This year has come and gone by in the blink of an eye, and with it, a huge slate of video games has arrived on our doorsteps. It’s tempting to define a year by one single game. Sure, 2024 was the year we all anticipated Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the year that Astro Bot surprised us all — and took home the big prize at the Game Awards. But the game industry is massive, and the tastes of gamers are more varied and particular than ever. No one game can define it.

This is what we found when the Inverse Gaming team members all submitted our lists of the top games of the year. The gaming industry might be going through some difficulties — with layoffs and consolidations and battles over AI — but when we look back at the many, many great games that came out this year, we can confidently say that the artists are winning. Of course, this glut of greatness is overwhelming to anyone who doesn’t game for a living. As such, we compiled our Top 10 lists, found the overlap, fought for those that we felt must be included, and came up with 10 games that we think made the biggest impact.

There have been dozens of zombie games over the last two decades, ever since The Walking Dead brought the shambling corpses back into mainstream popularity. Zombies are simply the perfect fit for video game enemies — slow, plodding corpses that relentlessly pursue the player. But with the glut of zombie games it takes a special something to stand out — and remind us why the monsters have been so compelling in the gaming space. That’s just what the Dying Light franchise has done, time and again. The secret sauce, according to director, Tymon Smektała, is to hold onto what works while pushing in new directions.

The new direction for Dying Light was clearly the parkour — an innovative movement that brought these games to life. “In Dying Light 1, you have a classic zombie game – where you have a weapon, zombies in front of you, and you need to take them out,” says Smektala. “Would you fight them, or would you run away and climb to where they can’t reach you? That’s why we added parkour, it was our way of pushing the zombie genre to other places.”