Here are the biggest games coming out in the back half of 2024

After spending almost three years as a Nintendo Switch exclusive, the fifth entry in Atlus’ punishing, mechanically deep Shin Megami Tensei series of demon-summoning RPGs is finally coming to a wider audience, complete with a whole new story path for players to follow as they navigate a world increasingly imperiled by supernatural forces. Less story-driven, and more combat-focused, than its cousins over in the Persona sub-series, the SMT games remain fascinating for their efforts to explore the rigors and depths of turn-based RPG combat; we’re excited to see what Vengeance can do in that space once it’s fully unleashed.

The latest psychological horror game from Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture developers The Chinese Room has an instantly hook-y premise: “What if The Thing was set on an oil rig?” Spooky setting, spooky unkillable monster, spooky developer: What’s not to like?

Is there a slight weirdness to the fact that the biggest game of the rest of 2024 is just an expansion on the biggest game of 2022? Maybe, but we’re too busy getting hyped for Erdtree, which will massively expand on From Software’s fantastically good , to care. From is pretty much the best in the business when it comes to authoring expansions for its beautiful, brutal worlds, and a chance to return to The Lands Between has us itching to resume our quest and ferret out all the secrets hidden in this new vision of its beautiful, dying world.

More than 25 years after its release, Cyan World’s Sequel To Myst remains a landmark of adventure game design—even if the years have rendered the actual act of playing it a bit more clunky than modern tastes might enjoy. Good news for fans of flipping levers and moving switches, then, as Cyan—working with a fan-team that had independently begun making their own remake of the 1997 classic—is now getting ready to release a fully 3D version of the game for both traditional platforms, and VR. Now we can all have the pleasure of losing our minds figuring out how Riven-based number systems work…

Long-recovered from that rocky start oh so many years ago, Final Fantasy XIV is currently gearing up for its fifth big paid expansion, Dawntrail. The new content pack will send player to a new region dubbed “The New World,” add in two new classes—including the Pictomancer, an artist-mage who fights with paints and a brush—and include an overall graphical overhaul for the game. The plot, we assume, will have something to do with crystals—but while we can poke gentle fun at FFXIV, its ability to keep fan interest high this many years into its run speaks volumes about the ways the designers keep their players engaged with new doses of content like this.

How do you launch a sequel to ? Frostpunk 2 aims to get even bigger, and more fractious, allowing players to control much larger steam- (and now oil-) punk cities in a world that continues to suffer from brutal and killing cold. And also from, y’know, people, as the game promises to put an increased focus on social pressure and the grim portents of democracy, as different factions in your teetering-on-the-precipice cities vie for control of its fate.

Concord, the new 5v5 multiplayer shooter from Sony and Firewalk Studios didn’t make the best impression when it took pride of place at the entertainment giant’s , drawing criticisms for an over-long story trailer that felt like it was cribbing largely from James Gunn’s trash can, married to some pretty basic-looking “Guns and powers” online combat. But games live in the hands, ultimately, so we can still hold out some hope that there’s a genuine spark of interest in the game’s online shooter chaos.

We could wax at length here about the long history of Star Wars video games, including the fact that the franchise is still coming off of a pretty decent high right now, after titles like flight sim and the satisfying story of . But all that really matters about the upcoming Outlaws is this: The team that made and its sequel have now made an open-world Star Wars game; this information either gets you drooling, or it doesn’t.

One of a couple games on this list that have been hanging out in preview land for a few years now, the sequel to 2015 satirical prison-builder Prison Architect is an odd duck, in so far as it’s been created by a brand new team apparently unconnected to the original creators. The basic concept remains solid, though: Build a “functional”—for your giving political value of functional—carceral state, now in full 3D. Prison Architect has always been a pretty loaded game, in terms of the ideas it’s toying with, but the basic “city” building functionality has also always been fascinating and robust; it remains to be seen whether new developers Double Eleven and Kokku can match the original’s rigor.

We’ve written previews of this particular sequel—which, like the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., has now had its subtitle changed to more accurately reflect Ukrainian localizations of the region—for like four straight game previews at this point. And yet, we still remain excited, because the original game remains such a singular success: A brutal, harsh survival challenge in an incredibly dangerous region, made only worse by the presence of armed militias, rampaging mutants, and paranormal anomalies. We’re excited to finally see what this team has cooked up for their latest trip to this doomed world.

As we noted back when this game got announced, Astro Bot is down-low one of the best franchises in Sony’s whole portfolio: A combination of incredible imagination and incredible cuteness, pushing the company’s hardware to the limits while never sacrificing varied, and incredibly polished, platform gaming play. We’ve loved every Astro Bot game to date—especially the VR-exclusive Rescue Mission—so we see no reason we won’t love this one, too.

This game told “hold my beer” in the “horrific hodgepodge of IP forced to co-exist with each other” stakes, and we genuinely couldn’t be more excited. Who hasn’t wanted to see the heroes from Nope drive around in KITT from Knight Rider while avoiding the Five Nights At Freddy’s crew, right?

Look: We have no goddamn clue, at this point, whether Bloober Team’s attempts to recreate horror gaming classic Silent Hill 2 will actually be successful. The only really good (traditional) Silent Hill game is something of a sacred cow at this point, and Bloober has shown itself to be . But we can guarantee that we’re going to play it, if only to have the comparison point to one of horror gaming’s greats.

Ah, you know a game’s going to have the good stuff when it’s getting chuds mad at it more than six months ahead of release. Ignoring the whining, though—centered on the fact that one of the protagonists of this latest Assassin’s Creed title is Yasuke, the famed African samurai of Japanese history—the idea of the franchise tackling Sengoku-era Japan is pretty exciting. (Especially when you factor in that both Yasuke and co-hero Naoe will play differently, a new twist for the franchise.) After AC took a step back to basics with the disappointing , we’re ready to see the franchise get big, expansive, and wild again—and it feels like Shadows will be a step in that direction.

A decent chunk of Metal Gear Solid fans will tell you that the series peaked with its third installment in 2004, with the prequel installment Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. With complex stealth, ridiculous bosses, and a story of Cold War-era paranoid, it hits many of the best notes of the entire series without diving, too frequently, into the cocktail of madness constantly brewing in series creator Hideo Kojima’s head. And sure, we’re a little hesitant to see a remake of the game happening outside of Kojima’s watchful gaze—but at the same time, getting a fresh, updated version of a gaming classic is hard to say no to.

We’re on the , , about the joys and glories of Color Gray Games’ detective title Case Of The Golden Idol, an incredibly clever, visually delightful spin on deduction games like Return Of The Obra Dinn. The sequel, apparently set in the 1970s, sadly doesn’t have a release date yet, outside of a basic, loose “2024,” but the second it’s out, we’ll be first in line.

Does actually need a remake? We’d argue the answer is no: The ground-breaking interactive horror movie—still pretty much the only big studio release to crack that long-sought-after idea—still plays and looks great, almost a decade after its release. But we’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little interested to see what its tale of doomed campers trying to survive on a very bad mountain looks like while powered by the Unreal 5 engine—or what new scares Supermassive Games will sneak in to get a reaction from players who’ve played the original game to death. (Are we secretly just jones-ing to get yelled at by a hyper-detailed CGI Peter Stormare? Who can say. Who can say?)