2024 Roundup

Another year has come and gone. I'm going to keep this intro brief, as I am about to regale you with utterances beyond human comprehension. I've expanded on my yearly roundup to include the ten games I've enjoyed most this year. They're not in any particular order, except for the last videogame, which I award the coveted title of "...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring Game of The Year 2024".

The Indie-sphere dominated AAA gaming this year. This is reflected in the list below: I think only 1 or 2 games below could even be labelled as "AAA". It reinforces an opinion I've held:. AAA gaming is a bit of a farce (and the label itself is getting foggier and harder to categorically pin down). "AAA gaming" is full of money-hungry businessmen that take advantage of the creativity and passionate labor of their developers. They impose strict deadlines, stifle artistic visions, and they're intent on replacing human labor with AI. As a result, they have been delivering sub-standard videogames with an unhealthy focus on profit and quantity over quality and cultural merit. They are costing thousands of people their livelihood with massive layoffs, all for the sake of appeasing shareholders and the almighty dollar. Independent developers are the real auteurs of gaming--the Indie scene is where all the interesting experiments and aesthetics mingle and live. Fuck the shareholders, long live game developers!

Going back to the regular programming next year. Happy Holidays. May 2025 bring us the peace and liberation we all desperately need. Please, keep each other safe. Kisses and smooches to you all.

There's A Beast Inside Of Me...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring And Become An Eco-Terrorist.

There's a subtle ecological message in Strange Scaffold's I Am Your Beast. I mean, check this out: Alphonse Harding, a retired spec-ops operative and John-Wick-a-like, lives in a secluded, snow-covered forest, happily living as a hermit in the vast North American wilderness. The COI sends an armed battalion to recruit him for "one last job"; some unnamed, low-rank soldier shoots a majestic bird he was admiring...and this sends him on a massacre run against his ex-employers? My man hates the military-industrial complex almost as much as I do, and no wonder, given they're one of the world's biggest polluters.

I Am Your Beast plays like a speedrunner's dream game. You are ranked not just on the variety of kills you can perform, but on how fast you can complete the levels. It's an 80's revenge action movie synthesized into an FPS on permanent fast-forward: it's a breezy and brief 2-3 hour game, full to the brim with frenetic headshots, slide-tackles and goomba-stomping. The whole time I was playing I felt like I was enacting guerrilla warfare against an overwhelming military force...and winning.

The gunplay is bolstered by some sturdy parkour and mobility mechanics. It is necessary to get "quite gud" at the game, as the later levels only unlock when previous ones are executed with speed and grace. A high-skill playthrough of a level might look like: jumping off a tree and smashing a soldier's head with your boots, stealing his gun, slide tackling while delivering speedy headshots, throwing the nearly empty pistol at an incoming goon, kicking his face in while he's down...all this happening in the matter of seconds, mind you. It's an exhilarating micro-shooter, fast-paced and action-heavy.

The moments of reprieve offer breath-catching moments in between the adrenaline and gunpowder. While the game is quite story-light, its plot only told us to us via still images and bold dialogue text popping on the screen to the rhythm of the actors' voices, the themes and personalities won me over. I loved the snappy banter between Harding and his man-on-the-inside, Byron. Their relationship fully evolves into a sympathetic bromance.

It doesn't try to beat you over the head with its message, unlike Harding violently thwacking a soldier with a branch, but reading between the lines adds value to the experience. Ultimately, it's a game about how war and conflict turn us into monsters, and how maybe the best use of military skills is turning the tables against the systems responsible for that. For the good of the birds and the trees. Highly recommend if you're a fun of twitchy First Person Shooters with an overabundance of style.

Proper British...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring And Be Thankful.

Oh, Thank Goodness You're Here! The town of Bransworth in Northern England is full of nimcompoops! The fryer's broken, so the chippy's closed. That lad there wants some fresh milk but he's cow-shy. This chap has his hands stuck down a sewer grate after chasing a two-pence. Also...mate...I'm pretty sure that storefront is fake: I can spot a brick wall behind the window...oh no wait...that's just the red brick salesman...Anyways, everybody's very grateful you've arrived!

Thank Goodness You're Here! is a slapformer. Its gameplay is boiled down to minimal perfection. You can move, jump and slap, and that's all you'll need to solve the townsfolk's problems. Since it's so mechanically devoid, the real star of the show is the humorous experience. In order to explain why this game warmed my heart, we need to briefly delve into some Artemis lore.

I learned "proper English" when I lived in Newcastle for a year between the ages of 10 and 11. I grew up with my father exposing me to Monty Python and old-timey British comedy. Fish and chips slap and I constantly crave a full English breakfast. I have a distant appreciation for British culture and have many friends in England, but, similarly to the US, I worry about its political direction and its ties to genocide. Luckily, Thank Goodness You're Here! is all about the positive, gleeful, and strange life on the English countryside.

Since the game lives and dies on its jokes, it's a bit hard to explain why I found it so charming, given how humor is incredibly subjective (that, and the worst way to ruin a joke is to explain it). I urge you to experience it for yourself if you're curious. You will be assaulted with snappy vignettes, intelligent innuendos and dry wit. Some jokes take a while to build up, and you will often be backtracking through familiar locales in the small town, but it's so worth it: all build-ups had satisfying conclusions that had me chortling and guffawing for the entire 2-3 hour duration.

I give this game a tentative recommendation. If you're not a fan of good ol' Bri'ish humor, you probably won't laugh as heartily as I did. I want to show this game to all my non-British friends, however, so they can understand there's more to the U.K.'s cultural patrimony than bland food, imperialism and rotten politicians. Thank goodness for Thank Goodness You're Here!

The Infinite Wealth Was The Friends We Made Along The Way...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring...I'm Writing About Yakuza Again...

Yet again, I can't avoid writing about Yakuza (my beloved). This year brought us the 8th mainline entry in the franchise: Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. It continues the JRPG combat system of its predecessor, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, and places us, yet again, in the gamer-shoes of scruffy-haired, Eric-Andre-look-alike, Ichiban Kasuga, off on a new wacky adventure in Hawaii.

I wrote about this game in an essay about the morality of the Yakuza series, and even proclaimed my excitement for it pre-release. I haven't really fleshed out my opinions on the game on this site, so while some later paragraphs might seem overly critical, when I was thinking of which games I enjoyed most this year, Infinite Wealth kept creeping up in my mind cavern (chalk that up to me being a superfan).

First, the positives. The turn-based gameplay is bolstered by the addition of slight movement mechanics. If you spot a bicycle nearby while engaged in fisticuffs, your character can move towards it in order to bash an enemy goon over the head with it. The combat kept me hooked throughout the games' lengthy duration.

The style and substance of a Yakuza game is there: the story is melodramatic yet emotionally impactful, the violence on display is cartoonishly humorous and the side attractions were wacky good times. I especially enjoyed doing BMX tricks on Crazy Eats, the game's take on Crazy Taxi turned food delivery service.

The game also has some of the most emotionally impactful substories in the series. The one that stood out to me the most, was when Ichiban assists an elderly man in fulfilling his dying wife's last wish: to see snowfall again. Ichiban accomplishes this thanks to the help of diaper-wearing, Yakuza man-babies, that crush their nappies into a powder resembling the icy white substance and makin' it rain down the woman's window. Only Like A Dragon can move me to tears then make me laugh the next second.

Now, the negatives. The pacing of the game was a huge issue for me. When the story was heating up, it would be sidetracked by a mandatory side activity or crippled by an unsatisfying narrative diversion. My biggest gripe with the game is that I think RGG Studio didn’t use the setting to the best of their abilities. Rather than immerse you into interesting observations about America or engage with Hawaiian culture, the game's setting serves as a mere backdrop for the usual Yakuza shenanigans.

The final chapter is especially underwhelming. No matter how messy, stupid or irreverent a Yakuza game's plot gets, the ending always feels great. The final battles are climactic, passionate, and there’s a lot of emotional rewards to it if you are invested in the story. The final dungeons of Infinite Wealth lacked that grandiose, epic feeling, and I feel that, rather than reach a satisfying climax, the plot simply deflated. Infinite Wealth really lost me towards the end. Which has never once been the case with Yakuza.

Regardless, this is still the good ol', kitschy Yakuza I know and love. I can only really recommend this game if you're a fan, as it makes for a poor starting point to the series. But, if you're a zealot of the Sega-published beat-em-ups turned JRPGs about scowling Japanese men, you probably already bought and enjoyed this wonderful game.

Strategic Burst Magicians...Or How I Learn To Stop Caring and Cast Spells

Tactical. Breach. Wizards. Tactical Breach...Wizards. Tactical Breach Wizards. Even the name rolls off the tongue so well. I was quite excited for this turn-based strategy game even before I found out it was another brainchild of Suspicious Developments, and the third entry in the Defenestration anthology, which, if you haven't guessed, is a series of games about throwing armed goons out of windows.

You play as a team of wizards in an urban fantasy setting fighting against corrupt cops, theocratic government forces and private military companies. Each mage has their own set of wacky abilities. My favorites were Jen, a private investigator that can fire electric bolts that push and ricochet enemies into environmental hazards, and Dessa the necromancer, the party's healer...who has to kill her friends in order to revive them.

It's easy to take a look at the grid layout, the turn-based gameplay, the zany characters with differing abilities, the influx of enemy waves and think of this game as an XCOM-inspired tactical game, but the comparisons are superficial at best. Tonally, aesthetically and depth-wise, they are very different beasts. The writing has a lot of dry wit and humor attached to it, the characters are polygonal approximations of humans versus XCOM's more "realistic" style, and the game lacks the base management and permadeath of the xen0-blasting series. A successor to XCOM this is not, so curb your expectations appropriately.

Tactical Breach Wizards plays more like a puzzle game, one with mutiple solutions for each level, that rewards you for completing them in as few turns as possible, which necessitates creative use of spells and chess-like thinking to be two steps ahead of your opponents.

While I did enjoy the story and the characters, if there's one complaint I have is that they all seem to have the same "voice". Your team is full of diverse personalities with interesting motivations, sure, but all main and side characters seem to speak in Joss-Whedon-like one-liners and sarcastic whips. I will not lie: I was skipping a lot of dialogue and optional levels towards the end, because what I really enjoyed was the moment to moment gameplay, and the thought involved in replaying a level to more efficiently beat it.

I still recommend this game if you like XCOM, strategy and puzzle games in general, if you're seeking an original game with an unique setting, or if you simply like to think before shooting. Now, let's take cover: we have a wall to breach.

Тепер розмовляю українською...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring And Get Back In The Zone.

I love buggy games from Eastern Europe, and the undisputed kings of slavjank are Pathologic and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., two game series that stand as some of my favorite games ever, despite being unplayable trash-fires.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl continued this storied tradition. It released in an unoptimized and unstable state. Quests were bugged, the sound frequently cut out, my HUD routinely went missing, sleeping stalkers would suddenly float 2 feet in the air...and yet I loved every second of my time in the Zone. Jank is never enough to stop me from appreciating a game's merits.

Heart of Chornobyl threw fans of the series back into the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, on the hunt for irradiated, valuable artifacts while avoiding or facing bandits, mutated animals and physics-defying anomalies. It's the kind of game I've been craving for a long time: an immersive, tactical, survival First-Person-Shooter.

Rarely do I play a game so steeped in its own atmosphere it cloaks me entirely. The sound and landscape are hauntingly beautiful, the Zone is grimly picturesque. The gunfights are tense affairs, where few bullets can fell you and your enemies.

I'm saving some personal opinions for some pieces I'm writing about it, so you'll have to wait for those to come out next year.

I recommend this game if you are either a hardcore survivalist roleplayer, a fan of tactical gunplay, a Slavic culture connoisseur or a wannabe gopnik. But, you have to be charitable with the game's current state. Even after some patches, it's glitchy and buggy as all hell. If you experience any issues that threaten to dissolve your immersion, chalk it up to The Zone being metaphysically fucked. Good hunting, stalker.

Detective Simulator 2024...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring and Solve Murders.

Shadows of Doubt is a voxel-based, detective immersive sim (as contentious as that genre definition is) set in a procedurally generated city. The blocky setting is a dystopia on steroids. Class lines are succinctly marked: most of the population lives in squalor, huddling for warmth amongst barrel-fires and residing in cockroach-infested apartments. The few wealthy people who can afford it (mostly landlords and corporate blockheads) live in better conditions, amongst the highest strata of skyscrapers. It's not so different from our own reality...except we're not governed by the Coca Cola company, who also happen to run the police force and own pretty much everything. Oh, that's a ripe environment for murder and violence alright!

You play as a lightly customizable private investigator. armed with just brains and brawn...and a fingerprint scanner...a mental evidence board...and an encyclopedic and eidetic memory...

You're going to be motivated to solve murders in the crime-ridden streets to achieve a singular goal: a prestigious spot in a luxurious retirement community, something few citizens can afford. So...yea...the comparisons with our world are just getting more on the nose, huh?

This dream of yours requires enough "social credit", which you can only receive from successfully submitting resolved cases to City Hall. Most of the information is optional, you mostly have to figure out who's done the deed by name alone; knowledge of the killer's address and procuring the murder weapon only net you extra dollars and social standing.

The most impressive element of the game is the wide scope of its emergent and innovative gameplay. There's so many different mechanics to engage with. Even summarizing them all could take multiple paragraphs. Once: I placed a guy in the scene of the crime due to matching fingerprints on his apartment's door-handle; I snuck inside and found the rifle used in the shooting: a literal smoking gun. Another time, I broke into a cafe to get surveillance footage late at night, but unfortunately had to knock out the morning shift employee when he caught me while he was opening the store. In my proudest moment, I was following the trail of a different job, some corporate espionage B.S., and somehow came across a woman matching the description of a suspect from a cold case. I diverted tasks, followed her home: sucker never threw away the knife she used for the stabbing! Her shoesize was also the same one leading out of the crime scene in bloody footsteps. Case frickin' closed.

Look: the game is full of cop behavior I can't condone, but I love me a good mystery game and I will always be a sucker for the hardboiled private eye trope. Shadows of Doubt is a game that rewards you if you engage in deductive reasoning and gut instinct. Fair warning: despite having celebrated its 1.0 release this year, the game is, as of yet, still bugged out and glitch-fucked. If none of that is a deal-breaker for you, I hope you play and enjoy what is, in my opinion, the most original game in recent memory.

Reverb Tip Pulsar...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring And Shred.

Within its first few minutes, Greylock Studios' open world FPS, Echo Point Nova, slowly eases you in to its extreme movement mechanics. You have pretty vertically adept jump, and you quickly get the ability to double jump: fun! You get your first gun, a serviceable SMG, and get to shoot your first baddies. It's around here you start to start to notice how fast you can move, how tight the shooting feels, how broad and vast the game-world is. You pick up your pickaxe, allowing you to break away at certain objects, useful when you're stuck somewhere or to dig a hole straight to your destination. Soon after, the fun really begins. Echo Point Nova grants you a hoverboard and a grappling hook and instructs you to go fucking nuts.

The game is a playground of traversal mechanics and fast-paced shooter-y hijinks. If I wasn't swinging like a monkey, grinding on walls, or falling from great heights, I was using those skills to partake in arena battles against slowly intensifying enemy numbers. You're quite fragile, and the permanent health upgrades can only excuse your lack of skill up to a certain point--you will be assailed by so many projectiles the game almost turns into a bullet-hell by the end.

The game offers some spectactular setpieces against garguantan bosses that must be scaled and eliminated by destroying weak points. The one that stood out the most was a flying, snake-like dragon, which I had to continously grapple to and slide through its innards, headshotting goons and chipping away at its parts, before briefly retreating to recover some health pickups.

The UI is amateur at best, sure, and the graphics can be downright ugly at points, but this isn't enough to stop me from crowning this game as the best First Person Shooter I played this year. It's a worthy follow-up to Severed Steel and I recommend this game even if you're a casual fan of shooter games, doubly so if you miss Tribes 2.

I Hope This Hurts...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring And Be A Horrible Person.

I love when games make me feel like a horrible person. Mouthwashing is the best game I've ever played...that I never want to play again. It's not at all a statement on its quality–it's a brilliant game, but points to the fact the game not only pushes you into a terrifying situation, it forces you to commit atrocities. Not even in a morally ambiguous way. You are a terrible person in this game. I hope this hurts.

The runner-up for most dramatic opening in gaming this year, (my GOTY won that competition), Mouthwashing innocently sets you as the pilot of a delivery spaceship, think intergalactic Amazon truck driver. I thought the game was calmly going to introduce me to its horrors. Alas, with your first motion, you purposefully crash the ship in an incident that leaves the Captain maimed, limbless, in constant, overbearing pain--a mass of bloody bandages and suffering– and the crew stranded in space, with little food and few chances of rescue. I said: I hope this hurts.

The non-linear plot places you in the shoes of both Captain Curly, before the unfortunate "accident", and replacement Captain and co-pilot Jimmy, post-cockpit-cockup. The other characters include surly technician Swansea, his hopeful young intern Daisuke and anxiety-ridden nurse Anya, all of which are perfectly characterized with their expertly-written dialogue.

The game's narrative primarily deals with themes of accountability, but the atmosphere and setting are interspersed with the threat of automation replacing labor, the consequence of job losses and the greed of a company that cares more about profit than its own employees.

There's a recurring motif in the non-linear narrative, an adage that stems from Curly's moral heart: the belief that our worst moments don't turn us into monsters. Mouthwashing disproves that notion, and instructs us that our worse moments can in fact turn us into immoral animals if we are not emotionally prepared to handle our lowest lows. Jimmy is a horrible human being. At his worst moment, he is a beast, with no redeemable qualities. Curly's adage reflect his naivete: while he is a caring person, this ignorance of his, this need to have everyone feel safe, including the immature and narcissistic Jimmy, ultimately escalates the conflict and tension leading up to the inciting tragedy. If you try to satisfy everyone, no-one will be.

The part of the game that made me tear up is a late-game soliloquy from Swansea. He talks about his worst days, when he was an alcoholic, binge-drinking until the late hours, sleeping it off some nights in the gutter. Until he had a vision of his untimely death. He sobered up and cleaned up his act. He did everything society asked of him: he got a job, went into recovery, got married, stayed sober, but alas, was never able to have children. He confesses to us that, despite all this, his time as a drunkard were "the best days of his life." Any recovering addict can relate to his feelings–the strange nostalgia of past drug binges, the hardship of sobriety...the struggle of being a better person.

If you can stomach the brutal and depressing plot, you will find one of the best narrative experiences this year. One particular scene almost made me throw up my burrito dinner, disgusted by its brutality, a first for me in my gaming history. One final time: I hope this hurts. Try not to drink the mouthwash.

Deal 'Em And Weep...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring And Play Poker (With One Hell Of A Twist)

I called it: I knew Balatro was going to make an appearance on this list. At the risk of repeating myself, the intro I wrote for the linked piece summarizes my feelings succinctly:

It's no secret that 2024's rogue-like, deck-builder, joker-'em-up, Balatro is addictive. It's that special type of "one more run before bed" type of game that leaves you red-eyed, staring at the sunrise hours later. Poker hands are played, enhanced by the power of devious jokers, to scorch the points multiplier ablaze. Small and big blinds predate a Boss Blind, where dealer chips offer severe disadvantages to your played hands. When you hit those synergies, God, it feels like winning big bucks at the Texas-Hold-'Em table.

This is Candy Crush for "cultured" gamers, as my friend once described it. Balatro is one of those games that's better experienced than explained, but I'll do my best. It's sort of a deck-building, rouguelike, where you play poker hands to achieve a score threshold to move on to the next stage. After each round, you can acuire more cards to your deck and buy special Joker hands, which synergize with your played hands to add multiplier bonuses to your ultimate score. Defeat means you get to start all over again.

Where the game truly excels is how it invites players to completely break the game. OP decks, busted cards, devilish synergies: all is fair in love and poker. There really is no greater joy than having a great deck and seeing the score multiplier go up in flames--alongside a beep crescendo that forms a victory symphony. Just sit back, relax and let the cards do the work.

What attracts me to Balatro other than its addictive gameplay is just all the aesthetic flair that gravitates around it. The trippy, psychedelic backgrounds, the calming, circus-y music, the beeps and pings of the points multiplier and the chips and the cards. It's one of those games that understands the devil (or in this case, the joker) is all in the details. God Bless Balatro! Now, if you'll excuse me, the poker tables are calling...

GOTY 2024...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring And Resist A Thousand Times

1000xResist has one of the strongest openings in a videogame, ever. It starts in media res, with a murder most foul, your character stabbing a deific figure through the back. Needless to say, Sunset Visitor's debut title hooked me really early on.

From there, the story goes back in time and places you into the shoes of the Watcher, a clone of said God-like figure, the Allmother, on a quest to re-visit her memories, commune with other clones, and discover some uncomfortable truths along the way. See: humanity is all but extinct due to a sudden visit by aliens that essentially made people cry themselves to death. Its an oversimplification on my part, just trying to give you the basic premise.

As a narrative-driven game, 1000xResist lives and dies by its story. It is fortunate, then, that the nonlinear story is incredibly well-written and expertly voice acted. It's a game that's light on gameplay, but full to the brim with lore and narrative excellence. It is able to incorporate so many themes into a cohesive whole. The Covid-19 pandemic, the 2019-20 Hong Kong riots, sinophobia, motherhood and gender roles are all relevant themes in the story that form an impactful cultural product, one that breeds political empathy for rioters, protesters and those of us who resist the systems that keep us oppressed.

1000xResist made me cry, not only because of its emotional beats, but because it made me think about the impending apocalypse and what I would carry with me to the end of the world. Rather than summarize the plot, I'd like to share with you some personal aspects this game made me reflect on: the uneasy melancholy I feel when rain falls, the hardship of immigrating to the United States, my own experience of watching anti-government protests in Venezuela, love and language, the necessity of struggle, the fact that I would choose resistance and death over blind obedience and life.

1000xResist has permeated my memory since I saw the credits roll. From that moment, I already knew that it was going to be my GOTY. I gave every other game this year a fair shake up, but the way 1000xResist marries sci-fi and contemporary narratives into a loving symphony about memory and trauma superseded all other options. I recommend this game to everyone, even if you're a non-gamer. If there's one game I want you to play this year, regardless of who you are and what you like, it's this one. I want everyone to witness the artistic and narrative merits videogames can offer us, as exemplified by this brilliant game and the people behind it.

I hereby crown 1000xResist as my Game of the Year for 2024, Magna Cum Laude. Hair to hair, I will resist a thousand times before I perish. Hekki grace.