The List and Beyond — Gaming in the Year 2024

I've never written an End-of-the-Year or GOTY-type post because I have never thought to do so. But, this year of unemployment and underemployment combined with my total burnout with visual arts after my exhibition last November led me to write instead. And I have by maintaining this website and the "Drudge List" sort of, picking up with startmenu, and exploring the world of daily writing projects plus getting within visual range of the finish line of the first draft of my first novel.

Now, I have a chip on my shoulder, perhaps from art school, regarding something called Talking About Your Novel, or "TAYN." I've been lead to believe that you should never TAYN. No one wants your big dumb voice dominating the conversation with falsetto rants about your incomplete project. No one is as interested as they seem when you TAYN. You can TAYN once it's published, but until then, keep the whole mess private or at least confined to a small, consenting writer's group. So I'll just say the novel has been a restorative place for me to linger. And I'm tremendously proud of my work, even if it doesn't get published it's good practice for the next one. Perhaps some day I'll post fiction on Bold Oblique... I've shared personal essays before but those feel more in-line with how I write about games than sharing a pure story.

Although I don't like writing about a game nearly as much as when I can write a story about playing the game. I like when I can zoom out from the screen to see the life of the player around the game. I want to write more like that in 2025. I did write about games though, got a few thoughts down, some quite a bit heavy that others.

This list includes games which I wrote a full review for as well as other titles I played but didn't mention anywhere. There are little game moments which encompassed strange experiences, casual laughs with loved ones, or personal highs which I never recollected in type. Partly, I found inspiration here from my Steam Replay 2024 page (incidentally, the only time a Year in Review-type feature on a service has actually been interesting to me) but also from digging though cartridges and squinting while I scroll through thousands of ROMS. Need it be remarked that not all the titles here will have be published in 2024?

The List

This list has a purpose, to close out the year and to let me ruminate on my experiences, thus this list will be neither exhaustive nor ranked, but it will be fair. "Fair" here means "alphabetical" and "kept to 300 words." Let's begin.

Animal Well

What an exciting start! This game's fine qualities, it's map, art direction, atmosphere, and puzzles, have been discussed and analyzed by a gaming community already sharpened by fifteen years of Dark Souls (ding!) speculation. However, the truest spark powering and informing this bracing experience remains elusive and still perfectly fresh in the quivering minds of Gamers. What I mean is, we have not yet begun discussing Animal Well and God bless Billy Basso for making it. I do not know if I will ever replay this game or if indeed I will ever stop replaying this game, so well fixed is it in my imagination—I often catch a glimpse of a neon cat face or a glimmering fountain in my thoughts at the end of the day, even now. Animal Well, when it appeared, also seemed to catalyse another kind of conversation: the "Is it worth my time?" Conversation. I heard or read more than one commentator (although I knew at least one of them already to be dull and incurious) declare it was better to play around with it until you feel stuck and then go watch a YouTube video about the ending.

What is it about video games that so deeply engenders both an indefatigable interest in games themselves but also a total ambivalence about actually playing through them? Maybe it's a problem of abundance. How can any one game's appeal hold out against a thousand, thousand little FOMOs?

my review

Another Crab's Treasure

I already wrote a lengthy review of this game and I said what I wanted to say: It's fantastic and perfectly understands itself the way only the greats do. I'm becoming an Old Man harping on Fundamentals. Alas.

Many months on from playing it I can say Another Crab's Treasure looms large. I go wild listening to the boss fight tracks and I still think about Praya Dubia. I think this far out I can feel what you might call "rough edges" in my memories of the mechanics. They aren't rough edges to me though, when I think of bits of menu or movement friction I just see the places that being smoothed out in Aggro Crab's next game (be it another Another or not.) Ok, I'm using words like "friction" and "smooth" so maybe, yes, they are Rough Edges. But listen—they are rough with potential. Rough like how the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci were "rough." Aggro Crab will take us even higher with their next project and one need only compare A.C.T. with their first game, Going Under.

I bought Going Under within a single breath of finishing A.C.T. and let me tell you they really wanted to talk about Capitalism, specifically Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups, in Extremely Direct Terms using Hades. That idea can only go about as far as it sounds. But they showed up and nailed it, more or less. It was in a game that talked about Capitalism, specifically Environmental Destruction and Existential Fear, in Slightly More Oblique Terms using Dark Souls that their voice truly flourished. So, let's wait and see what's next and until them I'm waiting for someone to make a "Nephro, Captain of the Guard" plush.

my review

Demo Shout-Out

I want to begin by saying my partner, for grad school reasons, built a massively powerful and intimidatingly rectangular PC. He then moved his old PC (also a beast) into the living room, hooked it up to the TV, dumped a ton of emulators on it, merged our Steam libraries into a family group, and dubbed it the "Family Computer." This means that I, who switched from a pathetic old PC to a Mac last year, suddenly have a good reason to play a lot more PC games.

First up, Splintered. Dude, Splintered. I need more turn-based RPG fans in my life, and ideally they would wear huge lapels so I might grab them and shout, "Splintered!" into their faces. It's a Dragon Quest I-like with a randomized world map in the loop and a character growth system which triumphantly takes on the criminally neglected task of deepening and refining the weapons and ability system from Final Fantasy IX. If YK, YK.

Steam page

Next, Vultures - Scavenger's of Death. The Steam page calls it "Turn-based Tactical Extraction". The setting is familiar, an elaborately designed police station crawling with zombies ("mutants.") The graphics are stylish, not copying utterly into the dithering pixels of the PSX, instead offering slightly cleaner, cel shaded-esque textures on low-poly models. I think it looks a bit like a spooky Virtua Fighter. The gameplay is tense and exciting and the menus are very usable. Apparently, the full game will have a character creator so I can make a little team of S.T.A.R.S. OCs. Also, and I'm just going to say, the player character in the demo, Leopoldo, is hot. I'm sorry but he's so hot.

Steam page

Finally, Lorn's fucking Lure! The full game released and I didn't buy it but I played the new demo. However, what I have to share about the old demo is what's interesting to me. Three years, nine months and three days ago I posted a little write up on the hidden, forbidden, holy ground of my old blog. It was something I was proud of at the time and in re-skimming it I find it's not too shabby, this of course forces me to confront certain questions. Have I not actually improved? Or, am I struck in a state of permanent mediocrity? Am I a phoney? Should I justa—Lorn's Lure is a first-person jumping game about using icepicks to grapple around the nightmare-gigantic, industrialized, sci-fi darkness of futuristic mega-caverns. Nearly four years ago I said

"engendering of curiosity and the faith that that curiosity will be, not rewarded, I dont like saying rewarded, but justified, is such a powerful tool of expression..."

and I think I might have been onto something with the idea of Justified Curiosity. The new demo definitely delivered on that front. Anyway buy Lorn's Lure even if I haven't.

Steam page

Dr. Mario DX

Dr. Mario DX is a fan-made ROM hack of Dr. Mario for the Nintendo Game Boy. It introduces full-color graphics and a character selector which alters the color scheme of the playscreen, the design of the viruses, and of course, the doctor character artwork. You can choose to play as Doctors Mario, Luigi, Daisy, or Wario. I have played this game almost every single day in the year 2024. I think I'm just playing through levels 15–20 over and over again, swapping characters at random. I love the music in the Dr. Mario series quite a bit and I have never listened to the music in this game. I have my Pocket by Analogue muted while I listen to either a podcast, audiobook, or YouTube video.

Let me tell you something, from one gaymer to another, I'm fucking good at Dr. Mario. I can destroy the final level of this all-timer puzzle game while very drunk. I can create superhuman pill combos while plummeting into the abyss like it's nothing. If I removed the training weights I would KILL my opponent. I'm OP.

Frankly, I'm just shocked something managed to unseat Panel de Pon specifically, Pokémon Puzzle Challenge the best-looking Game Boy Color game of All Time, as my preferred nighttime puzzle game. But I'm not in charge of my own taste in games, the Nineties are.

Whoa, here's a spectacular Christmas Wish for you: Nintendo, please release a 120fps, tate-mode default, Dr. Mario game as a launch title for the Switch 2 complete with a free custom tate-mode JoyCon attachment peripheral and special, limited "Doctor's Bag"-edition console with a leather strap and wearable Mario-branded head mirror accessory.

DRAGON QUEST III HD-2D Remake

I thought about this fucking game every day for about three months before it released. According to Steam I've played it for 140.3 hours, but that isn't true. It can't be. I played this game like a lion and a tiger were fighting inside me. I played mainly for medicinal purposes. It had to be excised.

I named characters after friends. I delighted in the monsters. I unlocked doors I couldn't enter the first time I encountered them. Fantastic.

Let's get real, do I wish there were casinos, monster medallions, Pachisi Tracks, item crafting, and a way to get the bonus from changing jobs without having to actually change jobs? Of course I do. I do generally trust the developer of a mainline Dragon Quest game when they choose to omit certain features found in other Dragon Quest titles. However, don't you think the HD-2D Remake brand sort of lends itself to maximum luxury and featurization? Like a "definitive" edition? Dragon Quest XI received a definitive edition and they didn't leave a single kitchen sink out of that one.

For this title, I'm the meme of the Steam review with a million hours that just reads "Meh." But, importantly I'm trying to think about the HD-2D brand. The Octopath Traveler games introduced the concept and got the gaming world weakly pleading for a Final Fantasy VI remake in that style. Then Live-A-Live (a personal ultra-favorite) refined it a bit and started setting expectations for what a remake of a Squeenix game might look like in this form. Now, Dragon Quest III feels like the first one made in what we might come to see as the HD-2D "mold"—a method for remakes. Although, the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters's existence probably precludes seeing anything remade from that dynasty anytime soon we may expect to see certain staples begin to define these sorts of titles.

EarthBound

The important part of my EarthBound review is the grief. My grandmother, who raised me as a mother, died shortly before I played. The game helped me through, along with my support system and time. It was helpful mostly because it had moments that made me miss her so bad it hurt.

I had intended to play the sequel this year but I didn't. Never intuited the right moment. Hard to trust that kind of feeling, but we must.

my review

Forager

I am NOT writing about this game because I think it is a good video. It is NOT a good video game.

However, in the intervening time since my partner and I fell into a Forager stupor and slapped ourselves out of it, it has become short hand. Now we will say "Forager-like" to describe anything that feels predatory and unartful. Any game that appears to want to entice and hook the player on impulsive play gets this comparison now. Especially that new smart phone card game. You know the one.

Sometimes, it's important to state a conviction clearly and definitely: fuck that shit. Fuck the predatory and the addictive. Fuck the Skinner Boxes and the Loot Crates. Games are art and art is for the soul, not the bottom line. It's not for the value extraction and the human instrumentalization and addiction.

Forage means to collect what you need from the wild, not to ravage every last inch.

my review

Inscryption

Oh Inscryption. I could just be biased as a newly inducted member of the "Maybe Card-Based Games Can Be Good" Club but I wish I could put you in the All-Timers rank. But I can't. The thing is, Inscryption, you just didn't perfectly land it. Your Freshman Student Film storytelling just edged out your Senior Game Design Thesis mechanics for my overall impression. You were so clever, but you weren't smart enough. I like you so, so much, but I don't love you. Au revoir.

my review

Placid Plastic Duck Simulator

Now here's a video game.

No controls. No input. Just a camera pointed at some rubber ducks. The game simulates an environment, a couple interconnected pools, nothing huge—and every so often it drops a themed duck into the water. The ducks bob about. Sometimes the ducks interact. For instance, there's one duck that occasionally breaths fire and other ducks, ones made of flammable materials, will catch fire if they are caught in the brief blaze. These interactions are somewhat rare until enough hours have passed that the pool becomes crowded.

I threw this on the TV during a Christmas party and it killed. I'm serious. It's the perfect amount of curious, interactive, and chill. Placid, like it says. People discussed the ducks, named them in the menu, and watched them float. The conversation would meander away from the ducks. Eventually, someone would blunder into the room to say "How are the ducks?' and they would receive a remarkably long and stimulating story of what's been going on in the game.

I like calling it a game. Even if it's more a proper simulator: no interaction. When you "play" you are fine-tuning a screensaver. Someone at the party said "It's not a game really, it's a toy." and I think they were right. I think it was Dean. Anyway, I wish more games were toys. I actually wish more Things were toys. At some playgrounds there's a wheel or a crank. It doesn't do anything you just crank it. Just spin it to spin it. The world should be filled with such things.

Sky Reservoirs: RECONNOITERER

Or RECON: GB.

One of my games on this list is one of my games.

The only video game I have ever released and an epilogue to a narrative series of paintings I exhibited last year called Sky Reservoirs. The game was something I had felt inspired to pick up and make after finishing the final painting but before the show was installed. The curator was interested in the game and suggested we show it along with the paintings. I made a short, looping video of a playthrough of the first area and we projected it onto the gallery wall. During the opening reception I walked around with my Pocket by Analogue and let attendees demo the game.

After the show was taken down I thought, "Well, I'll have to finish it." And over the course of quite a few months I did. Then, my friend Evan composed these incredible tracks which we implemented and the full experience (which I think of as "Sky Reservoirs: Reconnoiterer DX") is available for free on my itch.io page.

I thought when I finished it, that I would be ready to begin another game project immediately. This was not the case. I did a ton of pre-production (lots of artwork and a game design document) on a sort of mystical, Nordic detective game but really all my spirit is going into writing right now. Also, I couldn't figure out a good engine or case structure at the time. I'm so proud of my little Game Boy Color walking simulator that works on actual hardware I could die. Certainly a Game of This Year to me.

play it in-browser or download the ROM here

Sorry We're Closed

Another game I don't wish to repeat myself over. It's a gem. It has music I still listen to today.

Because I reviewed it recently I don't feel like I can add much more until more time has passed. So, instead of forcing something new, lets compare it to the other titles on this list.

Sorry We're Closed is important to how I think about gaming in 2024 because it takes my hand and reminds me games can, and often ought to, have a beginning, middle, and an end. Even with multiple endings and outcomes this game gives us story structure. A formal and sturdy structure of plot which represents the deepest and the surest of the game's old school roots. Looking at this list, there are very few titles I feel have a meaningfully structured story, EarthBound and Another Crab's Treasure do, but Animal Well and Dragon Quest III don't really unfold quite like grand plots. Then there are games like Placid Plastic Duck and Superflight which are obviously disconnected from anything like a story.

Maybe that's what makes it effective as a horror game. The video store feel and the story moments that explode with a "We Only Get One Shot So It Has To Count" punchiness. Another developer that's only just getting started, who's future output will be mandatory playing.

my review on startmenu

Superflight

Here's another "Family Computer" staple. It's so easy to just pass the controller back and forth and talk with this thing running. Maybe that's one of my big take-aways from this post, from this year: I want to play video games while talking.

Watch Tim Rogers's review of the game for Kotaku, he pretty much says what's left to say about the game itself.

The social feelings I have around this game are important to me. Superflight, WEBFISHING, and Placid Plastic Duck Simulator were impactful enough to me that they were three games on the list when I had the idea to write it. That casual, social experience of poking at a game while spending time with someone else grew in importance to me this year. Something to pursue. And that takes us to the last game.

✨ WEBFISHING ✨

This is all the Animal Crossing I think I ever needed. Short, sweet, simple, a just a tiny pinch of edge. It's online, it's lobby-based, it's perfect to fire up and get on discord for, and it's five dollars on Steam right now. You can make your little critter character, you can get yourself a title and an outfit, you fish with the chillest fishing minigame of all time.

At first, the game included purchasable titles for your avatar, among them were "gay," "bi," etc. Apparently some disgruntled GAMERS decided it was a terrible shame that there wasn't a "straight" title and raised an enormous fuss. The dev eventually added a "straight" to the game, with a hugely inflated price. It's hilarious.

But that's still beside the point. The game is about playing with people. Chatter begins and ends, music recommendations get linked in the group chat, silence never feels weird while neither does getting loud. Just the company. This is a campfire, a hearth. It's another warm light to gather around which is everything I guess anything really needs to be. So, this is also a Game of the Year. Maybe it's the true Game of the Year for me. I didn't expect to choose one and managing to pick the one that comes last alphabetically feels almost too perfect.

Here's to being almost too perfect in 2025. WEBFISHING is a pure shot of the warmest, most uplifting parts of the old internet while quitely, even subversively, expressing the humor and vibe of the cutting edge and it is my Game of the Year in 2024.

The Drudge List

And here, you know I'm not putting too much stock into a GOTY pick if that's not the end of the post.

My partner had this idea to create a play list of games for 2024 in late 2023. They would be a mixture of old and new, and they would all be those games of great intention we all keep piles of. Those "One Of These Days" game we all intend to get to. Well, we thought we'd buckle down and get to them. We both made lists which we delighted in endless refining and sharing with one another. Often during the period of our initial drafts one of us would enter the room and make a bold pronouncement about the list. For instance "It will be every Metal Gear Solid game." Only later to say, with equal gravity, "I shall stop at 3."

Eagle-eyed readers of this website (who do not exist) will have noticed the Drudge List page has been removed from the links table in the header. But vestiges, like the Abandoned Games List, remain. I couldn't stick to it. And frankly, making lists, something I have always relied on for a sense of stability and order, are beginning to feel like they actually give in to anxiety.

For a brief moment this year I had a Bluesky account. It proved, like all social media for me, an addictive and ultimately negative experience. However, during that brief time I was exposed to some discourse about reading books versus listening to audiobooks. On one hand people feel it's dishonest to call yourself a huge reader when you're mostly engaging with passive media like audio. On the other hand, if you've listened to the audio version of a whole series and someone you know beckons to you from a tea party and says "Won't you join us? We were just discussing that book series." and you say "Sorry, I haven't read them." Well, that also seems like a dishonesty—even if it's technically true. So, there's obviously some kind of anxiety about reading. I determined for myself the answer was that we are too worried about what "counts." Figuring out what "counts" as reading surely can't be as important or helpful to us as figuring out why we are so worried about "counting" in the first place?

This relates to the Drudge List to me, it's pressure to consume media in a prescribed way. It so far has done me little good, the times I've forced myself to play through a game. However, it has at times been very fruitful to "stick with it" in a game. Maybe more fruitful were the times I've "stuck with" a challenging or boring (at first sight) piece of art or film or book. But still, the allure of hidden insights and novel experiences can draw one into making plans. And games have a way or putting themselves into lists (see above.)

So, for that, I won't be making a Drudge List for 2025. I don't think my partner will either. I think I'm going to play fewer games over all and try to cultivate a serene attitude about games I don't think I feel inclined to pick up again (Sorry, Indiana!) I think my desire to push myself to be a total completionist with everything leads me to inorganically try to call shots about what I will be inspired by and then force myself to finish things I hate, out of guilt. Then, when something comes by and truly captures me, I don't have time for it because I think "I can't play that fun game or read that exciting book right now. I have to finish the ones I've already started and didn't like." It sucks. And, in fact, I would probably finish more books and games and gain better enjoyment, enrichment, and inspiration over all if I were more willing to quit. It's so psychological with me, that's the only reason. I think.

Anyway, this has grown meandering, personal, and biased rather than terse, relatable, and informative, so let me just tell you I hope you have a beautiful, healthy and prosperous new year. Free of TAYN.

All my best,

Joshua Winters
December 30th, 2024

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