Games of 2024

This has been another year in which I haven't played as many games as I would have liked, due to a bunch of smaller factors that are just making me not want to play games in the first place. My chair is uncomfortable. My computer is getting old and slow. My apartment has various other maintenance problems that I need to address. There is other non-apartment stuff I've been putting off, too. And so, every minute spent playing something is a minute I also spend feeling guilty for not doing something productive instead. The times when I did actually play a video game this year were the times I realized I'd be lying to myself if I said I'd do something else at that moment instead.

This post was originally going to be titled "favorite games of 2024", but I played a couple of games that I would definitely not consider "favorites", but which I have something to say about anyway. I'll kick things off with them:

Under A Star Long Cold

and

The Tower on the Borderland

I want to talk about these two games together, because the main thing I have to say about both of them is that they both disappointed me in similar ways.

Both games look cool in screenshots and seem interesting on paper. Under A Star Long Cold is a sci-fi stealth game that takes place on a large open map, with Metal Gear Solid V being a clear gameplay inspiration, and Star Wars being an artistic one. The goal is to collect enough cash to win the game within the 30 minute time limit, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to actually accomplish that goal - purposefully so. Piles of money are haphazardly strewn about the landscape like the world's emptiest Supermarket Sweep, but you can't collect all of the cash piles in half an hour, and even if you could, I don't think it'd be enough. The store page describes the game as "an exploration of agency and hope", which I guess makes sense, if it's trying to make some point on futility. This make it more of an arcade game which you're supposed to earn a high score in, rather than win per se.

Meanwhile, The Tower on the Borderland is a game that's inspired by "The House on the Borderland" by William Hope Hodgson - someone more familiar with the novel might know how. I haven't read it, and maybe if I had, I'd appreciate this game more. The game presents itself as a survival horror, where avoiding enemies is supposed to be just as viable as fleeing from them, if not more so. There are firearms and a knife, but both are pretty clunky to use. The game also features some metroidvania level design, where certain routes are blocked off when you first discover them, and need to collect some kind of item (for example climbing gear) to progress.

Sadly, both games are dragged down by extremely underwhelming level and encounter design. Both of them bank on having interesting logistical challenges and encouraging the player to plan ahead, but in both cases, the player simply doesn't have enough to consider when navigating from point A to point B. They gesture at having the player make tactical decisions, but there are never any such decisions to make. Their worlds are barren in a way that doesn't feel purposeful. And if it is purposeful, then it feels neither meaningful nor interesting.

Under A Star Long Cold gives the player guns, binoculars, and the ability to "tag" enemies with a little arrow in the interface, which allows you to keep track of their movements if they go behind a wall. The map is large, allowing you to scout ahead, but after the third time or so, it becomes apparent that getting to tag enemies is your *only* reason to scout ahead. There are no enemy traps or ambushes, no environmental hazards, no alarms, no building interiors, no diversions the player can use. Nothing exists in this world besides enemies, walls, and money. The game starts to wear out its welcome before the thirty minutes are up.

The Tower on the Borderland has slightly more going on, but not enough. I do think it has some genuinely good moments of atmosphere. But if its intent was to be a survival horror, then it isn't perilous enough to make its encounters feel meaningful (with the exception of boss fights), nor does it encourage the player to do any kind of interesting planning between checkpoints. If its intent was to be a metroidvania, then its combat and traversal options don't feel satisfying enough to motivate you to keep playing. The game world failed to motivate me too, after exploring for a while, I became confident that I wouldn't discover anything I'd find interesting.

For comparison, Prison of Husks was my second favorite game from last year, and despite being a free little 60-90 minute experience, it has more secrets and memorable things to discover in it than I ever found during the combined 9 hours I spent with Under A Star Long Cold and The Tower on the Borderland. You can read more of my thoughts about it in my favorite games of 2023 writeup - there are some oddly prescient criticisms of The Tower on the Borderland there, this paragraph in particular:

Art decisions aren't the only thing that contribute to a game's atmosphere, the gameplay experience does too! Sure, you could slap some fog in and spooky sounds to make a game appear more mysterious, but if your game's map is just a corridor with occasional forks in the road, then the straightforwardness of the game's structure directly conflicts with the mystery you were trying to build.

You can find the full post here.

Mech Engineer

This is a game for mech sickos. I've played it for over two hours and still barely understand how it works. Imagine a game with a diegetic interface similar to Paper's Please, except instead of stamping passports, you're building mechs and managing personnel to pilot them and fight off an alien invasion. For example, in order to test a mech setup, you need to manually assemble the core, ignite it by pressing a button on the control panel, and an array of four switches to manipulate its operating speed and test how it fares under higher temperatures. The game seems fascinating if you really dig into it, and it does come with several in-game manuals. I just need to be in the right mood to give it a real shot.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit

This is a fun little racing game about doing laps in and around parking garages. The main gameplay hook is that drifting grants you a brief speed boosts, and you can chain drifts one after another to not only extend the boost, but to keep going faster and faster. You can eventually a point where the car becomes too unwieldy to steer and need to rein it in. Once you've mastered drifting, knowing your own ability and knowing when to let off the gas is where the skill ceiling really is. The game is lo-fi, but colorful and full of ska music. Pretty good if you're in the mood for the kind of arcade racing game they don't make that very often anymore.

Threshold

This is a short narrative game about making your mouth bleed. You are stationed at an outpost that a train drives through, and you're tasked with speeding the train up if it starts going too slow. The local air is unbreathable, so you need to bite down on glass canisters every once in a while to suck some air out of them. There's another guy who helps explain your job, but he's a little shady. There's also a dead body buried in the back.

At this point you might suspect that this game is surreal, and you'd be correct. I also think it's pretty good. It gets you to think about labor, isolation, and the worth of human life in ways that respect the player's intellect. It's neither subtle nor straightforward about its subject matter, which is a balance I greatly appreciate. All of the surreal puzzle pieces the game uses can be easily mapped to real life concepts. It's up to you to make sense of how they fit together and what they say about the world we live in.

Kind Words 2

I feel very bad because I haven't bought this game yet, I only played the beta that happened a few weeks before release. The original Kind Words was less of a game and more of a little program in which you wrote a short, anonymous message about whatever problem's been eating at you, put that message out into the world, and had a few random strangers kindly respond to it. It just so happened to be made with Unity, use 3D graphics and be published to PC gaming storefronts. For all of my 100 hours cumulatively spent with Kind Words, I've only seen exactly one mean-spirited troll response, among the countless thousands I've seen. Whether it's thanks to good moderation, a very friendly community or both, the end result is still pretty amazing.

Kind Words 2 is more of the same, but not only. It features the same message-writing from KW1 and is backwards compatible with the original game in this regard, which is great. As far as new features go, it lets you create an avatar, walk around a little world and engage with several other writing prompts. For example, there's an activity where one person describes a cat, and another random person gives it a name. There's a spot where you can specifically ask or give recommendations, rather than spill your guts about personal problems. There's a spot where you can write a message, and only exactly one person will ever get to read it.

The thing with Kind Words is that it's great and therapeutic, but I don't always need it, it's something I'll get into for a couple of days, maybe a week, then return to a few months later. I haven't bought it yet because I don't need it right now - I will when that inevitably changes sooner or later.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

This is a little tricky to talk about. It's an expansion to Elden Ring, a game that is famously enormous, and it's mostly more of the same. New areas, weapons, enemies to conquer. If you're fatigued with the game, I would not call it "essential". It's actually one of the weaker expansions Fromsoft have put out in my opinion, Artorias of the Abyss for DS1 and the Crown trilogy for DS2 remain unmatched. In mood, difficulty and the kind of new story content it introduces, it's closer to DS3's expansions.

If you're *not* fatigued with Elden Ring, it's pretty good, on par with some of the best parts of the base game. My favorite part of Elden Ring remains exploring Leyndell and its underground, but that's an exceptionally high bar to clear. Even if it doesn't surpass my literal favorite part of the game, there are still some spectacular vistas and fights in this expansion, and if that's what you appreciated about the original game, getting to experience more of them is worth the price of admission.

I've cleared Shadows of the Erdtree twice, as my standard melee character and as a wizard, and intend to eventually go through it twice again: as my incantation caster, and as my level 1 character. I have a bit of a dilemma with the latter, because I still haven't decided whether the character is allowed to use "Scadutree Fragments", which are items you consume to boost your character's stats, and are essential for making the difficulty in this expansion manageable at all. It sounds a lot like leveling up, doesn't it? I understand the function these items serve in the game, they're a high-value reward for exploration, and their inclusion makes perfect sense. And yet, for my dumb personal reasons, I kind of resent that this system exists, because now I have to decide whether these extremely critical items are actually kosher for my already grueling level 1 playthrough or not.

Project RyME

Although I've been working in the video game industry for seven years now, I don't normally like to talk online about games I've worked on. I prefer to keep a degree of separation between my online persona and work persona (worksona?), because I like to not have random angry gamers yelling at me. This is all to say that Project RyME is a rare example of a game that I tested and created music for as my online persona - meaning that I'm obviously a little biased.

I summarized RyME best in my post describing how I made the music. It's a "really cool mystery-puzzle game that takes place entirely in a desktop computer," which "involves lots of file viewing, web sleuthing, running programs, and of course playing video games." Project RyME imagines a much humbler internet, one that I think the folks here on Flounder in particular might enjoy a lot.

One major thing I really like that I didn't mention was that it has some of the most believable dialogue between online characters that I've seen in a game, regardless of size or budget. The game features a fake instant messaging client, through which you communicate with many of the main characters in a group chat. This posse of chuckleheads is clearly written by someone who personally understands the dynamics of online friendships. The characters write in distinct, yet authentic voices, and after talking with each character for long enough, you could probably identify each speaker's messages even without seeing their avatar and username. I was so immersed in the dialogue, that I ended up following a similar arc to the kind I would if I were really in the situation presented in the game. I initially read the main chat room, but didn't bother reading the "off-topic" channel until a couple of hours in, having warmed up to the characters enough to care about what else they had to say. Genuinely an impressive accomplishment.

Balatro

I quite like Balatro. I honestly don't have much to say about it from a personal perspective, pick a random positive review from anywhere out of a hat, and I'll probably agree with most of what it has to say. The game doesn't feel like a true personal favorite of mine, it's simply a game I enjoy a lot.

Abandoned Deck and Ghost Deck are my two favorites to play with, in case you were wondering. With the former, it's fun having a thin 40 card deck that's easy to build around, since all face card builds are automatically off the table, and you can more easily count on drawing specific cards. With the latter, I love having more spectral cards to work with, and getting an early Ankh can enable some real bonkers runs.

Nine Sols

This is the closest I have to an actual personal favorite game from this year. I really enjoyed it, I still need to sit with it longer to decide how I ultimately feel. If I ever feel like replaying it, that'll be a good sign.

I could describe Nine Sols by just telling you it's Hollow Knight with Sekiro combat. But that's lazy and tells you nothing if you're not familiar with either game. It's a 2D action-exploration game, in which the main idea behind of the combat is to parry attacks from enemies, and counterattack when you identify an opening. Parrying feels very responsive and very satisfying, and as you gain more abilities for both fighting and navigation, the game starts to feel pretty spectacular.

The story of is revealed piece by piece, I'd argue by necessity - the way in which all of its dots are connected are complicated enough that describing the whole plot linearly is a fool's errand. In essence, you take the role of an iconoclastic little fox guy who metes out justice on the titular nine antagonists, and learns about friendship along the way.

One aspect that largely went over my head were the sci-fi daoist themes of the game. My very rudimentary understanding of daoism and the text within the game were enough for me to get the gist of it, but I could sense there were nuances around every corner that I was missing out on. Someone more educated than me would probably get even more out of this game than I did. However, even as a layperson, I appreciated what it was going for, it did make for a memorable and unique experience I haven't gotten anywhere else.