BEYOND MACHINA ANIMATA
I did not start writing about media (in a non-academic fashion) when I created this blog. Several years before starting Lotus Eater, I began keeping a spreadsheet of my media consumption, and whenever I finished a game, I would take extensive notes on it. I found this practice served several purposes: it gave me an opportunity to reflect on the experience of playing the game as a whole, rather than thoughtlessly barreling into some other new game. It helped to better consolidate my memories of the game, along with what I experienced and felt while playing it, and it also gave me ample material to consult on months or years later when I wanted to recall a particular game. It also helped to form and hone my thoughts; often, I found that my understanding of a game emerged as I wrote about it. Undoubtedly, some raw materials already existed—I had played the game, I had some set of experiences and feelings, I enjoyed it or I didn’t and so on—but all of that rich phenomenological information was still floating around like primordial dust, not yet clustered together into some Cohesive Perspective. Writing (or talking) about a game allowed me to gather all of those thoughts and experiences and feelings into Something New, to synthesize something that wasn’t just raw animalistic responses to sensory information. Starting a blog was just a way to bring this tendency to its natural conclusion. Before Lotus Eater, my ideas were being spread like so much seed onto barren ground. Like many on the internet in recent years, I decided to spread my seed onto a website instead.
I probably do not need to state this explicitly but: Lotus Eater is not meant to contribute to my career or eventually generate revenue or something. I imagine that that is obvious but perhaps it need be stated outright, given how much of the contemporary internet is devoted to people’s side hustles and future-main-gigs and brand development and passive income. I write these for pleasure and for exercise and because I realized at some point that I cannot help but do so, in one form or another. I suspect that others are in similar positions: burdened with thoughts and ideas and questions, surrounded by the miasma of their Experiences and Feelings, unconsciously-desperate to gather up all that dust into Something. And so I suspect that others would similarly find both pleasure and relief in having the opportunity to do just that, which brings us to the present post.
This year, I put out the clarion call for people who wanted to write a little guest Game of the Year post for Lotus Eater. I was intentionally vague in my request and encouraged people to interpret the task however they chose. As in mine own Game of the Year posts, I did not limit people to games released in the calendar year of 2024—I merely requested that the game be relevant to them in this year, in some way. I gave everyone the freedom to write something essentially as short or as long as they liked and also did not dictate a minimum or maximum number of games for them to discuss. I also suspect that many (most?) of the people who responded have never read Lotus Eater, which is in some ways preferable. I wanted to see how people would handle this task given minimal expectations and I certainly did not want anyone to be influenced by the occasionally-unhinged and frankly-irresponsible way in which I conduct myself on this website. I received responses from a variety of people: close friends, old friends, beloved mutuals, distant acquaintances, and one guy who I had never even heard of. Many of them very generously took time from their hectic holiday season to contribute something totally and utterly unique to this post, something that no one else could have contributed, for which I am both very grateful and very impressed. Each of the following lists is a neat little slice of someone’s consciousness, something that we probably would not have otherwise accessed, something that (if they are anything like me) even they might not have otherwise accessed. Isn’t that something?
Thank you to everyone who volunteered to contribute to this little round-up. I hope to do something similar next year, and perhaps even the year after that. I will see you all around the bend.
BLACK MYTH: WUKONG: A LOOK BACK
Contributor: Matthew Quann
Game Science’s debut, Black Myth: Wukong (hereafter, BMW), managed to sweep away the competition and become my favourite game of the year. Out of a sense of completeness and full disclosure, my gaming time is severely limited from years past. Parental and professional duties have placed me in the position of having enough money for the games, but not enough time, a sharp reversal from my high school and early undergraduate years. In addition to BMW, I also played:
- Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (very fun Metroidvania with some blisteringly tough platforming)
- Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (I’ve only played about half and despise the Minecraft-y bits, which I suppose makes me an old guy)
- Final Fantasy XVI (looks great, was way too easy, lacks the RPG elements I love)
So, I’ve been told BMW is based on Journey to the West, a text I know dick-all about. Nonetheless, the game looked beautiful and I have an abiding love of adventure and combat games. The initial few hours of the game were plagued with bugs (which I understand have since been patched) and my lack of understanding of how this game was meant to be played. See, I expected Souls-like gameplay with a lot of dodging, scrambling for the occasional hit, and wars of endurance. I mean, there’s some of that in BMW, but approaching the game in that way was my big mistake.
Around the time when I encountered the hulking, humanoid Tiger boss who feasts on dead monkeys, throws them into a giant pool of blood, and carries an absurdly large blade, the game clicked for me. I was relentlessly pummelled in the aforementioned pool of blood that serves as the arena for your showdown with the beast. I died again and again. Then on some seemingly infinite loop of me getting spanked by the Tiger, the rhythms of the game snapped into place and I understood the game. This wasn’t Souls, this was a dance (might I remind the reader, in blood). By the time my final run at the boss happened, my health was largely intact having figured out how to move to counter, dodge, and attack in exactly the right sequence. It was a revelatory and immensely satisfying victory.
Having moved past my initial block, the game opens itself up to a world that I was always happy to return to, be it for a quick 30 minutes or the rarified couple hours. The environments are breathtaking, the enemy variety (in both form and combat) was astounding, and the challenge shaken up often enough to keep me on my toes. At the time of writing I’m still butting heads against the final phase of the final boss. I’ve gone through oodles of encounters with the character that has stolen my abilities, but I’ve been strangely calm through the entirety of my ass-kickings. This game taught me to persevere through gaming adversity that feels distinctly different from my Souls experience, which can at times be punishing rather than triumphant. For me and my limited catalogue this year, BMW stands tall as my pick for game of the year.
A RECOVERING PHD, INTRODUCTORY GAMER
Contributor: Jillian
- Kingdom Two Crowns
- Spiritfarer
- Wildfrost
- Wingspan
- Dredge
The allure for me is that they’re easy, relaxing, not time-bound, yet you still build towards a larger goal with them. I love beauty of taking your time but still going on an adventure on your own terms.
VIBES OF THE GESTALT
Contributor: Tyler Lovell
1000xRESIST
This is the only narrative game on my list. Most narratives in video games are just boring movies, the kind I’d only watch hungover. [BLOG OWNER] hates me for this, though. There are lots of opinion pieces and video essays more eloquent than I, all about how much this rocks. Just look at those if you want details. If you want a one-liner, it’s an interesting non-linear narrative about identity, technology, and resistance. It’s told really well. The art direction is great, but I can see some people looking at the graphics and not being super moved to play it. I unfortunately know the game engine. Because of that, these areas of polish probably bother me more than you. It gets better in-game, and I got over it. You will too.
PSYCHORAMA
Friends of mine made this game. I played the demo and it was rad, so I want more people to play it! It’s a horror game with excellent pixel art. Give it a spin!
ONE BTN BOSSES
Okay, arcade time! This is what I’m into. The game design is very clever and evokes endless possibilities—and also implements them! I am so jealous of this. It’s so simple and so great. You’re quickly dodging enemy attacks with automatic fire. The fire slows down the more you change direction. If mobile games weren’t a hellish landscape of garbage, you’d have things like this on your phone making a bajillion dollars. But I play it on Steam Deck, and it rules.
DEVIL BLADE REBOOT
What if a guy made a great shoot-’em-up? Then he came back to it and made it even better. This guy works at Vanillaware, who already have quite the name for themselves. So you know he knows what’s up. This game has loads of 90s shoot-’em-up vibe that will show you why people get nostalgic for this stuff. The art rocks, the gameplay rocks, the music rocks, and you can beat it in one session. That good arcade gaming that checks all my boxes. I’ve beaten it several times, and I will do that again and again and again.
MULLET MADJACK
Are games allowed to look this cool? It’s a fast-paced arcadey FPS with retro anime style. Again, big vibe. That’s a theme for me. Does everything come together to create a big vibe? I’m interested. The action is very quick and makes you feel cool as hell. Watch a trailer—yes, it is as cool as it looks! That’s really all you need to know.
CHILDREN OF THE SUN
I was lured by this game’s graphics before ever knowing any gameplay. Thankfully, it’s also fun. At its core, it’s a puzzle game. You’re trying to take out all enemies in one hit, so you need to choose your path carefully. I’ve seen things like this in 2D where it’s easiest to communicate these ideas. But pulling it off in 3D with this art direction and vibe is the real treat.
PENNY’S BIG BREAKAWAY
I like Sonic, and so does this developer (they made Sonic Mania). So why not get them to make a 3D Sonic game? Oh yeah, Sonic Team wouldn’t be into that. So these folks made their own 3D engine (insane). They also made one of the best 3D platformers around. The spirit of Dreamcast-era Sonic is in here. But there’s a level of control and player involvement Sonic Team hasn’t ever been able to achieve.
NOT HONOURABLE MENTION
Astrobot: it’s fine. I don’t know why you’re all so excited. But I’m glad you all love Temu Mario.
GREATNESS WAITS
Contributor: bigsquishyfrog
MOUTHWASHING
Mild Spoilers for Mouthwashing
Mouthwashing is a good poster child for the eternally useless game discourse centered around whether “narrative-heavy games deserve to be games”. I don’t hope to meaningfully discuss this point in this snippet, but I also do wonder what critics of the game thought about having to laboriously saw their mouse across their desk in order to cut off a man’s leg for consumption, just as they had done an hour earlier for a slice of cake.
Considering it was originally intended as a DLC for Wrong Organ’s first game How Fish is Made, and its short runtime, Mouthwashing does incredibly well at not baring its ugly, unpolished seams to the player. I’m particularly impressed by the behavior of NPCs following the player character, wherein footstep sounds and teleportation are used to create the illusion that your shipmates are following you, without having to rigorously implement pathfinding and animation.
Mouthwashing’s main mode of gameplay is a cute marriage of walking simulator and point-and-click. You can click into “interactive zones” that lock your first-person control into a point-and-click mode: now your inventory becomes a context sensitive switch for item usage, and you can use your mouse to further interact with items in the zone (e.g., a button on a ship’s control panel). After a cutscene, it’s common for the game to drop you into one of these “interactive zones” instead of immediately putting you in first-person character mode, requiring you to right-click or otherwise manually exit the interactive zone in order to walk around. This explicit requirement for the player to manually switch between static and mobile modes represents the slightest hitch to immersion which was awkward enough for me to notice, and therefore probably awkward enough that the developers left it in intentionally.
I generally don’t find “immersion” to be a valuable quality of a game, or one worth talking about, but something about the immersion in Mouthwashing struck me. For most of the runtime, I was completely enthralled by the game’s unique storytelling, compelling characters, beautiful graphics, and poignant but translucent symbolism. But in those moments when the immersion broke, there is nothing left to feel but the game’s bleak portrait of humanity laying bare on your psyche. Mouthwashing made me feel like shit, and was my favorite game of 2024.
DEADLOCK
Before I played my first MOBA, Deadlock, I was intensely uninterested in the game design of the genre as a whole. I asked myself questions like: why are there neutral enemies between the lanes, why does “crowd control” generally refer to single-target slow abilities, why does a game with dozens of heroes with several abilities each need hundreds of shared items to combine into builds, why have all elements of real-time strategy evaporated from the game, etc. So it’s a bit scary to admit that, while I don’t have answers for literally any basic, macro-scale question about MOBA game design, I can now answer questions like: why was lane soul sharing changed from 50% to 100% back to 75%, why “urn NW lead capture locations” are a dumb mechanic, why McGinnis walker split push makes me want to rip my hair out, and etc.
While I can’t speak for other MOBAs, I encountered no issues in Deadlock with the steep learning curve that I had previously assumed was a hallmark of the genre. The game’s short tutorial, community hero build browser, and sandbox mode / bot matches were perfectly sufficient for me to become engrossed, at least in the game’s current alpha-ish state. For me, there was really no friction, just getting alarmingly quickly swept up into a machine of numbers and percentages and hidden mechanics, the genome of a game which is really a hulking complex system, a skinner box of macro-economy and micro-gunplay, patch notes, hero guides, ranked mode, damage per second, pick rate, oh my god this game is extremely fun.
I don’t even think half of the hero roster is that interesting (sorry Yamato, Wraith, and Geist). The game is addictive and stressful, and the community is toxic. But it’s phenomenally crafted, in that Valve way that I can’t put into words without sounding like a suck-up. At the micro-level, the capture souls / deny mechanic makes for highly engaging third person gunplay: cover, positioning, aim, and reaction time are equally important areas of mastery. At the macro level, I really appreciate the flex slot system and always-available secret shops to make hero builds feel truly dynamic yet constrained in an almost board-gamey discrete way.
I retain an essential skepticism and judgement towards MOBA as a genre. These games feel like a natural selection of the most dopamine-maxing and engagement-retaining mechanics that videogames as a medium have to offer. But if you ignore the ugly conceptual MOBA System breathing down your neck, you can see that Deadlock has some real beauty in the details. The game is unfinished, or whatever, but the 80% of what has been completed has totally captivated me. If the rest of the 20% lands, it will be my competitive game of guilty pleasure choice for a long time.
PSYCHONAUTS 2
Psychonauts 2 came out in 2021, not 2024. But its documentary, the Double Fine PsychOdyssey, received its final episode in July of this year, reaching an episode count of 33 and total runtime of over 20 hours. The game’s development is covered from inception to production to release completely in full, with several full-time staff rolling cameras at the Double Fine office for a 6 year time span. A somewhat prolonged, wrought, and storied 6 years.
The clip that initially piqued my interest in the documentary is of Double Fine employees being notified post-Microsoft acquisition that they can no longer pursue independent game development by an Xbox exec who probably didn’t realize cameras were rolling. It’s likely that this clip, or any other moment from the documentary that I can describe, won’t convince you to watch a 20-hour long documentary for a game you probably haven’t played. So I’ll keep my gushing brief: PsychOdyssey is an extremely raw, honest, and beautiful portrayal of game development. The cinematography, production, editing and storytelling from 2 Player are top notch, and the music and animation are a wonderful touch. I highly recommend it, even if game development or Psychonauts are not of particular interest to you, for being a beautiful human snapshot of some highly talented and creative people putting forward their best to create something new.
I think Psychonauts 2 (the game, not the doc) is great. It is probably the best possible sequel to Pyschonauts and a true “love letter” to fans, but I mean that in the saccharine way that admits the game is maybe a bit fundamentally flawed. Particularly, the emphasis on acrobatic platforming leads to a large number of highly polished and kinetic platforming setpieces (trapeze, tightrope, trampoline) that never really fit together in an engaging way. I actually found the combat super engaging, which was a point of contention for several developers in the documentary. The storytelling and characters are no-notes phenomenal; if you’ve played the game, I thought the standout level by a longshot was not Psi-King’s Sensorium but Bob’s Bottles.
I haven’t finished Psychonauts 2. Cheesy, but I stopped playing right before the final boss and haven’t had the time to go back and finish it. Like the gap between episodes 32 and 33 of PyschOdyssey, it’ll probably be a year before I do finish it. Some things take a long time, but greatness waits.
GOTY: BATTLEFIELD 2042
Contributor: ryan c
I’m not always sure I even like this game. I always feel embarrassed when I’m playing it, making me go Invisible more than I’d like to (this is very dishonorable; sharing what you’re playing is a True Gamer’s duty). Unfortunately, I cannot deny its grip on me. Year after year I come back to this dumbass game, and I always manage to squeeze something new out of it.
I’m curious what opinion the readership of this blog has about the Battlefield series. My assumption is they would (very understandably) associate it with other Bro Shooters. But I would argue there is something special and unique about Battlefield games, and I would place them in what I believe is the most venerated genre of them all: Old Guy Games. Battlefield 2042 is the latest member of an ancient lineage stretching all the way back into the before times, when life and the world was Good (c. 2002). Battlefield 2042 is a good game because it is essentially the exact same game as Battlefield 1942.
The core gameplay loop is simple: you spawn at your base with 31 other teammates, and you make your way around the map to various control points that you capture by having more players standing in them then the opposing team. In addition to infantry gameplay, you can also pilot a variety of vehicles (e.g. tanks, helicopters, jets, etc). Sound boring and unremarkable? On its face it kind of is. But I’d like to highlight three factors that make these games special…
Firstly, the scale of the game (typically a total of 64 players, but Battlefield 2042 also has 128 player servers) reduces the impact that a single player can have. In smaller-scale multiplayer games (so many of which have 8 or fewer players per team) everybody knows what everyone else on the team is contributing, and they often have no problem letting you know. Being a Single Guy on a comparatively massive team removes all of this pressure to “perform”, and this in turn reduces the player’s (or at least, my own) emotional attachment to the outcome of the match. The underlying structure provided by the control points provides a foundation for what is otherwise a free sandbox-type experience. You can choose to jump in or out of the actual Effort at your leisure. Sure, you can try really hard and play the game like a big COD match, but sometimes it’s just more fun to sit in a passenger seat and repair someone else’s vehicle for the whole match. You’re still contributing, but it’s a very different experience from the typical multiplayer FPS gameplay loop.
This example is one of Battlefield’s other special qualities: there are several secondary gameplay loops with which to engage, many of which are manifestations of the “support” role that is rarely present in military FPSes. In addition to being a pocket repair guy, you can also choose to fly around the unarmed transport helicopter, dropping the COD-style players off at various objectives. You can dedicate your match to supplying ammo or health, or reviving your teammates at the back of a large team vs team fight. You can spend the match using anti-aircraft weapons to fend off enemy aircraft (keeping them at bay can make a huge difference to your team, but not be reflected in your score at all), or fly around a drone to spot enemies on your teams minimap. There are so many ways to contribute to the team effort without actually playing a shooter, and if you ever get bored you can mix them up or jump back into the shooter portion of the game. There’s a choose-your-own-adventure element to Battlefield games, which is otherwise only represented in hyper-serious unapproachable military realism porn type games (which themselves often lack an actual fun game underneath).
The final quality I’d like to highlight in my defense of these dumbass games is the unique sense of joy that comes from emergent teamwork between a large number of strangers. Maybe this isn’t unique to Battlefield, but I would argue the specific way it manifests in Battlefield is not common. Battlefield isn’t a tryhard game, so there is essentially no voice chat or explicit communication at all. Matches rapidly fluctuate between chaos and order; each match is a stochastic teamwork generator. The Brownian motion of your silent teammates—all playing some random combination of the aforementioned secondary gameplay loops—spontaneously aligns into perfect symmetry, and your team collectively experiences a period of gameplay that feels like a trailer. And just as quickly, the coordination collapses into chaos. This ebb and flow of Order is addictive, and in my experience you’re guaranteed to get a couple hits each match.
So what makes Battlefield 2042 an Old Guy Game, and my Game of the Year? I think that each of these qualities is something that isn’t really well-represented in recent FPS games. I feel that the genre has evolved to cater to competitive players, who are in my experience often a specific type of younger person who has different ideas of what makes an FPS (and maybe gaming in general) fun. Everything I’ve described above is present in every Battlefield game, essentially unchanged since 2002. The core gameplay loop was devised during a Gaming Era where winning wasn’t really the point, and when playing with other people online was still a novelty and fun on its face (and not Very Serious Business). I keep coming back to Battlefield 2042 because nobody else is making this kind of game anymore. I mentioned I’m not always sure I like this game: the military aspect becomes increasingly embarrassing and uncomfortable to me as I get older, and this particular iteration of Battlefield has so many ugly and/or stupid design decisions. But that’s okay, I’ll keep playing that garbage.
In no particular order, here are some other games that I really enjoyed playing this year:
- Roboquest
- Balatro
- Helldivers II
- Stellar Blade
- Hell Let Loose (maybe an article for another time…)
- XCOM 2
- Unicorn Overlord
- Slay the Spire
- FTL: Faster Than Light
GAMER’S DELIGHTS
Contributor: psionic_warrior (twitter, bsky)
5. BALATRO
I think anyone who’s played Balatro is aware that Balatro is one of the best-designed games of the current gaming era.
It’s a total Skinner box of a game, using bright lights, flashing colors, and big numbers to draw the player in and keep them there indefinitely. It’s deceptively simple to start out; only requiring a basic knowledge of poker hands, and a lot of the early deckbuilding options are straightforward enough to not completely overwhelm a new player. By the time you’ve done a few runs, the hooks are completely in and you’re ready to try more complex strategies.
I’ve played a fair bit of Balatro; the thing that keeps it from being farther down this list is that I am fundamentally unable to approach deckbuilders with anything approaching skill. This is despite a solid decade of playing Magic: The Gathering; I’m just as cooked in your average booster draft as I am on even the lowest stakes of Balatro.
I flit from strategy to strategy depending on what seems coolest, I don’t understand any of the higher-level gameplay systems, and I’m completely unable to assess comparative card quality with any sort of skill. I kind of just take jokers randomly, ignore the arcana cards because they’re hard to use, and always focus on flushes because they’re the easiest high-scoring hand to assemble.
If you’re not like me, and don’t lose all higher brain function when given choices to make, Balatro is going to be an all-timer for you.
4. PAPER MARIO: THE THOUSAND YEAR DOOR
One of the great tragedies of video game criticism is that a lot of the all-time best games are, to put it bluntly, children’s toys. So many of the classics of the medium, from Pokémon Red and Yellow to Super Mario 64, were explicitly made for people under the age of 13. In a lot of ways it’s like if movie studios made a concerted effort to ensure Trolls: World Tour was on the same level as Citizen Kane.
What makes it stranger is the sorts of games that are allowed to be considered classics, and which people have decided are baby games for babies. In general, as long as your game came out before 1995, it’s fine, but if your game came out after Ocarina of Time, you need to grow up and play real games.
All this to say that 2001’s Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is an all-time classic, and should be on any list of the greatest RPGs of all time. At the risk of sounding like a Bluey adult here, it really is something that people of any age can enjoy, though of course I’ll concede that it has a ‘hits different’ quality if you played it under the age of 13.
I’m not going to explain why it’s so good because it’s been 23 years since its release. If you’re interested, go find a 75-minute video essay by some guy named SuperMarioAndy or whatever.
In 2024, Nintendo released a remake for the Switch, which is one of the most lovingly executed remakes I’ve ever played of any game. I assumed that the game wouldn’t hold up, but playing through the remake, I realized that, if anything, it’s even better in 2024, where Nintendo has decided against ever being this creatively ambitious ever again. If you haven’t played this game, perhaps because people on Twitter were overly dismissive of it, give it a try. I think you’ll be surprised.
3. ANIMAL WELL
Speaking of creative ambition. Animal Well is one of the most creative games I’ve ever played. It takes a lot of the trappings of traditional Metroidvania design (gated access to areas, items tied to progression, annoying navigation) and plays with them to make a game that separates itself meaningfully from the pack.
One of the best things about the game is it refuses to actually tell you what any of the items do—you’ve got to trial and error it yourself. This isn’t new, of course; Dark Souls players have been failing to understand how parrying works for 15 years now. What Animal Well does different is that most of the items have multiple uses—puzzling out what an item does will lead different players to different solutions!
Thanks to this, it’s meaningfully non-linear; very few puzzles have prescriptive, intended solutions, and there are many ways to abuse the items you have access to. Most of the puzzles are pretty well-telegraphed, and reward careful thought. Other Metroidvanias could learn a lot by looking at this game.
There’s also a big ARG component to some of the game-wide puzzles that require working with others and letting the community solve them as a whole. You couldn’t pay me to give a shit about this. I’ll catch the YouTube lore video some day when I need something to watch with dinner.
2. LETHAL COMPANY
I assume Lethal Company is pretty fun. I wouldn’t really know first-hand, I’ve never played it. The reason I have it on this list is because it’s the stage on which NorthernLion et al. have acted out some of the most enjoyable gaming content of the streaming age.
If you’ve never watched NorthernLion and friends play Lethal Company, run, don’t walk. This is a group of guys who have been bouncing off each other and playing off of each other’s jokes for the better part of a decade now. Lethal Company is sort of the ideal game to watch them work their magic; its mechanics end up provoking a lot of the greatest comedy moments. Sometimes it seems like the game has a procedural punchline generator.
Watching this crew play Lethal Company is what you’ve always wanted playing it with your friends to feel like. Here, the jokes always land, everyone is always laughing, and no one’s ever taking everything personally. If I had a group of friends that were this funny it’d fix a lot with me.
I’m rating it this highly because I’m insane and derive more value from watching other people play video games than playing them myself.
1. ELDEN RING
Elden Ring is my favorite game of 2024. It was also my favorite game of 2022 and 2023, and it stands a good chance of being my favorite game of 2025. To me, it represents the absolute pinnacle of the action game genre; it’s hard to see where we could even go from here. Will there ever be an open world RPG better than this? Could anyone make one, even if they wanted to?
Basically, what makes Elden Ring so good is that it takes the basic concept of a FromSoft game, and removes everything that makes those games obtuse, boring and slow. (I have played both Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 to completion and mostly enjoyed doing it, don’t @ me). The open world is here to give new players an easier on-ramp. Combat is much more forgiving than earlier titles, with many more tools for approaching encounters. Most importantly, the game is non-linear, meaning that you can go and make forward progress somewhere else if you get hard stuck.
Everyone already knows this. Everyone has been saying these things since the game came out in 2022. They’re all still true. This year’s DLC for the game just highlighted all of that again; if anything, it goes too hard into non-linearity and making progress on multiple fronts at once.
Shadow of the Erdtree is somewhat flawed, though—I feel like a lot of it is arbitrarily difficult just for difficulty’s sake, rather than actually presenting an enjoyable level of challenge. Much of the DLC mechanically is going around and collecting little tchotchkes that allow you to artificially inflate your own combat numbers to the levels of the bosses you’re trying to fight. Not super compelling.
Elden Ring has always been held back by its unwillingness to truly cast Dark Souls aside. For every game system that’s freeing and revolutionary, there’s one that’s clunky and unchanged from Dark Souls 1—don’t get me started about its multiplayer. In Shadow of the Erdtree, you can feel the decay and the rot starting to seep into FromSoft’s game design. This is about as far as you can push Dark Souls gameplay until you need to figure out something new.
Elden Ring is my favorite game of all time. That being said, FromSoft can’t keep linking the fire. They need to take their own games’ advice and let what is old and decayed die. Of course, I’ll keep drinking that garbage etc etc.
Thanks for reading, and may 2025 bring more gamer’s delights.
TOP 50 UFO 50 GAMES OF 2024
Contributor: prisel
I only played one game this year, UFO 50, but fortunately it’s a pretty great collection of 50 games. Here’s my tier list for the entire thing.
N/A
Grimstone: Booting this up just made me think about how I’ve never played Final Fantasy VI, and how I’d rather be playing that than this. I don’t see what this game offers over the many RPGs just like it that have existed since the SNES days. Quit too early to be comfortable ranking it.
F
49. Combatants: Feels like a game that would be in an AVGN episode. It’s straight up busted.
48. Camouflage: Every puzzle goes: Find the tile with the right color that you can reach, then find the next tile with the right color. Repeat until done.
47. Fist Hell: It’s hard to make a 2D beat em up that works outside an arcade, and this definitely isn’t it.
46. Block Koala: A good sokoban game level makes you realize an emergent property of the rules that you didn’t consider when you first learned them. This game usually doesn’t do that.
45. Hot Foot: On top of the game mechanics being pretty dull, a lot of the challenge involves figuring out how to get screwed over by your AI partner as little as possible.
D
44. The Big Bell Race: Not awful, but it’s by far the least substantial game in the collection. They were trying to hit the quota for this one.
43. Porgy: A metroidvania with very little to offer.
42. Star Waspir: This game, Fist Hell, and Block Koala all feel like they were made because someone thought the genre should be the collection, but nobody had made one before and knew the subleties of what makes that kind of game good. UFO 50 is about applying modern game design ideas to retro games, but with these ones you’re better off just playing a classic from the 80s and 90s.
41. Vainger: Super Metroid with no vibes.
40. Planet Zoldath: It’s not that fun to actually play, but the idea of a procedurally generated adventure game is neat, and it’s short enough that you’re done before the novelty wears off.
39. Kick Club: The most rage-inducing game in the whole collection. No individual challenge is that hard, but you die in one hit, and get so few lives you can’t afford to make many mistakes. Every death felt like someone told me my grandma had died.
38. Cyber Owls: This entire game is a joke in the UFO 50 universe canon about the particular ways that clueless executive meddling ruins games, so any criticism of it feels toothless because it’s all there on purpose.
37. Campanella 3: Passable shmup.
36. Caramel Caramel: Passable shmup, but funnier and cuter than 37.
35. Onion Delivery: Really hard, and I didn’t find that mastering the controls enough to finish a couple days rewarded me with a game rich enough to be worth the slog. On the plus side, it nails the silly manic atmosphere from obvious influence Crazy Taxi, and the main driving theme is one of the best songs in the whole collection.
34. Rail Heist: Seemed like it was going to be way more interesting than it actually was. Most of the time the way I beat levels just felt like I flailed and abused the AI’s quirks. I like that the horse is blue.
C
33. Campanella 2: Blaster Master never excited me much, and the gameplay is too simple to make me want to be as careful as the game wants you to be.
32. Overbold: I like the risk/reward mechanic, but there’s only so interesting a top-down shooter can get.
31. Mortol: There’s a conflict between the action parts and the puzzle parts. You’ll like figuring out the best way to get through a section while losing the fewest lives, and then you’ll get annoyed when you get hit by a random projectile and die anyway.
30. Paint Chase: It’s hard to be consistent at beating some of the levels, and it’s not compelling enough that I want to get good.
29. Golfaria: If you want to make a metroidvania fresh, just slap a new genre on top of it.
28. Campanella: Pleasant enough. More games should have funny bosses.
27. Warptank: Would be better if it dropped the puzzle elements entirely and was just a straightforward action game.
26. Bushido Ball: Would be higher if I didn’t know what Windjammers was.
25. Seaside Drive: Shmups aren’t my thing, but I appreciate that this one is trying to be different in a pretty conservative genre.
24. Hyper Contender: I assume the pitch for this one was “Smash, but a round takes about 60 seconds”. It’s about as good a realization of it as you could get for a project of this size.
B
23. Mortol 2: It was smart to make this one pretty easy, so that you have more room to breathe while exploring the world. Even if you run out of lives and have to start over, you’ll have gained enough knowledge that it doesn’t feel like a waste.
22. Devilition: Love the concept, but after a while of playing it my brain hurts, and there’s no way to save between rounds.
21. Attactics: It’s good!
20. Divers: The turn-based combat is slow and too simple, but the atmosphere is great. Love the spare use of sound, and the big green room that does absolutely nothing.
19. Quibble Race: One of those games where the agony of defeat makes for all the memorable moments.
18. Ninpek: Basically just Mario, but it’s well-executed, fun, and charming.
17. Night Manor: Gets a lot of mileage out of being so different from every other game in the collection. It makes an important decision correctly: It’s got about 2 hours to tell a video game story, and it chooses to make that story so simple and easy to understand that you’ll still get it even if you’re barely paying attention to the journal entries.
16. Rakshasa: Punishing just like its obvious influence Ghosts ’n Goblins, but there’s a surprisingly well-made game here if you’re willing to take enough Ls to see the later parts. Some of the best music in the collection.
15. Lords of Diskonia: The pace is too slow, but all of the pieces are well-designed and made to play off each other. One time an enemy bard accidentally hit my spider with its powerup, which caused the spider to instant kill everything it touched. If a strategy game is any good, it had better have some game-breaking interactions like that.
14. Elfazar’s Hat: I didn’t know what Pocky & Rocky was before playing this, so I thought UFO 50 had invented a new type of shmup. Now that I do, it’s still easily the best shmup in the collection. Why is this kind of game so rare?
13. Mooncat: Pure atmosphere, but that’s all you need.
12. Pingolf: This one grew on me more than any other. What caused it was that I didn’t appreciate the dunk mechanic at the start. It makes for a ton of crowd pleasing comeback moments that make you go OHHHH MY GOOOODDDDDD!!!!!
11. Magic Garden: The secret sauce for this one is that it’s possible to score WAY higher than you’d think is possible on your first few plays.
A
10. Waldorf’s Journey: I wasn’t planning on ranking this one so high until I thought about it for this list and realized that I liked everything about it and disliked nothing. I like that you can go way faster than is practical. I like that it secretly has a plot. I like that the walrus is cute.
9. Barbuta: The only other games I’ve played that have the same feeling of a secret inner world hidden behind a mysterious outer layer are the original Legend of Zelda and Fez.
8. Pilot Quest: Its ability to make you think about it when you’re playing the other games made me think to myself, what if you had a game that was UFO 50, but every game had a bunch of connections to every other game? It would be like Stop n Swop on crack and probably take 20 years to develop. Think about it guys.
7. Mini & Max: I always appreciate a good trick that makes a game seem way larger and way more filled with content than it actually is.
6. Velgress: The secret to a great twitch platformer: Lots of moments that make you say “NOOOOOOOOO” followed by “OH MY GOD I LIVED”
5. Avianos: A lot of board games in this vein tend to get abandoned midway through as everyone loses interest. This one is short enough that you can actually finish a game in a sitting and simple enough that you can learn to play without reading a rule sheet.
4. Rock On! Island: I know it’s just a stupid tower defense game but I love it. Bow OP. Funniest gag in the collection: When your caveman character dies, she spins around and falls over and is replaced with a gravestone that just reads “UG”
S
3. Valbrace: It’s like Dark Souls.
2. Bug Hunter: A beautiful piece of engineering. Every mechanic fits together so well.
1. Party House: When I try to convince someone to play UFO 50, I get them to play a round. It’s the best one, and it’s not even close.
TOP 5 UFO 50 GAMES OF 2024
Contributor: Wyatt
Party House
The best game in the collection, and also the most accessible. My 71 year old mom 100%ed it and she keeps making me set up my laptop in the living room so she can play it more. Functionally it’s pretty much a single player Dominion with a hint of blackjack. Despite not technically being a board game, it’s made me appreciate board games more; the video games I play (and that most boys play) are overwhelmingly about action and violence and journeys, so it’s refreshing to see a game about hosting parties that’s more thinky and intense than most “core gamer” games. My favorite scenarios are the ones where you don’t have any popular guests, and you end up having to go so hard on building up cash that your house becomes 4 stories tall and the rare triumphant “huge house” song plays while you’re freaking out trying to cobble together some pop and praying your star guests show up.
Campanella
These Thrust / Lunar Lander type games were popular in the 80s, and they were all slow as hell, and then everyone decided not to make them anymore. I didn’t expect this type of game to impress me, but Campanella does so by being more fast-paced than the games that inspired it, and by letting you recharge your limited fuel by having your UFO slash enemies with a sword. This ends up synergizing surprisingly well with the flying, giving a high risk high reward way to give yourself some extra time. The game is also brimming with personality, with charming and funny setpieces in every world. My favorite is probably the “boss” where you have to make your UFO dunk a basketball. The game feels a little like how it felt to find a gem while browsing addictinggames when you were a kid, except instead being something we think back on with rose tinted glasses, this one’s good for real. (That last sentence could describe the majority of the games in UFO 50.)
Bug Hunter
You can tell that this Into the Breach style game was made by the Party House guy. Unlike Party House, which gets much of its appeal from growth and synergies that feel broken in their best moments, Bug Hunter dangles strong abilities in front of you, but often you choose to get cheaper, weaker abilities instead, because they’ll solve the big problems you have to deal with Right Now. Even runs that are virtually a sure thing feel overwhelming in the moment—you almost never have enough tools to deal with every bug. But there’s tons of tools at your disposal, and they feel perfectly interwoven. Many risks double as rewards, mostly due to currency being explosive. It’s a small game but it feels complete, with any theoretical additions being almost certain to throw off the balance.
Seaside Drive
Having dabbled in shmups for a few dozen hours I’ve concluded that shmups are a genre for sickos, and not the type of sicko I am. In another world maybe I’d want to spend 50 hours replaying the same easy half hour of early game over and over to inevatibly die to what comes after it, but present me is only willing to put up with that degree of progress loss if it comes in the form of user-made Doom maps. Seaside Drive gives a pleasantly watered down version of the shmup experience—with 4 short levels, the game is long enough to feel tense and satisfying to win, without being miserable to game over to. And I’m glad it subverts the other shmup convention of no-momentum movement; moving in Seaside Drive is committal, giving your car a sense of weight, and making the power-charging drifting feel great.
This is supposed to be a top 5 but my #5 is Mini & Max and everybody who talks about UFO 50 on the internet won’t shut up about Mini & Max so instead I’m going to talk about my #16, Rakshasa.
Rakshasa
When I was a teenager who had something to prove, I attempted to beat Super Ghouls & Ghosts, and all that I proved was that my time was worth little enough to loop through the game twice (this is required to win even though virtually nothing changes), but not so worthless as to go back through the final two levels once again after missing the item you need that you have no way of knowing you need. This experience let me appreciate Rakshasa for blowing this game and all games like it out of the water. The high commitment jumps and their landing lag make you feel helpless, and this combined with the game’s lack of health and lives made me mad in a way few other UFO 50 games have, rivaled only by Onion Delivery and maybe Kick Club. And the game’s gimmick is a real missed opportunity. The gimmick is that dying makes you do a minigame that’s harder each time you die, and if you fail it you game over. But the minigame difficulty scales so steeply that in practice it’s reduced to “you get 3 lives or maybe 4”—beating the game is mostly about getting extra lives and not dying much (even dying once can doom your run since dying removes your powerup). I love the game in spite of all this. The Indian mythology theming is great and pairs well with the soundtrack, and the level design is really tight, with every enemy placement feeling meaningful, and with just enough randomness to make every attempt feel unique.
I’ll leave you with this stupidly elaborate tier list image I whipped up while procrastinating updating my resume. Feel free to look for the one opinion you disagree with (it’s probably Rail Heist (I’m right about it though)) and disregard all my other opinions.
CONTENT REVIEW GUIDE
Contributor: Parker Anderson
I probably spend more time thinking critically about video games than anything else. According to my record-keeping, I started 46 games this year and finished 32—numbers that would likely be even higher if I hadn’t played both Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (104 hours) and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (70 hours) this year.
It was an interesting year overall. I mostly stuck to new RPGs at the beginning of the year, then switched to doing mostly first-time playthroughs of older titles for the rest of the year. I largely ignored the AAA open-world/action scene, which I’ve been drifting away from for a while now.
As I get older, I’ve gravitated toward simpler games—or at least ones that don’t demand a massive time commitment. Keeping them short lets me keep the variety I crave.
For that reason, I’ve been playing through a lot of older series. Some I’m revisiting, others are new to me. As I play through each series, like Metroid, Jak & Daxter, and Devil May Cry, I’ve come to realize that understanding a game’s quality in the context of its own series—and in relation to its contemporaries—is the type of gaming experience that really gets me jazzed.
My wife and I are expecting a baby boy in a few months, so I’m expecting the number of gaming hours I can pull off to plummet a bit this year. Such a realization has me considering investing a little less into playing them and experimenting a little more with learning how to make them as a hobbyist.
It’s worth noting that of the five games in my list, two are remakes of older games; one is styled after older games; one is new yet meant to rekindle your love for older games; and another puts a fresh spin on Poker, a game so old that it completely predates video games.
Nostalgia wins again and again.
With that said, let’s kick off the list.
5. SILENT HILL 2
Bloober Team, 2024, 15 hours
The Silent Hill 2 remake didn’t make a ton of sense to me at first, but it definitely creeped me out with its squishy sound design and nail-biting encounters. More often than not, this game left me feeling winded. Once I started doing some digging into the story, I realized just how much of its depth had flown over my head. I suspect the issue was that it was my first Silent Hill experience, and I was interpreting everything at face value. The updated graphics probably detracted from the haunting ambiguity that the original game had 20 years ago, but even so, I want to play this game again!
4. CROW COUNTRY
SFB Games, 2024, 6 hours
The intentional PS1 graphical aesthetic has been growing in popularity, but none of them pull it off quite like Crow Country does, playing like a Resident Evil game with Final Fantasy VII’s graphics. The abandoned theme park it takes place in has such a charming, eerie thrill to it, and the monster designs feel like you can only half decipher them, making the whole thing even spookier. My favorite detail is how the environment mimics the flat, pre-rendered backgrounds of the PS1 era, then flips the script by letting you rotate the camera. It’s a brilliant little magic trick that fires my creativity in ways I never expected.
3. ASTRO BOT
Team ASOBI, 2024, 12 hours
Astro Bot took home the Game of the Year prize at The Game Awards this year, but was it really that good? Yes. Yes, it was. It’s that good because it delivers surprise and delight in every single carefully crafted moment, constantly giving you new mechanics to play around with. And above all else, the action of finding a new bots styled after video game characters that have played an important role in PlayStation’s history validated my love for games in ways I never thought possible—like a lifetime of passion rewarded in one perfect 12-hour ride.
2. FINAL FANTASY VII: REBIRTH
Square Enix, 2024, 104 hours
Few games will ever hope to match the ambition of the Final Fantasy VII remake project. The level of detail in these games is astonishing, and with Rebirth, they up the ante by expanding what they did in Remake in ways you’d never expect, like providing even more seamless combat options or bringing new layers of depth to the relationships of characters that have existed for almost 30 years now. Square Enix has shown they’re willing to go all out for this project, and I can’t wait to see how they finish it.
1. BALATRO
LocalThunk, 2024, countless hours
I started playing Balatro on my Switch at the beginning of the year and instantly considered it for my top 5, but everything changed when Balatro on mobile phones attacked. The perfect way to kill time does exist, and its name is Balatro. Playing it instantly feels satisfying in all the best (and perhaps slightly shameless) ways my gamer brain desires, but surprisingly, I never feel like my time is wasted. As if by playing it, I’m expanding my ability to think about the ins and outs of a complex system to find the path that will generate my best chances of winning. Plus, it’s easy to recommend to non-gamers like my oldest brother, who after sharing strategies with each other for about a week or two, soared right past my skill level.
Balatro, bringing families together.
HUGH’S FEW: THE GAMING HUGHLIGHTS OF 2024
Contributor: Dr. Hugh Ass
As soon as Mr. Eater asked me for my top ten games of the year, I knew I couldn’t pass up this opportunity though was nervous about being able to meet his high standard. I immediately thought it over, then went on to some other life developments and threw this together during my last workday of the year. See here my top five video games for 2025!
1. The Beast
Went into this one totally blind. I’m a sucker for a tragedy of fates and Bonello knocks this one out of the park across a couple of genres (and time periods). Given that I am also a sucker for a costume period drama, I was surprised that the first section sloughed the most for me, though the ultimate work was indeed greater than the sum of these parts and its importance to the metanarrative makes it easy to sweep that bit of slow pacing under the rug. Bonello adds to the century-plus spanning narrative in his cinematographic play that serves to differentiate the time periods on a structural level. 1910 is a decadent world of contrasts, 2010 has California’s thin glamourous veneer stretched over the broad skin of its decay, and the matte impersonality of 2044 makes us all want to be cutting shapes in the nostalgia nightclubs with our fellow lobotomites.
This is probably Seydoux’s strongest leading performance and could just as well be a meta study on the role of the leading lady in cinema—she embodies the push pull contortionism of love and fear that has been accepted as truth, largely due to the efforts of male auteurs. Seeing the Hollywood idyll be contrasted with McKay’s portrayal of the extreme real-world byproduct is an interesting study of the socio-cultural myths we dream up in collision with the realities they beget. How much of this is in our heads? How much do we push people away due to the structures we’ve imagined?
2. Anora
Went into this one totally blind (though admittedly with a huge love of Yura Borisov). I saw this most recently, so it’ll be my lengthiest review. BLUF: Sean Baker Stuns Again with a Stunning Humanist Depiction of Our Capitalist Hellscape. While having nearly unwavering faith in Baker’s ability to produce this exact movie, the current media landscape did give me pause that we might get a hamfisted lib culture war piece, so you can imagine my pleasure in getting a film that dissects class dynamics in a microcosm that can easily be translated onto just about anywhere or expanded onto anything. The fish-out-of-water Russians in New York element allows the insulation of the narrative and commentary within a limited social space, though rather than pointing to any kind of fundamental cultural incompatibility between The West and Russia, it highlights the links between Igor and Anora, both born under the boot of systems seeking to extract that most fundamental from its downtrodden. Only through solidarity is any kind of exit identified from the cycle of violence (sidebar: Here, it is the twofold corruption of Anora by capital as well as Igor’s roots in a system that embraced solidarity allow him to identify these links ahead of her, both of which show the ability of ruling structures to suppress action for solidarity and meaningful change through control of education and co-opt working classes into service of the maintenance of wealth with the occasional bonbon thrown down). A guy I follow on that game-review app that people use for clout said that Anora was достоевщина по-бэйкрески – a wealthy scion-cum-scoundrel (ed. nice) at odds with his absentee parents who come calling, the simpleton with a clear perception of how all these pieces fall into place, caricatures of people from an ethnicity in Russia’s periphery, and the hooker with a heart of gold driving the bus. At its core, Anora is about the tailspin our economic and thereby social [ed. someone should come up for a compound word for these two] structures are in and even more so, the people who are left holding the socio-economic cheque [ed. there we go] when the universe comes calling. A final note of how authentic it felt in a move that seems to service the Slavaboo communities—I’ve met all those guys and have heard those conversations. It does a great service to the movie that the lingo, even the Ringlish sounds authentic. Igor reminded me of a buddy (who broke the cycle through falsifying some of his own documents) and has a similar way of speaking plain truths with profundity. Last shot of the film gave me chills.
I went in on the thematics and need to rush so cinematographically: uhh looks phenomenal—almost like a Sean Baker movie with a higher budget or something. I really enjoyed the [contrasting expansive and near-claustrophobic/opulent and sparse/busy and calm] shots paired with the emotional rollercoaster. Sad I missed the big screen experience for this one.
3. The Substance
Went into this one totally blind. This movie came up recently when out for dinner (at a tasteful, but subdued restaurant no doubt) with some friends: somebody said they liked it (but in a Good way), someone replied that Demi Moore looked great in it, and a third replied that they’d kill to look like her at that age. Fargeat—mission accomplished? No, we were all expecting something extremely heavy handed with this movie and it delivered, but it goes a step further in playing with those expectations. I mean, you liked it didn’t you? Despite the messaging that every good millennial leftist embraces, we still coveted what we saw, we still asked our partners if we should moisturise more, we cannot help ourselves in perpetuating that at which we slapped our knees laughing; and with that Fargeat laughs back at us.
Influences are worn proudly on the sleeve and, while I feel like I usually have an aversion to that kind of thing, Fargeat brings a new lens to the Dorian Gray ur-narrative that feels fresh. Clearly, 2024 has been a great year for the Hollywood veneer wearing thin.
4. Only the River Flows
Went into this one totally blind. God this one looks so good and feels so cool. I feel like we get so hung up on Hong Kong kino that we video game bros miss out on a lot of mainland Chinese cinema in conversation. Korea has had East Asian noir locked down for several years now, but while their grip loosens, Wei Shujun steps in so competently. The first two acts do a great service to the genre (you could do yourself a great disservice in dismissing it as a Memories of Murder clone) and look gorgeous, with Wei moving from the cinema-cum-HQ (ed. nice), to the city, to the outdoors on sumptuous 16mm. Moving into the third act, we start to move into the Overlap (ed. call back to my GOTY from last year, Alan Wake II) into an unexplainable fever dream where the lines between the worlds blur and Ma gets closer to the rot.
The film is both meditative and kinetic as required and it’s crazy this hasn’t gotten more love within this scene. Next time you reach for the Na Hong-jin, think “Wei.”
5. The End
Went into this one totally blind. Second heavy hitter featuring McKay this year and when I say I hate musicals—and this is a theater kid ass musical—I was very surprised that this is so far up my list. Joshua Oppenheimer has no right to deliver a narrative piece so competently after producing two of the most important documentary pieces (okay, they’re companion pieces and shouldn’t occupy two spots on anyone’s list). So utterly far removed from the context of The Act of Killing, but we’re again met with the survivors, the doom they themselves engineered upon the world, and the self-delusion/narratives (both historical and escapist) they spin for themselves as shelter from their fate. This narrative isn’t groundbreaking at all, but it is presented here in a frank and very competent manner, which is actually kind of groundbreaking for the musical theatre genre. All of the actors seem to be utterly at home in the genre and deliver a more competent performance than anything any big name musicals (ed. sorry, Come From Away) have given us lately. Michael Shannon perhaps sticks out as a less obvious musical actor, though given he’s probably the best actor (full stop) in the room, he more than compensates to the point of his solo (The Big Blue Sky) being my highlight of the whole thing in a delightfully silly, cutting, amateurish even way. Divorced of any visuals, I’ll point you to the Swinton-helmed Another Winter.
To no one’s surprise, production design on this one is absolutely stunning. Copying the manor from Malmkrog and pasting it into a salt mine with a diorama plopped in the middle is more than apt for a symbol for the Potemkin Village of a utopia that these people build themselves. I’m not whatsoever qualified to talk about this, but the songs felt very well written and the choreography excellent.
If you couldn’t tell, I’m running out of time here and rushed through those last two so I can get to eating pickled fish and doing a couple of toasts. I don’t even know if these were actually released in 2024 lol.
Best Picture: Anora (Sean Baker)
Best Actor: Demi Moore (The Substance)
Best Cinematography: Only the River Flows (Chengma Zhiyuan)
Best Supporting: Yura Borisov (Anora)
Best Production: The End (idk Joshua Oppenheimer? Gimme a break)
Happy new year! May you find happiness, joy, and success in all endeavours in what will surely be an auspicious 2025.
-Dr. Hugh Ass
BIRDBATH’S SUBMISSION TO THE ANNUAL LOTUS EATER GAME OF THE YEAR NEWSPOST
Contributor: Birdbath
In a manner of speaking.
The included games are the games I would have certainly given top rank in my personal Game of the Year review, if I had the time and/or gumption to play them.
1. METAPHOR: REFANTAZIO
Metaphor: ReFantazio is perhaps the most “game I am certain I will play, and therefore it will never get played” game I could invent in mine own mind. And so here it is in the world, rife with familiarity and new secrecy, accumulating dust in the digital corner of my library (or it would be, if I owned it). It is, in all but name and setting, a Persona game. It is exactly Persona enough to utterly delight me for a fourth or fifth 80 hour plus campaign, and exactly unPersona enough to not fully push me through the threshold of actually playing it. Rather than the tantalizing promise of rebellious youth, in a sprawling urban city with ne’erdowells, sympathy-seekers and bad boys, it proposes a separate setting entirely: of rebellious youth, in a sprawling urban city with ne’erdowells, sympathy-seekers and bad boys, but, well, even more…fantasy. And superficially this is repellent in some ungraspable way to me. Not that I am adverse to fantasy in any sort or sense (in fact, more of what I enjoy is fantasy than not), but the generic sheen from the first hour of the Demo (wow, that really backfired for them, hey) left me content to declare: Metaphor is the game I will most confidently enjoy with mine own heart that I may never play. And I am content with that…for now.
2. BALATRO
We can all be the Joker, baby! Or at least, I think that’s what this game is about. Having also only played the Demo (0/2 for on Demos this year, maybe they don’t achieve the intended purpose after all!1) Balatro almost crests Metaphor as “game I am confident I will enjoy but may never play”. It has all of the allure a deckbuilder roguelike could desire: a gripping gameplay loop, a unique visual design, and a gameplay engine built on another, familiar game, core and foundational to almost all who would engage with it: Slay the Spire poker. I have loved all 80 minutes I have collectively spent thinking about how good this game probably is.
3./4. ANIMAL WELL/LORELEI AND THE LASER EYES
I have placed these interchangeably as my exposure to either game is limited by my intent to play them unsullied and unspoiled. These round out the bottom of the list as they are the games I am most certain I will enjoy AND most certain I will play. They rattle and fumble around together in my gumball-machine mind, waiting to be dispensed when the fateful (digital) loonie turns the crank that pops them out, their secrets urging to be opened.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
[Games I actually played this year, despite all intent not to]:
1. ELDEN RING: SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE
“I presume you, too, are keen to know, just what kind Miquella is doing here.” I was, in truth, quite keen to know just what kind Miquella was doing there. Did I then, upon vanquishing the vestigial remains of his consort, learn that which I sought? Uhhhh, kind of. Did Shadow of the Erdtree break free from the shadow cast upon it by the base game, free of its “oh it’s just an expansion, it shouldn’t be eligible for Game of the Year!! Wah I’m a huge baby who actually gives a shit about game of the year!!” often-lofted critiques? Uhhhh, kind of.
2. PERSONA 3: RELOAD
it may not have been my game of the year, but it certainly earned its accolade “Most bizarre soundtrack that insidiously takes over your brain until you’re singing the strange broken-english mumble rap word for word, googling the lyrics on your commute to work and thinking to yourself ‘oh wow, those actually are the words he’s saying.’”
3. THE RISE OF THE GOLDEN IDOL
Worthwhile enough to demand that you play The Case of the Golden Idol, not worthwhile enough to expand further.
GRIEVANCES
1. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: ECHOES OF WISDOM
While my exposure to the first female-led (in both Game Director and character) mainline Legend of Zelda game was purely second-hand, the only thing more traumatic for me to reflect upon than the newest iteration of the Zelda franchise is the amount of second-hand smoke I was exposed to in my childhood home from years 1-18.
2. ASTRO BOT
Wah I’m a huge baby who actually gives a shit about game of the year!! what is this crap!!
Thanks again to everyone who contributed, anyone who even briefly considered contributing, and anyone who gave this post a wee read. I hope each of you enjoyed your respective participations in this little project and I encourage you to try out one of the other participating activities in the future,2 except for my role, which will be relinquished only (and compulsorily) to my eldest child in the event of my death.
Footnotes
My most played Demo of all time is NHL 2010 for the Xbox 360. It allowed unlimited playtime given you could only play as the two hockey teams provided in the Demo. Not only was I convinced not to purchase the full retail game due to its limitless accessibility, it also guaranteed no future purchases in the franchise as my minor interest was forevermore sated. Great job EA, you fucking scum.↩︎
Actually, if you did contribute this year, I would prefer that you continue to do so in the future, instead of sampling the “briefly consider contributing” option.↩︎