by borgmaster
I played almost no games which were released this year. Like, this is the least engaged I have ever been with current releases. As such, here are the ten games I played from this year, ranked.
Honorable mentions of games I should have played but didn't: Astro Bot, Stalker 2, Pacific Drive, that new Zelda, that woke Princess Peach thing, and Metaphor ReFantazio or whatever it's called. Also Belatro, which I will never play and you can't make me. You nerds are lucky I didn't buy Sonic x Shadow Generations just to fill out the bottom of this list. Actually, I might still buy it because why not.
Oh, and Another Crab's Treasure seems like the least insufferable soulslike of the year, so congrats to that team. I should start a Lies of P Award for Least Insufferable Soulslike of the Year.
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The original Sins of a Solar Empire was the first 4x game I ever played. I don't know why that was where I decided to dive into the genre as a youth back in 2008, maybe it had to do with it having the coolest title I had ever seen for a game. It's still one of the coolest game titles of all time. It helps that I enjoyed my time with it and put in the kind of hours only possible for someone in high school. I was a few months late to the party in even knowing that this sequel existed, but when I did I gave Stardock whatever amount of money they were asking and immediately began losing hours of my life in this thing. It's like what I remember, but better. I should also note that I never really touched the expansions or re-release of the original, so my point of comparison is the initial disc-in-box version of Sins of a Solar Empire; and in that comparison this is nicely modernized in all the ways I would want. A+, no notes, this is exactly what I wanted. Yet, it feels weird calling it my Game of the Year for 2024. My last five GOTYs were transcendent experiences in their own ways, and at the end of the day this is just comfort food. I didn't have one of those this year, for how detached I've been from current events. I'm still glad I at least found a solid game that I won't feel bad about putting at the top of a list, so hopefully I have better luck next year.
It's cheating in a way for me to put the re-release of my 2021 GOTY on this list, but when I said I played 10 games I wasn't joking. In that context, SMT V is still exactly my thing, with the new route they added to it being good and worth going back to for another playthrough. Though, I haven't actually beaten this playthrough, which will be a running theme with this list. Still, the 30 hours or so I put in are good, SMT is cool, and SMTV is the reason why I took the plunge into this franchise in the first place. I'm liable to always reward a game when it handles this series correctly.
I've been a huge mark for the EDF games for years. I file these thing into the same compartment of my brain that I keep my Dynasty Warriors fandom, it's dumb, semi-mindless action. A podcast game. What I'm getting at is that I bought this game on launch day, paying the bastards whatever they asked for it, and have been gnawing on it since. I wasn't overly thrilled with some of the changes to the gamefeel, but I got over it eventually, with the absurdity of the timeloop premise and its campy panache winning me back over. I've only gotten up to EDF 8, for anyone keeping track, but I plan on reaching the end eventually.
I'm talking about DYNASTIES which came out this year, so don't at me. Speaking of, I usually buy all of the historical Total War games immediately on release, but there was so much stink surrounding the initial launch of PHARAOH that I skipped it and waited to see what happened. Turns out they spent the following year unfucking the game and put it out as a whole different .exe, which seemed like the appropriate onboarding point. And boy howdy, was it ever. The current version of this is good Total War, which I've been starving for since Three Kingdoms. I know the historiocity of this one is dubious at best, but it's more grounded than Troy, and that's good enough for me. Also, the Crisis of the Twelfth Century is a good setting for a war game, even if we don't know much of anything about how warfare worked back then. It was also a good excuse for messing with the strategy layer mechanics and economy, all of which add welcome mechanical depth. Oh, and Warhammer Fantasy can get bent.
This is a similar kind of cheating as with SMT VV, but, again, ten games. This is also like the third version of Persona 3 that I own, so the 40 or so hours I put into playing this one felt like even more of a rehash. With a couple of caveats, this is the best way to play P3, which was Atlus' intention so good job. But since it's still this game, it still has most of the warts that kept it from breaking out of weeb circles in the way Persona 4 eventually would. I think modern audiences have a baseline higher tolerance for this kind of content than 20 years ago, so now is the best time for this remake to come out. Anyway, I enjoy Persona 3 so can you.
I haven't put in anywhere near as much time with this one as I should have, but it's Microsoft's fault for dropping it in December. Though from what I did play, I'm confident in saying this is the first AAA game in a while that I've enjoyed. A high budget first-person brawler structured like a mix of Hitman, Wolfenstein, and Dishonored is enough on its own to make it into my good graces, with the brand licensing not even being necessary. You can even get through the combat on normal without having to perfect parry every enemy! In 2024! Truly a blast from the past.
So, I played this little game at the last minute to reach the arbitrary ten game count we use for these lists, and I'm glad I did. It's a small, open world shenanigan game that's more structured and good-natured than the goat game, and less structured with more systems than the goose game. The traversal is fun enough and the writing is cute enough to keep interest for the 5 or so hours weirdos like me would need to 100% it. This praise might seem mild, but that's still enough to make it the 7th best game of the ten I played this year.
I really liked the first installment of the FFVII remake, to the point where I was actively mad at Square retroactively making the original game good. I don't have to worry about that this time, since in spite of still retaining the solid systems, combat, character work, art design, and charm of the first installment, the content bloat and Nomura whack-assiness sink this one down to the "enthusiasts only" category. Especially the minigames. I hate these minigames so much it hurts. Fort Condor can eat my ass. Queen's Blood is a blight. The Costa Del Sol and Golden Saucer minigames? Some of those turn me into the avatar of rage. If you bring up that fucking frog minigame in my presence I will hurt you. It's been quite a long time since I've subjected myself to a game that fills me with murderous intent, but here we are. This would have easily been an exceptional experience if there was like 2/3rds as much of it.
I don't feel great about putting Botany Manner below a game that literally filled me with violent anger, but there's almost nothing to grasp onto with this game. I'm tempted to call this the Escape Academy of the Year, an award reserved for indie games that don't have a ton going on but are still completely fine. There tends to be one hanging around filling space on my lists keeping more problematic picks out of the top ten. This year that excluded game would probably have been Zenless Zone Zero or something. Other examples of this would be like Jusant last year, or The Gunk, Sable, and the Picross S series in previous years. As far as this game goes on it's own merits, this is a first person puzzle game with reasonable environmental puzzle design, and a moderately sized open area with a pleasant aesthetic. The narrative point has something to do with the ongoing and necessary historic revisionism uncovering the capable women in science who had been paved over by their male counterparts. I'm not sure what point this game is trying to make about that subject, other than generally raising awareness. The act of uncovering that story through finding stuff in the environment has me tempted to call this "Gone Home with all the edges sanded off", but that would be a bit too mean. Still a perfectly serviceable puzzle game, so there's that.
Ok, look...look. If you know what this game is than you know that it's barely a video game. It's like the Aquanaut's Holiday series but with 1/3rd the systems or mechanics. But you know what? No one makes Aquanaut's Holiday anymore so how else am I supposed to scan and catalog fish? I'm having an argument with you even though you aren't having one with me. It's also largely a multiplayer game but most of the players are in Japan and the ping is a bad time. Still, if EDF is the podcast game of the year, then this is the Youtube Essay game of the year, in that you need to pay even less attention to what's on-screen than with EDF. It also makes me wish that weird Africa photography game had been ported to the US. Anyway, this is the tenth game I played this year.
