Video games I played in 2024, part 2

Following up part 1, its finally time for my mini reviews of the games I played in the 2nd half of 2024, and also go what I think were the best games this year afterwards. I was visiting family for new years so this is a little bit later than I normally do it, but anyway here we go.

A reminder of my rating scale, with scores from 1 to 4 stars:

★★★★ (“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.

Anyway here we go!

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Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

This is some of the best level and world design Fromsoft has ever done. For the most part it takes everything that was good about Elden Ring's base game and amplifies that. The world is large and layered, almost-maze like while still feeling super open. Most areas on the map have multiple different ways to reach, with different challenges depending on which direction you come from. You can see so much stuff in the distance (or even close by) that you just don't know how to get to, until you observe the surrounding areas and compare it to the map and follow leads that look like they might take you where you wanna go, or might not. Its fun to explore, and I love the approach to open world design that Fromsoft has taken, vs the way other open world games just make it kind of trivial to go anywhere you can see. There was some of this in the base game, but the way the DLC map wraps around on itself so much really feels like that approach on steroids. It hasn't been this good since Dark Souls 1.

The bosses are for the most part pretty good, with Rellana being a personal favorite fight, hitting that sweet spot of "tough, but fair" that was missing from some of the hard bosses in the base game. Most of the bosses in the DLC felt this way, but the final boss is bullshit to a whole new level. The first form is fine, like yeah its difficult, he hits hard and his combos all have odd timings, but its learnable. The second form is where it becomes bullshit, where he has all the same combos as before, except they spam holy light all over the place that seem impossible to dodge, while also adding like 4 or 5 new moves into the mix that are hard to even see or tell what's going on, and impossible to dodge. It kinda felt like you just had to race him and hope you could do more damage to him than he could to you. I think its the most bullshit boss they've ever done, it took me longer to beat than Isshin, and didn't feel nearly as good. But the rest of the DLC is great, and an overtuned final boss doesn't really take away from the fact that this is some of the best content Fromsoft has ever put out there. ★★★★

World of Goo 2

It's World of Goo again. I'm not sure the game does enough to justify its own existence. World of Goo was a fine game but definitely a relic of its time, and the sequel doesn't quite advance it enough to make it feel new. The first few worlds of the game feel like a retread of the first game with a small handful of new mechanics (of which, the liquid physics + conduit gooballs are basically the only substantive addition). But then World 4 came along and it finally felt like it was doing something new and interesting (even if the noir adventure levels were kind of tedious). I wanted more of that! But then that ends fairly quickly, you get a small handful of challenge levels, and the game is over. It wasn't bad, but it really needed to be more than just that. ★★

Deadlock

Deadlock takes the high level strategy and tactics from a moba and places it into an overwatch-style hero shooter core gameplay loop. It works amazingly well, and somehow this game ended up being my most played new game this year, despite being in alpha and clearly unfinished. Valve is absolutely cooking something here, although I feel like the opening up of the beta may have been an accident, and they seem to be struggling a little bit with trying to balance the needs of having an actual playerbase with also like, finishing the game. But I think the core gameplay and movement mechanics and all the pieces of this game are absolutely amazing and fun, and I am excited to see how it evolves as they keep working on it. No score yet, because the game is not done yet. I will review again once its out for real. But watch this game!

Nine Sols

You play as a weed smoking enlightened atheist sigma male alien cat who's sick of all the normies and wants to spread the good word of Science by force. The combat is great, the level design is less so, though it does get better as the game goes on. The parry-focused combat is very nice, and I liked the way all the skills you have work in tandem during a fight. There's a superficial resemblance to Sekiro in that... there's a parry, but the talisman attacks and dodges and charge parry really make it feel like its own thing, though when it works it works and (like Sekiro) the fights tend to feel more like a rhythm game than an action game.

Exploration wise, there's only one checkpoint per "area" and its usually in the middle, which means you can "beat" an area and then have to do half of the next one before you get to a new checkpoint, and that tended to make early exploration rather tedious. You die pretty quickly, one mistake and you can get combo killed, especially if you let your guard down after getting past a "hard" area. The design doesn't do a great job of guiding you in the correct direction a lot of the time, a lot of areas look fairly samey, and there's an atrocious forced stealth section in the middle of the game.

The final boss is kind of a ridiculously insane difficulty spike and feels exactly like the type of difficulty I hate in games like these. It sort of gives up on having easily readable hitboxes which forces you to basically just memorize what buttons to press to beat patterns, but also has three forms and since you can't sight read the attacks and one mistake will kill you, learning the later forms is just tedious and frustrating. Add in the janky hitbox on the grab attack and after like 2 hours of trying I ended up just turning on story mode to clear it.

Also, I appreciate that the main character is basically an asshole and a villain, since its a nice change of pace from the usual here. ★★★

UFO 50

It's a collection of 50 retro-style games made for a fictional 80s console akin to the NES. It's a mixed bag, very reminiscent to how it feels to just pull random NES games you never heard of out of a collection and give them a try. At least, that’s the first impression you get. Cause like, on a surface level that's what UFO 50 is. You give all the games a try for a minute or two and then go back and finish the ones that seemed interesting. Doesn't matter what type of games you like, you'll be able to find 5 or so in the collection that you can enjoy. Might be a different 5 for everyone, but theres so much variety in here that you can certainly find *something*. But this is a *collection*. Is UFO 50 more than the sum of its parts? There is a meta narrative woven throughout the games in the collection, and the order they're presented in. It's enough to say that yeah, that adds something to the collection that makes it function as a whole instead of a bunch of random games. So its a little bit better than the sum of its parts.

Anyway, what you see above is more of my first impressions of UFO 50. I actually had to come back and rewrite this review cause I kept playing more and more of it. And realizing that hey, there actually is *a lot* more to this game than the first impressions would imply. Like, there were actually a lot more than just 5 games that I liked in it, in fact almost all of the games in it are interesting in their own unique ways, it just sometimes takes a little bit to get into them and see what they're actually about. And that the tiny handful of "bad" games in there are bad on purpose as part of the meta-narrative- a janky "first game", an fictional executive forcing himself into a project lead role, a bloated sequel that flopped and led to the fictional company going out of business, and stuff like that. And even these bad games have appeal to them to some extent.

But the real thing that started standing out as I played more and more UFO 50 games is that, these games aren't just copies of existing NES games. Sure, there's obviously some homages in there, but the majority of games feel unique and experimental and not 1-to-1 with specific games that existed at the time. Like, in a contrast to something like Shovel Knight, which is very much an homage to a bunch of specific NES games (Megaman, Mario 3, Duck Tails, and a bunch of others), UFO 50 is an homage to a whole *era of game development* instead, where many genres didn't exist yet and devs and designers were still figuring out what worked and what didn't and would experiment with weird shit. And a lot of these games feature *interesting* mechanics that work in small experimental doses like this but would kind of suck if applied to larger games that had more time in development.

Anyway in my original first impressions review I wrote a bunch of mini reviews for individual games in the collection, but I sort of think that does a disservice to the collection as a whole. Its not a bunch of individual games after all. So I'm leaving that out here. Maybe once I finish playing *all* of the games I could give byte sized thoughts on each one? Anyway, UFO 50 is a phenomenal experience, and a very special project. ★★★★

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Its a top down mainline 2D Zelda game, but with a bunch of design philosophy pulled from BotW and TotK. The whole game feels like a hybrid of every other zelda game. But this combination of it doesn't really work. Making open ended puzzles with multiple solutions is difficult, because you want there to be a lot of creative ways to tackle a problem, but if *too many* things result in success, then it stops mattering entirely since you can just do the same thing over and over. And unfortunately, Echoes of Wisdom falls way too far on that side of it. You have too many tools that just solve every single puzzle for you, basically by default. There’s no "creative problem solving" in just using floating platforms or clouds to jump over a room filled with puzzles, that’s literally just what the clouds do by design, and it just... lets you do that. Everywhere. Later in the game I stopped even understanding what the puzzles in a given room were supposed to be, it looked like the rooms were arranged with some kind of intent, but figuring that out never mattered since half the things you have just let you skip over everything. It felt like "there's puzzles here, but they weren't designed for me".

The game also seems to lack conviction to its MAIN GIMMICK ("play as zelda, not link") by just... letting you become link whenever you want to deal with enemies that way. And I don't quite understand why they did it like that. Zelda's moveset is interesting and distinct, which felt appropriate, made her feel distinct from link and more "wisdom-y". It's her game after all. But oh don't worry you can just transform into link at will anyway. It muddies it.

Anyway it's still a zelda game and it still has a lot of the charm that makes those games fun, but it just doesn't feel correctly realized. ★★

Factorio: Space Age

Factorio is one of the greatest games of all time so I was super hype for the expansion. And yeah, its good. It took me an entire month to beat it. There's so much smart design in there and the planets really do elevate the game a lot. I love the distinct flavor of each planet. My recycling plant on Fulgora was super fun to figure out and very satisfying to watch work. I love how a working Gleba factory is a machine that eats fruit and poops spoilage (even if building that correctly was exceptionally annoying). Vulcanus was... well it was just Nauvis again but easier. A useful planet for sure but kind of boring. Aquilo felt like an isolated outpost for manufacturing a few specific things, and the heat pipes mechanic felt like its entire goal was to make you build spaghetti. The final trek to the solar system edge felt like a much more appropriate climax to the game than just launching a rocket was in vanilla, it wasn't just "make these resources and you win" but you actually had to design a whole ship capable of surviving that journey, and tied together so many different goals and features you had been working on until then.

That said I also have some minor complaints, which (knowing factorio) I'm sure they'll address over time. Quality was kind of frustrating and janky to deal with, and it not being streamlined made me kind of just not want to engage with the mechanic at all beyond gambling for a few specific things. The enemy balance on Nauvis feels the same as vanilla, which is a bad fit for space age when you're spending extended periods of time away from Nauvis, on other planets. The time and pollution evolution is quite annoying when you're spending a lot of time just trying to figure out designs, and I feel like that was all balanced for people who already knew what was expected of them. The game is also very long, and I *was* getting tired of it by the end. None of that takes away from just how well designed the expansion is otherwise though, and Factorio still offers an exceptionally unique experience that you can't really get anywhere else. Even more so now. ★★★★

Antonblast

Joining Pizza Tower in the "Wario Land 4 inspired chaotic indie platformer" genre, Antonblast is clearly made with a lot of love and has a lot of personality. Unfortunately, that doesn't quite make up for how annoying this game is to play. The visual clarity of the game is *awful*, explosions and effects and screenshake are near-constant and get in the way of being able to tell whats going on at all, the game is too zoomed in for how fast it wants you to go, the hitboxes are awkward, and the controls have just enough jank to them to feel annoying when they dont quite do what you want. While I found Pizza Tower damn near perfect and was curious to see another indie take on Wario Land 4, the issues got in the way and I stopped playing half way through. ★★

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And that’s all the games I played in 2024! It was an exceptionally strong year for games, 6 of the games I played here I rated at ★★★★ (Balatro, Animal Well, 4D Golf, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, UFO 50, and Factorio: Space Age), which is a lot for me. In other years its been 1 or 2 games, and GOTY being obvious. That’s not the case this year, it really was a hard decision!

But in the end I think it has to be Balatro. While its not that rare for a game to be “perfect” (there’s one or two almost every year), it is very special that a game can be perfect while also having as much variety and personality as Balatro does. It’s a crowning achievement, it deserves all of its success, and will likely prove to be the most influential game of the year as well. Congrats!