Lilah's Best Games of 2024
Normally I would have posted this on Cohost, but unfortunately Cohost has passed into the great web archive in the sky :( Anyways, digging through my backloggd I played a lot of games in 2024 - perhaps a bit too many, now that I think of it. Some of them were wonderful, some of them were not, but here are the best of them in all their unfettered glory.
2024 Games
1000xResist
I only played 1000xResist a few weeks ago, but I adored it and it immediately became my Game of the Year. I already wrote about it here, so I'll let that do the talking:
1000xResist is, perhaps, the first video game I have felt in my soul. It understands me, and I understand it in turn. Mother, Iris, Watcher - I know these women, I am these women. I know the cycle of intergenerational trauma. I know how a mother’s love can stifle and cut like a knife, and I know how that knife can be turned to cut back, whether or not it is intentional. I know the wounds that are left, the gulf of resentment that forms. And I know the importance of the past, how understanding it can lead to forgiveness and a path forward.
Anthology of the Killer
thecatamites is one of the best solo devs out there. With Anthology of the Killer, he weds his restless creativity, his sharply satirical writing, his wonderful zingers to a more defined horror-comedy narrative structure and one of the most charming characters of recent years in protagonist BB. Originally developed + released as 9 individual games, you can see the increase in ambition as you go along. But the final chapter, combined with the museum framing of this collection, makes it clear that this is a single, cohesive work that stands as thecatamites best. It's the funniest game of the year, and also one of the smartest.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes takes Resident Evil's Spencer Mansion, drapes it in modernist design and a striking black-and-white aesthetic, and embeds it within a cryptic art-game for journal-slinging puzzle sickos with a fascinatingly fragmented narrative. Bold, exciting, and so satisfying to unfold.
Not-2024 Games
Ultima VI: The False Prophet
A childhood spent surfing abandonware sites left me with a love of the Ultima series, but I'd never really played this one. Turns out it's brilliant! Here, the series' burgeoning interest in world simulation combines with improved technology and 256-color VGA graphics to create the most immersive version of Britannia yet. It's a shockingly intricate technical achievement for 1990 that's full of character and personality and lots of potential for goofing around, and a total joy to explore.
Final Fantasy XI
Final Fantasy XI is one of the least-fun games I've ever loved. It comes from a radically different MMO paradigm, where virtual online worlds were glorified chatrooms to hang out in while grinding incessantly. It's full of slow combat and massive zones that take ages to cross. It's got a futzy, non-intuitive UI that has never heard of a mouse. Even with the myriad QoL improvements added over the years (faster XP gain, the ability to solo, mounts) everything in this game takes 10 million times longer than you'd expect.
And yet, it's often exhilarating. The pre-WoW MMO design combined with the narrative focus of a Final Fantasy game creates something unique and engrossing. The lack of quest markers encourages you to talk to every NPC like in a traditional JRPG, and it's exciting whenever you stumble across a meaty sidequest with cutscenes to go alongside. The long travel times between zones make everything feel like a journey. There's exciting world-building, especially in the questlines tied to each of the starting nations. And if the writing isn't perfect, it does make big narrative swings that lean into the long-form storytelling potential of MMOs.
So far, I've made it through the end of Chains of Promathia, the much-loved second expansion. And I'm very much looking forward to more in 2025!
Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers
Y'all were right - this is the best Final Fantasy XIV expansion. Shadowbringers has many of this MMO's flaws, including portions of the MSQ that feel like they're just there to fill space. But its world and characters are the most exciting we've seen yet in XIV, and the story finally figures out something compelling and genuinely affecting to do with the Ascians, previously one of my least-favorite recurring plot beats. Plus, it features Emet-Selch, a guy who definitely shoplifts from Hot Topic, and some of XIV's best duties and trials. A huge improvement over Stormblood, and one that revitalized my flagging relationship with FFXIV.
Guild Wars 2
My first-ever MMO was World of Warcraft, which I started playing as a teen near the tail-end of vanilla. I had an on-again off-again relationship with its gameplay, but I loved hanging out in its wonderful zones and just vibing. Guild Wars 2 recaptures that feeling - its zones are some of the most visually striking I've seen in an MMO, and the game pulls from open world design to encourage and actively reward exploration. With XP-granting vistas to discover, drop-in quests and group events, rewards for map completion and a world that's fun to just be in, Guild Wars 2 is the perfect game for those of us who want to just vibe and soak in the scenery. A fun MSQ with varied mission objectives and an engaging action-based combat system? That's just the icing on the cake.
AND SO, In Conclusion (or: Thee Gaminge Yeare In Reviewe)
For me and my wife, 2024 kicked off with an apartment move gone wrong. "It can't get worse", we said, and yet it did. It was not a great year.
As such, I found myself leaning on gaming a lot more than I did the last few years. Surprisingly, this became the Year of MMOs - the ambition of online virtual worlds called to me, and while I'll often bounce off new MMOs quickly, this year I tended to stick with them. After two years stuck in the turgid dregs of Stormblood, Shadowbringers finally re-ignited my relationship with Final Fantasy XIV and got my wife and I to start playing consistently. I finally dove into Final Fantasy XI after years of wanting to give it a try. I tried Guild Wars 2 and surprised myself with how much of a comfort game it became. And I even dabbled briefly with WoW Classic and, yes, EverQuest.
I also played more 2024 games than usual (10-ish! Including ones I didn't finish!) When it came to AAA tentpoles, I was broadly disappointed (Shadow of the Erdtree was great, but I found Final Fantasy VII Rebirth even more bloated and frustrating than its predecessor, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard sanded off all the drama and rough edges of earlier Dragon Age games for a smooth, friction-less experience that was the epitome of "It's Fine"). But it was a fantastic year for smaller indies. 1000xResist and Anthology of the Killer are two of the best games I've ever played, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a bold new puzzle-game classic. And to top those off, we got the smorgasbord of UFO 50 and a couple wonderful, inventive new shmups in Devil Blade Reboot and Radirgy 2.
I still have a few more 2024 games I'm hoping to work through in 2025, most notably Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and _Ys X. But I'm looking forward to what the rest of 2025 has in store, and hope the indie space is as exciting as it was this year.