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veebs-hates-video-games · 6 months ago

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It's that time again where I make an entirely too long summary of every game I played this year. There were far too many of them this time around (well over 100, but some of them I only played long enough to know they're not my thing, and a bunch are weird short little things), so I'll try to keep it to a sentence or two for most of them. On the off chance anyone's interested in more of my thoughts they should nearly all have at least one other more detailed post on here somewhere, hopefully all properly tagged at this point and everything.

Also hopefully the formatting makes it easy to skim through, broken into categories and with each individual game bolded, because I would be astonished if anyone actually reads the entire thing. It's over 180 games and 7500 words, so, uh...good luck?

I think I'll just stick with the same categories I've used in the past couple years. On average the categories further down the list have things I liked more, but there are things in one category that I might've liked more or less than some things in the categories next to them, and they're mostly not really ordered within each category.

So with that said, let's start with the worst gaming experiences I had in 2024:

Bomb Dolls: Probably more fun with other people, but it was borderline unplayable for me so I didn't want to subject anyone else to it.

Sayonara Wild Hearts: Anything that feels like it was designed in a lab to give me seizures and migraines simultaneously isn't allowed to place higher than this.

Gwenblade: It tries to do something interesting, but it has a pretty profound lack of polish that makes it just not work.

Survivors of the Dawn: It must get better later on, but it felt so sluggish and unsatisfying at the beginning that I couldn't be bothered to find out.

Neverwinter Nights 2: I guess I still really don't get along with RTwP and most CRPGs.

Persona 5 Strikers: This finally convinced me to give up for good on the SMT/Persona games, because I clearly do not click with their pacing or storytelling conventions in general.

Mouthwashing: The most profound sensation of boredom I experienced all year. Extremely not my thing, but I'm pretty picky when it comes to horror.

On to games that weren't the worst but still completely failed to live up to whatever (possibly incorrect) expectations I had of them:

Strawberry Vinegar: Weird miss for ebi-hime, with characters that felt awkwardly written and like they didn't suit their ages.

Scanner Sombre: Incredible tech demo, frustrating game.

CrossCode: I liked most things about it except for the actual gameplay, which was really not my jam.

Nier: Automata: Somehow feels substantially worse to play than any other Platinum game I've ever played, and the story and characters completely failed to grab me in the first half dozen hours.

Death end re;Quest 2: Huge let down after how surprisingly interesting but flawed the first was. They dropped almost everything I liked about the original, and even though they thankfully toned down the visual fanservice, the character writing was enough worse to counter that.

Dead Cells: Seems like probably a pretty good game, but having pretty obvious influences from Dark Souls in your gameplay mechanics is usually a good way to make me not have a good time.

Owlboy: It's pretty? Not much else going for it.

Night in the Woods: I did genuinely like a lot of stuff about it, but it just felt like it wasn't really going anywhere, and some of the night scenes were impossible for me to see with my weird/bad vision without turning the screen brightness to retina-searing levels.

Her Name Was Fire: What if 20 Minutes Till Dawn except everything was slightly worse?

Final Fantasy XIII-2: The first half was great and felt like a weird hybrid of Radiant Historia and Pokemon with a Final Fantasy skin, but the closer I got to the end the worse everything about it got until I quit in the final area. A contributing part of why the entire FF series is now banished.

Muse Dash: It's alright? The UI is a nightmare about a trainwreck though.

Final Fantasy VII Remake: I love the metanarrative of the story commenting on itself and how much more fleshed out the characters are, but as a game I didn't have a very good time playing it, and I continue to not vibe with the way Nomura/Nojima tell stories. The other main reason FF is now banished.

God of War: I was pretty hopeful about Dad of Boy, but I just don't like how it feels to play. A contributor to why I'm increasingly skeptical of giving most AAA games a shot.

It gets so lonely here: Second person is not a valid POV (for me personally).

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor: The mining mechanic is pretty neat, but otherwise it's one of the less interesting/satisfying things I've played in the genre.

Spider-Man: Most stuff about it is...fine? But aside from the great movement nothing else really makes it above fine other than the typical stuff that comes with throwing lots of money at making a game. Another major reason why I'm increasingly wary of buying or playing most AAA games.

Vampire Survivors: Ode to Castlevania: The least fun I've ever had playing Vampire Survivors, almost entirely due to it not having its own separate adventure mode to introduce stuff on its own terms in more digestible chunks.

Neva: Not bad, but basically everything about it that's different from Gris is different in a way I don't personally like as much.

Once on a windswept night: see: It gets so lonely here

Stray: I only lasted a couple hours before getting bored. I don't even mind that it's mostly a walking simulator since I've enjoyed plenty of those since they were first a thing, but aside from the novelty of being a cat nothing about it really clicked with me.

Next we have games that I liked what they were doing overall but they're just not really my thing:

Gorogoa: Good art and a clever way to structure the puzzles and how you navigate them/between them, but it's not really my kind of puzzle game.

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights: Probably the closest I've come to liking a game with Souls-like influences. Well put together metroidvania that feels good to play, but the combat got exhausting the further I went.

Snakebird: The addition of gravity and puzzles make Snake a lot more interesting, but I wasn't into the flow of it enough to want to finish it.

Please, Touch the Artwork: Good framing device and clever way to turn recognizable art styles into puzzles, but the individual puzzles didn't stay interesting enough to me after a while.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder: It does some really clever stuff, but I think I just don't really jive with how movement feels in modern 2D Mario games anymore compared to the ones from the 80s and 90s (but I still love the 3D ones). Also maybe kind of a victim of how sometimes Nintendo polishes their games almost too much, and the removal of any rough edges ends up detracting a bit from things I personally like.

Toodee and Topdee: The dimension/perspective swapping is neat, but it wasn't quite enough on its own to pull me through the entire game.

Tens!: Reasonably satisfying, and a pretty polished presentation, but this one also didn't hold my interest all the way through.

The Shape of Things: Another one with good presentation and decent (but slightly janky) puzzle mechanics that didn't quite hook me.

OscarWildeCard: Excellent name, and card battles to determine who has the gayest dinner party is a fun idea, but it's not really my style of card game in the end.

From Ashes, Bloom: I really like the creature and how it moves and interacts, but in the end it's a tower defense game, and those have never been my thing.

Cypher: I really like Matthew Brown's puzzle games in general, and I liked this too at first, but once I got to the point where I couldn't mostly hold the puzzles entirely in my head anymore I lost interest. I probably would've had a great time with it when I was younger and had more patience for taking my own notes though.

Manifold Garden: It looks good and has some good ideas, but kind of like Antichamber I feel like it'd be more interesting to me if I didn't instantly already wrap my head around the way it messes with space. The burdens of having an intuitive understanding of unusual geometry, I guess.

Burly Men at Sea: Seemed like it had potential, but the UI is awkward enough on the Switch that I didn't feel like finding out.

Railbound: Another puzzle game where I liked learning how it works but didn't feel like sticking around beyond that.

Rabi-Ribi: It seems cute enough, but I didn't click with how movement feels and the pacing was a bit off for me.

Cureocity: Has a good premise, and I liked the idea of the combat system, but I felt like I wasn't getting enough out of it for what I was putting in.

Parallax: The core puzzle concept is solid, but it gets a little tedious having to run around the map to actually put solutions into action. Also the most broken default controller layout I've seen in a long time.

Kero Blaster: Nothing really wrong with it, but it didn't hook me. Definitely not another Cave Story.

Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist: There's almost something there and the art's pretty decent, but the Switch version is Not Great, and it feels like it could use a bit more work in general.

Psychopomp: Seems like there could potentially be something interesting going on there, but it's borderline unplayable with a controller.

Press Any Button: This one also might eventually go somewhere interesting, or at least it definitely hints at it, but the gameplay segments started getting pretty tedious before I found out.

stitch.: Great presentation of the puzzles, crappy mobile game presentation for the menus, and solidly average actual puzzles.

Thumper: Pretty unusual aesthetic and music style for a rhythm game, but I don't have the reaction time to keep up with it when brain no worky like lately.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: I can appreciate what they're going for, and it definitely addresses some of the issues I had with BotW/TotK, but I'm still having a really hard time getting as into it as older games in the series.

Spitkiss: I'm into the idea, and the presentation is really fun, but I bounced off somewhere in the middle as the levels got more heavily focused on tighter timing of actions. Seems fun for someone more into that sort of thing though.

After those we have the ones that are the most "fine, I guess" of the year that I had mixed feelings about:

Townscaper: More of a toy than a game, but I got it in a game bundle and messed around with it on a Steam Deck. It's fun briefly to see what you can make with it, but that's about it.

Little Noah: Scion of Paradise: Most of my time with it wasn't actually this year, but this is the year I concluded that even though the characters are cute and the way you build combos is kinda neat, the game itself is only ok. Also the Switch version doesn't run great.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R: The first 2/3 or so of it is great. The art style used in the remake is gorgeous, and the characters and running around doing typical JRPG stuff feels like all the things that made 90s JRPGs great. Then I got to what previously would've been disc 2 and it all fell apart into what makes 90s JRPGs so hard to go back to sometimes.

Fallow: I like most stuff about it except for actually playing it, which was kind of frustrating. Her music's still great though.

Ape Out: It's alright. I'm not very good at it.

Downwell: It's fine. I get what they're going for, and it feels like they succeeded, but I didn't stick with it super long.

Looking Up I See Only a Ceiling: This one gets an award for suffering the most from a bad translation or not being written in the creator's native language. It'd probably be pretty decent if that was cleaned up.

Astronomical Club for Queers: Dialogue's a bit awkward, but overall it shows potential for making something decent in the future.

Hardcore Cottagecore: This one has serious student project/game jam vibes. With some polish and balance they could make something alright though.

A Little to the Left: Deserves an award for "game that most makes me want to go replay Unpacking instead". Fine, but I lost interest after a while.

Twilight Survivors: I've definitely played worse bullet heaven games, but at least when I tried it this one didn't have much unique about it good or bad.

Geometry Survivor: It's close to being pretty decent, but it just doesn't quite feel good enough to play to me to stick with it too long.

Ikenfell: The characters are good and the story is ok, but I could've done without the gameplay. The "instant victory" button was one of my favorite buttons I pushed this year and saved the game enough for me to actually finish.

Star Ocean: First Departure R: It probably would've been more fun if I'd played it in the 90s. Significantly less compelling than SO2R but not actually bad or anything.

Cats Organized Neatly: Presentation's alright, but the process of solving the puzzles isn't the most satisfying for me.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Fixes a lot of the issues I had with BotW, and the abilities feel a lot more polished and like they complement each other better, but I still ultimately don't love the way these recent Zelda games play and am probably done with them until the next major franchise overhaul.

The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne: It's fine. There's just only so much it can really do in like ten minutes.

Jewel Match Solitaire Summertime: It's a perfectly competent solitaire game, just like all the other Jewel Match Solitaire games. Good for when brain no worky, but it doesn't stand out in any way.

Xenogears: The first time I tried playing it was before Xenosaga was even out. I tried going back to it to finally finish it, but I forgot how rough the translation was and how janky some stuff like the camera is. At least now I remember why I've never finished it.

One Deck Dungeon: It plays out in an interesting way with the way everything is built around dice rolls, but it just didn't grab me enough to get me to keep playing.

the static speaks my name: It was just strange enough to be a little bit interesting, but not strange enough to stick with me at all for more than a day or two.

Stray Cats in Cozy Town: Might be my least favorite Devcats game I've played because the different angle makes it harder to come up with a good search pattern.

TREE: Another ten minute free one. I liked it more before replaying it to get the last achievement.

Witcheye: Pretty unique movement and fun for a while, but the difficulty increase later in the game didn't feel like it fit as well with what the controls let me do.

RYB: Some pretty good puzzles, but the more mechanics are introduced the less well it reads visually.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia: I've tried more than once to go back and finish it, and while I still like most things about it, the map design and a couple enemy types annoy me enough that I finally had to accept I'm not going to beat this one.

Graceful Explosion Machine: Surprisingly well balanced and an interesting gameplay loop swapping between weapons, but sometimes I lose track of enemies in the visual clutter. Also it's physically painful for me to play some of the later levels.

Frincess&Cnight: Good pixel art and fun interactions between the two characters' abilities, but the increasingly tight timings and need to start levels over for any mistake got a little annoying at some point.

CARS: More interactive art than a game. Fun to poke at for a bit, but probably not leaving a lasting impression.

VOYAGER: Slightly more of a game than the previous one, but mostly it's just tracing out fun patterns with your orbit while pretty good music plays.

Dragon Quest XI S: I played the demo on Steam a while ago and loved it, but having to replay the entire opening dozen hours when I got the full game on the Switch was painful enough to make me lose interest. There's so much stuff it does well, but It sure does start slow.

Project X Zone: I do enjoy a lot of stuff about it, but there are so many levels that each take so long to finish that after a while it got kind of tedious.

A Slug's Dream: Pretty good puzzles and presentation, but at some point I drifted away and never went back.

Puddle Knight: Same as above.

Please Fix the Road: Also same as above.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout: The most atrociously paced intro ever before suddenly becoming very good a few hours in, but the tediousness of needing to replace all my stuff at once toward the end of the game instead of stuff opening up more gradually killed my enthusiasm before finishing it.

Otoko Cross: Pretty Boys Mahjong Solitaire: A friend gifted me Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire years ago as a joke, so I impulsively got this on sale in memory of that. Totally fine but nothing special as a game, and if they toned down the horniness a bit some of the character designs/outfits would actually be pretty cute.

Death Becomes You: Some decent ideas and an interesting world, but some of the writting is kind of off-putting and some of the endings feel kind of abrupt and unearned.

this morning I decided to die: I get what they were going for and can appreciate it, but it didn't entirely land for me.

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age: One of my favorite mainline FF games since the 90s, and I did genuinely have a pretty good time with it a lot of the time, but every time I got back into it it would pull some annoying crap to pull me back out again.

Tales of Berseria: I liked a couple of the characters enough to keep me playing for a while and the story is fine, but I got bored of the actual gameplay eventually and gave up.

Tales of Arise: Feels better to play than Berseria, but even though it hints at something interesting going on nothing in the first couple hours hooked me enough to get me to keep going.

KarmaZoo: I love the idea, but it doesn't get to go higher than this because it requires other people to play and I couldn't find any when I tried.

Margo: Definitely a fan of the art style, but the overall experience was only ok. It was probably somewhat negatively influenced by it being a pain to get it to run on the Steam Deck and still running terribly when it did, a very rare experience for me.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk: It continues the pattern of most Musou/Warriors games that aren't affiliated with Nintendo in some way just not really being as good these days. It's ok, but it's noticeably more clunky and less polished than even the original Hyrule Warriors was and just doesn't feel as good to play.

Moving on, next we have games that were pretty good and generally met my expectations:

Luna's Fishing Garden: I didn't love either difficulty option for the fishing minigame, and it dragged a bit toward the end, but overall it's pretty cute and chill. Special mention to the "you got a fish" animation for being great.

Kuukiyomi 2: Consider It More! - New Era: I apparently never mentioned this in a post anywhere, or at least I can't find it. Anyway, it's more of the same from the first one, which is a good thing for the most part. It's basically WarioWare, except the minigames are about being considerate (or being a jerk if you'd prefer) in various situations. Cheap, short, and a decent way to be amused for a little while.

TET: Cute, funny, includes recipes. A good use of ten minutes and $0 if preparing food for Vietnamese Lunar New Year sounds like a good time. Also feels much better with a touchscreen.

Clickolding: Like I said earlier this year, it's the most about sex work anything's ever been without explicitly stating it's about sex work, and it will do its best to make you vaguely uncomfortable about that. Didn't leave quite as much of an impression on me as their other game I played last year, Can Androids Pray, but still pretty good.

An Arcade Full of Cats: Not my favorite Devcats game ever, but still enjoyable. As someone old enough to remember arcades it was fun seeing all the terrible cat puns on old games, and they did a pretty good job of capturing the general feel.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore: Most of my time with this was before this year, but I finally made it through the last third of it. I have some issues with the dungeons dragging on too long and the almost non-existent quest tracking, but the characters and story and combat are mostly fun, and it's the only SMT/Persona-adjacent game I've actually enjoyed other than BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle.

Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between: It didn't hit me as hard as the original over a decade ago, and a couple sections just didn't really land for me, but when it does work it does some interesting stuff. The train section was probably my favorite because it actually gets to expand on its ideas a bit more there.

The Fairy's Song: What if La Belle Dame sans Merci but make it yuri? Nothing revolutionary, but it does everything well enough to be enjoyable, enough that I'll probably get through the sequel one of these days too.

Bury me, my Love: Manages to capture both the surreal horror and mind-numbing mundanity of being a refugee seeking asylum and does a fairly effective job of it. The lack of typical VN QoL features kept me from going through again to see stuff I missed though.

Takorita Meets Fries: Fluffy nonsense about merpeople in search of french fries, and I mean that in a good way.

GOODBYE WORLD: The story and art were just enough to keep me going through the annoying platforming sections (which make narrative sense to be there, and even for them to be bad, but still), and the way it all came together in the end is what bumped it up as high as this.

Blackberry Honey: Yuri that's mostly cute and fluffy and fun while it lasts. I have Questions about the way the main character's boobs are drawn though. What's wrong with your boobs?

Voxelgram DLC #1: One one hand it's good because more Voxelgram is good, but on the other the larger puzzles are mostly just more tedious. Still good enough puzzles to get my poor ADHD brain to focus on something while listening to podcasts or whatever.

rat chaos: A replay of something I played many, many years ago. Not my favorite of the Twine boom back in the day, but having an "unleash rat chaos" button makes it memorable.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line DLC: Still not my favorite style of music/rhythm game so it doesn't go higher, but there's some good music in there, and it was still enjoyable enough that I had fun going through everything.

A Hero and a Garden: Cute, fun characters, good music (including the unlockable remixes after you finish the game), and somehow made in Ren'Py, which is not intended for this genre at all.

Hide & Dance!: I like it for similar reasons to the other games I played by hap (which will be further down this list), but it doesn't have quite as many opportunities for the silly humor that makes their games work.

Subsurface Circular: "You are a robot detective solving robot crimes by talking to other robots on the subway" is a great premise, and I was not expecting Thomas Was Alone (still my favorite Mike Bithell game I've played) to be canon.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land: It was genuinely great for a while, and they did an excellent job translating what makes Kirby fun into 3D, but I kept finding more minor annoyances the closer I got to the end, and I gave up entirely on the postgame stuff pretty quickly because it wasn't doing it for me.

Clear Skye Thinking: More cute yuri fluff that won't leave a lasting impression, but it was a good palate cleanser.

Regency Solitaire 2: Basically just Regency Solitaire again, which is fine with me. These always feel a bit more substantial and more polished than the other solitaire games Grey Alien publishes, so it's nice to have another of these after years of mostly just Jewel Match Solitaire.

Zenzizenzic: Good bullet hell game with good music, and everything is so many squares. Sadly not available anywhere anymore, and neither is the soundtrack. Also sadly I'm not very good at it.

Wedding Witch: I got it mostly as a joke after it popped up in a Steam friend's activity, but it's actually pretty competently made. I wouldn't mind seeing some of the stuff from this in a little more substantial game that's somewhat less horny.

A Park Full of Cats: More Devcats hidden cats. If you're into it you're into it, and this is more of it.

Gordy and the Monster Moon; One of the more recent entries in the Frog Fractions Cinematic Universe. A successful attempt to see what would happen if you made a traditional Zelda game without most of the things most people think of as making something a Zelda game.

Art Sqool: I've seen people complain that it's janky and gives you bad tools for drawing, but the whole point feels like that even if you only can make "bad" art you still did something creative and made an art. Fun to mess around with if you can engage with it on its own terms.

Fire Emblem Engage DLC: I played the main game last year, but I didn't get around to doing DLC stuff like the Fell Xenologue until this year. Not quite as good as the main story (which was one of my favorite games last year), but I still overall had a good time with it.

Super PSTW Action RPG: Replay of something I played years ago, so it can't go any higher, but if it didn't break my own self-imposed rules it would be GOTY every year.

A Tower Full of Cats: More Devcats? More Devcats. See every other entry for them.

Shovel Knight: Really well put together platformer inspired by old 8-bit ones on stuff like the NES and clearly made by people with a deep love for and understanding of them.

Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk: This and the next one go together. They didn't completely win me over, but I'll give them points for managing to nether glamorize nor stigmatize trauma or psychosis and avoid having an ending that's either tragic or fixes everything. Not perfect, but they at least tried to do something interesting with it.

Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk: See above

Meet Her There: Does what it's trying to do pretty well even if the writing's a bit stiff. Content warnings on this one aren't messing around. Also it's funny how many people totally missed how full of gender it is.

Florence: Effective storytelling with almost zero text or dialogue, and they actually manage to do some clever things to tie the very minimalist gameplay into that to enhance it.

Boyfriend Dungeon post-launch content: I played the game itself right when it came out and had a good time with it, but it took me until pretty recently to go back and do the additional stuff added after it came out. I probably would've liked it more if I'd been able to do it all at once, but it was still enjoyable enough to be worthwhile.

Star Ocean: The Divine Force: Definitely an improvement over SO2R (which was great in the first half but kinda fell apart in what would've originally been disc 2). This one still stumbles a bit toward the end but holds it together a bit better. Enough characters I liked and satisfying enough combat/exploration to keep me going until the end, and the nyoom button might've been my favorite button to push all year.

Be My Horde: Or at least what of it is finished up until now. I like the idea of having your only resource being dead enemies you've killed and most abilities revolving around upgrades/enhancements of your resurrection ability. The voice acting is also surprisingly good/fun. Definitely has potential if future additions to it can build on its strengths, but we'll see how that goes.

Pesticide Not Required: Possibly the most unusual premise for a bullet heaven game I've played, crossing it with a farming sim. Somehow it actually works? Builds feel kinda samey after a while unfortunately, but it's cute enough and interesting enough seeing how farming/fishing/mining manages to work simultaneously with killing hundreds of bugs at once to be enjoyable for a bit.

Golf Club Nostalgia: I'm absolutely terrible at the actual gameplay (thank you story mode), but the story and worldbuilding told through the radio broadcasts were interesting enough and kept me going. Not subtle about its politics or who it's commenting on even though it doesn't name any names.

I commissioned some bees 0: Not really anything special on its own, but I'm a big fan of the idea of commissioning multiple artists to draw whatever they want as long as they can fit a hundred bees in it somewhere.

Point of Mew: Short enough that its cuteness and charm can carry it through to the end.

Locke(d): I appreciate that someone took a hypothetical scenario from an essay, interpreted it completely literally, and then used that setup to talk about the ideas of the essay.

The Great Voyage: Not nearly as good as their second game, Vengeful Heart (which will be further down the list), but you can see how they got from here to there and how some of that stuff was already here to begin with.

CATO: Buttered Cat: Some reasonably clever puzzles, and building your game mechanics off the idea of a cat with buttered toast strapped to its back is silly enough that I can't not like it.

The Knight Witch: It didn't quite win me over enough to finish it, but what I did play of it was pretty well put together and enjoyable enough.

Peglin: It has a pretty fun loop, and turning Peggle into a roguelike is a pretty neat idea that works surprisingly well. I could see myself going back to it for a few more runs now and then.

Words Can Kill: It has a pretty fun loop, and turning Scrabble into a roguelike is a pretty neat idea that works surprisingly well. I could see myself going back to it for a few more runs now and then.

Across-Stitch: The tweaks to the typical picross/nonograms rules are just enough to keep things interesting, and I probably would've spent even more time with it if it didn't have some unfortunate color palatte choices.

memories: Another little yuri VN, this time sad. I liked the way it tied different memories to different outfits, and it's reasonably well told for what it is. It desperately needs a way to adjust the text speed though.

Next but not quite last are the ones that exceeded my expectations in some way without necessarily being better than the ones in the previous category (although some are here because they were good). I could also just have gotten more out of them than I was led to think I would:

Seraphim Slum: A VN that isn't afraid to get weird with it, and by weird I don't mean rawrxdlolrandom, I mean surrealness and strange metaphors and corruption/destruction as a form of love. I can dig it.

9th Sentinel Sisters: Seems unfortunately abandoned at this point, but what they finished of it is a fairly enjoyable bullet heaven game with a bit of a different feel and aesthetic from what I'm used to seeing. Translation's pretty awful though.

20 Minutes Till Dawn: One of the better bullet heaven games I've played, with a great monochrome-plus-one-accent-color aesthetic (the character portraits are particularly good) and different builds that genuinely feel different to play. Play on anything but the Switch if you have the option though, because it has atrocious slowdown with certain builds (although it still remains remarkably stable even then).

DoraKone: More yuri fluff about four queer girls spending the summer playing the my OC do not steal version of Pokemon GO. It's cute, and I liked the way they managed to tie the developing friendships/relationships into playing the game together in a way that actually felt like it worked.

A Time Traveller's Guide to Past Delicacies: More surreal weirdness, but this time with sock puppets too. I'm still undecided on what it's trying to say, but I really enjoyed the way it said it, and it captures both the fun and the janky parts of 90s FMV games well.

Bayonetta 2: The main reason this counts as exceeding my expectations is that the first game was full of great ideas but felt really unpolished in a lot of ways, and I wasn't expecting something that's still an entire decade old to have really fixed all that. But they did for the most part, and all the potential from the original finally came together properly.

Vectronom: Aside from pure rhythm games, this might be the first thing I've played since 140 that integrates the music and gameplay as well as it does. Bonus points to whoever decided to include some stuff with odd time signatures and rhythms later in the game.

Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting and Operation Guns: I liked both of these as much as I disliked Ode to Castlevania. They're much more interesting than the previous DLC was and experiment a bit more mechanically, and the adventure mode does a great job of introducing all the new stuff and teaching you the new mechanics and maps.

Lies as a Starting Point: A good example of how this category isn't necessarily better than "worse" categories in my list. It's pretty decent and the three storylines come together in a satisfying way in the end, but the translation is awful. I still got more out of it than I thought I would though.

Before I Forget: Ironically for a story about memory problems I forgot a lot of it because of my own memory problems. This nearly ended up in the best category though, and I appreciated how they made the story about who the character is as a person instead of just what's wrong with her.

Mom Hid My Game!: This and the next two are basically three parts of the same game, which is the offspring of a point and click adventure and WarioWare. Pretty short with lots of little bite-sized puzzles and a silly sense of humor.

Mom Hid My Game! 2: see above

My Brother Ate My Pudding!: see above

Soulstone Survivors: Another of my favorite bullet heaven games I've played. The addition of an active dodge and a lot of layered interactions between abilities makes it a bit more involved to play, but in a good way if you're looking for that sort of thing.

Bio Prototype: Not my favorite to actually play and the UI isn't great, but you can do some absolutely wild things with what basically amounts to a programmable build system to DIY your own weapons with very few restrictions.

20 Small Mazes: A great example of something that takes a simple concept, explores it thoroughly, and then ends without wasting time or energy on anything unnecessary.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe: As someone who's been playing the different variations on this since the original mod, this was a more effective story commenting on its own (re)telling and its own audience's expectations than FF7R was, at least for me.

Halls of Torment: What's this? Another of my favorite bullet heaven games? The standout for this one might be how so many of the achievements/unlocks are really well thought out to get you to approach playing the game in ways you might not have tried otherwise and are often little mini-puzzles themselves.

SeaBed: Very slow burn VN that ultimately pays off in the end even if I liked the journey a bit more than the destination.

Everything is going to be OK: On the surface it's very coping with adversity through absurdity, but if you keep digging it has more to say about trauma and depression and misogyny and the value of artists and so on.

Will The Man Get Frog: Cute little PICO-8 game/toy for creating haikus using an extremely limited set of randomly chosen words. Fun to mess around with to try to come up with anything remotely coherent.

The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place: Interactive poetry about being a willing participant in the destruction of history and trying to explain or justify it while also being aware of the sense of loss.

Luckily, My Arm Is a Shotgun: Nothing revolutionary, but it's surprisingly polished for something so small and cheap, and the titular shotgun is very satisfying.

a completely normal dating simulation that is definitely completely sweet, innnocent and normal: SOMETHINGETH ANIVERSARY EDITION: It feels like someone in high school in 2011 dumped their Tumblr into Ren'Py while also feeling like a flash animation from the 00s. I'm not sure the humor would hold up for me if I did all the different routes, but what I did play of it was the kind of thing I haven't seen in years.

And finally we have the ones I enjoyed the most or felt I got the most out of, not really in any particular order other than vaguely the order I finished them and added them to my list:

The Witcher 3: Absolutely my least favorite gameplay of anything anywhere near this high on the list, but the world and characters are so interesting and well developed that it more than makes up for it. I know they had an entire series of novels and short stories to draw on, but they've added so much more on their own, and it's only gotten bigger and better with each new game. They do a great job of making it feel like the world is much, much larger with a lot of stuff going on outside the small corner you're seeing at any given time.

Ghost Trick: It has a ridiculous premise and clever puzzles and a good sense of humor, but something else that particularly stands out about it is that despite the relatively simple art style it has some of the most fluid and expressive animations that give a ton of personality to everyone.

Vengeful Heart: Possibly my favorite retro aesthetic in anything I've played recently and definitely the best anyone's nailed the PC-98 look in a while, but even more than that the characters and story are great. They do a great job showing people from totally different backgrounds with totally different approaches working together against an oppressive power structure, and rather than everything working out perfectly there are definitely problems, but it still shows hope for overcoming them and a path toward the future.

Unicorn Overlord: Unlike Vanillaware's previous game the writing is only ok, but the art continues to be excellent, and it's easily their best iteration on their RTS ideas to date. I don't think the story will leave much of a lasting impression on me, but I had such a great time with the gameplay for the entire time I was playing that I don't mind.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong: Definitely kind of a slow burn that took me a bit to warm up to, but I really liked how things came together in the end as I got to know more about the characters and what was going on. It's also good at showing restraint though, not neatly wrapping everything up, and it left me with more to think about than when I started.

We Know the Devil: Another one that's good at hinting at and suggesting things without explicitly coming right out and directly telling you everything, and some scenes hit differently when replaying to see the other endings when you know enough to be able to read it as commenting on itself.

Jack Jeanne: A strong contender for my favorite thing I played this year. Definitely my favorite music/rhythm game, the best music in general, and the most gender. So many things in it can be read on multiple levels at once as being about the nature of art and performance, what gender even is, and how (or even if) to engage with an audience.

Visions of Mana: It's a shame the studio got shut down right when it released, because they definitely understood what made the old games in the series so much fun, and they finally made a new non-remake Mana game that's actually pretty great for the first time in over two decades.

1000xRESIST: I'm undecided on whether it's my favorite thing I played this past year, but it's definitely my favorite piece of media in general that came out in 2024. It's another one where everything works on like 17 levels simultaneously, like generational trauma, the nature of language and communication, the protests in Hong Kong, the experience of being an immigrant or a child of immigrants, both biological and found family, memory and what we choose to forget or to pass on, and like a dozen more things.

A Highland Song: If you're noticing that most stuff in this category is here because it has great writing/storytelling you're not wrong, and this one is no exception. The way what's going on is gradually revealed is satisfying, and the way it's structured across different paths keeps things interesting. It also does a great job of seamlessly blending realism and history with myth and legend, treating them all as equally meaningful and important to the people and world.

Ys X: Nordics: Sometimes you just need to go on a wacky adventure though, and Adol's shenanigans continue to be fun. The gameplay continues to feel tight and polished, and they also keep managing to have a large cast of interesting and likeable characters. It's just a good time.

I guess this time I'll only be tagging that last category because I played entirely too many games in 2024 and don't actually have enough tags for the top two categories like usual. There were some huge disappointments, but there were even more things that I didn't expect to like as much as I did, and there was a bunch of really great stuff in general.

#the witcher 3 #ghost trick #vengeful heart #unicorn overlord #opus: echo of starsong #we know the devil #jack jeanne #visions of mana #1000xRESIST #a highland song #ys x: nordics

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