games

Balatro was certainly the best game of the year. I feel like it kind of devoured the whole roguelite hype that has been building up for a few years to become a monster of a game with a completely fanatic community. But I can't think of other big roguelites this year! It sucked up all the air for itself; it seems like Vampire Survivor type games did very well, but I haven't played any.

Satisfactory did have its full release as well, and I think it deserves a mention as one of the most impressive titles this year, along with Factorio's Space Age. Final Factory, a super small game that I've lightly glazed here when it was close to release, is a game in a similar vein to Satisfactory and Factorio, but much smaller scale and with some new mechanics for moving around space stations, patrolling your factories with automated gunships, setting up logistic routes for ships to follow, etc.

I've had a good year for Minecraft modding, I've had immense amounts of fun experimenting with the Hex Casting mod. It allows you to make Turing Complete spells using a whole programming language that is quite unlike anything I've ever used before. If you're familiar with coding, I'd say it's kinda like if lisp was based entirely on pushing and popping values from the stack, but also you have to write code to compile your own programs, and it's all written with hieroglyphics. If you don't code, it's not nearly as scary as it sounds, but it's still a learning curve. It mixes super well with Create. Admittedly this mod is not new this year, but I did check it out this year so I'm counting it

Path of Exile 1 had its best league of all time, while its sequel is now finally out in Early Access; sadly POE2 is a bit undercooked: it's an amazing game for people who want to play it for 60 hours or less, but it compares much less favorably to POE1 in terms of its endgame, at least for now. Hopefully next year I have more positive things to say about it.

it's been a great year, see y'all in the gaming gulag in 2025