Game of the Year 2024 Edition: Brought to You By the Power of AI (2025)

Mode 7

Jul 28, 2007

For reasons I'm not entirely able to articulate, 2024 has been an odd year for my relationship to games and gaming. Although I started working on it in 2023, I finally in 2024 100% freed myself from the self-inflicted mental pressure of finishing games that I'm not enjoying, or simply feel like I've seen enough of what the game has to offer. I feel like I played less games this year overall, but looking back over my list of games played and finished this year that's definitely not true. I absolutely need to start keeping a proper journal next year, and in general would really like to try and write more about what I'm playing and my thoughts/feelings as I play games. Last year, there were so many fantastic games that trying to cut myself down to a list of 10 was agonizing, but this year I think more than half of my top 10 has been locked in stone since midway through the year and the challenge this time around has more been working out where inside the top 10 each game respectively ranks - except my #1 which was instantly my GOTY when I played it and nothing else has come even close to making me feel what it felt.

As always, outside of Honourable Mentions, I restrict my list to 2024 releases only and games that I have either finished or played a significant amount of in the case of endless titles/multiplayer games etc. I'm writing this while extremely tired and so forgive me for my lack of detail and if any of this doesn't make any sense.
Edit: "How tired?" I hear you ask. Tired enough that I forgot an entire loving game. I did have a moment hitting save on my post where I was wrinkling my brow in puzzlement at Star Wars Outlaws being #10 because I thought it was only a HM, but there were only 9 other numbered games so it must have been number 10, right? I completely omitted Tactical Breach Wizards somehow and have now rectified this.

Honourable Mention - Best Game To Revitalise My Interest In An Entire Genre
Dune: Spice Wars

RTS games are, broadly, a genre where over many years I have come to the realisation that they are simply Not For Me - as much as I enjoy turn based tactics games or big ponderous 4X games or Grand Strategy games, I've found most RTSes just leave me adrift and confused, struggling to rapidly balance offense, defense, economy, expansion, and any hope of some kind of strategy. Dune: Spice Wars dropped on Game Pass and being a long-time Dune fan I decided I'd at least give it a shot. The game struck me like a bolt from the blue; a fusion of RTS and 4X elements that just somehow Made Sense to me, with micro generally only conferring slight edges in direct battles and macro strategy otherwise being significantly more important. I was hooked; rapidly consuming guides and commented playthroughs from YouTubers working in the strategy games space (I recommend Daevok's channel without hesitation for guides and informative but entertaining commentary). I got a few friends to install the game and engaged in my first actual competitive real time strategy games for the first time in probably 15 years or so. I even ended up joining a competitive multiplayer Discord for strategy games (Turin's Discord) and getting more interested in other titles as well as a result. My hyperfocus-induced infatuation on the game and genre would eventually cool as time marched on, but at least now I have a much stronger sense of what it is in the RTS genre that I do and don't gel with, and will be significantly more likely to pick up a release in the future. For that I'll always be thankful!

Honourable Mention - My Best Multiplayer Experience Of 2024
Make Way

I'm lucky enough to have a couple of friends that managed to get online generally once a week or so for an evening of multiplayer gaming, and 2024 has been a great year for it, with Hunt: Showdown, Helldivers and Lethal Company all being fantastic experiences that lead to much raucous laughter. No game has come close to just the sheer joy, though, of our Make Way sessions. If you're unfamiliar with the game, it's a top-down Micro Machines checkpoint racer; survive the track and make it to a checkpoint and you get points, dead players respawn when a new checkpoint is reached, and if everyone dies the race resets to the last obtained checkpoint. First to cross the finish line at the end of the track gets a points bonus. First to a set total wins. The track is littered with pickups and weapons and depending on your settings has little to no walls preventing you from slamming into your friends to send them plummeting off the track. This, already, would be a recipe for a great time - but the twist of Make Way is in how the track is build. Ultimate Chicken Horse style, every round players are offered a selection of track pieces and horrendous hazards to litter the existing track with. The race gets longer and longer each round, and the track quickly becomes a complete nightmare as people compete to be the biggest rear end in a top hat possible. The traps are all fantastically inventive, ranging from pinball-esque bumpers that almost guarantee your death if you hit them, to swinging sandbags that seem to have an inbuilt sense of perfect comedic timing to sweep through and clean someone up. It's such a simple concept for a game, it engenders good-natured trash talk and vendettas almost instantly, and even just writing about it now leaves me wanting to jump on with some mates and play it again. Sublime.

Honourable Mention - Best Game That Preserved My Mental Health
Art of Rally

Work got pretty rough for a few weeks late this year, necessitating near constant long and stressful days of overtime as my work dealt with probably the most significant cybersecurity event that we had ever seen. It left me very little time for anything, and it left me desperately exhausted, burnt out and miserable. I pretty much dropped every game I was playing at the time as I had no energy, motivation or desire to try and further progress in any of them, but was desperately looking for some way to just switch off and relax in the very slim windows of time I had available. Art of Rally turned out to be the perfect solution. An isometric rally game with a low poly art style, Art of Rally has driving physics sitting firmly in the 'simcade' space between arcade and simulation. It's approachable to quickly get to grips with a car by driving around the game's free roam areas either hunting for collectables or just enjoying the scenery, but the real reward is the sense of accomplishment from slowly and incrementally improving your times and performances across the various tracks. I love games that can put me into a flow state, and while my genre of choice for those sort of fixes is often SHMUPs, this year Art of Rally was the perfect balm for a really, really lovely couple of weeks.

Honorable Mention - Best Game That Was Better Than Most People Think
Star Wars: Outlaws

I think most people are familiar with the concept of a 7/10 game (laudatory) but even within the "7/10" space there's a pretty big spectrum of quality. Just how 7 is that 7? Let me get the negatives out of the way first. The game gets in its own way with a way-too-long introductory sequence that dripfeeds central game mechanics and heavily limits the player's ability to just go off and explore the drat game, the open world game play is nothing particularly new or exciting, the stealth gameplay is extremely mediocre (though patches after launch have toned down some of the more egregious bullshit failure states associated with it), and the amount of systems crammed into the game means that they all feel a little underbaked and underserved. If you can get past that though - and I certainly wouldn't fault you if you thought the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and just stopped - what Star Wars: Outlaws manages to do is completely nail the tone, environment, style and music of the Star Wars worlds. If you ever wanted to be Han Solo as a kid, this game has so many beautiful little moments that reinforce that fantasy. Whether it's overhearing opportunities for a quick score by eavesdropping on conversations in a dingy cantina, cheating your way through high-stakes hands of Kessel Sabacc (a card minigame good enough that I would play it in real life), or salvaging an attempt at stealth gone horribly wrong with frantic blaster fire resulting in a desperate improvised scramble to get out with your skin intact, this game is for you. Kay Vess is a fantastic hot mess and complete idiot in a way that I find extremely lovable, her animal companion Nix is goddamned adorable, and you can feed him food in cutscenes that put the Monster Hunter series lavish food cutscenes to shame. I can't recommend this game in good conscience if that fantasy doesn't appeal for you, but for those who think that sounds appealing, I'd recommend trying to grab the game on sale and play through. I think a sequel building on this game would lead to something significantly better designed, but given the game's lackluster performance the chances of that seem slim.

#10 - Best Game To Steal Hours Of My Life At A Time
Balatro

Every year there's an indie game that crosses over to the mainstream and I think there's little doubt that this year the game was Balatro. It's such a simple concept - meet a target score by forming poker hands from your cards, modified by various card upgrades and Jokers that act as permanent passive or triggered abilities. Rinse and repeat. I don't think Balatro is quite as revolutionary as has been proclaimed in some corners of the internet, but I think what it's done in a way that no other game before it has is make the deckbuilding roguelike genre approachable with a number of incredible smart design and presentational choices. The meat of the game is so simple to explain and so quick to pick up - even people who have no knowledge of poker hands are familiar, generally, with the concept of poker. Add in the deeply satisfying way that your score and multi values catch fire as your hand increases, the incredible sounds of cards shuffling and poker chip-esque clicks as your points accumulate or tick up into your total, the chill, jazzy Balatro theme by composer Luis Clemente - all of these elements coalesce into something apparently perfectly formulated to tickle my dumb monkey brain. I'd sit down for "just one run" and have entire hours vanish, a sensation that I'm sure is not at all unfamiliar to anyone else who found themselves enthralled - or perhaps ensnared - by Balatro this year. I don't know that for me I'll be revisiting the game much in the future, but I sunk so much concentrated time into it earlier this year that it would feel dishonest to not have it on this list.

#9 - Best Game That I Can't Believe Is Actually Good
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

There's always a December release that I'm invariably glad I tried to play/finish before the end of the year because it ends up on my Top 10 list. This year, that game is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. I'm a big fan of Indiana Jones - it was pretty formative for young Mode 7 and had enough of an impact that beyond a general interest in history and archaeology, I have seriously at two points in my life become incredibly close to beginning an archaeology degree. My life and career ended up taking a different path, but if I had the money to just go off and study something for sheer self-interest, have no doubt that I would be heading towards an archaeology PhD as soon as I possibly could. The initial trailers for Indiana Jones left me cautiously interested, but hesitant - a first person Indiana Jones game by MachineGames, primarily known for first person shooters, felt like a mismatch. My fear was that I'd be mowing down Nazis by the score with a variety of weapons which while satisfying wasn't really "Indiana Jones" to me. A trailer showcasing a cutscene taking place on a Nazi battleship suspended on a Himalayan mountain (it's a long story) immediately revitalised my interest, because it proved to me that MachineGames absolutely got the "tone" of Indiana Jones - the cutscene wouldn't have been out of place in an Indiana Jones movie, and Troy Baker's performance as Indy is uncannily close to Harrison Ford. Finally, I got to grips with the game myself when it dropped on Game Pass and was absolutely blown away. This isn't just the best Indiana Jones game since Fate of Atlantis (not a hard bar to clear), it's also probably the best piece of Indiana Jones media. I'll defend large parts of both Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny, but Great Circle does a significantly better job than either of them at understanding what it is that makes Indy.... Indy. Gameplay is a first person action-adventure hybrid, but with a significantly higher focus on adventure than on action. When you do need to confront facists and Nazis you'll spend far more time skulking around and smacking them over the head from behind with whatever nearby heavy object you can grab (and there is a delightful cornucopia of items to choose from liberally littered around every possible environment) than you will in straight up fights. Blow your stealth however and generally enemies won't open fire! They'll close for a fist-fight instead which both gives you ample opportunity to take them out without further alerting the rest of the camp, and also makes the game feel far more like an Indiana Jones adventure than just gunning them down would. I think I can probably count on one hand the amount of times that I actually drew my gun in the game, which feels appropriate - I'd much rather be dramatically power punching a fascist and watch them slow motion topple backwards like dead weight. The adventure component of the game similarly does a great job reinforcing the game's theme, seeing you exploring ancient trap-ridden tombs and pouring over symbols and environmental clues to solve puzzles. The game spans the globe, but the highlight of the game is probably undoubtedly it's first hub area of The Vatican, a densely packed and well designed environment full of tantalising clues, secrets and collectibles, stuffed full of fascists to sneak past, knock out or shove off tall ledges. Later hubs while managing to feel extremely distinctive tend to be a lot more open and a pain in the rear end to navigate through, leading to a lot of unnecessary downtime in between 'the good bits', and the game definitely feels a lot buggier in the back half as well - something that I'm sure will be ironed out by patches over the coming month or two.

#8 - Best PS2/GC/Xbox Game Somehow Released In 2024
Kunitsu-gami: Path of the Goddess

Capcom have put out some incredibly interesting AA games lately between Exoprimal last year and Kunitsu-gami this year. Kunitsu-gami is a tower defence hack-and-slash hybrid where as the spirit swordmaster Soh you're charged with escorting divine maiden Yoshiro through the defiled and corrupted villages of Mt. Kafuku, purging them of the presence of yokai-like spirits called the Seethe. Stages are split into day and night - during the day you'll roam around the stage, freeing villagers from cocoons of defilement and purifying parts of the landscape to recover crystals, using these to carve a spiritual path for Yoshiro to slowly dance along leading to a corrupt torii gate. When night falls, Yoshiro remains in place, completely defenseless, and the Seethe will aim to reach her and kill her. It's down to you and the villagers - who you can assign a variety of job roles to for crystals such as 'Woodsman' or 'Archer' - to protect her from the invading Seethe who pour through the corrupted gates. This cycle repeats until Yoshiro reaches the gate and purifies it, completing the stage. At first, this is pretty simple to keep on top of. You only have a few villagers to manage, a few potential jobs to assign them, and the Seethe all have pretty stock behavioural patterns and attacks to deal with. As the game progresses though, it begins to throw more and more at you. Seethe grow more complex, featuring special attacks that debilitate Soh and/or the villagers, or empower their allies. Their numbers grow too, necessitating the use of specialised job roles to help with crowd control. You'll have more villagers to work with, but the game will expect you to sensibly work out how to balance progress during the day and having a defensible position at night. Do you push on to guarantee that you can finish a stage the following day, or hang back a little so that Yoshiro stops behind some controllable chokepoints? Between stages, you'll task villages with repairing your purified towns unlocking currency to upgrade villager roles and eventually Soh themselves, artifacts to provide passive benefits, or other little collectables. The game has a visually arresting art style and design, absolutely dripping in its Shinto themes. Soh's attacks all draw inspiration from kagura dance and bunraku threatre, your save system is a goshuin book - a book holding shrine stamps commonly collected from Japanese Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Stages will often have their own gimmicks to change up the basic formula, such as lanterns you need to light to allow villagers to spot the incoming seethe, or stages that see you rendered incorporeal as Soh and reliant solely on your villages to defend Yoshiro at night. I do wish the game had introduced some of these wrinkles a little bit early - it takes a while to unlock a number of villager roles to work with and far too long to unlock upgrades for Soh that give combat with the Seethe substantially more nuance and interest. The game absolutely sets out to provide a very singular focused experience though; a tower defense game across multiple levels - a retro throwback in structure and format of the game rather than graphics or gameplay. Games structured like this feel vanishingly rare these days, and I had a great time with Kunitsu-gami from start to finish.

#7 - Best Game I've Been Eagerly Awaiting The 1.0 Release For
Caves of Qud

Caves of Qud is a goon-made traditional roguelike RPG set in a deeply weird and wonderful science fantasy world.

You should play it.

#6 - Best Absurdist Black Comedy Game
Indika

Indika is a surreal, absurd black comedy narrative adventure game. You play as Indika, a young nun in a convent who struggles constantly to keep her focus due to the fact that she constantly hears the mocking taunts of The Devil in her head. This leads to her being shunned and ostracised even within her convent. As the Devil beautifully puts it early on in the game - The sisters loved Indika. Christian love is known to be patient, merciful and faithful. However in a lowly, human sense, they didn't love her that much. To be completely honest, they didn't love her at all. Many of them felt nothing but disgust for her. Indika has what I think is the single funniest moment I've seen in videogames this year right at the start of the game, and it was the moment that convinced me I was in for a hell of a ride. You're given a very straightforward task: draw water from a well. You slowly walk over to the well in the convent, slowly rotate your control stick to lower the bucket down the well, slowly draw the now filled bucket back up to the top, pick it up, and slowly lug the heavy bucket of water over to a barrel and fill it. A video-game scoring chime plays and "1/5" pops up on your screen triumphantly. The game then makes you go and repeat that process, four more times to fill the barrel. Once it's filled, a nun emerges and dumps the barrel of water out, completely rendering pointless everything you've just done. It's such a wonderfully cruel joke at both Indika the character and the player's expense, and I was immediately entranced by it. What follows is a miserable journey across an absurdist bleak, ruined and horrific (although frequently darkly comedic) 19th century Russia as Indika attempts to deliver a letter (a task given to her to get her out of the convent for a while), and a fascinating story that deeply interrogates the nature of faith and morality. Most of the gameplay is simple walking sim fare with some light puzzle solving elements; these don't always land, but are often dressed up in amazing visual language. When Indika hears the voice of the devil, the world literally splits apart and can only be knit back together by her fervent prayer, resulting in you navigating spaces by alternatively praying and not praying to make your way around obstacles. The spaces that you venture through often play around wildly with realism and scale, sometimes sharply and suddenly but sometimes in a creeping fashion where an environment starts out 'normal' but becomes stranger and stranger as you make your way through. Indika's flaws - puzzles that are too simplistic and last too long, and some extremely dodgy platforming in parts - don't detract too much from an incredible story presented in amazing fashion, and at a tight 4-6 hours for a playthrough it tells the story that it sets out to without overstaying its welcome. A delightfully dark, mature and funny game - I'm looking forward to seeing what the developers do next.

#5 - Best Genre Fusion I Can't Believe Someone Hadn't Already Done
Minishoot' Adventures

What if a 2D Legend of Zelda game was also a twin-stick SHMUP? Some genre mashups are so simple and the product of their marriage so effortlessly good that you question how nobody ever stumbled on this before. Minishoot' Adventures (the errant ' in the title is, according to the devs, a contraction of Minimalist Shooter. That's not how that works, but sure, fine, whatever) is a joyful game. Exploring a Zelda-esque overworld and requisite puzzle dungeons, your cute little spaceship will take on hordes of enemies and even larger hordes of bullets as you dodge, weave and blast your way to rescue your family and friends. It's not that Minishoot' Adventures excels in any one particular area, everything about it just super solid. Controls are responsive and precise, environmental exploration is a decent mix of straightforward in determining major objectives but contains plenty of secrets to discover if you go hunting (and as the game goes on you'll unlock markings on the map to track down all of them if you're looking to 100% the game). Dungeon and puzzle design does stay rather basic the whole way through the game, but combat is so much more interesting than any 2D Zelda title where, let's face it, monsters and fights outside of bosses are generally just sort of wandering hazards, that it balances out. The game is the perfect length as well - my playthrough, although not 100%, clocked in at about 8 hours. There's a number of accessibility options and adjustable difficulty, so I'll happily recommend this one to even neophyte SHMUP enjoyers. Games can be an amazing medium capable of absolutely beautiful pieces of art and narrative, but also sometimes games are just a goddamn delight to play, and Minishoot' Adventures falls into that latter category.

#4 - Best Game To Defenestrate People In Since The Last Tom Francis Game
Tactical Breach Wizards

I've been waiting for Tactical Breach Wizards for what feels like forever, having loved all of Tom Francis' (the dev behind previous two entries in his "Defenestration Trilogy" of games Gunpoint and Heat Signature) prior works, and having listened to him talk at great length on the Crate and Crowbar podcast over the years about his experiences with the X-com series. Tactical Breach Wizards, more or less, is Tom Francis endeavouring to make his perfect X-com game and in the process I think he's stumbled upon making the perfect X-com game for someone like me, too. As a crew of magical

badasses fuckups with emotional baggage you will tactically manuever your way through levels working out exactly how to efficiently deal with the almost puzzle-like arrangements of enemies and level elements in front of you. This solution will usually involve forcefully shunting them out a window or into a magical portal where possible for an instant kill, in a moment that I never once in the entirety of the game found unsatisfying. There's a satisfying difficulty curve across the game as when new enemies and complications are introduced you'll also accumulate new characters for your squad, or new tools and upgrades for those characters, that keep you on equal footing with your foes. There's also a host of extra scenarios and challenges to participate in beyond the main campaign, giving it a far meatier chunk of replayability than you'd perhaps expect. I've seen criticisms that the game is too "puzzle like" rather than "tactics like" which is a distinction that I think is arbitrary - to me, tactics are simply a type of puzzle - but outside of maybe one or two encounters across the whole game I never felt like I had only one possible way of solving a situation. Finally I want to shout out Tom Francis' writing - the game has a strongly comedic tone with some fantastic one liners and little character interactions, and for me at least I never felt it crossed the line into smarmy falseness or Whedon-esque rapid fire quips. There was even enough pathos for some of the character beats that I found myself caring about my crew of adorable complete messes, with Jen and Dessa's relationship being a particular highlight.

#3 - Best Game To Trigger Some Extremely Specific Nostalgia
UFO 50

Alternative award title - Best Game I Cannot Believe Actually Exists. UFO 50 is a collection of 50 8-bit aesthetic games, spanning a variety of genres, all purportedly for the fictional 80s developer UFO Soft for it's console, the LX. In reality, UFO 50 is a collection of 50 retro styled games by Spelunk dev Derek Yu and a number of other contributors. It's also a very hard game to review, critique or otherwise discuss because we're not talking about one game here, we're genuinely talking about 50 whole rear end goddamned games in a single collection. When you fire up UFO 50, it can be almost paralysing; you're dumped into a menu allowing access to all 50 games, and it's down to you to just... start picking games and trying them out. And it's here that for me, UFO 50 gives me the most incredible rush of nostalgia, because there's an experience in my life that this perfectly replicates. In the early 2000s, a huge part of my gaming was playing retro games via PC emulators, exploring the libraries of the NES, SNES, Game Boy, Mega Drive, Master System and eventually absolutely anything and everything I could get my hands on including huge swathes of old PC games via sites like Home of the Underdogs. UFO 50 is the closest thing I've found to recapturing that first rush of sitting down with a whole collection of ROMs for a console, with very little idea of what half of the games in there are if any, and booting them up one at a time. Sometimes you find a game you hate. Sometimes you find something amazing, but not to your taste. Other times you find something incredible that you're immediately hooked by and spend hours playing (shoutout to the Mega Drive port of Pirates! Gold which was my introduction to that game and series). UFO 50 is not going to be a collection for everyone; if 8-bit era gaming generally is not something you're interested in engaging with, I don't think the fact that there are 50 of these games and that some of them are absolutely incredible is going to be enough to sway you. But if any of this sounds even remotely appealing, I guarantee you'll find something in this massive, incredible collection that is extremely up your alley because have I mentioned that there's fifty loving games here?!?

#2 - Best Game That Made Me Feel Like A Goddamned Idiot
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

"Resident Evil with math puzzles instead of zombies" is an extremely reductive but not entirely inaccurate assessment of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. A brooding, atmospheric (sometimes bordering on horror) puzzle adventure game, Lorelei doesn't give you much to go off at the start and revels in its obtuseness. When the game begins, you are controlling a woman standing next to a car. If you press a button you'll discover your inventory, which contains a car key and some tampons. You also have a 'mental note' that simply reads "Meet him at the hotel." With nothing but that to go off, the game begins and you're left to try and work out who you are, where you are, and just what the hell is going on; as you start to unravel the purported reason for your visit to the hotel, you simultaneously realise that nothing is quite what it appears to be. The game feels like an intricately unfolding puzzle box as you slowly explore the hotel grounds, solving puzzles, learning new information, forming theories about the plot and characters involved, amassing clues that will sometimes pay off an hour later as you realise that it's the hint to a door that you've been trying to open. The game is presented in an absolutely gorgeous stark black and white art style broken only by splashes of a searing pink/crimson colour for emphasis, and so many of the rooms in the game feel like perfectly crafted dioramas or art pieces in and of themself. The one button control scheme that the developers have introduced here is certainly straightforward enough, particularly for players who might be unfamiliar with game controls more broadly, but the lack of a back button is a piece of incredibly painful friction that I think the game really could have done without. Lorelei's photographic memory and mental notes does a fantastic job of ensuring that you're not having to backtrack for information to solve puzzles; as long as you're exploring locations thoroughly it's generally pretty clear where you have and haven't been and what the puzzles you should try tackling are. The game is extremely non-linear for large parts of it, allowing you to try different puzzles if you get stuck, but unfortunately there are points where the critical path collapses down to a single puzzle and eventually you're going to either need to solve it or hunt for a walkthrough. No matter how good the puzzles and atmosphere, anything teasing a mystery box styled story that failed to stick the landing would be extremely unsatisfying so I'll say for me at least that I found the story pretty clear by the end of it all; the final puzzle of the game in fact explicitly requires the player to understand the elements of the plot in order to progress!

#1 - Mode 7's Game of the Year
1000xRESIST

1000xRESIST is my favourite narrative game ever made and possibly in my top 10 favourite games I have ever played, and I'm too tired to do it justice at the moment. I need to get my list in, so I'm going to come back to this post later and edit in a proper writeup for this game, but suffice it to say that I have spent the year grabbing people by the shoulders and shaking them yelling "PLEASE PLAY 1000xRESIST". I have bought people copies of this game so that they'll play it. I have not stopped thinking about it since I played and finished it, and I want to sit down and play through it all over again from the start so that I can appreciate it all over again.

Edit:

Okay, I think people have probably talked enough about the structure of the game/plot in broad strokes that I'm just going to list things that I adore about 1000xRESIST. I love the soundtrack and the surgical precision with which it is deployed across scenes and story beats that never fails to move me each time I hear it. I love the staging of this game - the devs are a dance/theatre collective who have turned their hands to game design and it absolutely shows. So many scenes, particularly in the communions, are just so beautifully presented and staged in a way that feels highly reminiscent of theatre blocking rather than cinematographic framing, which I find deeply, deeply refreshing in video games generally because I think games can do and be more than just mindlessly aping cinema as a medium. I love that the game more or less dumps you in blind and trusts that as you keep playing the worldbuilding and explanations you need to understand how and why the world is like it is will coalesce - and they do, without any moments that I thought felt like pointless exposition dumps for the sake of exposition. I love the quiet moments between communion scenes, exploring the Orchard and chatting to the other sisters, the slow sense of growing familiarity with the various minor NPCs and the payoff later in the game for being able to read between the lines and see how they've changed and developed. I love the heady sci-fi narrative that the game unfolds for you, with a chapter focused on exactly who these alien beings are and how they think and why they do what they do being a massive delight. I love the character relationships across the time periods of the game. I love that the game's message is a hopeful one, but a hopeful message that doesn't shy away from reality, consequence, or all the - for lack of a better word - bad poo poo that the people involved in the story have had to go through to arrive at that hopeful moment. I love that at the ending, if you (ending spoilers for 1000xRESIST, obviously) try to do a 'bloodless' end and not remove fascist elements like Mauve and the Red Guard that the game bluntly shuts you down with a 'bad end'. I love that even as someone who is not from Hong Kong, or from a diaspora, who arguably would be hit significantly harder by a lot of the themes raised in 1000xRESIST, I nevertheless found something that speaks so fundamentally to human experience in this games characters, themes and narrative that has been so powerful that I have not been able to stop thinking about this game for months and months and months on end.

I love 1000xRESIST. It is the best narrative I have ever experienced in a video game.

Please, play 1000xRESIST.

List for Rarity:

10) Balatro
9) Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
8) Kunitsu-gami: Path of the Goddess
7) Caves of Qud
6) Indika
5) Minishoot' Adventures
4) Tactical Breach Wizards
3) UFO 50
2) Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
1) 1000xRESIST

Mode 7 fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Jan 1, 2025

#?Dec 31, 2024 08:44

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