Video games in 2024 -- a good year
The games I played and liked last year were almost all really good. This time I’ve given points out of five for fun and memorableness/creativeness, which I think are the two main things I care about, and an overall score.
Perfect Tides (point and click adventure)
Perfect Tides is a coming of age story set in the year 2000, on a seasonal island in the US. This is a good setting that nicely represents the boredom/lameness of many teen hometowns. You play as Mara, who is a teenager struggling through high school.
I’m not really sure whether this is a game or not, but I really enjoyed playing it and it stayed in my mind for ages afterwards. I was really rooting for Mara! What gameplay there is consists of moving between screens (of which there about 30), collecting items and choosing conversation options – it might actually have been the first point and click game I’ve properly played.
I played through this with my wife, which was really fun. Turns out she had a very Mara-esque teenagedom. What glorious insights I gained into the childhood of a teenage girl, previously unknowable to me.
We both loved this game and neither of us wanted it to end. What will become of Mara!? Fortunately, a sequel is coming.
Fun: 4/5 Memorableness: 5/5 Overall 4.5/5. It’s a funny game (I was sold from the prized Princess Diana plate) and has a good art style. It’s less frustrating than other games like this I’ve tried, and there are lots of fun extras to find. Half a point docked for having almost no gameplay. My second favourite this year.
Balatro (cards/rogue-like)
Imagine if poker was fun? Balatro answers that question. Modify your deck, add jokers etc to get increasing scores. Poker is fun with no rules, and there’s loads of different ways to win. The soundtrack loops but somehow never gets old – quite a feat.
Apparently the developer made it after watching a streamer playing a slot machine rouge-like game. I too, sadly, remember wasting some hours myself watching this during lockdown. More sadly still, I didn’t build on this experience to make a mega-popular game. I saw so many people at the start of the year playing this on their phones, on their switch etc.
Like Slay the Spire but a lot less punishing and easier to get going with, so ultimately more fun.
Fun: 5/5 Memorableness: 3/5 Overall 4/5. But is it Bal-ah-tro or Ba-la-tro?
Thank Goodness You’re Here! (comedy/genre-defying)
Takes about two/three hours. Two controls: jump & slap. I played it in a couple of sittings and was obsessed with seeing all the dialogue. I think my favourite bit was the neighbours in the bin. The end slaps.
I found this game very funny. If you like Wallace and Gromit I think you’ll like it too.
Yes, the gardener is Matt Berry.
Fun: 3/5 Memorableness: 4.5/5 Overall 4/5. Genuinely funny comedy game.
TUNIC (action/RPG)
The game starts by dumping you, a fox, on a sunny and colourful isometric island. There are no controls or instructions given, and any text you find is in an unknown language (which looks a bit like Japanese, but it’s not).
You discover how to play the game by collecting pages of the manual within the game itself. However only small parts of the manual are actually in English, and you have to decode its meaning using context and images. A previous player’s notes and writing are found on many of the pages. This is the major novelty of TUNIC, and is extremely well thought out and executed. The manual’s illustrations are lovely and you find yourself bringing it up all the time, both for the maps you have discovered, and as you are slowly able to decrypt more of its contents. As was I am sure the intention, the manual strongly reminded me of PS1 game manuals for RPGs – little hints in the margins which make no sense until you reach the relevant point in the game (or sometimes ever). Particularly, I remembered playing Japanese games which were partially or completely untranslated (it brought back being shown .hack).
The gameplay is part puzzle and part combat. The former is broadly well-done and the novelty of the manual makes these memorable. I never quite expected the puzzle solutions to actually work as you are working with such limited information. But each time something works, it’s very satisfying and encourages more experimentation.
The final puzzles in the game are perhaps a little samey (c.f. the witness). There’s a golden period of fun in the middle ~75% of the game once you know the basics of what you’re doing but still have things to learn. Some of the magic is gone by the time you reach the end and have worked most things out. A small whinge about the final big puzzle to complete the game: it would be better with some checkpoints to validate your progress. It’s all or nothing and you have no way to ‘debug’ any of the individual steps you have taken.
The combat is also fun. There are probably the right number of mechanics to make it varied without getting too complicated. The level of difficulty and frustration is mostly about right, so that it isn’t devastating when you die and its satisfying when you get past a difficult section. I would say that I found a couple of the later boss fights too difficult and annoying, and admit that for the last two I eventually used the easy mode difficulty to pass them so I could keep going.
Fun: 4/5 Memorableness: 4.5/5 Overall 4.5/5. Tunic is a well-told story, subtly communicated without any text or dialogue. There were a few mysteries remaining at the end, and I liked a story where you can make your own interpretation. Combat is too hard/samey at the end. Third favourite game this year.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (RPG/puzzle)
Two Zelda games in two years? You spoil us.
Get this though. You play as Zelda in this one! Wow. Instead of (well really, as well as) having weapons, you can make copies (known as echoes) of the enemies, and other items such as pots and trees. The echoes can be used fight for you, solve puzzles, and cross gaps. A nice addition is that there are also 2D platformer/puzzle-type sections along with the main 3D sections.
Maybe it’s a bit too easy overall, but when I played it on a plane and wasn’t tempted/able to look up solutions started to appreciate the puzzles more.
I did enjoy this game, quite a lot really. It’s good fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously, and was pretty novel. Building up your collection of echoes (copies) is pretty satisfying, as is exploring the map.
Fun: 4.5/5 Memorableness: 2.5/5 Overall 3.5/5. Really fun to play, but doesn’t have the special stuff of a main Nintendo Zelda.
Outer Wilds (puzzle)
Outer Wilds is a game that’s best played without knowing much about it.
Briefly, and without spoiling anything past the first 30 minutes or so, you pilot a spaceship and explore a miniature solar system while stuck in a time loop. Turns out I love a time loop game.
The story/backstory are really compelling and told in a unique way. It’s amazing how much is packed into small spaces, and simultaneously how you are guided through such a large space to the interesting parts so effectively. I was completely addicted to solving the puzzle of this universe and didn’t want it to end.
The sound design is brilliant, and I also loved that the game is an actual physics simulation of everything in miniature solar system. When you fast forward time, you are actually running the simulation forward as quickly as your CPU will allow (which isn’t all that fast).
I wish I could go back and play again without knowing the answers. Maybe in a few years I’ll have forgotten enough to be able to do so, but maybe it’s just a game you can only experience once.
Fun: 4.5/5 Memorableness: 5/5 Overall 5/5. My favourite game of the year and one of my favourites ever. Some of the puzzles a tiny bit frustrating but otherwise pretty much perfect.
I’d consider the time I spent writing this post well spent if one of you reading went and played this game!
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (puzzle)
A quick mention to the Outer Wild DLC.
It’s high quality and worth the small extra payment. The additional story and universe building are the bits I enjoyed the most. The new area, a ring world, is stunning when you first arrive there. Its small size only adds to this, an improvement over e.g. the massive Citadel of Mass Effect which never really felt like a full world as you could only go to small sections of it.
Unfortunately it was a bit too horror-focused for my liking, which made the world less appealing to explore. I also got a bit tired by the end and looked up the final puzzle solutions, some of which were complicated to the point where I wondered how many people worked them all out on their own.
Fun: 2.5/5 Memorableness: 4/5 Overall 3/5. Worth getting if you liked the main game and wanted more at the end.
Animal Well (puzzle/platformer)
Like Balatro, this game also had a bit of a moment when it was released. It’s explicitly inspired by Tunic (you can even change into the fox) and also quite similar to Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It’s not quite at the level of quality of these games, but I still enjoyed playing it.
The puzzles are all very good, and again are rewarding if you push through some of the frustration when they seem impossible, or return to them with more items.
I enjoyed completing the main game, but I couldn’t be bothered with the thousands of extra secrets I see that exist from looking at the youtube fandom surrounding this game. I’d already seen all the rooms thank you!
Fun: 4/5 Memorableness: 2.5/5 Overall 3/5. Being impatient it felt like I wasn’t the exact target audience, but had fun nevertheless.