#294: Games Of The Year 2024
He's been!
So, how was 2024 for you? Personally speaking, this has been a year in which many of my long-held preferences and prejudices have been challenged, and in places entirely upended. If you’d told me back in January that among my favourites of 2024 would be a JRPG, a story-heavy game about feelings and stuff, and a card game that wasn’t Slay The Spire, I’d have laughed you out of the room. But here we are. Perhaps you can teach an old dog new tricks after all.
A reminder, in case you need one, that when I am not writing this humble newsletter, I am a videogame consultant. I spend the bulk of my working week playing and writing about games about which I am forbidden to talk publicly. (I can, however, tell you that 2027 is shaping up very nicely indeed.) And besides, I am but one man! If your favourite game of the year isn’t on this list, know that I have not done it to spite you, or because I think you are wrong. There are plenty of great games I haven’t got round to, that I didn’t fancy, or that didn’t get their hooks into me sufficiently to cement a place at the top of the ol’ mental backlog. This is my polite way of saying that, no Dragon’s Dogma 2 isn’t here. Nor is Lorelei, or Shiren, or Rebirth, or Helldivers, Infinite Wealth, Erdtree etc. I'm sorry! Please don’t hit me!
Here, then, are my five favourite games of the year, presented in the traditional countdown style, with handy platform-specific store links for each, because I am nice like that. Please enjoy. And paid subs, you still have time to submit your witterings for this year’s instalment of the Hit Points Reader Awards; you’ll find the details in last week’s edition. (If the free readers among you would care to join us on the other, better side of the paywall, you may do so here.) Onwards!
5. Indiana Jones And The Great Circle
A lot of the comparisons have, I think, been a little overplayed. Yes, there are whiffs here of Dishonored, in the way you skulk about a sprawling city, and of Hitman, in the the level-specific disguises that let you hide in plain sight. There are trace notes of Riddick, calling back to MachineGames’ origin story at Starbreeze, and lots of Tomb Raider and Uncharted, because, well, of course. But what’s most striking, and most remarkable, about The Great Circle is that it is utterly itself; so singular, so unexpected, and so confident.
There is a parallel-universe version of this game — the one I assumed we were going to get, to be honest — that is safe and predictable, linear as all get-out. Uncharted 2 reskinned with a whip and a hat, packed with endless movie-quote Shibboleths; inappropriately heavy on the gunplay; focus-grouped and user-tested to a bland shine. But no! Here is that rare licensed game that truly understands its character, and is brave enough to deviate from the blockbuster template in order to properly do them justice.
To play The Great Circle is to be Indiana Jones. You are capable and willing, sure; you are smarter than the average adventurer, but you are no superhero. The Uncharted-ish platforming is purposefully ungainly, the perspective shifting to thirdperson, showing Indy heaving himself awkwardly up a drainpipe or whatever, to remind you of his physical limitations. Action mechanics are improvisational and played firmly for laughs: the stealth kill with the toilet brush, the frying pan to the face, the wince-worthy shot to the nuts with the butt of a pilfered rifle. You feel throughout like a reasonably intelligent, mostly determined but ultimately quite tired man who is highly prone to slapstick and perpetually one false move from absolute calamity and, yes, look. Relatable. In its way, possibly the biggest, and most pleasant, surprise of the year.
4. Metaphor: ReFantazio
But I don’t even like JRPGs! I cannot even remember the last time I finished one! They’re just so long and ponderous, so overwritten, so weeby. And I struggle terribly with turn-based combat, particularly when it’s stretched out over 60 hours and at least half of it involves one-shotting fodder enemies with the same old attacks and spells. It bores me to tears. Or, at least, it used to.
I don’t believe Katsura Hashino and his team at Studio Zero intentionally set out to make a JRPG for people who don’t like JRPGs, but their collective effort to cut down on so much of the faff and cruft traditionally associated with the genre is evident, and from this genre-sceptical remove, greatly appreciated. You can fast travel anywhere — not just between big cities but within them, directly to specific streets or premises. If you’re of a sufficiently high level, you can instakill rank-and-file enemies in snappy, if basic, thirdperson combat; if the game forces a full turn-based fight on you, therefore, you know it’s going to matter.
And while I know some people find the Persona-style deadline system — you have seven days, or ten or 30 or whatever, to power yourself up and complete the next big dungeon — to be stressful and constricting, for me it’s liberating, and an absolute gift: you always know exactly when the story is going to move on in a meaningful way, and until then you are in full control of its pacing. For a while there I wondered if I'd been misjudging JRPGs all this time; the third act, in which Hashino and co revert to type by stretching the denouement beyond the far horizon — there's even a boss rush! In 2024! — thankfully set me straight. Probably just as well, really. The last thing I need is a new rabbit hole to fall down.
3. Astro Bot
Team Asobi, PS5
To get the bad stuff out of the way, I think it’s a little frontloaded — nothing in the back half of the game matches the wondrous creativity on show in the mouse and casino levels — and that the endgame challenge levels show up its limitations as a platformer. The enemy variety is rather lacking, it reuses its power-ups a bit too much, and I take the point that its loving celebrations of PlayStation’s history are undermined by Sony’s ongoing mission to dismantle it. Oh, and my fingers keep mistyping it as Astro Boy, which is really quite annoying.
But when Astro Bot is good, it is really, really good. Nothing I’ve played this year has put anywhere near as many smiles on my face, and while my kids absolutely loved watching me play it, it’s one of the few games I’ve encountered this year that truly feels like it was made for me. This game is for us, you know? People who’ve been around the block a few times, who understand the art and craft of a good 3D platformer; who get a little thrill when they open a treasure chest to find a mascot from some long-forgotten, twenty-year-old, six-out-of-ten platformer. Delightful stuff all round.
And if I can pop on my industry-wanker hat for a moment, Astro Bot also yielded a masterclass in post-release DLC. Speedrun levels offered a lot of replay value at, I assume anyway, a reasonable development cost; the weekly cadence kept the game in the discourse and the headlines. And last week’s free Christmas level was a wonderful surprise. You can stick your year-one roadmaps, your season passes and all that piffle up your arse; this is how it should be done.
2. 1000xResist
I am not a story guy. In my Edge days I’d always farm out reviews of the particularly narrative-heavy stuff because I just didn’t have the vocabulary for it, and while I’ve got better at it over the years it’s still something I struggle with. My attitude to what constitutes good videogame storytelling has always been like that old line about pornography: I might not be able to describe it, but I know it when I see it.
All of which makes it pretty hard for me to tell you about 1000XResist, even before we consider the fact that just about everything I could tell you about it would be too much of a spoiler. This is something that just has to be played, from as cold and ignorant a start as possible. It is a remarkable achievement, I think, taking a series of seemingly contradictory themes — science and religion; submission and defiance; devotion and heresy; there are others but I already feel like I’m saying too much — and somehow weaving a coherent, yet seriously chronologically fucky, story out of them, in a dozen or so hours that pass by in a flash. While the austere, poetic writing is the main draw, it’s surprisingly mechanically involved for such a story-focused game; it looks absolutely sumptuous; and it’s got what, for my money, is the runaway soundtrack of the year. If you can listen to this without immediately scurrying off to buy the game, we will probably never be friends.
Glorious.
1. Balatro
Localthunk, PC/PS4&5/Switch/Xbox/iOS/Android (phew!)
Yes, yes, all that stuff I wrote. Let us cast our minds back briefly to February 29:
“I’m not sure how much I actually like Balatro, is the thing. As a game it is far too random for my tastes: sure, you’ll get the odd broken build that shatters your previous best single-hand score and you’ll laugh like a drain, but for every one run that goes that way you’ll have ten that go nowhere at all, and another five that start out promisingly but peter out. [...] I have played Balatro for 40 hours in just ten days and I think it is quite a boring game that is, very, very occasionally, the most exciting game I have ever played, and the more of it I play the less I am convinced that that is satisfying enough for me to persist with it.”
I have now played Balatro for 511 hours, and am happy to admit that most of the above, and perhaps all of it, is nonsense.
There are two ways to play Balatro, is the thing. One involves engaging with its structure: working around the escalating score requirements and punishing modifiers of its difficulty progression, scraping through rounds by the skin of your teeth, then dying and tutting and starting again. The other lets you opt out of all that stuff, slumming it on the easiest deck and the lowest difficulty level, and is all about chasing broken builds and stupidly high scores, turning the game inside out. I have spent far more time doing the latter than the former. If there’s been one overriding theme of my gaming life this year it’s been the realisation that, when you’re 46 and tired and busy, Easy is where the fun is, and Balatro is the purest expression of that. Ghost Deck. White Stake. Bliss. Turn the whole deck into, say, polychrome-lucky-red-seal queens of diamonds. Rack up the e numbers, hit ante 20 or so, take a few screenshots for the Discord and get on with my day. Or at least kid myself that I’m going to. I’ll be firing it up again in an hour or two for sure.
The ‘easy’ way to play the game is much narrower; there are only a handful of setups that can reach the sort of scores required to get deep into Endless. But I rather like the way this condenses the game's sprawling possibility space, particularly since you're able to repeatedly reroll the contents of the shop providing you have the funds for it — the power of which I definitely didn’t appreciate back in February — and the way you can cycle Jokers in and out, selling the ones you’ve outgrown, building power in little increments to tide you over while you continue to hunt for the final few pieces of your latest broken build. That, for me, is the game’s greatest trick: your decisions aren’t necessarily for keeps, as they are in so many other run-based Rogue-y things. You are building an invincible killing machine, but the design of it is always changing.
My favourite thing in strategy games is the moment where there’s basically nothing else for you to do; when the machine is fully built, and all you can do is sit back and watch. My touchstone for this has always been the end of a level in Plants Vs. Zombies, where every tile is filled, and the board has been optimised, and you can just lean back, exhale, and behold as the undead hordes wither and melt in the face of your unassailable defences. I think winning a round, deep into a Balatro run, might have replaced it. The lick of flames around your score telling you it’s time to unclench, because the round is won. Score calculations accelerating to mach speed, because if they didn’t you’d be there all day. The sound effects pitching up and up until only dogs can hear them. Then the cards are swept away, and there’s this glorious little pause before the reward screen pops up. That pause? That little bit of nothing right there? That’s my favourite thing in all of 2024, a perfect split-second of peace. Sorry, February Nathan, but you really were a colossal idiot.
There you go! Hit Points will return to paid-subscriber inboxes next week with The Reader Awards. In the meantime this humble newsletter wishes you the merriest of Christmases, and a joyously happy New Year thereafter. Thanks so much for putting up with me for another year; it’s been a bleak one but I am, despite myself, quite optimistic about 2025. I am almost looking forward to it! See you on the flip.
