In 2024, my larger friend group decided to tackle our video game backlogs in a more organized manner than usual: we picked 25 games each and had someone create a bingo card out of them. I ultimately completed all 25 games I picked, so here is my ranking and some reflections on each.
Truly the most wretched game on this card, or at least the one that most failed to live up to my expectations. Nightmare Temptation Academy is a game that delights in relitigating uniquely millennial forms of trauma, which I don't need to be educated on, and frankly I don't think this game situates the reality of said trauma properly enough to be of historical use either. Full of nihilist navel-gazing, obsessed with do-overs (ending text: "if you could do all it over again, would you?"), and unearnedly portraying high school as literally and allegorically the end of the world, Nightmare didn't even live up to the first word in its title; nothing lodged in my psyche at all that wasn't already done better and before by real life.
An extreme letdown after the first game, BCR2 decides that the obvious follow-up to a game where you kill Nazis is a game where you kill Fidel Castro. The addition of a jump button technically makes the game more accessible but at the price of any uniqueness to its pitch -- and then backtracks by making it optional anyway. It is everything a Game Industry Sequel conventionally tries to be - More Stuff, More Modes (the helicopter segments weren't bad, exactly, but they also sure were unnecessary), and More Players, running roughshod over everything that made the original special. Also, Spencer's new look is just downright awful.
I admit this one is on me, partially, for insisting on playing the remake instead of the GBA original, but seeing as half my complaints were about the plot anyway, it's not moving from this spot. Re:Chain of Memories was a mind-numbing slog with some of the most irritating combat I've had the misfortune to put myself through, and for almost zero relevant narrative (at this time). I will give the game props for attempting a rummy-based combat system, rarely seen in card-based RPGs, but I'm also going to walk those points back for making such a mangled attempt that it's clear why no one else has tried again. While I'm aware that the nature of Kingdom Hearts' plot means I might revise my opinion of the Org XIII story I received in this entry upwards later, I'm not honestly holding my breath, and I still regret attempting it at all.
As with BCR2 before it, this game decides to be a sequel by backtracking on everything good about the first entry. Whereas Final Fantasy XIII is one of my all-timers, XIII-2 stuck me with a cast who are too dopey to care about, a tedious monster-collecting mechanic, and "open world" design clearly made to pander to the gamers who (foolishly) slagged XIII for being linear upon its release. By the time I got to the end, I described it as "The first half of Homestuck but minus any understanding of what its characters are doing." Everything magical about XIII evaporated in this game, and in ways that make it very easy to point the finger at people who didn't appreciate the first game in its own time.
This is a bit of a bias point. Two Point Hospital was a perfectly cromulent management game, but in the course of completing the base game I came to realize that there is a fundamental disconnect between me and the genre it operates under. I don't like management sims, it turns out, and generally prefer having some kind of avatar in the game worlds I inhabit. For similar reasons I have never vibed with Paradox-style grand strategy, or with builder game creative modes (you know, Minecraftlikes). This game is perfectly good for someone, but that someone isn't me, and I won't make further pretensions otherwise.
At this threshold we cross into games that were more Alright, I Suppose. VA-11 Hall-A still smacks of its channer origins in several places -- calling the cyberpunk cops "White Knights", the infamous references on Dorothy -- but it briefly shows moments of trying to transcend this. Unfortunately it was still 2014-2016 and it shows in much of the writing. The closest the game gets to having interesting material is Dorothy's open admission that she is delaying her upgrade from her child-form chassis specifically because it gives her a competitive edge as a sex worker, and frankly you could probably make a whole (more interesting) game working with that material, but the rest of the cast is stock cyberpunk, and the gimmick of being a side character is less of a big deal once you've played a twenty games that opt for the same perspective with better writing on itch.io. The game's problematic aspects are often wildly overexaggerated by its detractors in my experience (the 4chan baggage is basically all off-the-cuff name-checking rather than woven into the text), but the equally loud fans also probably need to play literally anything else. Still better than Doki Doki Literature Club, at least.
I'm putting a moratorium on Western RPGs that crib only from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Not an outright ban, as now exists for "throwback JRPGs in the vein of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6", but a moratorium. I don't like timed hits and unless you really know what you're doing they mostly serve to make playing the game kind of a chore. I'm also disappointed, but not surprised, that the Light series continues to not... really do much. I realize it's unfair to compare a series of side games for a tween cartoon to the very solid writing that characterizes later Steven Universe (and of course The Movie and Future), but it does leave the games feeling a bit like they get the short end of the narrative stick, despite having the full show voice cast (rare for any licensed game) and Rebecca Sugar's involvement in story. It was a decent romp but I wouldn't return to it for a replay. We'll see how Unleash the Light shakes out at some point.
Analgesic Productions' Anodyne is a landmark game in my life for several reasons, so I was excited to see how the sequel carried on. Unfortunately I think it missed the mark for me by trying to be less abstruse. The first Anodyne is a very surreal experience that doesn't even really have any conventional kind of narrative closure after beating the final boss, and leaves the nature of the relationship between Young and Briar rather open to interpretation, even with the very obvious fact that the Land is all in Young's subconscious. Anodyne 2 works on a more explicit level to engage with cultish behavior in evangelical Christianity, and the difficulty and pain of escaping it. While this did mostly work, it's a tack that carries absolutely zero weight to me, as someone who was raised almost completely agnostically, and later turned to Internet Atheism before settling on Discordianism. Anodyne 2's aesthetic side also felt more composed, which is a weird thing to knock a game for, but Anodyne 1 shocked me more reliably, between CELL, Young Town, and even the fisherman incident (if you've played it you know what I'm talking about). Also, despite claims that Anodyne 2 is a standalone sequel in the vein of Final Fantasy, the postgame actually makes clear that it is a direct sequel to 1, which honestly I think would have made it land better for me to know up front. This reveal was the one thing that really made me perk up at the game - which is a darn shame seeing as it's the last bit of actual narrative and requires reloading after completion.
I like hacking sims, and the thing is that Hacknet isn't one, actually. It's a visual novel wearing the trappings of hacking sims. While I don't object to this on principle, I did want a little more math in my game, and a less brutally on-rails main quest. This might come across as a RETVRN attitude, and I get it, not everything can or should be Uplink, Hacker Evolution, or Dark Signs, but those tend to be what I go in for. As it stands, Hacknet felt a touch twee to me, but not in the all-saturating way of (for example) ustwo or most Annapurna games. There were some really cute touches in here as a consequence of its narrative-first approach; I was especially fond of the end sequence being timed precisely to the crescendo of its soundtrack music, which you simply wouldn't see in most of these games, but it made me wish for a synthesis of the two, rather than ditching all the fun mechanical baggage of juggling side quests and goofy upgrades in the name of ensuring the plot happens on time.
Decent H-vania. This is definitely the game I have the least to say about; it's not really engaging with its porn to do higher-concept narrative, but the main girl is cute and her boobs are big, so I can't say it doesn't deliver. I made it overly hard for myself by doing all the achievements in a single run, but this really just meant more tedium than average in boss fights, and frustration as I combed the world over for that Last Lousy Collectible at the end. I'm ultimately not much of a Castlevania or Metroid player, but I don't really get the sense that this was more than competently executed.
In a classic bit of iconoclasm, I've chosen to make my Square Enix Full Discography Project not one of their well-known, widely-renowned series, as so many people commit to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest or even SaGa or Mana; instead I've gone for the depths of the Media.Vision-developed mobile-first series Chaos Rings. And as one might expect from a mobile-first series... there's not a whole lot of meat on the first game. The entire experience is best described as "diet PSX JRPG" - your party size is two (excepting brief thematic moments of only one), there are only three elements, and the whole game can in fact be 110%-ed in the time that it would take you to clear most actual console games. The narrative is a bit iffy, too, focusing as it does on a time-loop eugenics project to defeat a conceptual vacuum beast, seemingly an incarnate force of entropy. But for its cringe, Chaos Rings also dispenses with the ability to really dive into making that cringe so horrific as some much worse games do, like Suikoden or Treasure of the Rudras, and it did not eat half as much of my time this year as the other time loop JRPG I played (see above), so I'm still motivated to stick with it and see what happened in the next three installments. Even if it gets worse, it will probably at least get interesting in the process.
Dusk is... fine? I guess? I increasingly question the need for the boomer shooter revival when the actual landmark games not only still exist, but still have active mod scenes. To Dusk's credit, it was only the first episode that really left me feeling wanting, and once it got out of its boring retread of Redneck Rampage by way of Blair Witch and into more unique settings I liked it much more. I also thought it was goofy to be riffing so much on the classic three-episode shareware model but still pass out the entire arsenal by halfway through episode 1; it makes it difficult to escalate. Credit where it's due, the turn towards eldritch level design in episode 3 actually woke me up positively. But ultimately I don't really feel that I got anything out of Dusk that I wouldn't have also gotten by picking ten highly-rated entries on Slipseer.
Doom 3 was also a letdown, and it's hard to really rank it either above or below Dusk, but ultimately I gave it first-mover priority. Having heard endless complaints from Gamers over the years about how this game was trying and failing to be System Shock 2... it extremely isn't. Actually what it's trying to be is Resident Evil, but Doom 3 is to Resident Evil as Chained Echoes is to Chrono Trigger: an attempt to ape a classic but pave over all its rough spots. Doom 3 has an abundance of ammo and a generally low TTK in both directions, not to mention save-anywhere. While I did have to do health management, when popular consensus insisted this was a survival horror game I was expecting to literally ever have concerns about ammo use. The monster closets eventually get predictable, and I was amused more than once to see that I wasn't able to trigger one because the trigger was to pick up certain health packs, which I couldn't, because I had too much health left. The Hell marathon level was the closest the game gets to this, but by the time you exit it you're revved up to slaughter everything with more aplomb than before. As someone who values the dark and eerie aspects of Doom a lot (favorite WADs include A.L.T. and The Given), this game sold itself to me on aesthetics but ultimately revealed it had little more understanding of those facets than the Blizzard-core full-heavy-metal-album-cover slop that Bethesda is now pumping out in its name.
Duke Nukem 3D is a fascinating document of 1990s neoliberal derangement. As a character design, he attempts to recuperate the social critique of such works as They Live and Alien but without any evidence of real internalized understanding of what made those films work as critiques or as works-in-themselves. This also applies to what it apes from Doom. For example, Duke inherits the Doom functionality of exiting levels by either killing a boss or pushing a big button (well, already a step down from Doom also having teleporters work as exits), but the button is specifically coded as a self-destruct button in every case, which doesn't actually make sense half the time. The first episode is spit-polished to a mirror shine, but the quality curve trends down after that in the base game. Episode 2 does feature some interesting level design ideas, even if they often come in the same form as everything else in Duke3D of "pissing on whatever pop cultural reference we could think of at the time", but by the time Episode 3 rolls around it starts feeling like half-baked reduxs of half of Episode One levels at a time, each. The actual moment-to-moment gunplay is also less satisfying because of the wide variance on damage per projectile, as well as the lack of flinching; each encounter boils down to a DPS race, which of course Duke is generally equipped to win. Fortunately, for latter-day players like myself, the not-in-the-original-release Episode 4 is a stunning return to form, with the levels reaching back to their convoluted, labyrinthine layouts and elaborate setpieces from Episode 1, and in particular the last two levels aboard the alien ship itself really leaned into what I wanted the game to be all the way through. Perhaps this is just me doing boosterism for the Marathon trilogy again, but I'm okay with that. (As an aside, I also ended up playing the first expansion pack, Duke It Out in D.C., which is a sizzlingly medium-rare distillation of the post-Reagan action hero zeitgeist of simultaneously upholding and desecrating the United States as an idol. It also leans incredibly strongly into hyperrealism, with the infamous Smithsonian level, as well as the nuclear sub base, being a huge positive standout for me. I don't recommend the other two expansions, but DC is an absolutely ridiculous followup.)
Okay, look. I see why people like this game. It does do new and good things with the often-tried, more-often-tired "CRPG" formula that it wears on its sleeve. And it is overtly communist, despite what some fence-sitting players might try to argue. But it's also really small in scale, partly because of the narrative systems it employs, and ultimately comes across as having spent a lot of extra money to make a 3D free-roam visual novel, when 2D with menu navigation would have sufficed. But it's fine. The Thought Cabinet is inspired enough design (as you can tell from how memetic it now is), and I see why people vibed so hard with this game, but I also implore people to not stop here and keep playing weirder and more openly leftist works. (No, I don't actually think Disco engages with fascism as a real and urgent threat; it is the same equal-opportunity mockery as the rest of the political ideologies, with no real demonstration of what it will work if left untreated.)
Fun little romp but I reiterate my moratorium on Timed Hits Western RPGs Helmed By Animators. Fortunately, Costume Quest 2 is much shorter and has a harder time wearing out its mechanical welcome. It's a cute little story about embracing childhood even under duress - sadly, its most interesting character development has to happen off-screen after you return Young Orel to his own time, where he presumably lives a life of covertly disobeying his mother's ban on candy and Halloween. But it's short, and Double Fine's aesthetic work is on point as ever, and it doesn't trip into problematic tropes like their bigger games often manage to with the additional runtime and more serious topics.
I've been around the Fallen London fandom for a while, so this was a bit of a return to form for me, especially because Sunless Sea was a relative high point for me last decade. Skies revisits the Escape Velocity-like formula of Sea, but with some changes that... puzzled me somewhat as a longtime fan, but less so as a Video Game Business Realities Understander. Fallen London itself is very slow-burn on its lore, even with the many changes made in the last four years to accelerate the pace of the early game, and Sunless Sea played into this a bit - it gave you a bit more of a lowdown than FL does so you could get started, but still tucked a lot of deep lore in, well, deep water. But Sunless Skies blows straight past the drip-feed and starts talking about the Judgments almost immediately. Partly this is of necessity due to how far the timeline of Skies has advanced and diverged from "main" Fallen London as a possible-sequel to Sea, but combined with the fact that Skies also makes a lot of casual-friendly mechanical improvements (many more things persist between captains than did in Sea, even when you die instead of retiring, and movement is much zippier), it is clear that Skies is positioned as an entry-level game... mechanically. Lorewise it might almost count as a walking spoiler for most of the giant browser game that Failbetter runs! I understand why these changes were made, but ultimately I had to come down on Sunless Sea being my preferred entry. However, for someone who just wants to see What's All This About Then because their friends haven't shut up about Hesperidean Cider for 15 years, Skies is probably a decent on-ramp.
I promised myself I wasn't going to be emotionally affected by a twee Humble game but dammit I got misty thinking about having a house with my loved ones and putting all our stuff in its right places. Unpacking is pretty, and gay. It is not a revolutionary game by any stretch, but I had a nice time and it reminded me of reasons to go on at the end of this year.
I've finally started playing Yakuza in timeline order, and boy do I have a lot on my plate. But the series is fun, and while a lot of praise for it seems to focus on the wild shenanigans in the substories (How to Train Your Dominatrix still sticks out), I'm also really here for the exaggerated crime-film aesthetic of burly men crashing into each other as allegorical showdowns between their worldviews are carried out at the end of their fists. The games do a much more interesting job for me of gamifying the criminal lifestyle than GTA does, though they do it with some questionable decisions at times, and the combat can be a little unhoned (I did my entire Legend playthrough with nothing but the square-square-square-triangle combo for both Kiryu's Beast style and Majima's Breaker style). These are good games to fill the live service niche that I otherwise need to step back from truly indulging, and I look forward to catching up and seeing how it's finally evolving in the 2020s too.
Look. I didn't even know Suda or the Tokyo Jungle designers were involved with this when I booted it up. So when I realized both of these things at the 30 minute mark I was already almost done with the first playthrough. Ranko Tsukigime is a very short piece (womp womp) and the leads clearly knew they had to grab your attention quick. I'm still not entirely sure what happened in it, and the lack of any real thematic scaffolding makes it impossible for me to push it any higher on the list, but I absolutely had a good time seeing more cutscene art styles than there are cutscenes in the game, and it's not a difficult game to run through either. Definitely worth tracking down for your PS3 emulator (since it's been delisted from PSN).
Okay here we fucking go. The Good Shit starts here. Brütal Legend gets the lowest spot on this list because it is still at its heart a goofy game about inhabiting a heavy metal album cover, but it does it with so much more love than Blizzard ever managed that it's impossible to be mad or really anything other than joyful. I didn't have much trouble with the Stage Battles, despite the reputation, and getting to make decisions like "START A REVOLUTION: NOW or LATER" made me howl in delight. This game also might have metalpilled me (and I don't wanna hear shit from the hipsters about that meaning Mötley Crüe as much as Brocas Helm), so that's a delightful way to vibe more with some of my friends. Hell, I'll pre-order the sequel the second Tim Schafer finally announces he's had time and inspiration to make it happen. ... Assuming it ever does after the Microsoft acquisition, and that despite that they manage to not overindulge in 2020s Open World Syndrome, which would be the worst possible way to ruin this game's formula. Ugh. I'm sad again.
Alice is hella problematic (see the entire "Orient" sequence in the middle) but it sticks its landing so hard I could not help but place it here. I did not expect going in that it was actually going to do anything like a convincing depiction of mental illness, let alone coping mechanisms -- and in truth, the writing in the London segments is a little scattershot and threadbare, but this also dovetails with Alice's own fractured psyche and heavy dissociation. I'm a sucker for Blue Girl, to be sure, but Madness Returns also managed to meld its scattershot material into an actual, and even more surprisingly, competently executed trauma narrative, tracing Alice from helpless waif to determinator detective to avenging angel. My main problems with this game are that I would probably give the next one to a crew of severely mentally ill, terminally online trans women, who would put out an even more insane take on Alice and also probably have the chops to make it a real CAG. However, the aesthetic of the series is flawlessly on point despite not being made under what I'd consider flawlessly optimized conditions. The Vorpal Blade's red-motion-lined SCHWING is immensely satisfying to wield, second only to the game concluding by answering the question "And what do we do with men who pimp children?" with "WE SHOVE THEM IN FRONT OF A MOVING TRAIN!"
Unlike the other interface dramas here, Hypnospace Outlaw had my number. Its free-floating, mission-minimal plot structure really helps give it a sense of place, as does Jay Tholen's open admission that he wanted more to make an entire fake Internet than a "good game". Spoiler alert, that's actually how to make a good game. Hypnospace is concerned with the player's brief career as a moderator for its eponymous sleeptime Internet, on three separate days leading up to the disastrous New Year's product upgrade for the in-game company that runs it. Even though you only get three different views tops of any page on the fictional network, every page is dripping with delightful character, and the tragic fates of some of the central players almost made me tear up during the "post-game" where the Hypnospace Archival Project enlists you to recover the pages cached on your headset, while also re-evaluating and bringing proper closure to the drama that happened the 20+ years prior. Hypnospace Outlaw believes in looking at the past, to treasure and learn from it, but importantly (and in contrast to the last-placer on this list) not to wallow in it, and to move forward, even when things are painful, even when sometimes people are just Wrong today. You want Games For Empathy? This is what that actually looks like. Believe in yourself, and believe in other people, even when they don't look or act like you. Solidarity forever.
Okay, so this is kind of cheating. The first time I played Mega Man Battle Network 2 was in 2003. It's been lodged in my psyche ever since, and now I'm finally tackling the whole series. I could go on here about how the combat system throws so many ideas into a single pot and yet managed to come out with something so unique that its real-time turn-based card-battler shmup fighting game combat is still played as an e-sport two decades later. Or I could talk about the weirdness of the narrative and environments, like the weird, artifactual racism the US+Europe pastiche country is painted with in a distorted funhouse-mirror reflection of how inescapable it was and is even today in our pop culture exports. Or just the warm fuzzy feelings I get wandering around the deep Undernet, which was one of several things in my youth that primed me to love dead end dungeons in games. Or, hell, the way that the Internet of Things-based terrorism so many of MMBN's plot devices rely on has only turned out more prescient than ever. But what really grabs me, forever, about Battle Network 2 in particular, is the fact that the big bad is -- a ten-year-old kid just like Lan. At the climactic moment of the game, the fascist terrorist who has been engaged in a steady struggle to bring Netopia to chaos and ruin, is revealed to be a literal child. A child who was bullied and ostracized and then fell into the dark corners of the Internet, where an even bigger bad with an agenda to push told him he could be great, and take his revenge on those who hurt him, through the power of anonymous darkweb terrorism. A child who was groomed into fascism, and saved at the last moment when Lan extends the hand of friendship. Even (justly) coated with the glove of "You'll need to pay for your crimes", the very next words Lan says are "But I'll be your first friend!". It's perhaps more treacly than real life, but I forgive it that the same way I forgive most other children's media. Not everything needs to be a philosophical treatise. Be present. Be excellent to each other. Everyone is carrying pain you may never know.
Objectively the best game on this list. It's not a coincidence that my top two spots, in 2024, went to the games that overtly tackle fascist terrorism. But where Battle Network 2 is limited by its shounen lens to not dig too far into the horror of its villain's life, or his effects on the world, An Outcry is overtly and specifically crafted to be about the terror of living under a nascent fascist regime. First, a brief explanation: An Outcry, a horror game made in RPG Maker 2003, is set on the eve of a fascist electoral victory in Austria, which is interrupted by the arrival of a horde of speaking, glowing, horrifying birds -- Shrikes. You take control of the Unnamed, a non-binary person barely making rent for their shithole Vienna apartment, addicted to cigarettes and getting deadnamed on a regular basis by the neighbors. All too swiftly the birds are revealed to be both allegorical and literal forces of fascist violence, and the choices you make as the Unnamed determine whether you -- or anyone in the building -- survive the night. In the mean time, you're periodically thrust into RPG Maker-style combat, but with a twist: the Unnamed is weak, and winning the encounters has no benefit over simply surviving them long enough to flee.
At its slim runtime, the game has no time for fucking around with unclear language. IGNOREing the titular event has only ill consequences, and indeed plays up how utterly apathetic and unengaged it makes you by completely skipping the combat system except for a single optional encounter (that, due to bugs, is at time of writing outright impossible to win if using EasyRPG compatibility instead of the native executable, a grimly ironic detail for me). FOLLOWing what might be called the "proper" course of events is no less traumatizing, but at least you stood up and declared yourself, and fought back. Not everyone is horrible to you, and even those who are do not deserve the all-consuming, all-voiding fate that the fascists will inevitably visit upon them any more than you. The unending and rapid onset of the horror inflicted on the Unnamed and their neighbors, and all of Austria, as the night wears on, should indeed take its toll on you the player as well. For my part, the Panopticon Shrike's final form still haunts my waking nightmares, but the debate-me insult-deflector Manshrike is no less a threat, especially the many forms in which he is unarguably transposed back to our world. Birdness, as the FOLLOW route may put it, is the impotent desire to see the world fixed through violence. For the Unnamed, violence may win them a temporary respite from those who would take their life, but the combat system makes overt text of the thesis that "surviving is winning". Take solidarity where you can find it, offer it even when you think you won't, and you may yet see yourselves--never yourself, only yourselves--through. In this, of all years, An Outcry was the most important game I could play or recommend. Take a few dollars and a few hours and play it (external link).