games

My favorite game of the year was Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. Owlcat finally got it right with the ship battles as the "mini-game" and their TTRPG bona-fides really shined with this. Great writing, cool characters, nice voice acting. The choices, while not necessarily true "choices matter" (TM), allow for some great RP moments. The battle system is a little chunky at times since so many characters need to recast buffs most turns and so that gets a little repetitive, especially when you get stuck doing some of the "random" encounters while bouncing around in your space ship.

But, small details aside, it's a long, text heavy, rewarding CRPG. With BioWare's corpse jacked by EA, Owlcat has really become my go to for CRPGs. I honestly like it more than BG3.

Almost done Halls of Torment and getting kinda burnt out, might drop it and come back later.

Got Darktide with a friend and have been having a good time playing through missions. It is DARK on some of them, to the point that my friend's favorite special ability to have on a weapon is "has a flashlight". Overall gameplay is good, one of the grenade options for ogryn is just whipping a large rock at enemies, and it is extremely satisfying. Progression seems a bit weird; weapon stats are capped by a character's weapon mastery level as opposed to overall character level, which means you're heavily encouraged to main something. On the plus side, it looks like you can kinda skip that by just buying a bunch of shit weapons and sacrificing them for mastery XP at the forge, but that's obviously kinda lame. Sadly no solo-only play, which is weird, because VT2 with bots was fine.

Top games I played this year prior to December (most of them did not come out this year lol):

1. Shadow of the Erdtree - No surprises here, the biggest problem I have with the game is that I played it for like 20 hours in 3 days and burned out
2. Victoria 3 - I'd played it before at launch, but picked up a legit copy during a sale and had a lot of fun playing Big Communism Simulator.
3. Vampire Survivors - Played through the Contra and Amogus DLCs earlier this year and had a good time utterly breaking things with the new Darkanas in the last big update
4. Total Warhammer 2 - Was waiting to get all the DLC when it went on sale for years, and had a good run going through a variety of campaigns earlier this year. This has problems (a lot of the campaigns are just not very interesting, the mid-to-end game is almost always a grind), but overall still very good
5. One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 - A dumb fun musou game. Does a terrible job of actually explaining what happens in One Piece. The post-game grind is dumb and I didn't even attempt it.
6. Halls of Torment - A solid Vampire Survivors clone, this time themed around Diablo 1. Some of the classes are bad (Norseman), and the level variety isn't particularly interesting, but otherwise good.
7. Risk of Rain 2 - The new DLC broke the game at launch, and a lot of the new content is still bad (glares at Chef), but the recent updates have returned it to actually being a fun game. There are no longer giant swathes of items that I don't want to pick up.
8. Monster Hunter Rise - Nowhere near as good as World, feels grindy in comparison, perhaps because the story is so much weaker? The base-game endboss sucks lol. Sadly both my friends I was playing with burned out before we could start Sunbreak, and though I played a bit on my own, I don't know if I'll ever finish it.
9. Yakuza 7 - The JRPG combat is a fun bit initially, and could probably have worked for something shorter, but this is a 70 hour game that never gets more complex than 3 party members attacking and the last one using healing abilities. It ends up feeling extremely tedious (with a huge difficulty spike partway through the campaign which can fuck you over if you haven't been grinding out the side content). Main Story is terrible (which seems to be the case for Yakuza games?), Side Stories are charming, minigames range in quality from "actually pretty fun" like Dragon Kart to "I'm not touching this with a 10-foot pole" like mahjong, koi-koi, poker, or blackjack. I do not understand how people are able to play through these as fast as they come out, I feel like I need to take a few years off between games.
10. Hi-Fi Rush - I honestly don't get the hype. For a musical spectacle fighter, the integration of the music wasn't that great. Something like this lives or dies in its boss fights, and the only one I consider good is Wolfgang. Not by coincidence, that's also the only one with really well integrated music. Comparing it to MGRR, it just doesn't even come close.

Been watching my partner play Metaphor: ReFantazio and it's basically a better version of the Persona games without the forced romance or weird shit that persona games do. It looks like it took all the best elements of those games and improved upon them. The story is pretty good so far 20 hours in. Gameplay is typical persona/jrpg gameplay but I like the choice of either enganging an enemy and transitioning to a turn-based fight, or just wacking it with your sword and keep it moving if you're stronger than the enemy. More rpgs need this.

I was recently playing Watch Dogs 2, since it was on gamepass and I thought I'd give it a shot. I think the story is pretty cool 3-5 hours in but I also put it down about a week ago and have no desire to pick it back up. The gameplay wasn't really doing it for me. Just kinda felt like a clunkier GTA game with some sci-fi elements. The characters seemed interesting, though.

Honestly, been looking for a game to really scratch that itch and I haven't found one I really enjoy in a minute. I need to buy a mini pc to play Baldur's Gate 3. Oh, and I'm looking forward to Date Everything because I love goofy shit.

Hmm what did I play this year. A lot of unfinished games. A lot of gamepass. This year was a story of “my partner is away for the weekend, I will play 20 hours over the next two days and then never have a chance to finish the game” lol.

Early in the year I played a bunch of Deliverance: Kingdom Come, but dropped off. Definitely want to come back to it. I played lots of persona 5 (I think that was this year…) and Like a Dragon: Ishin, but they both left game pass before I could finish them 😔 there was one week where I played a LOT of vampire survivors.

I’m not sure if it was this year or last but emulated a bunch of random shit, got decently far in Pokémon heart gold before my laptop died. And I beat Metroid zero mission!! (Extremely rare glimmer_twin finished game). Then on my new laptop I played like 5 seasons of football manager 2024. Also got addicted to Stellaris for the first time.

Right at the start of the year I was trying to get some use out of my switch so I finished Mario Odyssey and played some random indie stuff I don’t remember.

There was also a whole bunch of random stuff on gamepass I dabbled in. Banjo kazooie, more indie stuff. Lately I played a fair bit of crash bandicoot remaster over a couple of days and did like 5 runs on frostpunk before getting annoyed that I lost with thirty seconds left in the big storm.

And most recently I reinstalled CKIII. May god have mercy on my soul.

Top game of the year for me was Stepmania, no contest. Super fun to play with the family, fantastic cardio workout, sick tunes if you skip all the J-pop songs.

Half Life Alyx has been remarkable, amazing VR game. Unlike most games where you just press a button to reload your firearm you actually have to physically grab a new magazine from your backpack, unload your pistol and put the new magazine in. I once dropped the magazine on the ground when a head crab was coming towards me and I just about had a panic attack.

I also recently tried learning how to play Victoria3. So far I haven’t been able to figure out how to play more than 2 hours without crashing my economy, but I found a YouTube channel that has twenty or so 40+ minute long “beginner tutorials” so I’ll learn eventually 🙃

Balatro was pretty fun, wondering what the creator is gonna do next after the game, assuming they dont just retire of off Balatro.

Other than that I don't really have much, all the AAA games I legally obtained were just mediocre, like Cities Skylines 2, just being too car brained and entirely Usian city design focused. Maybe I'll try out that Soviet city builder but it seems a little too complicated for me

Might pick up Hades 2 sometime next year if it has a 1.0 release, as it stands I don't want to play games unfinished as I have a hatred of beta testing games in steam "early-access" wasting my time

Still playing Cyberpunk 2077 here. Been playing it for about three weeks now. I'm blown away by how much better this game is now, when you compare it to the complete dogshit it was when it came out. Loving the plot. Phantom Liberty has some insane action set pieces that are more exciting than most Hollywood films these days. From complete failure to probably one of my top 10 RPGs of all time, I say that's quite the comeback.

Next one on the list is the new Indiana Jones. Looking forward to that one!

Working on Dragon Warrior (Quest) I via a romhack that re-translates the game to be closer to the Japanese and also changes the sprites to be closer to the JP release too. Also Final Fantasy I via a another re-translation that closer to JP and removes some of the censorship like the church cross being removed. So funny how uppity Nintendo was about Western releases of JP games to not offend Sunday School moms when looking at the eshop today and there's fucking hentai games now.

My ranking of games I've played this year is as follows. This was a great year for time well wasted and I will be shocked if next year is somehow better.

1. (Honorary) Disco Elysium. I technically played this for a few hours this year, so I can still put this in my #1 slot.

2. Elden Ring (which I got in late December 2023). I loved every minute of my 100+ hours in it. The world building is amazing, even if I don't understand it, the combat is some of the most fun I've had in a game ever, and it looks stellar. I haven't beat it yet, and I honestly don't want to because of how great this is.

3. Dwarf Fortress. All games on this list are fun, but only this one is !FUN!. My dwarfy highlights of this year include: losing a fortress to aggressive unicorns, sealing off a 4-year-old vampire who killed 6 in the mayor's office for the rest of time, losing a fort to a titan who slipped in through a tiny hole in the ceiling (I hate trees), creating my first 200 pop fort (with way, way, way too many goblin citizens), and creating bearmurded-the Hexbear fort.

4. Stardew Valley (first played this year). This game was an incredible way to get rid of stress and I loved letting hours pass by as I calmly tended to my hundreds of melons and industrial blobfish caviar production facility.

5. Silent Hill 2 (2024 remake) (first played this year). This was my introduction to the world of Silent Hill, and what a world it is. I have never seen a game produce that level of unease in me and produce true horror without using jumpscares or other cheap methods.

6. Assetto Corsa (first played this year). Vroom.

7. Battlefield 1 (first played this year). I installed windows on a usb hdd with terrible read speed just to play this game. It took 2 hours to install and 20 minutes to load each time. I regret nothing.

8. Factorio. The factory didn't grow as much as it should have, but I enjoyed what I was able to do in my limited time with it this year.

9. Sekiro (first played this year). I would rate this much higher if I was good enough to beat the first boss.

(Dis)honorable mentions:

1. CS2. I regret playing this game. This sucks ass, everyone who plays it is a terrible person, and I'm bad at this.

2. Trackmaina (2024). To experience Ubisoft's Trackmania, do the following. First, shove pennies up your asshole. Secondly, put the hose of a shopvac up your rear end and turn it on. It's worse than the game from 2008 and serves only to extract money.

3. EVE Online. See above.

I was saving this for the next weekly, so I'll talk about what I'm still playing and my favorite game this year.

Right now, I'm still playing Dragon Age 2.

The more I play it, the more it starts to annoy me and becomes clear why it got way less praise than Origins. You spent the whole game going to the same 6ish locations for the majority of quests, they re-use the same caves over and over, and the main challenge of the game usually involves it spawning more enemies. When you think you've killed them all, here come two more waves of 10. I was impressed by the first boss which was a big rock golem in the Deep Roads that was actually pretty difficult and required a lot of manual party control

But after that it's just waves and waves of goons, so the most important thing is just running around a corner so that you can line of sight archers and then AoE everything to death when they clump up.

The game also keeps trying to hammer home how bad and dangerous blood mages are but then they contrast that with the Chantry, makes people Tranquil which is essential a magic lobotomy, every time they start to question authority. I somehow forgot about this because it's been like 6 years since I played Origins. One of the party members wants to burn the whole institutions down and kill everyone in it and tbh I'm with them. You have individual mages running around killing people but the Chantry is a government sanctioned institution that enslaves children and lobotomizes them before they've even done anything wrong.

The only other player in this is Tevinter, which is talked about by one of your companions and is a nation ruled by mages. He was enslaved by them. So he's the contrast to "not all mages are bad" and is a good foil to your own character if you play a mage or sympathize them too heavily in a general sense. The Chantry sucks but mages with no unchecked power and an ideology focused on accumulating power leads to the same thing. They just both need to be toppled, templars need to get help for their lyrium addictions, and mages need to go back to living like the elves.

I haven't really beat many games this year, but these are the ones I have finished:

Ratchet & Clank, Clickolding, Pillars of Eternity, The Walking Dead (Arcade), Ballionaire

I've become less interested in games and have read more books this year than prior years instead. In 2023, I had a PS2 phase where I went back to play stuff like Sly Cooper, God of War, and Ratchet & Clank early 2024. I stopped there because I wasn't really enjoying myself and found that some of the games aged less well than others.

I've gotten like 450/500 achievements in Halls of Torment based on another Hexbear user posting about it, so that's probably my top game of the year. It's a very good "bullet heaven" game like Vampire Survivor but has way more interesting classes and progression. You do hit a certain point where you basically can't lose though, especially if you use Shield Maiden block build.

Ballionaire was okay, but very short and very easy. Clickolding was a meme game. The Walking Dead arcade game kind of sucks but I do still like games like that and you get to use a giant crossbow controller in it. Ratchet & Clank aged better than both God of War or Sly Cooper, I think, but still had some sections that were kind of frustrating or required really precise timing. The humor doesn't really hold up. Pillars of Eternity was okay but I'm a noted real-time with pause hater and think it's one of the worst control schemes in video games. I liked the story/writing and the companions, just ignored all the Kickstarter gold name NPCs, and plan to continue into the 2nd game sometime this year.

I've put more hours into Lord of the Rings Online than anything else because it's a very huge comfort game and I've been reading Tolkien stuff alongside it to really get in the mood. I recommend it for anyone really into the setting or who wants a slower-paced MMO that doesn't require grouping for content, daily grinding, and isn't really focused on raiding.

I’m finally giving Dominions 6 a proper shot! I played a bit of Dominions 5 before, but I never got particularly good at it or tried multiplayer.

This time, Im planning to dip into multiplayer if I end up enjoying it.

If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s an indie 4X/wargame that started way back in 2001. It’s made by just two devs (super indie vibes), and each new entry has only gotten bigger and better. At this point, there are around 100 playable fantasy nations, which is just massive.

So whats Dominions 6 about? You’re basically a god—you create your own god at the start of the game—and you pick a mythological nation to lead. The goal is to take control of the Thrones of Ascension or become the top god by eliminating the others. Conquer their lands, snuff out their dominion, or claim the Thrones—your path to victory is up to you.

It sounds deceptively simple, but from the moment you choose your nation and create your pretender god, you’ll face a myriad strategic decisions. The graphics feel comfy to me, though many will call them outdated. There is a massive magic system as well. I probably should make a thread about Dominons 6 at some point.

Caves of Qud. I've made it the furthest I've ever gone so far with my future-seeing buff chef. Using precognition I was able to force favorable mutations and rng cooking effects, and explore safely through spacetime vortexes, and now he's a veritable God with such low cooldown on abilities that the cooldown on precognition is less than the active duration, meaning there is never a moment he can be killed without rewinding time and trying again.

Trying out the new Indiana Jones game, honestly really gets the tone right, also gonna try out some indie games as well (Coven and Caravan Sandwitch)

Mechabellum, FaB on Talishar, and Helldivers. I need to get back into PoE 2, I hit the sand king guy from act 2 right as I got busy and as the illuminate came out, so kinda bounced off him. I can beat it, just need to sit down and make it happen

I'm playing the Marvel slop. I played Overwatch back before Activision ruined it and I'm enjoying it now.

This year I have continued my on-again off-again love affair with From the Depths.

I found a little indie plane game called nuclear option and its basically ace combat but like a little more "sim"-ish and its great to fuck around with nukes and stuff online

Valve did a great job at boosting the number of Linux users, all thanks to Steam Deck and now planning to release SteamOS to OEMs. So I feel that Windows will lose its users once Windows 10 extended support expires next year. 2025 will be the great year for Linux to shine.

I injured my hand kinda bad a few weeks ago so now I have to put down the Fromsoft games and pick up something slower for the next month or so

Balatro. It's good. I wish they would update it with more jokers or something. I eventually hit a wall in climbing the stakes, but I had lots of fun with it.

Factorio Space Age. They did a good job on this. A few silly arbitrary limitations imo, but I put another few hundred hours into it. It was worth the money.

Dwarf Fort. Sel explanatory. But adventure mode was a let down imo.

Elin. Elona prequel. I could do without some of the edge, but it's a fun exploration/builder game. This is what I thought DF adventure mode was going to be like.

Path of Achra. It hit that nice sweet spot between gameplay and theory crafting.

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

Dungeons of Hinterberg. It's good!

Liked a lot of the JRPGs this year like Infinite Wealth, Trails, and Metaphor.

I couldn't fight off the urge to start something new so Final Fantasy VI is on the back burner for now. In its place I've started Cave Story, which I've only played about 2 hours of so far but I've been enjoying. Other than that I've been on a big pinball kick. There's a table at my work that I found a good virtual recreation of, so I've been learning the mechanics and practicing in the hopes that I can get on the leaderboard. I only need 30 or 40 million to get on there, I can't remember which at the moment, and I've already gotten a little over 20 million as my personal best so I think with some more practice and a little luck I'll get on there soon enough.

As for my favorite games I played for the first time this year:

Chrono Trigger

What is there to say about this one? Everyone knows it's a beloved game. Pretty close to the ideal RPG for me. Fun combat, fantastic music, lovable cast, interesting story with just the right amount of cheesiness, nice art, no annoying random encounters, not too long. AND there's a bisexual cave woman? What else can I ask for?

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

My first foray into the Castlevania series, and I'm very glad I did. I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to enjoy this one because I am honestly ass at platformers/side-scrolling action games, but it actually wasn't too bad. The game feels great to move around in and almost all of the bosses were fun to tackle. I really loved the feeling of struggling with a fight the first couple tries and then figuring out a strategy that the boss couldn't deal with and just obliterating it. The exploration was a good time too, you'd think the backtracking would get tedious but in my experience it wasn't bad. I ended up playing Aria of Sorrow right afterwards and will definitely be playing Dawn of Sorrow in the near future. I definitely want to try the SotN randomizer some time soon and check out some of the indie metroidvanias that passed me by before as well.

When They Cry

Two somewhat notorious mystery visual novels. Technically I started Higurashi in 2023, but a good amount of the time I spent reading it was in 2024, and I went from that straight into Umineko so I'm just gonna count the two together. Both of these have rattled around in my brain basically non-stop since finishing them, and yet I still don't really know how to put my feelings into words. I don't really know if I would recommend either? They are both extremely long (each has a longer word count than the Bible lol), have some seriously problematic elements, and deal with very heavy topics. Due to the nature of the stories I don't really want to say any more than that. If you did want to check these out, just be warned that they can be triggering in many ways. I would say if you need it to get someone you trust to screen each first through something like doesthedogdie.com, or if they've already read it themselves even better. Otherwise go in knowing as little as possible.

As for games that actually came out this year, well, I barely played any... I guess Caves of Qud is pretty fun? I think I would really like it if I played more, but roguelikes where you play as the same character over several play sessions never really stick for me. Halls of Torment and Balatro have both been good for the occasional play session, but I'm not too excited about either. There was some cool looking stuff on my back log I meant to play that came out this year, but I never got around to them. Maybe next year!

coming off like a combined 10 hours in hoi4 in the past few days. i've decided i do not like the TNO mod, hoi4 really number-go-up worms into your brain so it was hard to realise but FUCK that was a waste of time and boring. TNO fundamentally doesn't understand the game its based on and its devs are depraved masochists. Hoi4 is a game about preparing for the Big War, then you fight the war. TNO the Big War is a fucking failstate, what even is the point? and the developers just want to make longer and longer 'paths' for countries, because you know what a lack of war in the war game really needs? even longer to be sitting around twiddling your thumbs!

Been playing the halfsword playtest. It has the most interesting melee combat in any game I've played, and even though the playtest has barely any content (really just fighting npcs in a barebone arena) I cant stop playing. Also the blood and gore effects are pretty gnarly.