These Are the Best Netflix Games of 2024, Ranked

Shatter Remastered is a no-hassle, all-frills brick-breaking game that combines slick controls with interesting mechanics like the ability to blow or suck in the balls you’re trying to keep from getting too close to the edge of the screen. If you’re craving simple arcade action, this might be your best bet for Netflix’s current game library.

I’ve put far more hours into games like Golf With Your Friends than I have most other major releases. It’s because there’s something really wonderful about sinking a ball into a hole while trying to overcome weird physics and wacky stages. Wonderputt Forever does everything it needs to do to keep me engaged. I love watching the scene transitions between levels, and it understands the best part of minigolf games, which is hitting your ball in ways that deftly avoid delightful little obstacles to sink that 1,000-to-1 putt.

Lucky Luna is a platformer that relies on swiping back and forth for all of its controls. I can’t say I didn’t find it strange to control a character in a platformer who didn’t have the ability to jump. Still, after a bit, you do get used to the idea of traversal being limited to left, right, and down (up until a certain point where a handy dragonfly changes things). Still, it does feel somehow limited even after a few levels as it tries to introduce new traps and challenges. It has a nice, clean pixel art style that remains engaging enough, but certain levels do feel a bit same-y.

This vibrant Where’s Waldo?-style game is a delightful diamond-in-the-rough. Based on the webcomic of the same name, this hidden object game asks you to spot characters in a cluttered, colorful map. It’s honestly one of the most absorbing games of its type that I’ve played. You can see the attention to detail on each object, and as you move over certain spots in the map, you’ll hear the sounds of a character playing a violin to the crowd or a DJ spinning a record, all of which meshes with the upbeat music so well it made me feel a small glow in my ravaged heart.

Storyteller is a charming, if a little convoluted, puzzle game that involves linking characters and scenes together to have a cohesive narrative. You plop a scene type and characters onto a page and then try to recreate an arc of sorts. If that sounds complicated, it’s really not. You’ll start off with only a few characters and scene types, though the difficulty ratchets up the more levels you play. It can feel a bit too much like trial and error, though the animations alone are cute enough to spend time with this quaint puzzler.

It’s a shame that Hades is also on this list. Otherwise, Dead Cells would be the best roguelike currently available in the Netflix games library. It’s a great game full of split-second decision-making, and interesting character builds, though I also found the touch controls to be a little too inconvenient for such a precision-minded game. It’s certainly the kind of title where you’re better off using a controller.

If you’re a classic sidescroller Shovel Knight fan, don’t expect the same sort of gameplay from Pocket Dungeon. Instead, this is a roguelike block-breaking puzzle game where players must try and group enemies together to do as much damage as possible while taking as few hits back as possible. It works, but if you’re like me and don’t have any real interest in block-breaking puzzlers, the game can feel like quite a chore. The good news is it works quite well on mobile with simple swipe controls.

This is a pretty solid attempt to bring the quality looter shooter Relic Hunters to the mobile market. It’s most akin to a twin-stick shooter, except you use thumb presses to direct your shots. The game can become quite the bullet hell experience, which means mobile touch controls are probably not your best bet when things get hectic.

If you haven’t played the first Valiant Hearts: The Great War, then you may be surprised how much a comic book-style sidescrolling puzzle adventure could be so emotionally effective. The sequel, which has remained a Netflix exclusive until last month, takes themes similar to those of the first game and introduces us to a few new characters who are doing their best to survive the horrors of WWI. The game isn’t as long as the first title, but for what it does, it still remains an effective story told in such a way people of varying ages can get into it, despite how many emotional sucker punches it throws your way.

For anybody who played Rainbow Six: Siege, playing Rainbow Six: Smol feels like the antithesis of the hardcore military operator cosplay that the big boy game tries to portray. It’s a top-down shooter with power-ups, cartoon villains, and fake fantasy worlds with Super Mario Bros. 3-style missions on a world map. It’s enjoyable enough with a surprising amount of depth of gameplay and some small amount of mission variety, but if you’re not completely enamored by the style and tone of the game, you might be thrown for a loop.

Imagine if your Tinder app was turned into a time-traveling, medieval China dynasty simulator. Instead of swiping left or right on potential hookups, you’re swiping left or right whether to bet on the farmer or merchant winning in a fight or whether to marry a political match. There’s a bit of deckbuilding involved as well, but it’s all relatively light considering the main swipe left or right mechanic. This version of Reigns is also based on the classic Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set during the end of the Han dynasty. There’s also a combat system and a few other minigames involved, but the main swiping mechanic is surprisingly engrossing, especially if you haven’t played any of the Reigns titles before.

If there’s one game on this list that should get your attention, it’s this little jewel from the creator of Downwell. Instead of moving your character down, this time, you’re tasked with traveling up, deftly judging parabolic arcs to reach the next platform and occasionally dealing with a rather bipolar cat. The game constantly throws new mechanics your way to keep things fresh. Try it. It’s the kind of game that makes having a Netflix account actually worth it.

If you remember, World of Goo was easily one of the hottest indie and later mobile games around back when it was first released in 2008. It first came out on the Nintendo Wii and PC, but the physics-based puzzler is essentially unchanged 16 years later (feel old yet?). If you have never played it, World of Goo is a physics-based puzzle game about building structures with goo nodes. There are a few goo types that will change how you can complete each section, and enough brain teasers are involved to keep you stumped for many hours. If you want to go back in time to the days when the Wii shop music would play endlessly in your ears, then the Netflix remaster is certainly worth your time.

With its strange mix of star-studded cast (Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy, and Willem Dafoe) and locked-room, isometric live-die-repeat gameplay, Twelve Minutes is, at the very least, an interesting game, even if it doesn’t work nearly as well on a phone as it does on a PC. When trying to use touch controls, you’ll often hover your finger over the object you’re trying to pick up or interact with. This led to at least one rather funny interaction when I pissed off my wife by accidentally taking her cup of water off the dining room table. Still, it’s a unique puzzle game with a clever twist that’s worth it for an afternoon or two of scratching out how to solve the loop.

Moonlighter, a game that combines light roleplaying as a shopkeeper with dungeon crawling, doesn’t do both to the scale you would expect from the best of each genre. Nevertheless, it’s a fun, solid game for those who like a pinch of Stardew Valley community building amid bursts of high-stress dungeoneering, like the 2D Zelda games or The Binding of Isaac.

If you haven’t heard of this game yet, and you’re into puzzle games with a heavy dose of a Missile Command-esque sense of damage control and triage, then you’ll really love Into the Breach. It’s designed by the same folks at Subset Games who did FTL: Faster Than Light (Which is still unavailable on most mobile devices, for shame). This mobile version of Into the Breach has pretty tight touchscreen controls that make it easy to move and select units even on a congested board. Really, I have no complaints. The fact that Netflix was able to snag the mobile version of the game means there are some executives at Netflix who know what’s going on in the gaming space, at least to some extent.

Playing Oxenfree feels like it sends me back in time to the days when I religiously read young adult fiction like the Goosebumps or Animorphs series, centered around characters who were just a little bit older than I was talking about relationships and family trauma that I wouldn’t truly comprehend until a few years later. It’s a point-and-click adventure game with a lot of style and some excellent voice acting that ties the entire epic together. You can beat the game in just a few hours, and it certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, though it’s also the kind of game you want to play over again to see if you can interact with characters differently and score a different ending. There are a few horror elements in there, but the tension ratchets up in the latter parts of the game.

The Oxenfree sequel essentially takes what worked with the first game and does it again, though only slightly more refined and with a different cast of characters. The voice acting is still great, though now you’re playing from the perspective of adults rather than a gaggle of teens. If you enjoy the adventure game aspects of the first title, you’ll enjoy this one as well, though we suggest you start with the first game as there’s a lot of thematic setup that is better experienced rather than recapped going into the sequel.

Suppose you wanted to play the original GTA trilogy. In that case, you don’t need to spend hundreds on an old PlayStation 2 and the original discs, and you don’t need to opt for the buggy mess that was the original remastered series that came out several years ago. The Netflix editions of GTA San Andreas, Vice City, and III both look and sound better than the original games, and they run much more smoothly on phones than they did back in the PS2 era. Playing the games with touch controls on the phone isn’t nearly as bad as you might think, though it still plays much better with a connected Bluetooth or phone controller.

This beat-em-up is easily one of the best titles to come to Netflix’s games library. It’s the kind of old-school style that precludes a fair bit of hidden depth to the attacks, combo strings, and environmental interaction. The animations are indicative of the old ‘80s cartoon, and if you’re only here to watch ninjas of the Foot clan go bug-eyed seeing the turtle stroll into the room, then the game’s worth playing just for that. It also does multiplayer online with up to four players, so long as you have your own Netflix account.

If you’re jonesing for a well-written adventure game with a dash of magical realism, then Kentucky Route Zero is easily your best option. It’s an adventure game akin to early point-and-clicks like the classic Monkey Island titles. Still, Kentucky Route Zero is much more interested in spinning a yarn about truck driver Conway’s odyssey down the titular, mysterious highway. There’s not much in the way of puzzles, but it’s very heavy on writing, dialogue, and atmosphere. It’s also one of the most engrossing experiences you can play in video games, and the fact you can get it free with a Netflix account means you have essentially no excuses to play it finally.

So many of the games on this list are ports to mobile, and while they’re still solid choices on a smaller form factor, they’re not quite pitch-perfect. Laya’s Horizon is so damn fun to play because it was made for touchscreens first. It’s essentially a gliding simulator where objectives are often “get to point B from point A in as stylish a way as possible.” Your two thumbs control pitch and yaw, and you can pull up all the way to stall and use your cape as a simple parachute for the tightest turns. It’s fun, surprisingly challenging, and constantly beautiful. There are not enough good things to say about Laya’s Horizon.

Even though it’s been out for six years, and there’s a sequel in sight, Hades remains one of the best roguelike action games around. This is the first time the game was made available on iOS. While the touch controls don’t give you quite the same level of precision you need to clear the latter harder parts of the game, it’s still a masterpiece of design, from the frenetic gameplay to the character interactions between Zagreus and his messed-up family of Greek gods. You owe it to yourself to play Hades, so load it up on your phone, hook it up to a Bluetooth controller, and you’re all set to lose hours and hours of your life trying to get the hell out of Hades.