Ars Technica’s top 20 video games of 2024

-Kevin Purdy

Sixty Four

Oleg Danilov; Windows, Mac

I try not to think about, or write about, games in the manner of “dollars to enjoyment ratio.” Games often get cheaper over time, everybody enjoys them differently, and they’re art, too, as well as commerce. But, folks, come on: $6 for Sixty Four? If you play it for one hour and just smile a few times at its oddities and tiny cubes, that was less than a big-city latte or beer.

But you will almost certainly play Sixty Four for more than one hour, and maybe many more hours than that if you enjoy games with systems, building, and resources. You build and place machines to extract resources, use those resources to fund new and better machines, rearrange your machines, and eventually create beautiful workflows that are largely automated. Why do you do this? It’s a fun, dark mystery.

The game looks wonderful in its SimCity 2000/3000-esque style. It can be mentally taxing, but you can’t really lose; you can even leave the game window open in the background while you convince your boss or remote work software that you’re otherwise productive. It’s a fever dream I’d recommend to most anybody, unless they dread a repeat of the many lost days to games like Factorio, Satisfactory, or even Universal Paperclips. Just wishlist it, in that case; what could go wrong?

-Kevin Purdy

Tactical Breach Wizards

Suspicious Developments; Windows

What can you do to spice up turn-based tactics, a rather mature genre?

Tactical Breach Wizards adds future-seeing, time-bending, hex-placing wizards, for one thing. It refines the heck out of grid combat, for another, adding window-tossing and door-sealing into the mix, and giving enemies a much wider array of attacks than area-of-effect variations. Finally, it wraps this all up in an inventive sci-fi narrative, one with an engaging plot, characters that reveal themselves one quip at a time, and an overall sense of wonderment at a charming, bizarre world of militarized magic.