henke on 26/12/2024 at 14:02
Quote Posted by Malf
En Garde!Just started and gotten up to where the demo finished, and it's outstandingly pretty and charming. Drains the Deck's battery worryingly quickly though.
I also played that this year, on the Deck as well. It's a good time! 2023 game tho.
faetal on 27/12/2024 at 00:56
Quote Posted by Malf
Helldivers 2The big success of the year, which is doing a lot of interesting things with Games Master driven gameplay.
I picked it up and played a few missions single-player, but again, this is really meant to be played in a group, and I think only one other person from here is playing it (faetal maybe?)
So it's just sat there languishing in my pile of shame.
Yes. Furthermore, this is easily my game of the year.
I've never been that into multiplayer games, but I'm borderline obsessed with this.
Most fun I've had gaming in a long time.
Hit me up any time if you fancy trying a harder difficulty mission (and the associated upgrade materials).
Renault on 1/1/2025 at 20:21
Alright, 2024 is over. Here's my list:
Shadow of the Erdtree - More Elden Ring is a good thing. This didn't disappoint, and at times surpassed the original. The exploration was the best part.
Conscript - Sorry henke. :) This was an amazing game made by just one guy, who really put his heart into it. Kind of a mixup of Resident Evil and NES Metal Gear. My type of thing.
Dread Delusion - Pretty cool laid back retro RPG with funky colors.
Metro Awakening - Best VR game this year. Scary, intense, and thick with atmosphere.
Animal Well - I still have so much to do here. Great combination of simple gameplay with complex game spaces. Nifty unique visuals too
Astro Bot - Only PS5 game I bought or played this year. So creative, so fun. You can forget you're an adult for a while.
Children of the Sun - I love me a good sniper game. This one was one of the best I've played, great fun with lots of primary/secondary challenges.
Riven Remake - Man, I've waited for years for this, in one form or another. Definitely lived up to my expectations.
Indy Jones & The Great Circle - It's like you are Indiana Jones, taking part in one of his movies. Fantastic job by Machine Games.
Intravenous 2 - Bought it on a whim, hated it initially, but grew to love it (once I sort of figured it out). Tons of replay value here. It's Hotline Miami with the option of going full stealth.
Close but not quite:
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Pacific Drive
Batman Arkham Shadow
Mouthwashing
Threshold
Top 5 Thief FMs:
Mysteries of Tolham/Lord Taffer (TG) - Only for diehards, great exploration and lots to do. My favorite this year.
Winds of Misfortune/skacky (TG) - Yeah, another skacky city mission with big tall buildings, ho hum. But of course, it was amazing and such fun to navigate.
A Thief's Training/Snake (TG)
Rogue's Lair/vegetables (TG)
Nest of Vipers/nicked (T2)
henke on 2/1/2025 at 13:29
I'm glad you liked Conscript, Renault. :) I liked a lot about it, but the checkpointing and clunky combat ultimately put me off it. When I died yet again and knew I'd have to trudge through 15 minutes of game just to get back to the same difficult combat bit I said "fuck this".
Started playing nicked's Nest of Vipers FM last night btw. Great mission. :thumb:
qolelis on 4/1/2025 at 21:07
1. Caravan SandWitch: Casual driving between points of interest and then exploration by foot with some climbing and side quests. Also, some people freaking out about the game on Steam makes me like it even more, because I'm simple like that.
Other games of note in no particular order:
Year Unknown
Desolatium
Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley
Botany Manor
Echostasis
Repunk
Malf on 5/1/2025 at 10:36
I thought I'd previously posted this, but obviously not!
A late entry for me, as I bought it after Christmas: Stalker 2
I waited for it to settle down a bit after a buggy release, and it's still pretty buggy; I've had more than one bugged quest, and one gamebreaking one that I had to use UETools to fix.
But bugs aside, it's a remarkable game.
It's refreshing to be playing an open world game that does things its own way and is less interested in hand-holding.
The exploration is the star here, with something remarkable hiding behind or below seemingly every hill.
The "combat" as it stands, I could take or leave, especially against the mutants, which are more of an annoyance than a challenge. Bloodsuckers in particular are just irritating, and the fights against them always, always devolve into me cramming myself into a corner and waiting for them to come straight at me, which unfortunately is the case for a lot of the mutants.
But at the same time, while this is infuriating and lacks nuance, the intensity of the encounters gives the game something I think it would miss if they were more "gamey".
And this lack of "gameyness" bleeds into other areas of the game, serving to always keep the player on their toes, as they're always working with incomplete data. There's no list of unlocked blueprints or the items they apply to for example, meaning you never know when something might be upgradeable, which in turn means it's always a pleasant surprise when you discover you can upgrade something.
I bounced hard off of the first game, as I bought it and tried to play it on release, when it was unplayably buggy.
But I now see what all the fuss is about. Stalker 2's a great experience, and more importantly, one where you're playing an everyman and not some super-soldier whose destiny is to save the world.
One more annoyance (as we tend to be most critical of those we love the most):
There's an awful lot of things in the game that are locked behind story progression, and in the spirit of incomplete information, the game doesn't tell you this. So you can spend a significant amount of time trying to get to a stash or artifact, only to do a search and find out you can't access it at your point in the game. When this happens, it rips apart the otherwise ever-present feeling of player freedom the game gives you.
demagogue on 5/1/2025 at 11:28
It's evidently the year for very cinematic games that have you basically walking through the dev's story, with a fair amount of time travel and/or anomalies along the way. Alright, here's my top 10:
1. Stalker 2. The old atmosphere is back. Remember they aren't glitches; they're anomalies.
2. Animal Well. Every two years or so there's a perfect indie platformer, and this year it was this.
3. Indy and the Great Circle. I don't like the concept so much, but it's as close to being in an Indy movie as you're gonna get, and has fair gameplay for what it is.
4. 1000 x Resist. A walking sim; less gameplay and more a nice interactive mechanic for progressing the story done in a slick way. The storytelling delivers, and the world it builds was fascinating to me; may help if you care about society & culture etc. in Asia/China, or anyway an expat Chinese view on it. Also definitely a commentary on the covid era.
5. Indika. Cinematic & dark in a bleak Russian countryside following a compromised nun. What's not to love? Also a bizarre mix of hyperreal and retro pixel.
6. Outbrk. Tornado hunting. It's getting some hate in the forums for the bugs and sparse world south of the horizon, but it's evidently an obsession for people like me growing up in heartland America with tornado alerts every year and driving around country roads. Not for everyone, but if you'd love those things like I do then you'll love this; and there is a puzzle to it, as you have to predict where the tornado alerts are going to be when you get there, the route you should take, where to stop, and when to go. The cloud and weather sim & visuals are top notch. Great build up as the storm gets increasingly unhinged as you approach your mark, and having a live tornado traveling nearby you is appropriately terrifying, exciting, and humbling.
7. Pacific Drive. Bringing Stalker back to its original home in the US. Bang up start! Driving part and the atmosphere & world were best. The grinding wore thin quick though.
8. Warno. Cold War goes hot RTS wargame. They say it's not for singleplayer and some people don't like how it abstracts things, but I really love it. Looks fantastic & I like how slick and smooth it plays for a war game.
9. Nobody Wants to Die. Easily the best & most cinematic cyberpunk noir experience I've ever seen in a game. The gamifying of the detective work is a little over the top and task-list dependent, but follows the theme this year of really interesting mechanics carrying the story forward.
10. MiSide. I don't know why I got wrapped up into this game. You get dragged into a J-dating sim in your phone and do a lot of gimmicky mini-games. But you're dealing with the world like you would if you were really in a real video game, I mean exploiting the code, bugs, AI going rogue, and version updates from the inside, etc. I had a really similar game concept before, so I was really interested in seeing how this game dealt with the same concept; since I hadn't seen another game really give it justice (cf. Stanely Parable). Surprisingly mind bending.
------------
Here's a list of other games I liked played or watched enough of a let's play to have an idea, in a rough order of preference:
Technically 2023 games that felt like 2024 games (last year was a better year for games for me): The Brew Barons, The Bed We Made, Shadow of Doubt, Chants of Sennaar
MS Flight Simulator 2024
Senua's Saga: Hellblade II
Nine Sols
Crypt Custodian
Astrobot
[ECHOSTASIS]
Thank Goodness You're Here!
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Felvidek
Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum
No Case Should Remain Unsolved
The Rise of the Golden Idol
Astro Bot
Fallen Aces
UFO 50
Threshold
Mouthwashing
Frostpunk 2
Nuclear Nightmare
Just Crow Things
Tactical Breach Wizards
Neva
Dune Imperium
Exo Rally Championship (demo)
Tiny Glade / Dystopica
Silent Hill 2
Balatro
Hades 2
Satisfactory
henke on 5/1/2025 at 12:22
RE: Outbrk. I've played a bit of the somewhat similar (
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2250550/Tornado_Research_and_Rescue/) Tornado: Search & Rescue, which was a neat but pretty janky. Sounds like Outbrk might have better gameplay. If there's one genre I wish AAA would tackle it's something like this. Imagine a tornado chasing game on a AAA budget! :D
Quote Posted by demagogue
Technically 2023 games that felt like 2024 games (last year was a better year for games for me): The Brew Barons
Huh? Noooo, Brew Barons came out March 1st, 2024, according to Steam. And that's when I got my KS backer key as well.
demagogue on 5/1/2025 at 15:56
Ah, I looked all of them up independently since sometimes things released on early access, etc., and that came up 2023 for some reason. But anyway if we're going by the Steam date & it's a 2024 game, then Brew Barons would take the 5th spot for me. I was pretty absorbed for a month by it.
