It feels strange to write a piece like this at the end of 2024. I am not a professional game critic, and thus I am under no further obligation to write this post than what the gremlins in my own head demand from me. And indeed, in a year where those who make and discuss the games I love have been so disrespected, discarded, and disregarded, that might even be the sensible thing to do.
But I’ve done this so long that it just wouldn’t feel like the year was complete without it. As always, they’ll be presented in a random order. Without further ado, the highlights of 2024 are:
Undefeated
As I grow older and more secure with myself, I’ve embraced my interest in furry visual novels more fully than I have in years prior. One of my more fitness minded furry friends, with an interest in combat sports, started talking up this one, and on that recommendation I installed it on my Steam Deck.
The premise of an underground MMA scene controlled by a shadow organization was on its face compelling, but what worked more for me was the way the author used it as a vehicle to discuss and address other, more broadly applicable themes. Themes of toxic/performative masculinity, generational trauma and the cycles of abuse, neurodivergence, and standing up to corrupt authority all take center stage at one point or another. It’s clear that the author, while obviously a fan of the combat sports he is drawing inspiration from, is aware of and alert to the more problematic aspects of it, and chose to acknowledge and incorporate them into the tale.
I didn’t follow it as it was mid-development, opting to play through it only after it became a complete package. Though I came to it late, I’m happy to have come to it in time to appreciate what it was doing.
The Rise of the Golden Idol
To the surprise of absolutely no one, one of my favorite games of the year is a mystery game. Though it lacks the novelty of its predecessor, being the second Golden Idol game, it’s still equally as well thought out and constructed.
If anything, Rise does a better job at breaking down some of the more complicated and esoteric logical leaps from the first game into more digestible chunks that more effectively guide the player to the desired conclusions. Most of the time, when I was stuck, I was correct in the broad strokes, but made a few too many mistakes in assembling the details in stark contrast to the final puzzle in Case where I was mostly lost.
I wish I could discuss more specific details without spoiling significant reveals, but I remember piecing together a conclusion that forced me into stunned silence as I processed it and what it implied for both what was to come and what came before. In fact, the implications of it left me reeling for the rest of the night. It stuck with me such that I needed to get out of bed and pull an all-nighter to finish the game and get it out of my mind.
There aren’t many games that can do that and leave me feeling good about it later, but Rise of the Golden Idol did.
Hades 2
Is it any surprise that the sequel to a game I think of as one of the best roguelikes ever designed would end up on this list? Technically, Hades 2 is still in Early Access. Thus, the game remains incomplete. And yet, what we currently have is more than was available when the original Hades was finally finished.
What impresses me most is that Supergiant, a studio that has only made excellent video games, was not content to just make “Hades, but more”. Melinoe, the new lead character, feels distinct from her brother, who took up the mantle in the previous game. Though she is equally capable, her fighting style makes far greater use of magic, evasion, and spatial awareness than her sibling.
I was also impressed by the appreciably darker tone Hades 2 takes in comparison to the more jovial experience of the first game. Supergiant’s team was clearly well researched, doing an excellent job adapting the source material of Greek myth into something wholly unique while staying true to the sometimes paradoxical and complicated nuance that makes the mythos compelling to this day.
And so, I’ll keep coming back as more is added to it. Death to Chronos.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
I can truly say without a doubt that I have never played a game quite like Kunitsu-Gami before this year.
Though it starts light, combining RTS and action game elements together, asking players to escort a priestess down the titular path so that she can seal away the great evil threatening the land, the game incorporates new mechanics and/or gimmicks on each stage to wring out as much as it can from its core gameplay loop so that players can gradually build up before it introduces its more devious and tactical challenges. On that front, it succeeded, and I left feeling satisfied by the experience, as if it ended at exactly the correct moment.
And that’s before we get to the look and style of this game. In many ways, Kunitsu-Gami closely resembles a Japanese-oil painting brought to life, which is why so many game critics were quick to compare it to Okami in that respect. It might not be the Okami game so many are clamoring for, but it demonstrated well how such an art style could conceivably be translated and implemented in the modern era, one where every frame is almost literally a painting.
It is exactly the kind of game where thinking about it again makes me want to play it.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
While I was shocked to see that an Indiana Jones game both came out and was as close to perfect as it could get as anyone else was in 2024, in hindsight I shouldn’t have been. If there’s anything the team at MachineGames can get right, it’s the sheer joy one can derive from outsmarting Nazis and fascists.
It would have been tempting for most developers to just take the obvious path and adapt Indy using the Uncharted-style that clearly took inspiration from the original films, but they chose instead to walk a harder and more rewarding path. They remembered that while Indy is both skilled and smart, he’s only a man who is unlikely to win a fight when he’s outnumbered and outgunned. Thus, the game places greater focus on stealth, ambushing Nazis with improvised weapons to take them out before their friends are alerted. To call it an immersive sim would discredit both the game and the genre, but the inspiration is present.
Beyond that, that sense of adventure was always kept at the fore. Details like the crack of the whip and how it drives animals away, the smarmy shit-eating grin on Indy’s face as he picks up his Lucky Hat for another go, or even Troy Baker’s pitch-perfect Harrison Ford impression. All of it lends The Great Circle an air of authenticity that makes the player feel like they’re in a classic adventure film.
And if that’s not a metric for success, I don’t know what is besides killing Nazis in 2024.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau
There is a beating heart to Tales of Kenzera: Zau that is so rarely seen in other games of its ilk that it more than makes up for any minor shortcomings. Both the twin narratives of Zau petitioning the God of Death to resurrect his dead father, and the meta-narrative of Zubera reading the tale written by his own deceased father and the way they play off each other results in a gestalt greater than the sum of its part.
Though I’m about as far removed from African culture and heritage as one could possibly be, the themes of death, loss, and the grief that follows are universal. And that language provides a strong inroad with which Tales of Kenzera shares in the powerful, metaphorical storytelling traditions that it draws from. It’s rich in its own unique way, and all the better for it.
Tekken 8
My verdict on Tekken 8 is that the new King model is insanely hot and almost nothing else matters.
Astro Bot
Astro Bot is one of the most twee, saccharine experiences I have played in years, hearkening back to the old school PlayStation 1 and 2 platformers that were my bread-and-butter growing up. I knew going in that’s exactly what I was going to get based on my experiences with Astro’s Playroom. What I didn’t realize was just how badly I needed a game like this in my life.
For me, Astro Bot is as close to a perfect game as I am likely to get. Not only does it look great and run smoothly on my machine, but it plays well. There was almost never a moment in my time with Astro Bot where I wasn’t smiling either at what I was seeing on my screen or what I was doing in-game. And while part of that is absolutely stemming from the way it’s dipped and coated in a chocolate shell of early PlayStation nostalgia, I’m confident that it stands on its own even for players without that frame of reference.
It has earned a permanent space on my console’s hard drive, since I can almost guarantee that I’ll want to go back to it over and over again.
Dragon’s Dogma 2
When people describe what makes Dragon’s Dogma 2 such an incredible experience, quite frankly they sound insane. They’ll describe scenarios where they’ve made major mistakes and failed quests by either taking too long or accidentally throwing away an important quest item without realizing what they were doing. They’ll talk about how they slept in town when one of their pawns had a dangerous illness, and woke up to find everyone had been slaughtered. They’ll discuss how they hired a carriage to fast travel from one town to another and got ambushed by a giant ogre along the way. And they’ll accompany all of these stories with smiles on their faces as if they’re the coolest things to ever happen in a video game.
Shockingly enough, they’re completely correct in doing so, but these anecdotes fail to capture the true essence of what makes the game special. What all of these stories encompass is how Dragon’s Dogma 2 sells the picture of a world that exists not solely for the player, but also for the rest of the people living inside it. It is a game that asks the player to be mindful of their actions, and their consequences, and trusts that they are responsible and intelligent enough to do so.
In a world where so many games are designed to be as painless and frictionless as possible, putting the player on a pedestal from which all potentially hazardous choices are erased from the space of possibility, a game that expects more, where making mistakes or difficult decisions is possible, is almost more valuable than gold.
Like most games, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is designed to be fun, but it is wise enough to understand that incorporating friction in just the right places adds valuable texture that results in a more memorable experience.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
It is honestly impressive that after spending a decade in development hell, a new Dragon Age was released. And not only that, it provided a much-needed resolution to the plot threads left dangling at the end of Inquisition and its DLC.
By this point in my life, I had already written off Bioware, especially after Anthem, as a non-entity that I no longer needed to keep tabs on. In my mind, they were effectively dead, and any attempt to resurrect them or their properties was destined to fail.
To not only be happy with how Veilguard concludes, but to appreciate what it did with characters like Varric and Solas, a decade after I had mentally closed myself off from that resolution, is honestly more than I could have realistically asked for.
Marvel Rivals
The greatest compliment I could give to Marvel Rivals is that it reminded me of the early days of Overwatch, back when my friends and I would gather together every Friday night over Discord and see what goofy hijinx we could get up to in the Unranked queue. And while I could endlessly complain about one character or another being too powerful or unfun, or list off my favorite characters and why I like playing them, the truth is that almost doesn’t matter.
And it doesn’t matter because for the past week, as I’ve been on my vacation, I’ve had multiple nights where those same people are together playing a 6v6 Hero Shooter with me as if no time has passed whatsoever. I had grown scared for a long time that my old friends’ tastes in multiplayer games would never realign in such a way to make that possible, and yet here we are.
I couldn’t be happier about both that and the shapeliness of Venom’s ass.
Tactical Breach Wizards
My friends could likely point back to the exact time I started playing Tactical Breach Wizards, because it would be around the same time that I started trying to throw the word “defenestrate” into casual conversations.
And truly, there is rarely a more potent joy than defeating an asshole traffic cop by punting him through a window with a gust of storm magic. Or having a dream sequence in which we punt our emotional baggage out the nearest available window, which does nothing to resolve our inner trauma but gives us better ideas at how to effectively shove bad guys out of windows.
Jests aside, what truly impresses me most about the game is how is so effortlessly combines witty, clever writing with the kind of tactical gameplay that encourages skillful thinking and planning with anti-capitalist/anti-corporate propaganda in a way that left me hooked from start to finish.
It’s an easy recommendation, especially if you’re the kind of person who enjoys tossing cops out of windows.
Unicorn Overlord
There are many people who will be turned off by the writing and story of Unicorn Overlord. And these people are correct in pointing out how perfect, yet bland the protagonist is and how there are basically no surprises from start to finish.
However, these people would similarly fail to discuss how the tactical and strategic layers of Unicorn Overlord combine to create a truly unique and innovative take on the tactical RPG, combining high-level real-time strategy with turn-based combat where units play out turns following a script that the player decided in advance, similar to the gambits in Final Fantasy XII. For a first outing, it truly impressed me, and my hope is that it did well enough to justify a new game in a similar style so that it can hone and refine itself over time.
It’s exactly the kind of game I would recommend people try the demo of, so they can at least form a better picture for themselves and see what could be done in the genre space.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
I am continuously impressed at the way Ryu Ga Gotaku manages to make hit after hit in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series despite releasing so many more games than any other studio could realistically handle. And this one is no different.
But what I want to call special attention is the way they handle Kiryu’s section of the game, as most of his side quests involve seeking resolution or peace and resolving any lingering business from his previous adventures as his body degrades and he reaches the end of his life. As someone who has played most of these games and been with the character for almost a decade now, it hit home far harder than I expected it to, and I had to put the controller down to wipe tears from my eyes multiple times.
I’m still in my youth, but it left me contemplating the passage of time and whether or not I’m making the best choices when deciding how to utilize the limited time I have on this Earth. I doubt everyone will have that same reaction, but this is my list and not theirs. If a game has me in such deep reflections, then it’s obviously doing something right.
Balatro
I was fortunate enough to get into Balatro about two or three days before it exploded in popularity. A friend of mine was playing it as we were getting ready for our weekly Commander night, and I sat and watched them go through a run.
I was instantly hooked, and before long I had purchased the game for myself, stacking my deck to make it to the 8th blind. Even now, just thinking about Balatro is enough to have the soundtrack playing in my head, conjuring the pleasant dopamine hit from stacking tons of buffs and upgrades onto a basic pair.
And now that I’ve gotten past the Orange stake, it’s my turn to evangelize the gospel of Balatro to all, available now on your mobile device.
Pokemon TCG Pocket
The old adage in the space of trading card games, even virtual ones, is that if many of your friends are playing the same card, so are you. For me, this was the case with Pokemon Pocket. Many of my friends and content creators I follow were giving it a shot, which gave me the interest I needed to try it out for myself.
I’ve never been into the Pokemon TCG, mostly because I never gave it a fair shot, but Pocket ended up being the gateway I needed to enter the space. It’s not the same as the paper card game, which I’ve now come to realize as I started trying to break into the paper card game, but that ultimately works to its advantage. The reduced deck sizes and simplified mechanics result in the type of faster paced gameplay that works better on mobile.
And while I’m embarrassed to admit this, it’s also just fun to crack packs and see what alternate arts or rare EX Pokemon come out of them. It is entirely possible to play Pokemon Pocket without ever engaging in deckbuilding or card battles, just casually opening packs, and that appears to be part of the intention.
The developers knew their audience, and how to adapt the game to mobile to give it the best potential for success, and I won’t be surprised if that continues for years to come.
Metaphor ReFantazio
Since I am someone who loves modern Persona games, it should be no surprise to hear that I was fond of Metaphor ReFantazio. It’s also probably not surprising to hear that if I did Game of the Year, it would be my pick without any hesitation. What may surprise you is that I think it’s the best game the Persona developers have released in almost twenty years, and I don’t think it’s even close.
Almost every problem I have with modern Persona games has been systematically eliminated during the development of Metaphor ReFantazio. The playable cast are all adults over the age of eighteen, and there are no romance options, which eliminates those creepy moments in Persona where John Persona starts dating his teachers while in his teens. And we aren’t in high school, opting for a more creative fantasy setting with a stronger emphasis on politics and intrigue. These two massive changes to the formula give the game leeway to explore stories and themes that were simply not possible in Persona, and inject a much needed breath of fresh air.
As far as combat goes, now that I’ve been introduced to the near infinitely customizable archetype system, I no longer wish to ever go back to Persona Fusion and Fusion Inheritance. The development system Metaphor chooses to go for is not just easier to use and understand, but also gives the player a much greater freedom in how they adapt their party to each fight and dungeon. Even better, if we’re overleveled for a dungeon or encounter, the game allows us to auto-kill the mobs and move on with our lives without forcing us into combat.
I never imagined I would be praising the Persona team for the care and compassion its put into its writing, since the series has struggled for decades now when handling queer and minority characters. But there’s nuance here that so much of their other work lacks, and it genuinely left a strong positive impression on me as a result.
I know. I’m also surprised I feel that way.
Unfortunately, not every game can be a success, especially not in the era of Concord, XDefiant, and the myriad other games released by publishers and left to rot, their development teams either dissolved or getting folded into other projects. As the ever-present twin to my highlights, the disappointments of 2024 are:
Deadlock
This is one of those times where the fault lies less with the game and more with myself. As everyone knows, it wasn’t difficult to get an invite code for Deadlock. Once they were out, they spread like wildfire. And since one of my friend groups was getting into it, I figured this was my best chance to give MOBAs another shot after bouncing off of League of Legends and DOTA 2 after a few hours with each.
Unfortunately, even presented as a 3D shooter, I have come to realize that I simply hate MOBAs. I hate having to plan builds in the item shop. I hate having to worry about XP farming over the course of a match. I hate how the genre encourages people to continue obviously losing fights, sometimes for long stretches of time. I have to be honest with myself and admit the qualities of the genre that fans of it like are the exact things that repulse me.
And my disappointment with Deadlock is tied directly to that. It’s a great MOBA, which is why I hate it.
Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
I wanted to like Echoes of Wisdom, in much the same way I want to like every game I buy. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t have fun with it, but the few issues I do have are major ones that cheapen the experience.
While the premise of a Zelda that can summon clones of any object or enemy she encounters is interesting on paper, in practice most players will quickly settle upon the same strategies both in platforming and in combat, because they are so powerful that nothing else compares. Why would I try to pull off some cool platforming trick when it is far easier to make a stack of bed, or magic water, or clouds, that I can use to climb as high or far over whatever obstacles I encounter? Why would I play around with the numerous monsters I could summon to fight for me when the same two or three of them mop up any fight without a problem?
And in a hypothetical world where I did want to experiment, that would require scrolling through the game’s atrocious UI decision to present the list of available “echoes” as a single, unsorted row, undivided by categories. Players do not even have the ability to favorite or hotbar echoes for easy retrieval. This may seem minor to some, but it means that players are often spending minutes at a time scrolling through available options just to use the game’s core mechanic, and that is simply unacceptable by any reasonable metric.
I was happy to see a game where Zelda was finally playable, but it’s sad to think that it was this one.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2
Unlike The Last of Us: Part 2 before it, I think Senua’s Sage: Hellblade 2 is a good video game with a good story. However, like The Last of Us: Part 2 before it, Hellblade 2 is a game that struggles to justify its existence against a predecessor that neither wanted nor needed a sequel.
The conclusion to Hellblade: Seuna’s Sacrifice is so strong that the story feels complete, without any need to continue along with the character. And while it was fun to come back to Seuna for a second outing, almost every moment of the game left me wondering why Ninja Theory chose to return to this character rather than move on to a new one.
And even worse is that I found it difficult to understand why this was a video game as opposed to a film or Netflix original series. To some extent, that was expected since the first Hellblade was in that cinematic “playable movie” mold that so many games find themselves in. What I didn’t expect was how bored I would get by the playable parts, with dull, tedious exploration puzzles and combat with enemies that were both too tanky and too simplistic.
I liked it exactly enough to make it through to the end, but it’s unfortunately not a game that I can recommend when most people have such limited free time as it is. There are just better ways to make use of it.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
It’s not the first time a game has been both a highlight and a disappointment, and it will not be the last. While I stand by every word I wrote, those feelings come with some damning caveats that leave me equally as cautious about future Bioware titles as I was going into Veilguard.
As a setting, Dragon Age has always been strongly rooted in dark fantasy since the beginning. It was clear while playing the game that the new team from Bioware wanted to pivot away from that, into someone at once both more affirming and light in tone and voice. However, in doing so, they rob the setting of much of its texture, to the point where it sometimes feels less like Dragon Age and more like “fantasy Mass Effect”, an important distinction to series fans.
Little incongruities like a child-kidnapping assassins guild being rewritten into something more akin to almost Robin Hood-esque vigilante killers or a fascist dictatorship run by mages being strangely accommodating to queer and trans viewpoints remove much of the bite that gives the setting its texture. Even your party is pleasant, but in a way that co-workers who don’t hang out outside of the office are “pleasant” but otherwise forgettable.
On the Aftermath podcast, one of the hosts said that Veilguard felt as if it was written less by queers and more by “well-meaning allies”, and I feel where the sentiment stems from. I could not tell you whether it’s because the writers were scared of disappointing fans, or if they just didn’t have the skill, but either way they did a poor job incorporating the darkness the gives both the settings and the queer stories they’re trying to elevate the punch they need to stick with the audience well after credits roll.
And while they can build on that, and improve, it makes for bland, flavorless showing once first impressions fade.
The Casting of Frank Stone
I’ve already written about my opinion on Frank Stone at length as a result of my Let’s Play on the game with Acharky, but in summary the game spends 90% of its six-hour runtime setting up for a mediocre 10% payoff at the very end. As a result, it struggles to stand on its own, using the Dead by Daylight license mostly as a crutch to trick fans of the franchise into feeling as if there’s more to the story than it first appears.
Even on the occasions where Supermassive completely misses, like in Little Hope, there’s always at least something I can look back on and have a meaningful discussion about. With Frank Stone, instead I just make jokes about how he was obviously intended to be a new Dead by Daylight killer and bombed so hard no one cares.
It’s an experience as hollow and dull as its premise.
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
I grow more sour on Rebirth the further removed I am from it. There are many things I like about it, from the interpretations of classic scenes from the original game, to new editions like Queen’s Blood. However, it’s held back by several persistent and pervasive issues endemic to the core design philosophy of the remake.
The first is obvious once the player leaves Kalm: Much of the side content is fairly bog-standard Ubisoft open-world fare, from climbing towers to defeating specific grouping of enemies with the occasional side story thrown in. And while it’s not tiresome early on, as the game progressed I grew increasingly annoyed that each new region was bloated with needless guff that I was losing interest in. And while I’m happy Rebirth chose to incorporate more mini-games like the original FF7 did, most of them are ruined by some fundamental issue, from the preset formations of Fort Condor to the scoring system of the shooting gallery.
But the bloat also grafts itself onto the main story, turning what was originally a ten-hour segment of the game and expanding it into a full 70-90 hour epic. The problem is that this section is largely a road trip with an ill-defined goal, so for most of it the actual main plot of Final Fantasy VII doesn’t move forward. Even worse, once the story finally does get underway, after writing Nibelheim in a way that erases part of the magic of the original, they manage to ruin possibly the most important scene in the entire FF7 extended universe and canon. The scene that everyone talks about, that lingers in pop culture and ensured that FF7 would live on in the history of video games forever more.
Yes. That one. They managed to screw up that one, in the interest of fostering debate and speculation. It’s the kind of mistake that makes me question the judgement of the team in charge, even if they’re mostly the same people from the original game.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure
I was not confident that bringing Max Caulfield back to take the leading role in another Life is Strange game was a smart idea. The endings to that game are so wildly divergent that trying to reconcile them while building a new story felt, to me, like a fool’s errand. Additionally, regardless of what choice is made, that ending is conclusive. Similar to my problems with Hellblade 2, Double Exposure is an addendum to a story that needed no further expansion. It was complete, even if I had problems with it.
And yet, as I launched the game, and began playing the first few chapters, I saw the vision. I may have disagreed with the choice to bring Max back, but thrust into the driver’s seat I saw why the development team at Deck Nine felt as though they needed to thrust her back into the limelight. Her experiences back in Arcadia Bay and the trauma of those events are necessary in informing the character and why she, and she alone, was uniquely suited to be the lead for this story they were telling. As the first three episodes continued to set the groundwork for the finale, I became a true believer.
Which is why the final two episodes upset me as much as they did. Not only did it take a turn that I felt unearned by the story leading up to it, it also dropped several threads that felt like they should have been more important than they ultimately were. And worse, after the credits roll, the end with “Max Caulfield will return”.
As the folks at Remap said on their spoilercast, it felt like season one of a Netflix original series, where you can almost sense the development team pleading behind the scenes to get renewed for a season two. When I compare that desperation with the way Dontnod conclusively ended their original game, it bums me out.
And that’s all he wrote. The Non-2024 Gaming in 2024 post should be coming out soon, but until then remember that all of these games, even and especially the ones you dislike, were created by people: People who are suffering, much like you probably are, under the weight of a system that treats us with callous indifference at best and cruel hostility at worst. Be kind to those people, because the works you love wouldn’t be possible without them.
We’re all in this together.
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