Haven't I seen you somewhere before? 2024's best games were pure nostalgic comfort food, and sometimes that's what you need

I recently realised with some alarm that I've spent nearly 2% of 2024 playing Ace Attorney. That's not just 2% of my free time or even the time I spent awake, to be clear, but a whole percentage of the time I was alive in 2024, in-game in Ace Attorney. But honestly, what can you expect in a year when five previously almost-lost games from one of my favourite series were remastered and rereleased for modern systems, literally doubling the amount of Ace Attorney accessible to contemporary audiences within the span of only eight months?

I have no regrets about mainlining both the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy (released on January 25th, total completion time: 105 hours) and the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection (released on September 6th, total completion time: 60 hours) as soon as I had the opportunity to do so. As someone who was initially drawn into Ace Attorney when the last two remastered collections brought the series to home consoles, knowing that I'm now caught up on all 10 core games in this franchise gives me an immense feeling of satisfaction, and I'm sure other fans in my position feel the same way.

But the trade-off of spending an entire calendar year with a 1-in-50 chance I'd be playing Ace Attorney at any given moment was that – perhaps unsurprisingly – nothing else has left quite such a big impression on me in 2024.

At first I ascribed this to 2024 being somewhat akin to the morning after the night before, with "the night before" in question being all of 2023. By halfway through last year, I'd already declared around 20 games as possible GOTY contenders, and I hadn't even met Baldur's Gate 3 yet. It was simply an amazing year for new games, and 2024 was always going to see a bit of a come-down by comparison. But as this year draws to a close, I do appreciate the fact that, if I was a bit metaphorically hungover at the start, then my miracle cure breakfast of choice was essentially a Full Monty Ace Attorney fry-up – and that probably did dictate how much appetite I had left over for other things.

That's not to say that no other releases impressed me this year, of course – far from it. I especially liked the funny one about the little guy who does his best to help everyone as a fish out of water in an unfamiliar town: a description I'm obsessed with because it can apply equally well to the surreal indie comedy gem Thank Goodness You're Here! and Sega's Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, a massive RPG sequel that was nevertheless beginner-friendly enough to get me over my history of being too intimidated by the overwhelming back-catalogue of the Yakuza franchise to jump in. (You could say I'm… LAD shy no more!)

An honourable mention is also merited by Little Kitty, Big City, the Goose Game-alike about a puckish black cat lost in the really-exceedingly-kind streets of an unnamed, pastel-tinged city. This game has been on my most-anticipated list for three years running, and I was immensely pleased when I finally got to play it in 2024 and found it was everything I'd hoped it would be.

And, on quite a different note, there was Mouthwashing, a retro-style indie in the body horror sub-genre that I usually switch off from as soon as possible, but which ended up as hands-down the best example of original game writing I experienced all year.

But honestly, there's no rhyme or reason to what stood out to me this year, no real narrative conclusions I can draw from any trends I got invested in – with the notable exception of just how many great remasters were released throughout the year. A ridiculous amount, the highlights of which you can see enumerated as part of our VG247 Alternate Game Awards.

So yes, declaring this year's duo of Ace Attorney remastered collections as my personal joint-GOTY is a totally self-indulgent heart pick, but it's Christmas, a time when we should be extra honest and celebrate what makes us happy. And spending a solid week of this year solving crimes and objecting to the opposing counsel's nonsense in the inimitable company of Apollo Justice and Miles Edgeworth made me extremely happy.