first PC port, this now exists as the ultimate way to play Ragnarok, taking full advantage of every high-end PC bell and whistle you can think of. It’s a superb port — but it’s a great adventure, too, taking the brutal melee combat the series is famed for and throwing it against an icily apocalyptic background.
13. Black Myth: Wukong
Black Myth: Wukong was the surprise mega-hit of 2024 — a Chinese-developed Souls-like with incredible visuals and combat a touch more forgiving than the games that inspired it. A dark action RPG that takes its story beats from Chinese mythology, Black Myth: Wukong follows the legendary Monkey King as he battles gods, demons, and mythical creatures. You’ll need a beefy gaming rig to see Black Myth: Wukong in all its finery, but everyone can enjoy its tight combat and truly epic boss fights.
14. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
Yeah, again, not a full game — but how can you ignore the most hotly anticipated release of the year, which expands upon one of the greatest games of all time? Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree made good on the promise of further adventures in The Lands Between, with amazing landscapes to explore, tough-as-nails bosses to encounter, and a host of new gear to mix up your playstyle with. And though a DLC pack, there’s more content here than some full games, making for a very challenging and generous package.
15. Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut
Another excellent PS5 port, this definitive version of Ghost of Tsushima enhances the original, taking full advantage of a top-tier PC’s graphical horsepower, and throwing in the excellent Iki Island DLC as standard. Set in feudal Japan, players control Jin Sakai, a young samurai who must accept new ninja-style tactics to overcome Mongol invaders who have devastated his land. With a rich, emotional story, stunning open-world landscapes packed full of secrets to uncover, and gory tactical swordplay combat, it’s a truly cinematic experience, and one you’ll want to play ahead of the launch of its sequel, Ghost of Yotei, in 2025.
[Shortlist’s gaming rig: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics card (Gigabyte Eagle OC 16GB edition) | Intel Core i5-13600K CPU | Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB DDR5 RAM | Asus ROG STRIX Z690-F GAMING WIFI ATX LGA1700 Motherboard]
