The winner of our overall GOTY can rightly name the best indies...
The developer behind Stevivor’s Game of the Year 2024 — Balatro’s LocalThunk — has taken to social media to detail their top indie games of the past year.
LocalThunk named Animal Well as the best indie game of 2024, calling it “an engrossing experience”.
“[Animal Well is] dripping with style, secrets, and making me feel like an imposter in this industry as a dev, Billy Basso created a true masterpiece,” Local Thunk continued.
LocalThunk also offered a series of runners-up in the following titles:
- Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers: “People mistakenly wrote this off as a Balatro clone but this was announced before my game ever was. A beautifully synergistic and strategic deckbuilder I have sunk dozens of hours into.”
- Arco: “Play Arco already, it’s incredible.”
- Nova Drift: “In terms of pure fun, this game hit all the right notes for me this year. It’s so much of the run based formula I love distilled into a perfect game for the Steam Deck.”
- Ballionaire: “I played this game as a demo in Sept 2023, and seeing the journey it went on to full release in late 2024 was incredible. The vibes are great, the synergies are poppin, it simply deletes time; its a certified banger.”
- Mouthwashing: “I didn’t even know this was a horror game when I started playing it at 11pm one fateful night. I was hooked instantly, and both the world it created and the poignant message woven into the game stick with me vividly months later.”
Are there any other indies that LocalThunk hasn’t detailed? Sound off in the comments area below.
In addition to being Stevivor’s overall Game of the Year for 2024, we also named it the Best Indie Game of 2024. Naturally.
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