Balatro was one of our games of 2024 and the vast majority of us at Nintendo Life Towers have poured more hours into its poker roguelike gameplay loop than we care to admit. But what were the games that caught the attention of its developer, LocalThunk? With 2025 finally here, the dev took to Twitter to share some of his indie highlights from the last 12 months and crown his 'Golden Thunk' award winner for 2024.
We'll start off with the biggie. The dev named Animal Well his personal game of the year, describing Billy Basso's mystery-filled metroidbrania as "an engrossing experience" and "a true masterpiece" — honestly, we'd have to agree on those points.
Basso himself replied to the LocalThunk nod, describing the award win as "the greatest honor of them all".
But that's not all! 2024 was a bumper year for indies and the Balatro dev was also keen to highlight some of the other titles that had been vying for his attention. Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers was first up, another card-based deckbuilder which, the dev noted, "People mistakenly wrote this off as a Balatro clone but this was announced before my game ever was".
The dev also flagged the "incredible" Arco, Nova Drift ("a perfect game for the Steam Deck"), physics-based roguelike Ballionaire and the Steam horror game Mouthwashing. Only Arco is available on Switch for the time being, but hey, our fingers are crossed some of these make the jump to 'Switch 2'.
Balatro capped off 2024 with an impressive run at The Game Awards, where it picked up wins in three categories including Best Independent Game.