The Best and Worst of 2024

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Spent a lot of time tinkering with tabletop rpgs this year, hopefuly I'll get back to some blog posts that've been on the backburner. Take this mixtape before continuing.

Best Games

A somewhat sparse year (full lineup here), so I'm getting creative. Not creative enough to include DLCs, mind you, gotta have some standards.

1. Monster Train (iOS)

So many cool builds to find and combinations to explore, with immediate run variety and short length. Lots of awkwardness here and there, one-floor set-ups are a lot less dynamic than res/spell oriented ones, a lot of champs kinda suck, and the dlc is as messy as it is cool, but tends to work out.

2. An Angel Dances in the Sparks of a Bonfire (Web)

Takes the most fundamentally compelling part of shmups and isolates it to display all the raw beauty within (i.e. routing bullet patterns without relying on memorisation). The deepest 1D movement like how Getting Over It is the deepest 2D movement. I have not been able to move past this. If aliens found Tetris on their own I hope they found this too.

3. Women Puzzle (Web)

The panic and excitement of finally getting the puzzle and nothing happening; the dread of looking up the song and trying to survive for four and a half minutes; the revelation of finding and executing the proper win condition. Incredible experience.

4. Zachtronics Solitaire Collection (iOS)

I checked this in two years back, and maybe forgot when making the top list (Poinpy too, which definitely deserved it). Seeing as I've kept playing and now have more than 10x the wins though, it works out. Looking at the picture I used is funny because it was meant to show how stuck you can get but now I can see a way out - a good sign both for the game and me.

5. Magicube (PC)

Quickly sets a standard for concise yet tricky levels, lots of little tricks and broader dynamics to explore. Some letdowns around the place, that solve too easily or don't introduce anything new (including the last two levels kinda), but very rare. Particularly liked 9, 20, 37 (ahead of schedule) and 44. Had to look up 43, never managed to intuit the wincon even if I found all the tricks to execute it, and only got 17 with cheating. 

6. Rena Game (Web)

I haven't played many fangames to compare but had a great journey of obsessive one-more-tries with this. So many good avoidance scenarios that perfectly mix its ingredients, plus some cool gimmicks. Yellows on hard are kinda evil but Rika + Satoko is perfect.

7. Moon Cat (PC)

Part of UFO 50 which I am less than halfway through so fuck it. Funny mechanics with a bit of depth and ever-delightful music. I got super close to finding the secrets (one of them basically just missed the pixel you have to stand on) but still enjoyable to hunt for them overall. My one complaint would be that it doesn't really push you on the mechanics that much, it's satisfying to get familiar enough to start turning around mid-air and such but you never actually have to do that.

8. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES, via PC)

Cool and bullshit enemies in roughly equal measure - normal knights are both, depending on if you cheese them. Good overworld progression despite a couple obscure bits (go to hell Bagu), and dungeons work well built around the big walkbacks (basically, dungeons are hard to get to but once there you trade resources for permanent progress, so the challenge is to get as much done per life to avoid fighting your way back too many times). The last one is like 3 times worse than anything before it though, so I got filtered there.

9. Fez (PC)

Cute with some fun ideas, but both the regular navigation and post-game secrets are repetitive. Few of them build upon each other to form something greater, and as one-offs they can be sort of arbitrary and plain. Carried by its music mostly, great mystery vibes even if the substance is mixed. 

10. OutRun 2: Coast 2 Coast (PC)

The new single player and meta progression is stupid, and it's definitely a lesser of the original aesthetically, but it's nice to be able to see the road and the driving is a big step up; largely due to drifting which is fun to execute and complicates optimisation.

Worst Games

Very clear shift here from really bad games to some picks that are just fine but interesting to dig into the flaws of.

1. Kingdom: New Lands

An incremental / survival game (yes those are contradictory) with pleasant visuals but opaque mechanics, suicidal AI, and the most tedious recruit dynamic ever (monsters attack every day resetting any recruitment, and recruits take more than a day to reach your settlement). On the first map you quickly get more money than you can spend proactively, so you're left just running around endlessly re-recruiting and re-equipping your minions, none of the satisfaction of decent base building or management games.

With sparse information you might imagine some interesting consequences or choices, or some upcoming significant level of development for your town, but at least to start it can't live up to any such expectations. Way, way, way too slow and shallow to function as a permadeath game, and too unsatisfying and poorly thought out to work as a simple incremental time waster.

2. The Entropy Centre

Has one fundamentally tedious idea and just repeats it ad nauseum. It's sad how low the standards for casual puzzles are that having this little creativity and novelty in levels is celebrated. It makes me doubt how good Portal or Talos actually are - not that I'm super high on them to begin with, but how anyone can find this remotely passable when they've played Portal is beyond me.

3. Another World

Starts with a bit more wandering (with decent visuals and sense of this strange world), but quickly devolves into trial and error traps and gotchas with tedious tasks to repeat every attempt (like upgrading the gun and destroying those three pillars). The combat is fine with the three different shots, but relying on contextual actions still makes that awkward, and once at the tunnels and caves it's so bad. I'm not gonna call it dated because Limbo and Inside did the exact same shit with great fanfare, but for my money this is some of the most boring game design possible.

4. Descent + Overload

Boomer shooters with flying that ends up a bit odd-shaped. I wasn't a big fan of how oriented they are around ambushes, rounding a corner and getting fired at with the fairly uniform response of reversing while firing backwards. Save states trivialize it while keeping yourself from using them is still hard to strike a balance with when replaying a section knowing the spawns is so much easier. Overload has a bit more dynamic behaviour but I'm not sure that's too positive really, like playing a multiplayer game against AI, at least to start it feels too erratic. Exploring and navigating the levels in zero-g is interesting, but doesn't interact with the combat a whole lot since the encounters are so separate. I could definitely see the speedrun being cool though.

5. Diorama Dungeoncrawl

At its best a fairly effective 3D Castlevania, with some nice gauntlets, tricky platforming, and juggling of enemies and boss attacks. Level 5 is solid on the whole, and the lich is a good boss (quite polarising with/without powerups since the AoE is so essential, but once you figure that out it's still interesting to execute, jumping away from enemies to charge the strike mid-air but needing to land close to as many of the enemies as possible).

On the other side, there's a lot of open rooms, especially early on, that you can just waltz through without any real obstacles, and even if you take a hit here and there the checkpointing and amount of health you get are so generous that it doesn't matter. A bear boss is a notable difficulty spike but it doesn't lock you into the arena so you can just run away (to then learn its moveset in the boss rush). There's also a sizeable amount of jank that becomes relevant when it is harder, like the colossal knight that gets knocked into you if do more than a single light attack at a time, sort of punishing more efficient avoidance of its attacks.

6. Osman

Looks very pretty, some initial unfairness but pretty chill on that front, it's more that once you have experience the strategy to beat some bosses is just to have powerups to cheese them. I like action games where you can always come back, working towards a clean perfect strategy that doesn't have a time limit or rely on temporary buffs, so it's mostly down to that. 

Other Media

Films that Lingered

Too many to go over individually this year.

• While You Were Sleeping: The funniest movie I've ever seen? No way the misunderstanding hook could've played out any better, endless webbing of complications and misunderstandings, everyone's so charming and the "main" pair have insane chemistry. While watching I'd just think over the situation in my head and burst out laughing, only for the dialogue to elevate it further. 
• RRR: Raw appeal in its physicality, emotion and energy. Politically the archetypes and themes are anything but nuanced, but in the spirit of revolution and their personal attachment to it, there's certainly enough. Some striking dialogue to punctuate the storyline, like Charan saying something to the effect of "my own courage drives me, but it is your courage which will make me win" to his girlfriend.
• I Saw the TV Glow: Loses me somewhat in the last part but that middle is intoxicating, gets around to a compelling theme sans closure, and completely stunning presentation. 
• Un Chien Andalou (short): This has some amazing vibes, absurd that its marketing and reputation is so focused on the eye cutting when there's so much more. The Mordant Music soundtrack is also great.
  
• Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead: The feeling of dancing on the border of the fourth wall is immaculate, with a lot of elaborate witticisms and cool set design to complement that, plus some incredible plays-within-a-play(-within-a-film) as particular highlights.
• My Own Private Idaho: Not the cleanest along the way, but hard not to think about this now when it shares with the above such a striking metanarrative theme of dysfunctional side characters (i.e. that they're dysfunctional because they're side characters in a story). Soul-sucking despair is all I'm left with from the ending.
  
• The Last Days of Chez Nous: Incredible music, every piano scene breaks my heart. So human and infused with complicated love, some of the nuance and subtext goes over my head (not finding subtitles not helping that) but it's still so deeply affecting. Love the house and outfits, the whole comforting context of the drama. The amount of detail here too, so much said in a lingering shot or the shifting facial expressions (mainly of Lisa Harrow).
• Bound: Remarkably horny, even if I expected more from the title. So ambitious in its style, not a single ounce that isn't completely nailed. I have no clue how they thought they could pull off fucking white paint at the end as complementary to the sleek glinting metal but they did. Incredibly fun and tense plotting, the faceoff in the apartment a high point; dramatic irony abound, into a chokehold of a silent climax. 
• Ringing Bell: What seems like it may be a simple nature story like Bambi (surely a big inspiration) contains unexpected depth and nuance. Thought-provoking and deeply tragic, in the sense that there is no solution to reality's darker sides. Full write-up over here.
• The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia: Conveys the struggles of a broken world, yearning for completeness, finally seeing change only for nothing to be different... Ascensia's final scene is just heartbreaking.
  

Peterkin and the First Dog (novel)

Maybe it's just called "literature", but I was struck by this and another fantasy adventure I read this year (something about bottons?) having an underlying sense of character and philosophy. Here, the naturalistic alt-history setting and kind of folk adventure is the background for "the boy who tamed a wolf", but it's decidedly less interested in the journey or wolf than the boy himself.

Haibane Renmei (anime series)

A haunting and mysterious atmosphere, aided by great music and a compelling early digital look; while it's no visual show-stopper, the background art in the forest and in-universe paintings are not let down at all, and only the CGI windmills are at all bad - just make sure to avoid the awful upscale of the BluRay. Spends the early episodes setting up the town and comfortable feel of the world, giving way to more serious and sad topics over time, though those are evidently present from the start so it's more a case of feeling this lurking darkness than being completely at ease.

As it continues and delves fully into that serious side, I'm really glad that it doesn't lose the essential mystery - too many stories like this will have a resolution that either simplifies matters to resolve them, or just doesn't dare to give clarity at all. The circle of sin is a brilliant thematic center, and both Rakka and Reki have great character development incorporating that without ducking out of exploring their full feelings.

One Piece Chapter 1-600 (manga)

The first 100 chapters is strongly self-contained and if you're at all interested but find it daunting, I think it's perfectly suitable to think of it as a 100 chapter story. In some ways it is the best on offer (never trust a recommendation to start later); expansions to the crew are charming and longer arcs can have really fun plotting, but the romance dawn vibe fades a lot as the story continues. From that strong start, it continually tops itself in scope and depth with every step, culminating in Enies Lobby (for personal stakes) and Marineford (bringing in the rest of the world). At the timeskip (cutoff can be argued, 600 is nice and clean), things take a bit of a tumble; this is where I started reading years ago (after catching up to the anime), and where I lost steam in this "re"-read as a result, though it's still pretty damn great.