What an awful year, was 2024. What a terrible, rotting, degenerated compost heap of a year, particularly when it came to games and the game industry. I can’t name the last time a major US game studio released a game I was excited about. Pentiment? I think it was Pentiment.
That being said, in other parts of the world they still make games that are good. And in the indie scene they still make games that are good. Pretty soon they’ll have fired everybody out there, and we’ll be left all alone with Product 4: The Contenting – Revenge of IP. Until then, however, let this love carry us.
I have no categories by which to organize the games I’m about to describe. Some may wonder why I am deploying the fewest rhetorical-organizational tools here on games, the subject about which I am theoretically most qualified to speak. What they don’t see is that I have studied games the most vehemently because they are the most mysterious. Allow the games to retain that mystery and we will learn more from them.
I played A Little to the Left for the first time near the end of the year, and it haunts me to this day. I suspect I’ll write a more extended analysis of its apophenic ordering of household goods, but until then think of this game as a metaphorical account of the endless war between God and Satan. You play as God, your cat is Satan, and the teeming masses of men’s souls are the unordered heaps of silverware in your drawer. Riveting.
Another lovely puzzle game this year was Tactical Breach Wizards, undercover as a turn-based tactics game. The brevity of each level, the clarity of each character’s powerset, and the charm of each character’s style and personality come together to make for a game that is fun, exciting, and well-told. More and more as I grow old, I also grow exhausted of the games that are endless timesucks, not only demanding 60+ hours of total play, but 3 or more hours per session to even get fun. Good god. I’m only working part-time and I’m still too busy for that. That’s what I enjoyed most about Tactical Breach Wizards: it’s a game you can boot up and play for however much time is available. In that brief period, you’ll have objectives to complete, actions to take, and amusing character interactions. You’ll have fun.
Rise of the Golden Idol dropped this year. Yippee! I resisted playing the original Case of the Golden Idol game for a while because of the rather grotesque caricature art style, but when it finally caught me, I was caught forever. The mad perverse mystery, the devious puzzles, and the spiraling delicious central narrative imprinted themselves indelibly upon my mind, so I was of course delighted to meet the sequel. Rise is more ambitious structurally and mechanically, with the basic Golden Idol puzzle finding numerous reinventions. The narrative is not quite as compelling, its final revelations not achieving the same thematically rich and terrifying heights of Case, but that would be a startling achievement. Rise is more of the pleasures of Case without being entirely more-of-the-same. That’s also an achievement, and probably a more sustainable one.
Embarrassingly, I also loved Cyberpunk 2077 in 2024. I didn’t play it when it came out, and I didn’t play it while CDProjekt Red flailed about trying to fix their exceptional mess. But then in February 2024 some friends of mine who had played convinced me to try it, claiming the bugs were largely fixed (on PC, where we play). Not only did I have a low-bug experience, I also had a very powerful one, mixing delight and sorrow and beauty in various measures. I’ve spoken at length about this one via other media, so I will say only that the horrific airless feeling of young V watching all the doors of their life close in front of them hurt gloriously. It hurt like the truth. We were fellow travelers on the cold night highway of this killing world. We did not give in.
The best game of 2024 was 20 Small Mazes. I’m not doing a bit here, it was 20 Small Mazes. This is a free game that contains exactly what it claims: twenty small mazes. Each maze is an experiment, an exploration of what a maze is and could be in a digital context. Each maze is a tiny revelation about how to navigate an unknown space. The mazes all live together in a heap on the screen. It’s up to the player to arrange them, adjust them, sort through them, and confront them in whatever order makes sense. The game isn’t long. The game isn’t flashy. But its curiosities and significances and satisfactions are undeniable. It is graceful and humble. It is something that could not be made by the game industry at large. It’s just 20 Small Mazes. Why try to be something else?
That’s 2024. In a time of bombastic spectacle and overwhelming horror, it is no surprise that much of the redeeming came from small, quiet things (and my motorcycle in Cyberpunk). Now it’s 2025; we are in the labyrinth, there’s no way out except through. There will be more consolations. My next post will be a book review. Wait for it.