Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022 – 2023
I think I actually played enough games this year for me to curate some highlights rather than discussing absolutely everything for once.
As usual I’ve skipped a fair proportion of the year’s big releases – I have been holding off on starting Astro Bot or Indy (and other things) until I upgrade my ‘home cinema’ setup a bit.
So, in the approximate order in which I played them:
Animal Well
2024 was a good year for solo- (or at least tiny team-) developed games. Animal Well is a good an example of the potential benefits of this approach (in the same way that Transport Tycoon, Undertale, Horace, Fez, Jeff Minter’s games, etc. etc. are). It was built from the ground up by designer Billy Basso over a period of several years and has a very distinctive look and feel as a result.
Animal Well’s USP is that it’s a Search Action game (what we’re calling Metroidvanias now) where the available tools that you can collect to unlock more of the world can (in theory) be acquired in any order. This works surprisingly well – among my friends who played around the same time, everyone seemed to take a different route. (It must have been an absolute nightmare to playtest.)
As many reviewers have noted, the game really does manage to recapture the thrill of discovery of the early ‘arcade adventure’ games – secrets are everywhere and the player frequently feels clever for working out novel uses of their toolset.
It’s usually fairly obvious when you need a specific tool to progress, and there’s quite a lot of leeway for overcoming obstacles with the ‘wrong’ tools – it’s well worth checking out speed running videos (after you’ve finished the game) to see what’s possible if you have ridiculous concert pianist dexterity.
Filling out the map and beating the end boss takes enough time and effort to leave the player coming away feeling satisfied, but for hardcore completionists there are several further strata of secrets to unlock. This leads to probably my main criticism of the game – there isn’t quite a clear enough delineation between puzzles that can be solved entirely with the tools and information available in the game itself, and those that are intended to be solved with external information (or by comparing notes with other players on Reddit).
It would surely not have been that much trouble to hide some of these meta-puzzles until after the credits to prevent players who don’t want to engage with ARG mysteries from wasting their time banging their heads on a brick wall. Beyond my personal distaste for the current fad of putting Kit Williams style cryptic treasure hunts in games that don’t really need them, it could also be argued that they have implications for game preservation – the clues external to the game will eventually go offline.
But let’s not end on a sour note. Animal Well is a great self-contained experience. It’s also worth pointing out that it has a sense of humour – I was a bit wary based on the pre-release trailer as the gloomy lighting and eerie ‘medieval tapestry’-like character design (typified by the nightmarish Dog/Cat Ghost Thing that has become the game’s Dobkeratops), but there is a lot of playfulness in there too (especially once you obtain a specific powerup that lets you see graffiti and murals painted on many of the game’s walls).
Animal Well gets a ‘strong recommend’ from me.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Speaking of mysteries, if anyone can enlighten me as to why I wrote down the bullet point “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” in my notes for this game I’d appreciate it.
I think I was alluding to how the modern Lego games are a somewhat dubious fusion of cutting edge AAA visual techniques grafted onto extremely dated and creaky engine technology.
It’s very jarring to go from appreciating the stunning materials, lighting and microscopic details on the ‘careworn’ plastic characters one moment, only to spend the next 20 minutes slipping off a narrow platform, or getting trapped behind one of the game’s many, many invisible walls forcing a reload, while the camera lurches around like a drunken seagull as if the last 20 years of interface refinement hadn’t happened.
I think it had been at least 15 years since I last played a Lego game before I picked this up as a PSN freebie. The amount of technological advancement that TT Games have brought to bear in the intervening time is of course extraordinary. However a worrying amount of ‘progress’ seems to have come in the form of scale.
Skywalker Saga has thirty or more huge pseudo-open world levels covering all the major locations in all nine of the main Star Wars films, and each and every one of them is packed with hours of collect-’em-up activities. (The game shrewdly opens with the original trilogy, before the Disney movies and finally the prequels – my interest tailed off pretty sharply once Jar Jar Binks turned up.)
There are also hundreds of playable characters to unlock and reams of ‘lore’. The game’s Marvin The Paranoid Android-esque H1NT Droid constantly berates the player for caring about collecting all this stuff, which seems less and less like a joke and more like a cry for help from the crunched developers the longer the game goes on.
Maybe I’m being a hypocrite (as someone who has happily sunk hundreds of hours into No Man’s Sky – as well as other open world games and MMOs – over the years), but I think there comes a point where you have to question the social responsibility of making a kids’ game that would take several children working in round the clock shifts the entirety of their summer holidays to 100%. At the very least I think the market can do without another Lego Star Wars game for a few years now.
Bonus Trivia: Alternative comedy fans take note that this is (to my knowledge) the first game ever to have a playable character both voiced by and modeled on Adrian Edmondson – previous games (such as How to Be a Complete Bastard on the Spectrum and the Pepperami licensed game Animal! for the PC) offering only one or the other. I love living in the future.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
I’ll admit that I haven’t played an awful lot of modern point-and-click adventure games (outside of the early Telltale games, Amanita Design and Ron Gilbert’s new games), but I’m confident in saying that TGYH represents the genre evolving into its ultimate form. It’s strictly linear and features what can only very loosely be classed as ‘puzzles’ (usually little more than a hotspot somewhere on screen that your tiny character has to slap), and yet somehow it still manages to be one of the best games of the year.
TGYH is the story of a salesman who is sent to a town in the north of England, and spends a day getting caught up in the increasingly bizarre drama of the locals’ everyday lives while waiting for a meeting with the town’s mayor. It’s been compared to the Beano, Viz and Reeves and Mortimer by those attempting to pigeonhole the style of slightly grubby surreal humour, but none of those comparisons are entirely accurate.
The humour is very childish and broad, and mostly hearty and good-natured, but you may detect a slight streak of mean-spirited art student snickering sometimes poking through (fnar). I don’t think the game is looking down on working class people as some have argued, but it has a tendency to reflexively make the stupidest joke to fill any silence (e.g. “I’m eating for two… and I’m pregnant!”) landing somewhere between Zucker Abrahams Zucker and Beavis and Butthead.
There are plenty of laugh out loud moments, brought off with panache with some very slick and inventive animation and one of the most naturally hilarious voice casts ever assembled for a game including Matt Berry, David ‘Swatpaz’ Ferguson, Em Humble and Jon Blyth – who I saw the other day had been deservedly nominated for a Games BAFTA. (Congratulations Log, sorry I made it sort of weird when you didn’t immediately recognise me as the guy you once gave a reproduction of The Fallen Madonna With The Big Boobies painting from ‘Allo ‘Allo to over a decade earlier when we last met at the PCZONE party last year. For you, it was Tuesday.)
If the game was longer, or more saggily paced, I can easily see it not working anywhere near as well, so the developers should get some credit for judicious editing. Really the only issues I found with the game were maybe one or two slightly too well hidden hotspots blocking my progress for a matter of minutes, and the subtitles going out of sync during fast scenes (which has probably been patched by now anyway). Another ‘strong recommend’ from me and another solid hit for publishers Panic Inc.
Tunic
The (very early) point at which I stopped playing Tunic was when I couldn’t find anything else on the map except an enemy blocking the route. I turned on ‘god mode’ to at least see if getting past this enemy was what I needed to do, and found myself in a dark, ugly industrial late game area that looked like every cheesy Renderware Gauntlet clone I’d played on the Gamecube, where my character was continuously bombarded with noisy explosions by offscreen enemies.
The thought of inching through the game’s mysteries to get to this nightmarish location the long way round was so unappealing I immediately uninstalled. Congratulations, Tunic’s developers, on somehow creating the opposite of the ‘Super Nashwan Power‘ abilitease.
I don’t have the patience for games like Myst. I bounced off Tunic very quickly and you could (justifiably) argue that I probably didn’t give it a fair shake. But in my defence I will say that the argument that you have to play a game for several hours before it clicks can only be stretched so far. If the advice to new players is also ‘turn on invincibility’, my suspicions as to how much goodwill you’re extending to this game purely because it reminds you of playing Zelda III for the first time are going to be raised further.
Tunic is a somewhat technically wobbly game (fussy collision, lots of framerate hitches on PS5 – I dread to think what it’s like on Switch) that confuses early Sierra/Infocom style smug obscurantism for enjoyable puzzle solving. The central conceit of recreating the experience of playing an untranslated game without the manual in practice just leads to a lot of tedium early on as the game withholds a functional map or a short term goal to work toward (or even a sprint button, at first) from the player.
It’s also something that doesn’t really read in the same way for players outside the age bracket and geographical location of the developers. Playing import games might seem novel to American millennials, but grey imports were commonplace for 1990s console players in Europe (where many games were released much later – if they were at all – than in the rest of the world), so Tunic’s insistence that Japanese games of that era are intentionally inscrutable and exotic comes across as… dubious at best.
I can’t really speculate on the circumstances of Tunic’s development. It’s a game that had a protracted development cycle but didn’t release with the level of polish that would usually imply. There are lots of cases of games following this kind of ‘Apocalypse Now’ development trajectory, where project scope and schedule don’t quite meet in the middle for whatever reason. Maybe if things had gone slightly differently I’d be moaning about Animal Well and praising Tunic here. I do wonder how early that ‘god mode’ option went into the menu, though.
And yes it’s presumptuous of me to say that my personal reaction to the game trumps the generally glowing critical reception it got. It’s found an audience, sure, but I suspect that it won’t be remembered as enthusiastically as more obviously compelling games of its ilk ten years from now.
A strong ‘play Death’s Door instead, it’s much more polished and will frustrate you in a GOOD way’ from me.
Immortals of Aveum
I think the most interesting thing about this game is that it presumably went through the conventional publishing process, and yet still somehow made it all the way through to release in spite of being clearly broken in really obvious, fundamental ways.
I can just about see the game making sense in the abstract, presented as the proposition “we’re going to make a fantasy Call of Duty, in the same way that Titanfall 2 was a space sci-fi Call of Duty”. If we assume Titanfall 2 made enough money to answer the follow up question of “Why?”, it’s peculiar that nobody thought to then ask “How?” before greenlighting development.
The player character (an insufferable young adult fiction trainee wizard) walks down a series of highly detailed, perfectly generic disguised corridors, intermittently shooting stock fantasy enemies (men with impractically tall medieval helmets, etc.) with colour-coded plasma balls. There is no discernable audiovisual feedback for taking or inflicting damage. Missing this fundamental component of an FPS, criticism of how well or poorly it does anything else is redundant. It’s a house with no roof or walls.
If there is one positive outcome that can come from Immortals of Aveum existing, I hope it’s that id Software’s art department play it and notice that it’s worryingly difficult to distinguish screenshots of the maps from screenshots of Doom Eternal, and this leads them to contemplate whether a game franchise about space marines kiling demons in hell needs to be slathered in quite so much Dungeons & Dragons sauce.
*Holds finger to earpiece* “Doom: The Dark Ages?” Oh. Oh dear.
Days Gone
I’ve had this game sitting in my PSN account forever, but it took the Summer games drought and endorsements from several people whose critical opinions I trust to finally give it a spin – and I’m glad I did.
One thing that it quickly made me realise is that my impressions of last gen open world / ARPG games have been hopelessly spoiled by Cyberpunk 2077. It’s really not fair to compare a PC-native game which had a vast blockbuster budget and a 12 year development cycle to obviously much more modest endeavours, and Days Gone manages to hold up pretty well. It gets the (clearly overstretched) Unreal 4.0 engine to do some miraculous things (much in the way that Batman Arkham Knight pushed the previous gen engine to its limits), so for the most part I found I could overlook the invisible walls, slightly janky traversal, lack of any environmental interaction and the extreme paucity of incidental dialogue from NPCs.
Days Gone is a game about a man called Deacon St. John (Sam Witwer), a squeaky clean biker gang member employed as a bounty hunter by a succession of terrible people who have emerged as camp leaders in the wake of a zombie apocalypse in rural Oregon. ‘Deek’ is driven through the game’s narrative primarily by the search for his missing (and possibly dead) wife, as well as by trying to keep the remaining outposts of civilisation from collapsing due to internecine fighting or attacks from zombies and cultists, while at the same time (sort of) investigating the nature of the zombie plague in an uneasy alliance with some mysterious FEMA-ish scientists.
There’s also a side plot about trying to keep Deacon’s best pal ‘Boozer’ alive as he battles blood poisoning, depression, comedy alcoholism and general existential malaise – which feels like someone decided to take the Sony blockbuster trope of finding a universal experience that most of their core demographic can relate to and apply it to ‘having aging parents’ rather than ‘having kids’ for once.
Days Gone is built around three technical pillars which work extremely well:
1. Motorcycle. Deacon’s bike (which behaves more like a dirtbike than a Harley Davison) handles fantastically. You can in theory ride it during combat, but for the most part I found it a bit fiddly for this, mostly using it to run over the odd zombie and act as a mobile save/ammo refill point during big fights.
Chucking the bike around with wild abandon, GTA-style, will damage it (and can easily get Deacon injured or killed). It has to constantly repaired (with salvaged scrap in the field, or at camp) and refueled, and if it becomes inoperable it doesn’t magically respawn somewhere convenient. Early in the game (when the bike’s fuel tank is tiny and Deacon is noisy and weak), running out of fuel can be a major setback, but as you start to capture more of the map it becomes less of a pressing concern.
It could be argued that the bike’s limited range discourages exploration of the world (which is very hostile to the player on foot, spawning a rabid wolf behind the camera approximately every 15 picoseconds), but as there’s not a lot of interest to find in the world perhaps that’s just as well.
2. Dynamic weather. While it doesn’t have a major impact on gameplay (getting stuck in mud or buried in snow would get annoying), Days Gone’s weather system is impressively well implemented. Rain affects bike handling (for instance you can slide down hills to conserve fuel) and enemy behaviour. Streams and rivers can freeze over in cold conditions. The transition from deep snow to balmy sunshine can sometimes happen a bit quickly, hurting the illusion somewhat, but other than that it’s beautifully realised especially considering the engine tech and target hardware.
3. Crowds. This is the biggie. There are hordes of (sometimes many hundreds of) zombies roaming the map following pheromone trails and congregating in specific areas to rest or feed. Early in the game, Deacon is so puny and useless that dealing with one zombie at a time can be touch and go (a bit like Resident Evil 4), so alerting a swarm is usually immediately fatal. But the brilliant thing is that right up to the end of the game, even as your odds of survival gradually improve, the sound and spectacle of being chased by hundreds of zombies doesn’t stop being a white knuckle experience.
You can sneak around a horde setting up traps, or thin out their numbers by leading them through choke points and throwing molotovs, but you’re almost guaranteed to end up running away with your stamina depleted as they nip at your heels. (Right at the end of the game you get machine guns that can reliably drop one zombie per round, and a long list of all the remaining hordes to mop up, but even then it still manages to be stressful – a bit.)
From the earliest days, games (from Space Hulk to ZOMGies) have known that being chased by a crowd of angry baddies terrifies some deep primordial part of the human brain, and Days Gone is the game that finally capitalises on that.
(There are also the obligatory crafting, stealth, tracking and fighting human enemies as per Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us, et al, which are functional but never challenging or interesting.)
While the core loop (tool up, drive somewhere, kill things, repeat) remains sufficiently compelling throughout the game, some other aspects are a bit more disappointing.
Days Gone is a needlessly long game, where a lot of the playing time is taken up with busywork and actual narrative and character development are spread very thin.
The player is never once given any meaningful decision to make. The game is structured so you can either see through each of the story threads to completion or miss out on some rewards. Nothing you decide to do can ever block of any other ‘content’ from being accessible.
You’ll sometimes find hostages in the world that you can choose to send to one or other of the camps to gain favour (in practical terms, meaning leveling up your weapons or your bike faster), but all the camp leaders (with one exception) are objectively evil scoundrels. One of the leaders you encounter early on is using their camp’s inhabitants as slave labour, and while Deacon grumbles for a moment he doesn’t challenge the status quo at all.
Later on you encounter a militia leader who is presented as a quite out-of-his-depth religious zealot, driven mad by power (who you eventually do overthrow – spoilers I guess?). But the game falls over itself to stress that actually he’s not an evangelical Christian conservative type (which he obviously would be in reality), he’s actually really progressive but just has to make tough decisions, what with the zombie apocalypse and all. Which feels like the writers trying to have their cake and eat it (in terms of trying not to offend any potential audience segment). And don’t get me started on what the game seems to think ‘anarchists’ are (presented rather unconvincingly as what the unworldly protagonist thinks they are).
The writing in this game is, in a nutshell, a load of old cobblers. While I vaguely recall that the game’s director has made some dickheaded comments on social media, I don’t think the problem stems from the game trying to push any specific worldview – it’s just too inarticulate in what it’s trying to say and too easily buffetted by publisher pressure to commit to any position strongly.
On the more basic level (some charismatic characters go on a genre TV adventure), it all works well enough, largely thanks to Sam Witwer not being annoying or obnoxious, and trying his best with the generic material.
Which reminds me, the worst decision the developers made in the game was having Deacon and the other characters constantly announce the current status of the game through speech barks. I guess they did some market research that said that players don’t like it if they come back to a game after a long absence and aren’t immediately reminded of who they are and what they were doing, but this is an absolutely terrible solution to that problem!
Every single time you get into the vicinity of human enemies, Witwer has to give an extremely awkward speech about how they’re DEFINITELY murderers so it’s okay to kill them all in spite of whatever musings about frontier justice the game might be making in the plot at the same time. It’s very silly.
(Also, regarding the thing that went around about how nobody in the game remembers what lavender is (ROFL! LOL etc.), in spite of the zombie apocalypse only having happened two years prior: yeah, this is the game doing the ‘status barks’ thing above, where the characters have to awkwardly mention lavender a bunch of times in case the player forgot what you were looking for, it is not an example of bad writing, it’s quite possible that they were using a more obscure plant name earlier in development and didn’t rewrite one particular line when they changed it, this is not an effectual dunk on the game’s writing, shut up.)
In summary I’d say Days Gone is a solid 8/10. Mechanically it’s streets ahead of most of the big Sony blockbusters (Horizon Zero Dawn had a much stronger mystery story though). It’s a shame they’re not making another one.
Ghostwire Tokyo
First things first: If you have this game on PS5, for the love of god put it in ‘performance’ mode. The game either defaults to, or offers without adequately explaining, a ‘quality’ mode with raytracing that absolutely tanks the framerate to little perceptible benefit.
I didn’t know what to expect when I started playing this game. Would it be a horror game? An action game? An RPG? Having finished it I’m still not really sure.
Ghostwire Tokyo is a supernatural fantasy/horror story about a human everyman who gets caught up in a supernatural cataclysm caused by a powerful occultist who has kidnapped his (the player character’s) sister to use in a ritual that will connect the mortal realm and the spirit realm and bring back his dead wife and daughter.
This cataclysm has caused a large area of central Tokyo to be trapped in a ‘time bubble’, with all the human occupants frozen as ‘spirits’. Interlopers from the spirit realm (the manifestations of negative energies in the living) have broken through and are trying to harvest the spirits.
The protagonist is brought back from the brink of death by the ghost of a paranormal investigator who possesses his body and grants him ‘supernatural fighting techniques’ that let him banish these visitors and harvest the spirits themselves (so they can be whisked away to safely via ‘ghost transmission devices’ hidden in phone booths). Cue several hours of wandering around the empty city doing errands for ghosts and investigating mysteries as you tail the main baddie back to his lair in Tokyo Tower.
What this entails in gameplay terms is exploring a quite small, almost entirely static urban open world, doing all the generic Ubislop open world activities (collecting things, fighting wandering monsters, feeding many dogs, doing side missions, expanding your map by purging ‘Torii gates’). This sounds quite dull, and indeed it mostly is, but it’s where the game diverges from that formula that it starts to get more intriguing.
The game’s tone is quite enjoyably weird. It takes the same ‘slice of life’ presentation of Tokyo as the Like a Dragon games (although with an even greater level of real world veracity), but just takes it as read that all Japanese folklore and mythological creatures are real and tangible forces in the world. It does for Japanese folklore what Deus Ex did for conspiracy theories. (How’s that for a box quote? Several years too late?) It’s somewhat educational, for a player who hasn’t read up on this stuff.
The combat is simplistic and a bit ponderous (99.95% of battles take place on a flat plane, you move slowly and can’t take cover, and enemies delight in attacking you while you’re winding up an attack, cancelling it, which can get frustrating), but once you get the hang of it (and once you get the magic attack that is basically a machine gun) it’s becomes quite engaging.
Combat is built around a mechanic where if you visibly damage an enemy almost to the point of death it becomes stunned and you can remotely yank out its ‘core’ for a bonus, even (with a bit of skill and timing) doing this for multiple enemies at once. You can also rip out the cores from unalerted enemies which feels great every single time (much like Adam Jensen’s takedowns), and the game delights in setting up situations with very generous ‘stealth’ criteria (the enemies always prioritise syphoning souls over noticing the player) so you can perform this move over and over again while cackling like a loon.
(I also appreciated that the developers took advantage of the fact that the enemies are ghosts to not bother making any animations for them traversing the environment, and simply having them teleport away as soon as they hit the edge of whatever surface they’re on.)
Because you’re also technically a ghost, you can walk on water and don’t take falling damage. You eventually get a grappling hook and gliding ability, and can parkour around the city’s rooftops freely to grab extra loot and engaging in (or avoid) combat at will.
One of the highlights of the game are the ‘hallucination’ sequences which sometimes occur during story missions in indoor locations, where the ghosts perform mindbending visual tricks. These start out as fairly basic effects (elongating corridors, upside-down rooms, chairs and clutter spontaneously stacking up to block doorways, etc.) but as the game progresses they become properly impressive demoscene-like choreographed sequences. It’s just a shame there aren’t more of them, and they’re bookended by so much repetitive collecting and fighting.
One of the lowlights of the game is that the quest-giving NPC ghosts all look a bit crap – fuzzy indistinct blue blobs. I think the developers have done this intentionally to disguise that they’re using the same few character models over and over, but it’s a bit of an oversight considering how often you encounter them. If they’d used the ghost shader from Luigi’s Mansion they’d’ve easily earned another point out of ten.
(Also there’s a ‘gesture based’ spellcasting mechanic which the game lets you skip every time with no penalty – which begs the question of why they bothered to retain it, as it’s clearly a failed experiment that adds nothing to the experience.)
Ghostwire really feels like nothing more than a tight, linear ten hour game that has been stretched into a very thin open world based on publisher dogma that it has to offer 40+ hours of ‘content’. It doesn’t quite come off as a ‘full length’ AAA game, but it’s not like any other game I played this year. Also it has capsule vending machines and Shinji Mikami plays the piano at one point.
Queens
Queens is LinkedIn’s answer to Wordle. No wait, come back. Of all the recent web games in this ‘coffee break’ appointment game format, it’s the only one that has had be returning to most days (when I remember) to keep my streak going.
It’s such a simple puzzle that I assume it has to have been done previously. A 10×10 grid is divided up into ten coloured regions. The object of the game is to place exactly one chess queen into each region so that there’s only one in each row and column and none are touching (including diagonally). The challenge is to place all the queens as quickly as possible without making a mistake or using a hint. The puzzles are authored rather than algorithmically generated, and they can get quite fiendish.
I assume in the fullness of time there will be a way to play it without needing to look at LinkedIn, but for now it’s enough of a draw for me to tolerate glancing at a feed of genAI garbage and people who I worked with for a week twenty years ago promoting their rancid political views for a few seconds every day.
My First Gran Turismo
This actually is my first Gran Turismo, my only previous experience of the series being watching a petrolhead mate play the first one for hours on end over 20 years ago. It’s a little stand-alone demo of the most recent game in the franchise, letting you play a few races and challenges and carry your unlocked cars through to the full game if you decide to be upsold on it.
It’s a really nice visual showcase of the PS5. And it really drove home to me that I have no idea what I’m doing when I play ‘serious’ driving sims (erm, I can’t drive). I’m not going to rush out and buy a steering wheel controller and a ‘racing chair’ any time soon, but I might pick up the full game if it’s ever on sale. There’s not much more I can say, really – if you came here looking for expert driving game opinions you typed “Mike Channell” really wrong into Google.
Marvel Rivals
I guess I’m out of the loop with the current state of the art in production values for PC/console F2P games, because Marvel Rivals (the character models in particular) looks absolutely jaw-dropping to me. Once you get into the game it is, to my old eyes and atrophied reflexes, the same basic shooter grey goo as: TF2, Fortnite, Overwatch, etc. There are dozens of characters and squillions of synergies between their abilities. Nothing is explained in the game itself – I think you’re assumed to have watched someone stream it for hours before starting.
It didn’t get its hooks into me in the same way Apex Legends did a few years ago, or even The Finals (briefly) earlier in the year. I assume there’s some strategic depth to be found in there – or maybe mainstream shooters really are just glorified chatrooms now. I’m mainly noting it down here so we can all laugh at this amazingly stupid tweet from Blizzard’s Mike Ybarra again.
Balatro
I played many, many hours of Balatro over the Christmas holidays. I feel like I’ve still only scratched the surface. It’s a brilliant achievement of design, and I’d happily call it my game of the year. I think it’s particularly exciting to me because it hints at other games that could be made using these design conventions. It’s opened up a new genre branch which has a lot more scope for diverse and thoughtful design (and not just ‘Balatro but with insert-different-casino-game’ clones) than the last game to catch on like this (Vampire Survivors), which really was little more than a Skinner Box at heart. I think I’ll have more to say about it once I’ve digested it fully.
For now I will add my voice to the chorus that PEGI’s decision to stand by their 18+ rating for Balatro (imposed on the basis of the 100% gambling-free game referencing poker’s mechanics) is outrageously, indefensibly stupid.
Arbitrarily ruling elements of game design as harmful is a direct threat to artistic expression and innovation.
What next? Any game that makes reference to anything that can be gambled on in the real world being rated 18? All forms of sporting competition? Horses? Money? Fixed odds betting terminals have graphics, better rate every game with graphics 18+ to be on the safe side. Teaching someone the scoring card combinations from poker is not functionally equivalent to showing them step by step how to shoot heroin or build a bomb, you absolute freaks.
But of course the EA Sports FC games, trojan horse for the lucrative, real money FUT lootbox game, are still rated 3+ ever year. I think PEGI should ruddy well (diplomacy mode engaged) try to be a bit more consistent in how they apply their rules.
Evergreens
(Deep breath.) Now we come to those games I’ve had in rotation every year for the past few years.
I think I’ve reached the end of the road with Marvel Snap. Every living card game has a finite lifespan, and for me I think the rot started setting in with the ‘Activate’ card ability (which didn’t seem to open up any particularly interesting new gameplay to justify the extra level of complication), as well as some unappealing monthly events (I think I’ve seen enough slight variations of Spawn for one lifetime now thanks). The really ugly new shader for foil cards was also a puzzling choice. But the main thing that’s broken the habit for me has been how unstable the mobile client seems to be now. Oh well, more time for Balatro.
In spite of the game being largely considered to be in its twilight years now that Light No Fire is on the horizon, No Man’s Sky saw some really strong updates (and accompanying expeditions) this year. The arrival of fishing, launched in tandem with the new water system, is a great case study for technology creating new affordances for gameplay. The Halloween expedition found a way to (at least momentarily) make the survival mechanics interesting again and is probably the nearest the game has come yet to having decent planetside combat. Ship customisation, overhauled space stations and ambulatory buildings all got added to the game in 2024 as well! Aside from earning the boy scout badges in the expeditions, I’ve also been getting back into basebuilding, following BeebleBum’s excellent tutorials on YouTube for some tips.
And yes, I’m still sometimes loading up Cyberpunk 2077 even though I’ve completely rinsed it at this point, just to soak up the atmosphere. I hold on to the (very irrational) sliver of hope that the most recent patch (which added a few verrrry minor features) was a dry run for getting the external Virtuos studio who worked on it to continue to support the game with more substantial new content in future.
Flash!
(Aa-ahh.) The Ruffle Flash emulator has come on in leaps and bounds over the last year, with the percentage of ActionScript 2 and 3 games that are now playable again steadily climbing. Some computationally complex later games (like Ant Karlov’s Knightron) are still running at far slower than full speed but I’m sure we’ll get there eventually.
I strongly recommend anyone who was into Flash games before Apple killed it in the early 2010s has a browse around Newgrounds to see what games have been brought back from the grave. Or if you are a young person who has no idea what anything in this section means, I also urge you to do this. There were a ton of interesting games and genres in the Flash ecosystem that didn’t make the leap to mobile or GameMaker/Unity and which are still worth playing and studying today.
YouTube
No time for a full roundup of good games-related video essays this year (you’ve probably already seen the Half Life 2 20th Anniversary documentary anyway), but Radio TV Solutions came through with a Christmas miracle – the whole of Breaking Bad retold in Half Life 2 VR. (You will probably want to watch Breaking Bad and/or Half Life But The AI Is Self Aware beforehand to ‘get’ this.) Until next year!
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