The Best Video Game Remakes And Remasters Of 2024

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An image shows James from Silent Hill, a Stormtrooper, and other characters.

2024 was a really good year for video games. (But not so good for the people who make them.) And while it featured a ton of new games, both big and small, this was also a year with a lot of remasters and remakes.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a sharp increase in the number of remakes and remasters from all publishers and console makers. Most months had at least one or two, and some had even more than that. The increasing commonality of remakes and remasters is likely one more sign that the video game industry is growing more risk-averse and more reliant on big, safe bets. That’s not great, but some of the remakes and remasters we got in 2024 were excellent, even if their very existence makes me nervous for the future of the game industry.

Anyway, here, in no particular order, are some of the best video game remakes and remasters from the past 12 months!

An image shows Cloud fighting Sephiroth.

Rebirth is sure to be a more divisive and debated game than Remake was. But in this deep sea of an RPG, I was thrilled by the action and the tactics, brought to emotional highs and lows through its characters, and found myself with an even greater love of FF7, the original and this return, than I thought was possible. -Claire Jackson

Luigi’s Mansion Dark Moon, released on 3DS, was always really Luigi’s Mansion 2. So it was nice to see that, when Nintendo decided to remaster and port the 3DS game to Switch, it dropped the Dark Moon subtitle and slapped a 2 (and an HD) on the end. And in a lot of ways, this is still just that game, but now it looks and plays like Luigi’s Mansion 3. As someone who loves that game, that was all I needed, and now I can’t help but wonder if we’ll get a remaster or remake of the original Luigi’s Mansion in the future. It would be nice...

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Sometimes a remake or a remaster needs to add a lot of content or change up many different pieces of the original game to make it work for contemporary players, or even just to be a good game.

However, with Nintendo’s remaster of the beloved GameCube RPG Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the publisher rightfully only changed just enough to make it look and play better on Switch. That’s all this game needed, and it’s really what most fans wanted in 2024.

A screenshot shows the main cast from Persona 3.

Somehow, after over a decade of fighting, dancing, and dungeon-crawling spin-offs, I feel like I’ve met the ultimate version of Persona’s best cast. To me, that’s what makes Persona 3 Reload the “definitive” version of Persona 3. There’s been a lot of rightful criticism of Atlus doing a complete remake of a game that has always felt fractured across multiple versions. It doesn’t include the female protagonist route from Persona 3 Portable or the playable epilogue from Persona 3 FES.

But as far as SEES, their journey to end the Dark Hour, and how the power of friendship carried them through? Reload is the best version of this story, and only makes me appreciate the bold steps it took even more. - Kenneth Shepard

There wasn’t a big demand in 2024 for a remaster of PO’ed, a somewhat obscure Doom clone from 1996 released on 3DO and PS1. It featured bizarre weapons, ugly monsters, and really weird levels. But thanks to a birthday wish by one of the devs at remaster experts Night Dive Studios, PO’ed was given a top-notch rerelease and is easy to play across modern consoles and PC in 2024. It’s not a great game, but it is a really good remaster of something that likely would have been lost to time in a few years otherwise.

A metal walkway leads towards a large golden dome on a mountain.

The remake of the 1997 sequel to the seminal puzzle game Myst is a masterclass in how creating an ambient soundscape can help flesh out the world of the game. Even with so much visual splendor on display, the songs of Riven’s mysterious islands are what have stayed with me the most since finishing the game. -Willa Rowe

An image shows James fighting a monster in the fog.

Did the world need a Silent Hill 2 remake? The original is still worth playing and fans have made it easier than ever to experience that classic game in 2024. So I’m not sure we needed a remake. But I’m at least happy to report that the remake we got is a genuinely well-made, faithful adaptation of the OG classic developed by people who seem to not only love Silent Hill 2 but who also understand it and know when to tweak and when to stand back and let the original moments shine.

Remaking Silent Hill 2 always seemed like an impossible task, and I imagine it wasn’t easy, but Bloober Team has done it and in the process created one of the best scary games of 2024. - Zack Zwiezen

A screenshot shows Sonic's nemesis, Shadow.

Shadow Generations, a hefty pack-in alongside a full remaster of 2011’s Sonic Generations, delivers a wonderful course-correction for Sega’s mistreatment of Shadow over the years, reminding fans that he was once the deepest well of emotional storytelling the series has to draw from. The best part is that it’s also a thrill to play, feeling better than maybe any Sonic game has in, well, generations. - Kenneth Shepard

Oh, look, another Night Dive Studios joint! This time around, the team remastered a beloved cult classic from the PS2 era: The Thing. The third-person shooter might not have had the best combat around, but it made up for it with great atmosphere and a unique AI/squad system that forced you to be careful around your NPC friends lest they assume you were a dangerous alien in disguise. But at the same time, as you tried to survive the arctic base from the movie, you had to worry about your own squad mates acting strange. Were they just scared? Angry? Or were they actually the deadly alien, masquerading as your friend?

This system made every moment of the original tense, and The Thing Remastered cleans up the UI and textures, and makes this chilling shooter easily playable on modern consoles. Now a whole new generation of kids can be scared by The Thing.

A screenshot shows Darth Vader talking to a person.

And sure, why not, let’s add one more Night Dive Studios remaster to this list. This time it’s the team’s work remastering and porting Star Wars: Dark Forces to modern PCs and consoles. The original FPS was a very good Doom clone with some neat tech tricks and immaculate Star Wars vibes.

Night Dive’s remaster is a fantastic way to experience this classic shooter in 2024. It feels like the original game, but features improved visuals, controls, and sound effects. (If you prefer, it lets you turn off a lot of these modern improvements, too.) If you have longed for a new Star Wars FPS but haven’t played Dark Forces yet, grab the remaster and enjoy the ride.