Video games I played in 2024, part 1

Hey so, usually I do these posts once a year, but 2024 has been kind of a wild year so far for games and I have so many on my list so far that I thought I’d split the year in half.

Here’s a quick recap of my rating scale (it’s a 4-star system). These are subjective ratings, how much I personally enjoyed playing the game, not an objective statement about “how good a game this is”.

★★★★ (“Great”) - A great game that stands out among its peers by being exceptionally memorable or just doing what it does exceptionally well.

★★★ (“Good”) - An enjoyable game that accomplishes what it sets out to do. This is sort of the “default” place games end up, unless they do something special to distinguish themselves, either positively or negatively.

★★ (“Mid”) - A game that doesn’t quite live up to the standards it sets for itself, or where the negatives can’t really be ignored, but the games here usually still have something to offer that make them worth playing.

★ (“Bad”) - A game that is just bad, that leaves me feeling bad after I’m done playing it. I’m not a professional reviewer so I don’t *have* to play games I don’t want to play, so its very rare for me to play a game that I actually think is bad, or to not just immediately stop playing a game once I realize it’s bad. It happens sometimes though.

With that, lets get into it (in roughly chronological order)

Cocoon

I didn't get around to this one in 2023, but after seeing it on so many GOTY lists I did decide to give it a try. It's fine, its very polished and pretty, though I feel like that came at the expense of a lot of the depth and interesting stuff you could do with the mechanic. Patrick's Parabox and Recursed are both games that feature a similar main mechanic that go far more in depth with it than Cocoon does, though without the production value and world cohesiveness. I don't think I ever got stuck on a puzzle in Cocoon; they were all pretty linear, usually with only one thing you *could* do at any given point in the puzzle. Many puzzles you can figure out instantly from looking at it but then it takes 2 minutes of orb shuffling just to get it configured correctly. It kind of feels like its cosplaying as a puzzle game, it presents itself as one and makes you *feel* like you're solving puzzles, while its just sort of taking you on a linear rollercoaster instead. For what the game wants to do, it clearly does it well. I just do not vibe with it that much. ★★

Momodora: Moonlit Farewell

I kinda just felt bored while playing it, the combat is a mess (most fights just devolve into mashing attack and heal since the game tends to eat your dodge input if you ever try to time a dodge in a fight, the visual effects are so intense they just constantly obscure whatever is happening), the exploration is limited (its a pretty linear progression on a small map without much need for metroidvania progression since there's not that many mobility related powerups anyway). Despite the game being short it still felt like it just dragged on towards the end, which is absolutely not the thing you want with a short game. I liked the previous Momodora game, so I'm not really sure what happened with this one... ★

Pseudoregalia

The movement tech is very fun and the way the map opens up with each new powerup, both when you first get the powerup AND when you learn about the more advanced movement tech associated with each powerup is neat. Most platforming powerups have some sort of "bonus" advanced way to use them to discover, and I definitely got myself into trouble getting deep into areas I was not supposed to be in yet. The environment art in the game is pretty bland and ugly, and not in the "it looks like an N64 game" way, I just mean like, even early N64 games looked better than this. I can look past art normally, but in a metroidvania specifically that environment art serves a purpose, and each room looking like a greyboxed level made it much harder to keep track of where I was in the world and how parts connected together, especially combined with the lack of a map*, which resulted in a whole lot of aimless wandering towards the end. The combat parts also left a lot to be desired, but for what appears to be an extended game jam game that only took a couple of months to make, its very good for what it is. ★★★

(*for what its worth, I believe they later updated the game with a map)

Blasphemous II

Enjoyable, some neat ideas with the progression like how its pretty open in the beginning and your initial weapon choice effecting which routes you can take at the start (would love to see this idea taken even further). World design and exploration is nice but the individual room design leaves a bit to be desired, lots of "long hallway with enemies spammed in it" type rooms, and enemy placement feels like its just kind of spammed without thought. Some enemies feel ridiculously tanky even with a maxed out weapon. The penultimate boss fight was a weirdly huge spike in difficulty that almost felt unfair, like it needed a few more frames of animation to properly show attacks winding up. Other than that the game was fun, a perfectly serviceable metroidvania. ★★★

AM2R

Can you tell I went on a bit of a metroidvania kick for a couple weeks? Anyway I didn’t play this when it came out because I opted to play the official Samus Returns instead (ugh) and didn't feel like playing another Metroid 2 remake in close proximity, but hey it's been long enough so I decided to finally check it out. AM2R feels very close to a GBA-era metroid game, like a "what if nintendo remade Metroid 2 right after zero mission?" alternate universe thing. And, aside from some absolutely wonky default controls (that luckily were very customizable) it does that pretty well. That being said, while AM2R does a very good job at remaking Metroid II... its still Metroid II, and a lot of the bad parts of Metroid II are still present here, most notably the boss fights against the various metroids being pretty bad (and a lot of the newer fights they added in AM2R were also pretty underwhelming), and just the general structure of the game not quite feeling metroidy enough. I think I had more fun with it than Samus Returns (which I found mediocre), which is saying something since its a fan game, but it didn't do much to make me not still think of Metroid II as the black sheep of the franchise. ★★★

Balatro

Perfect? Balatro feels like the sort of ultimate form of this style of game that has been evolving over the past couple years, a sort of combination psuedo-incremental (number go up) game mixed with drafting builds (games like Luck be a Landlord, Loop Hero, Vampire Survivors, and plenty of others). Balatro isn't a genre groundbreaker, but it does feel like the ultimate evolution of that genre, the new gold standard, and one I would classify as pretty damn close to perfect. All the numbers feel perfectly balanced, all of the jokers are sometimes useful and sometimes useless, they all have their place, and they all feel roughly equal. Usually that sort of exact balance comes with a kind of uniform blandness, where nothing ever stands out or becomes interesting, but Balatro avoids that and still allows for tons of interesting builds and broken combo potential. At the end of a run I might be barely scraping by, or winning in one hand, or getting a billion points when the requirement is 500k. The variety is there, and its fun to unpack during runs. It’s a very smartly designed game, and probably my favorite of the year so far. ★★★★

Helldivers 2

It's a maybe a bit odd of a comparison, but this is the closest a game has gotten to recapturing the feel of Left 4 Dead since... well... Left 4 Dead 2. It's chaotic, fun, and has a lot of really smart mechanics in it. Having to enter DDR style strategm codes in the heat of battle gives you the ability to fumble them and that creates for some pretty intense, hectic and hilarious situations. Blowing up your teammates accidentally, or your own rail gun, or all the other ways to friendly fire. It's simple but good. That being said, the whole "live service" aspect of the game is a real bummer. There's too many resources and battlepasses that kind of get in the way of just playing the game, and drip feeding new content over the course of a season is annoying when the stuff that is there at any given time is pretty limited and repetitive. ★★★

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

A Ubisoft AAA metroidvania. Yes, the whole game is very by-the-numbers, but the numbers do add up here. Its big, the combat and bosses are fun, and the platforming challenges during exploration were fun as well. They drag on a little by the end, every platforming challenge feels scientifically designed, standard rule-of-threes type stuff, so it does start feeling a little bit tedious at times, but they do make pretty good use of the platforming abilities you get. A good game, but just a bit generic. ★★★

Animal Well

Ok so, I played through Animal Well about 2 months before it officially released, which for a game this full of secrets is always an interesting experience. Anyway it's a pretty cute pixel art metroidvania that you can finish in about 5 hours. At least, that’s when I got to the credits roll. I did play for another 30 hours after that trying to find as many secrets as I could, without help of the wiki (because it literally did not exist yet when I played it haha). The game itself is very reminiscent of Tunic and Fez, though Animal Well is far more focused on its secrets than those games were, and I feel like the game benefits massively from that focus. It does a great job of feeling like the secrets are actually leading somewhere, and keeps adding more and more layers to them as you solve more and more of them. The game is also smart about getting out of its own way once you get to the point where you're 100% focused on secret hunting. You find more and more ways to navigate the world, teleport around, and open shortcuts, so by the time you're just wandering around the whole world looking for eggs and rabbits, the game just lets you do that with having to worry too much about platforming or combat or puzzles getting in the way. Its very good. ★★★★

Fallout 2

After watching the Fallout tv show, I had a hankering to play a fallout game. Previously I had only played Fallout 4, which was weirdly unmemorable. As in, I played 40 hours of it, and I barely have any memories of what happened during those 40 hours. Anyway I polled twitter asking for which one people think was the best in the series, and the consensus was either the classic ones or New Vegas. So I gave Fallout 2 a try. Like, I tried. Twice. Just could not really get into it. I think its just an age thing, its old and janky and the beginning of the game is just not fun. (I’m not giving it a score)

Fallout: New Vegas

So I switched over to New Vegas instead, after installing 200 bugfix mods so it could run properly (but I avoided any gameplay changing mods). A lot of people think this is the best in the series and I wanted to know why. And well, yeah, I get it. The story is great, the moral choices were actually real dilemmas, like... every faction in the game kind of sucks, so theres never an obvious good/bad answer to anything, its just like... who sucks less, but even that depends on which perspective you're looking at things through. And you can get stuck thinking through this stuff, unless you shortcut the decision making process by deciding to, you know, ROLEPLAY and just make the obvious decisions the character would make. It is a role-playing game after all. That part of the game is neat and well done, and after beating it I just wanted to play through again just to see the other faction storylines as well. But man the game is fucking slow sometimes lol. A lot of the interior spaces are mazes of samey looking hallways that make navigating them kind of annoying especially when you have to repeatedly navigate the same hallways cause a quest giver is buried deep inside someplace. Maybe I'll just increase the run speed a bunch with a mod if I play it again. ★★★

Another Crab's Treasure

It's an ambitious game for a small team and I absolutely respect the attempt to make a souls-like that does its own thing and doesn't also just copy all of Fromsoft's vibes and mechanics verbatim (*cough* lies of p *cough*), but this game is really rough. It sort of presents itself like "a soulslike disguised as a cutesy 2000s era mascot platformer" but in reality its kind of more like the inverse of that. A lot of the level design feels straight out of a collectathon platformer, big open spaces, lots of platforming (and invisible walls), and the soulslike aspects of mostly show up when the bosses do. I like that aspect of it. Its just really rough with its execution. The platforming is janky and you slide off edges all the time, get stuck on geometry, fall through holes in the ground, get to areas with no collision, etc. The combat is decent but it seems like the timing windows on dodge and parry are tuned way too tight. The game also seems to like to eat inputs (most egregiously if you try to input an attack or dodge while its in slowmo from your shield breaking or respawning). And then the game ends with 3 2-form bosses in a row, which is I think more bosses than like the rest of the game combined. It gets very tiring at that point. It's an ambitious game and I respect that, the good parts of it are pretty good, but that comes with a lot of jankiness that takes it down a bit. ★★★

Hackshot

It's a sort of cute and interesting hybrid of peggle + zachtronics style game, with the aesthetic and "optimization-focus" of a zachtronics game, minus the programming parts. Which written out sounds kind of dumb lol. "Its like these other games but with some stuff added and some stuff removed". Ok it's its own thing. The goal is to hit a bunch of targets on each level with a bunch of balls, but you can adjust the physics of the balls per shot by spending points (inverse gravity, high weight, no bounce, etc), and you can redo shots as many times as you want to try and beat the level in as few shots as possible, or with as much combo as possible. It's simple and well made for what it is. I enjoyed it but didn't finish it because it started requiring me to engage with the optimization parts to progress (get as many points as possible per level instead of merely beating them) and trying to max that out often felt a bit pedantic in what was required. Still, the game is a good example of how far you can take a relatively simple concept, and how there’s still a lot of space to make interesting stuff in a genre as simple as... whatever "vaguely-peggle-like" is. ★★★

4D Golf

So I played this game and thought it was a funny concept but not very fun and bounced off of it. Then I came back and gave it another try. And then came back later to do the challenge levels. It grew on me more and more each time as I started to realize just how clever the game is on multiple levels. You see it'd be pretty easy to just make a version of "4D Golf" who's sole purpose was to confuse people and break their minds, but this game puts so much effort into making it comprehensible, with a ton of different ways to visualize things and all the toggles and views you could ask for. The volume view especially is helpful, because as it turns out the "surface" you play on in 4D golf is actually "only" 3 dimensional (if the ground is flat), so when you tilt the camera in the right way you get what is basically "3D golf with no gravity". And with that suddenly everything weird feels comprehensible.

But once you start getting a feel for that, the game gradually implements more and more dimensionality to the courses, with hills and ramps and eventually gravity changing pads so that you can't *just* think of the game as 3D golf anymore, eventually culminating in a mind breaking 5D level. Which is impossible to visualize. The "Volume View" of the 5D area is actually 4 dimensional, no longer 3 comfy familiar dimensions there, but you spent so much time before that getting familiar with what 4D feels like that when you view that 4D volume mode... it almost feels familiar. Like the 5D stuff is *kind of* a joke, in that the point is really "haha oh its actually 5D" which is even more impossible to visualize than the 4D stuff... but the way the game builds up towards that gradually, and the new perspective the 5D stuff gives you on the quaint, trivial 4D stuff earlier in the game, like it all just works. I don't think it's even possible to execute on the concept of "4D Golf" better than this game did. ★★★★

Hyperbolica

After 4D golf I checked out the dev's previous game Hyperbolica briefly. It's a neat hyperbolic space tech demo, but has a very bad game stapled on top of it that does not compliment the tech in any way, and is almost anti-synergistic with it. The main feature of hyperbolic space is that you can pack a *lot* of space into a circle. Traversing the perimeter of it takes exponentially longer than going across it. Which just kind of makes exploring the space annoyingly tedious (nevermind the motion sickness from it). So the game being loose exploration with 2000s-era shovelware minigames that require you to search annoyingly large spaces to find a specific NPC to even trigger the minigames in the first place... it’s simply not the correct gameplay for the tech gimmick. ★

Isles of Sea and Sky

For the most part its pretty fun. Sokoban-style puzzles mixed with a zelda-ish structure, including item unlocks. The puzzles are creative and a bit more loose than is usual from this type of game, which can really make them pretty difficult as they often have red herrings or unnecessary elements that obscure what the "designer intent" actually is. This is not a bad thing, when a puzzle game is *too tight* it often ends up trivializing puzzles because you know that everything on screen is relevant in some way so it just becomes a matter of ordering it all correctly. Isles of Sea and Sky does do a very good job of incorporating counter-intuitive solutions and red herrings into levels, so the puzzles feel more organic. That being said, this game does have a fundamental flaw in that the zelda-style item progression makes some puzzles actually impossible until you get the appropriate item, (and those items can sometimes trivialize older puzzles if you skipped them), but being a puzzle game its not obvious whether or not a puzzle is beatable the first time you see it. Some stuff like the colored blocks are signposted well enough, but since you don’t know what the elementals or items do until you get them (or even what screens will have elementals) its sorta hard to even know what you're missing sometimes. But you can also just skip most puzzles the first time you enter an area and focus specifically on the ones that unlock relevant items first. ★★★

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And that’s what I’ve played in the first half of 2024 so far. So many games came out recently that I still have yet to play, and there’s even more coming out soon (especially looking forward to the Elden Ring dlc). See you at the end of the year for my second batch of game thoughts!