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2024 In Gaming

Last year I wrote “2023 In Gaming”, a post that explored my adventures in rebuilding my passion for gaming by playing a whole variety of games that had languished in my backlog or that piqued my interest through the year. Having rediscovered that love of the blips and beeps I wanted to continue that energy in 2024 by finishing (or playing at least 10 hours of) 24 different games over the course of the year. Suffice to say I did pretty well, a total of 43 games reviewed over the course of the year and many (many) hours of enjoyment had. There were two major takeaways in my pursuit of this goal:

  • Forcing yourself to play different games to achieve a goal is a great way to turn fun into work.
  • When anhedonia or depression hits, having comfortable fallbacks is important.

While my goal is to review at least 26 games in 2025, I discovered that pushing yourself to try new things when you’re in a low place absolutely sucks. I had a few times during the year where I was laid low by stress, by side effects of medication, and by a general downturn in my mood, which also helped me discover something I had forgotten about gaming: it can be a great source of familiar comfort too.

Games that you’ve finished the main narrative of but contain a large endgame, games where you want to grab achievements or high scores, games those that are never ending lands to construct a world, and even just those with short but enjoyable gameplay loops are great to have as fallbacks when you have had a long day or a bad day and just want the comfort of the known. A few of them stood out for me this year as well as my lifetime playtime:

  • BATTLETECH (161 hours)
  • PC Building Simulator (27 hours)
  • Aliens: Fireteam Elite (46 hours)
  • Ground Branch (12.8 hours)
  • Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint (169 hours)
  • Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (104 hours)

It’s Okay To Read A Guide

Something that has hampered me in years past is my push to try and play a game entirely myself with no outside help. In the past I’ve gotten to sections I could not beat or struggled with mechanics I could not understand. I felt looking up “how to do X” was akin to cheating and antithetical to winning a game on my own merit. Which is kind of silly if it means I quit playing a game I might love because I was going about it the wrong way.

BATTLETECH was a great example of this, I’ve tried it a few times over the past few years and never excelled despite loving the premise and depth of it. This year I decided to read a couple of intro guides on some of the games mechanics and how to play more effectively and by jove it completely changed my relationship to the game. I ended up sinking over one hundred hours this year once I’d gotten the hang of it and it rekindled a love of mecha and strategy games which you can see dotted through the list. Other games that I needed the occasional guide or walkthrough and which meant I fell further in love with them included:

  • Aliens: Dark Descent
  • The Talos Principle
  • Jagged Alliance 3
  • Balatro

In most cases when I needed a guide I really just needed a couple of pointers or was stymied by a particularly hard puzzle. Seeing a different perspective on mechanics or alternate conclusions you wouldn’t have come to yourself can really get you back into the enjoyment of a game.

Recommendations

A couple of games from the year that I’d recommend as Good™ but weren’t contenders in various game of the year awards:

  • Tactical Breach Wizards: beautiful art, perfect dialogue, engaging mechanics that let you set your preferred difficulty.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: a grand classic turn-based RPG in the WH40K universe with some really fun mechanics and characters.
  • Say No! More: Short and simple game about the power of setting boundaries at work.
  • Aliens: Dark Descent: I have no idea how a real time, top-down, squad-based tactical game could also be the most suspenseful horror/thriller I’ve played but damn it succeeds.
  • Satisfactory: Somewhere between Minecraft and Factorio with excellent narrative elements that reminded us of ScorpInc, Shmouf and I sunk a lot of our end-of-year holidays into this.

Highlights

These are a few other games that really stood out at me, but not always ones I’d recommend to others.

  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow Of Chernobyl: I finally played it to the end! Possibly one of the most formative games for me and one I’d always wanted to beat.
  • The Exit 8: Probably one of the best indie, extremely short psychological horror/puzzle games I’ve played while also really showing the capability of Unreal Engine 5.
  • Ground Branch: Still a work in progress, but the level of detail and it’s commitment to realism makes for an extremely fun/engaging/tense way to pass time after a long day.
  • Jagged Alliance 3: Layers of mechanics on top of mechanics make this a very difficult one, something I want to study a bit more and give more attention sometime in the future. The pastiche of mercenary stereotypes spanning decades really brings it to life.

The List

As per last year it’s roughly chronological in terms of when I first got into them during the year and as a heads up the reviews aren’t always super detailed, but thoughts I had about the game and a desire to provide feedback to developers and hopefully push the game rankings up in whatever black box algorithms control their discoverability.

  • WH40k: Rogue Trader (rev)
  • Prey (rev)
  • Sheepy: A Short Adventure (rev)
  • Deathloop (rev)
  • Goat Simulator 3 (rev)
  • Deep Rock Galactic (rev)
  • Outer Wilds (rev)
  • The Exit 8 (rev)
  • Divinity: Original Sin 2 (rev)
  • Aliens: Fireteam Elite (rev)
  • Say No! More (rev)
  • Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (rev)
  • THE CORRIDOR (rev)
  • Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries (rev)
  • PC Building Simulator (rev)
  • Postal 2
  • Necromunda: Hired Gun (rev)
  • Aliens: Dark Descent (rev)
  • F.E.A.R (rev)
  • F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin (rev)
  • F.E.A.R 3 (rev)
  • F.E.A.R: Extraction Point (rev)
  • F.E.A.R: Perseus Mandate (rev)
  • BATTLETECH (rev)
    • BATTLETECH Heavy Metal (rev)
  • DREDGE (rev)
  • DAVE THE DIVER (rev)
  • ARMOURED CORE VI: FIRES OF RUBICON (rev)
  • Kiwi Clicker (rev)
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow Of Chernobyl (rev)
  • Tactical Breach Wizards (rev)
  • Spec Ops: The Line (rev)
  • The Talos Principle (rev)
  • Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint (rev)
  • Quantum Break (rev)
  • MechWarrior 5: Clans (rev)
  • Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (rev)
  • Revolution Idle (rev)
  • Ground Branch (ref)
  • Jagged Alliance 3 (rev)
  • Balatro (rev)
  • Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (rev)
  • Satisfactory (rev)

Next Year?

I want gaming to remain a big passion and part of my life and so I’ll aim to (sufficiently) play at least 26 different games in 2025. There’s a few favourites from this year that I’m sure I’ll sink some more time into, but I also want to explore a few genres that I didn’t give as much attention this year. I hope to play through a few more narrative-focused games including Firewatch, Tacoma, and Disco Elysium. I want to “finish” a few of the crafting games including Satisfactory, Factorio, and Subnautica. I want to lose myself once more in Caves Of Qud now that it’s had the 1.0 release and (hopefully) get the chance to finish it.

But mostly I want to have fun with gaming.