Man, fuck this year. Here are some video games I felt like talking about, I guess.
(2023 ⇐ 2024 ⇒ 2025)
ABZÛ
There are a few different throughlines to the games I played this year. One is that I delved deep into my backlog; games I picked up in a bundle or a Steam sale some 6 or 7 years ago but never found the time or the hardware for. There are a lot of them. Most of them were worth the wait. I've long since given up on the idea of playing every single game in my libraries to completion, but it's nice to have options.
Another throughline was seeking out shorter games. I've… had some trouble focusing on longer projects this year, so games that I could play in short bursts (like The Solitaire Conspiracy), complete in a few sessions (like What Remains of Edith Finch), or even a single sitting (like Dépanneur Nocturne) were useful for filling in the time. ABZÛ was the first, and ended up being one of the best. Simple but effective gameplay, immaculate visuals and music, and a lot of fish. It was only a couple hours long, but it was the best couple hours I played all year.
Pikmin 4
I played though Pikmin 2 several years ago and had a good time. Last year I picked up a used copy of Pikmin 3 at a convention on a lark, played through it, and had a good time. This year my brother got me Pikmin 4 as a gift, I played though it, and had an excellent time. There's a certain charm these games have that keeps bringing me back, and the most recent game showcases the best of all of them.
Splatoon 3: Side Order
Ahh, time sinks. I still play Sky on the regular, return to Animal Crossing every now and then, and even threw a bit of Eastward: Octopia into the mix. I completed many more loops of Cobalt Core, and more races in F-Zero 99. Over the summer I even found time for some long sessions of Civilization 6.
Splatoon 3 was another mainstay, but this year it reached the proverbial end of the line. The game is still around and I still play it, but like with Animal Crossing before it, the game has been "finished" in that peculiar way live service games are. What exists now will continue to exist, but everything they wanted to do with it is done. Thanks for playing, enjoy the reruns, see y'all in the sequel.
But if it had to end, the one-two punch of Side Order and the Grand Fest made for a good capstone — a well-crafted single-player challenge, and a spectacular you-had-to-be-there finale for the multiplayer side. I can say I was there at the beginning and there at the end, and I'm glad I was along for the ride.
Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers
Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart and its antecedents are a thing I've been vaguely aware of for a long time but never followed too closely, so the sequel was a welcome surprise. It offered an abundance of content and a robust single-player mode, and it's a free fan-made project, so I figured "why not" and gave it a try, and was subsequently hooked for a good month or so. Not everything clicked with me — it's way more mechanically complex than any other kart racer I've seen (I'm told that's part of the appeal, but I've never had the dexterity for it), and it can get frustrating very fast whether you're racing against the CPU or against other players. All the same I can't help but admire it. Ring Racers is a passion project that's as much a love letter to itself as anything that came before, and apologizes for none of it.
Patrick's Parabox
I'll always make room for puzzle games, and this was the standout of this year's lot. Sokoban games can range from "okay" to "clicks with me immediately and is an instant favorite" (Baba Is You et al). Parabox landed squarely in the latter category, occupying my brain for a good few weeks until I'd solved every last level. The different ways it layers puzzles on top of each other were fun to figure out, especially when it starts introducing new ways to "break" them, which it turn become additional layers of the puzzle. Highly recommended.
While Patrick's Parabox was the best puzzle game I played this year, Epigraph was the most unique. It's another game about deciphering a fictional language à la Chants of Sennaar or Heaven's Vault (which is to say, one that appeals to me specifically), but in a much more compressed form. The entire game consists of a single, very complex puzzle. You're given seven artifacts with undeciphered writing, and a couple paragraphs of notes to start you off, and that's all you get. From there, you have to unravel the language piece by piece, isolating individual words and phrases and meanings until you understand the bigger picture. That such a leap is possible at all is a testament to how well designed the puzzle is. Like I said last year, I want more games like this to exist.
One caveat: only being a single puzzle means there's functionally no feedback unless you've solved the whole thing, so if you've almost solved it, it can be difficult to figure out which part of your solution you need to fix. It's only a minor gripe that didn't detract from the experience overall; as it turns out, I felt the same way about the final puzzle of…
TUNIC
I've been sitting on this one for a while. It's consistently been at the top of my wishlist ever since it was announced all those years ago. I bought the soundtrack the day it came out, but I never delved into the game itself until this summer. Something about TUNIC always drew me back towards it. I knew it was a game I wanted to experience blind, and now that I've done so, it'll be a game that occupies my thoughts for a long time.
TUNIC, the adventure game, is good! A charming little title in the vein of the old Zeldas. Exploring the game world is fun and gives a very satisfying sense of progression, whether though finding new tools and weapons, opening new paths, or discovering hidden paths that were there all along. Fighting enemies and bosses is challenging, but not insurmountable. It does get kinda frustrating in the back half, especially the last boss. The built-in accessibility options make it much more tolerable.
All of this is tied together by TUNIC's central gimmick, an in-game manual pieced together page by page. Most of it is written in a script you cannot read, and it leaves you just enough information to intuit what needs to be done, but forces you to dig deeper if you want to learn the truth: TUNIC, the puzzle game, is a masterstroke. Much like all of those hidden paths and shortcuts, all of the information you need is placed in front of you even if you don't realize it. Decoding the cipher text, and understanding the meaning of the Holy Cross and the Golden Path (not even solving the puzzle, just realizing what the puzzle actually is), was the most satisfying thing I've done in a game in years.
TOEM
Some games are memorable for a particularly hard challenge, or a compelling narrative, or a perfectly crafted setpiece level. Some games are memorable because they're just really pleasant. No stress, no time limits, just vibes. Everything about this game puts a huge grin on my face — the music, the characters, all the places to explore and secrets to find and puzzles to solve. A week, a month, a year from now, I'll have a stray thought about TOEM, and my day will be a little brighter because of it.
I like this game a lot, y'all. Very much looking forward to the sequel whenever that comes out. Take a picture, it'll last longer.
(Honorable mentions from the archives: Storyteller, A Little to the Left, Freshly Frosted, Wavetale, Islets, Arranger)
Here Comes Niko!
While we're on the subject of pleasant games, this is another one I've been meaning to play for a while, and another one I enjoyed a fair amount. Looking back, TOEM and Niko! have a lot in common — vibe-centric games with 2D characters running around in a carefully crafted 3D world, carried by a charming aesthetic and cast of characters, with a core loop of travelling from town to town and doing various small tasks to make friends and help people out. The biggest differences are the genres (photography puzzle versus collect-a-thon platformer), the color scheme (minimalist and monochrome versus bright pastel)… and one more key detail.
I knew most of what to expect when I started, the soundtrack and the aesthetic and the platforming, but knew next to nothing about the story, which caught me off guard. Early on it hits you with a moment of "…oh," that lingers throughout the game as you learn more about what the protagonist is actually trying to accomplish. (At some point I want to write up a comparison of the narratives of Niko! and A Short Hike, but it'd be an entire essay in itself so I'll spare you the details.) I didn't go into Here Comes Niko! looking for pathos, but that's what it gave me and I think it was a better experience because of that. Kudos.
(Honorable mentions from the "I'll get around to this one eventually" list, that I got around to eventually: Going Under, Creature in the Well, Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, Sonic Mania, What Remains of Edith Finch, RiME)
Anthology of the Killer
The best game of 2024. Like, unironically.
This comes from another developer (thecatamites) that I've been vaguely aware of as someone who makes interesting niche art projects, but only really knew about secondhand from other people, which was still enough to put it on my radar. And now, I cannot get this goddamn thing out of my head. It burrowed in months ago and has lived there rent-free ever since. At some point I need to introduce my siblings to this game because I just need to talk to somebody about it.
Anthology of the Killer is a lot of things. It's a collection of nine short narrative games that have been released over the past few years. It's surrealist horror comedy, and dances between all of those aspects whenever it pleases. It's a satirical take on history and modernity and art. It's a story about death cults and pop music fads. It's about just trying to get by even as the world around you gets stranger and more violent, or as you realize that maybe it already was. It's crude and bloody, and gets away with it by looking like it was drawn in MS Paint. It's a game where I can say something like "Heart is probably the best overall, but Flesh is underrated" and not sound like I'm losing my mind. It's the most well-written game I've experienced this year, and possibly any year.
"Aren't the stars pretty? Isn't it a nice night? Do you think the world is basically good or basically bad?"
"Man, I just work here."
Who knows. Maybe 2025 will be better. Just gonna keep spinning the wheels for a while, see if it gets me anywhere. See y'all next year.
Decided to do another UNDERTALE-themed fanart animation, this time featuring the titular Patrick from one of my favorite puzzle games, Patrick's Parabox!
side note: this one has been a nightmare on basically every platform I've tried to post it on due to to image compression.
