Game of the Year 2024
A little late with this post, but 2024 was another year filled with good games to play. Less so for those in and around the game industry but that seems to be a continuing trend unfortunately.
Honourable Mentions
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - Good follow up but the dual protagonist really messes with the pacing. You want to do the bonds and other side quests but the A plot really just moves in a way that doesn't have space for them.
Caravan SandWitch - Nice little exploration game, a chill time driving around the leftovers of an exploited world.
Songs of Conquest - A great bite sized Heroes of Might and Magic like, really condensed down into a strategy game where a 4P skirmish can be done in a couple of hours.
Age of Mythology Retold - A great remake of my favourite of the Age series (look I know we aren't going to get a remake of Galactic Battlegrounds but it would be extremely funny)
Destiny 2: The Final Shape - A great finale to what they've been building to for years. Prismatic is a great new system for build customization, Pale Heart is a great area, new raid was fun. Might have been on the actual list if I hadn't found a lot of the live game-ness kind of rotten (have for a while tbh). Going from this is is as good as it gets to no longer wanting to play the game at all.
Fallout London - A kind of great, complicated, messy and ambitious mod of a game I did not like very much. It's a pretty uneven experience but it's also some of the best Fallout I've played in a long time.
My Top Ten
10 - Dungeons of Hinterberg
Recovering from burnout by adventuring in the magical Austrian Alps with actual magic! It's a good time, good little dungeons for you to go through and plenty of folk to hang out with during your down time. They do some fun stuff in those dungeons with puzzle design and the times they change perspective away from behind the back are really neat.
9 - Dragons Dogma II
I kept meaning to play the original and just never did, I did have a good time with the sequel. Really like the Pawn system, it's just a good way to get you to swap out characters and also have them help you out in small ways like acting as quest guides. Some fo the classes were really fun to play but others felt like kind of a slog (Archer I'm looking at you). Some really fun quest design in it as well, trusting you to fail or succeed all on your own even if it is occasionally a bit too obtuse for its own good.
8 - STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl
A true sequel to STALKER for good and bad. I feel like if you didn't like those old games this will not change your mind. But that game was always kind of singular, even Metro for all it's similarities doesn't hit the same notes. And I played it at launch and it was extremely messy, had a moment where in the span of 10 minutes had a character say thanks so much for saving us to getting a call saying they're all dead. To say nothing of performance issues. But despite all that nothing quite matches being in the Zone. Creeping your way through anomalies trying to get out some trinket. Panicked shotgun blasts as bloodsuckers appear from nowhere. Valiantly running away from a group of bandits because your ambush failed and instead of taking them out one by one there are 10 guys with gun firing at you and your gun just jammed.
7 - Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Okay a December 2023 game, but also it's an Owlcat CRPG it's a long one. Just a warning the level up system is extremely intimidating but is more straight forward than it first appears but also Owlcat are a bit maximalist in this regard and is kind of a complaint you can level at a good chunk of their work. But nothing else really lets you steep in the grim dark world of 40K like this and the imperium really is a miserable place and getting to weave your own path through it is so much fun. Noble politics, the spectre of the inquisition and the threat of Chaos that looms over everything you do (look this human empire based their entire FTL travel system by taking jaunts through the hell dimension, they might have it coming to them). And there is just a really good tactical combat system underneath all of it.
6 - Satisfactory
Out of Early Access and it's better than ever. Love to build a factory and optimize production chains. But like better than that I like the exploration aspect that you get in Satisfactory, there's good reason to go out put on your jetpack and go exploring. The alien items scattered high and low throughout the world provide you really good bonuses that can then feed into your production line. Did I need a couple new train lines between my bases, kinda. Should I have fixed up my factory instead of adding yet another conveyor belt across my base, maybe. Should I have made a proper way to dispense of nuclear waste instead of what I did, yes probably. But that's the fun of it a bigger better factory producing more and more junk.
5 - Balatro
Just a really clever game. Lots of ways to manipulate your actual deck and a whole host of different jokers to mess with scoring. Does so much messing with the familiar scoring of poker hands while having it's own entire set of challenges it puts before you to beat. Beat it with all the base decks and a couple of the challenges, but I haven't gone through most of the harder difficulties. Also play Big two a great Canto card game that was one of the inspirations.
4 - Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II
A very different 40K game, that benefits from knowing lore but doesn't need it (you really don't want to get into the mech), the story is pretty uncomplicated. But seeing a swarm of Tyranid clamber up the walls to gut an imperial guard line is just looks incredible and there's really a sense of scale to the whole conflict that's happening in the system. The combat feels weighty and impactful, and you really make use of the mixed combat of close and ranged combat weaving shots in between swings of a chainsword. Really shines in multiplayer and probably best played that way, the actual class based missions outside the main campaign are really good as well. Just really good different classes that go deeper into particular play styles (Shout out to the Vanguard, grapple hook into melta rifle into chainsword, great combo).
3 - Metaphor: ReFantazio
It's so good to have this team move on from a high school setting. You get to have the story be much more explicitly political (even for all it's stumbles in this regard), but it's also nice to have Persona like with characters of different ages and backgrounds interact with very different life experiences. And it's also good to see refinement to what will be very familiar if you're coming from Persona, Bonds definitely work better structurally than Social Links and there are some great ones here Heismay's being a real standout. The Archetypes are a cool job system that let you make a ton of different builds with very different focuses. Really great characters to take some time to hang out with in a story with some really unexpected twists and turns.
2 - Tactical Breach Wizards
A great tactics game that is just filled with humour, great characters and plenty of people that deserve to get put out of windows. The latest game in Tom Francis' defenestration series and it's a wonderful XCOM style tactics game. The abilities of your crew are all great and your limited upgrade points means you're going to need to pick and choose which sucks because they're all great options that let you do very different things on the field. But one of the things that really holds this together for me is the story. Less in what the story actually is but in the way it's told. Lots of it gets told through short scenes of characters in a place talking to each other and gets by with just a lot of sharp writing and just a really fun way of letting you into character interiority that feels very in place in a slightly fantastical world with Storm Witches and Traffic Warlocks.
1 - 1000xRESIST
And finally my game of the year. This is just an all round fantastic sci-fi story but also one that's kind of hard to talk about. There's some exploration and light puzzles but for the most part it's a narrative game that deeply cares about generational trauma, the 2019 Hong Kong protests, Covid and remembering. All inside the trappings of this sci-fi trappings of being stuck inside this small group of clones, each their own person, while you dig through memories that aren't your own trying to find out what was important.
One of the things that really makes this special for me is a bit more personal but does come from having grown up in Hong Kong and that that sentence just feels so much heavier than it did once upon a time. It's probably been over 20 years since I lived in Hong Kong, spent most of my childhood growing up there and I don't want to claim more on this than I deserve to here. But it's been hard over the last six years (look there's more to HK politics than that but lets just say six) seeing one bad news story after another whether that's the 45 pro-democrats being sentenced to jail for running a primary election or seeing photos from Victoria Park on June 4, once home to a Tiananmen Square vigil now just being patrolled by cops, saying nothing about 2019 itself and displays of police violence and photos of them filling the streets with tear gas week after week. I mostly wanted have that as a preamble to say that part of this game is a punch in the gut, it's game so full of heart, pain, joy and regret. There's so much more than that too but it should really be played and seen for itself. But I don't think I'm ever really going to get a game story that hits me like in this way ever again. sunset visitor 斜陽過客 made something really remarkable and it's a really great one.