Played in 2024: Quick Thoughts

In 2023 I did a list for each month of the year, which felt a bit spammy at times, so I'm replacing them with a single list for the full year

full reviews will still be posted as inspiration strikes, but these little blurbs should be considered first impressions for when i dont have a full review prepped

sorted from most recently played > least recent

No Sun To Worship
No Sun To Worship
Marvel Strike Force
Marvel Strike Force
im deliberately skipping the story and its still putting me to sleep
Scarlet Maiden
Scarlet Maiden
Riptide GP: Renegade
Riptide GP: Renegade
The perfect Steam Deck game and nails some early-mid 00s energy so perfectly that I was actually a bit shocked to see the release date. Not really interested in the trick system which is a shame because it becomes increasingly necessary to win races, but the core gameplay is satisfying and it's a great thing to pick up for a quick race or two
Seven: The Days Long Gone
Seven: The Days Long Gone
Truly great when the gameplay clicks but unfortunately that's somewhat rare. There are some fun ideas and a map that's really fun to explore but the ideas that don't work are constantly getting in the way: a camera that fights you as often as it helps, a crafting system that's as frustrating as it is fascinating, and combat that's tuned w/ the damage so low that you never want to engage with it or the related parts of the crafting system. Navigating to the objectives and treating each location like its own little puzzle box is a reward in itself - the island's natural pathways are designed in such a way that you can feel clever just for navigating to your destination. It's easy to keep playing this for a while just enjoying the parts that work, but the natural increase in difficulty will make it more frustrating as you encounter the combat more often, as the camera gets in the way more often, etc.
Super Auto Pets
Super Auto Pets
Crab Champions
Crab Champions
Eversoul
Eversoul
sort of the polar opposite of reverse:1999 in that this is as bland as you can possibly get in terms of story and character design (you should almost objectively be embarrassed to play this) but the game is ludicrously generous with its pulls (you will get hundreds of pulls within 2-3 days of starting and get to essentially create a banner for a high-rarity character that you're interested in)

hardly does anything new by AFK game standards but I like the 3d autobattlers and think that these characters actually have some interesting abilities on them even though some of the tanks are gigabusted (daphne)
Reverse: 1999
Reverse: 1999
it's so stylish with such an interesting initial plot hook that i'd love it to death if i saw anything of value in the combat at all
The Lost Village
The Lost Village
Review
AFK Journey
AFK Journey
not really exceptional in any regard as far as AFK games go except for the fact that 1. it has a PC client, and 2. i'm surprised by how little incentive there is to spend money in this game. progression becomes fairly difficult after just a few days of active play but you'll unlock basically the entire cast within a week without spending a cent and characters rapidly become more useful for their abilities than for their rarity, meaning that basic strategy and understanding of team comps will carry you much more effectively than your wallet ever could. the art is nice and the alternate game modes in this are genuinely fun.. interested to see what they do with this, the devs seem genuinely interested in creating a good game in this space that isn't totally predatory so I'm wondering what they've got up their sleeves from here on out

i could list all the ways in which this game is pretty generous to f2p players (the menus are clean, the leveling is easy) but i'll hold off on that because this blurb is long enough. if there's any demand for a review for this game i can certainly put one out
Odd Realm
Odd Realm
i really want to like this but unfortunately it's just too confusing - z-levels especially are something you'll need to start interacting with pretty quickly but they're frequently very visually confusing and while i think this could be really rewarding to learn, i'd rather go back to dwarf fortress than sit down with this

i really like the different plants though, the way farming and different materials work, there's just a very shallow learning curve to this one that even modern DF has a better handle on
Honkai: Star Rail - Into the Yawning Chasm
Honkai: Star Rail - Into the Yawning Chasm
This is the most compelling Honkai Star Rail has been since its launch and it's not even close. The story of Penacony wavers between moderately dry conversations about ~something mysterious happening in the shadows~ to some actually pretty good deep dives into new characters. Aventurine's story is perhaps the strongest of all, providing insight into both his faction, his home planet, and giving depth to a character that initially seemed like another bland, hypercompetent schmoozer.

Even if you don't give a shit about any of that, they really popped off with the gameplay - the puzzles here all toy with perspective and I like basically all of them except the human pinball cannons. I'm still impressed that they decided to go with a type of puzzle that turns walls and ceilings into walkable surfaces for this.

Enemies also received a glow-up in that even the basic enemies in this area frequently require some meaningful strategy in how you deal with them. In many ways I suspect it's benefitting from being so deep into the story of the game that they can do interesting things like this, but seeing how much other elements of the game are improving alongside this, I think it's safe to say that they're just getting better in general when it comes to crafting this game. I still think they could do a better job of tying characters' gameplay to their core themes, but they did a fantastic job of doing just that with the final bossfight of this update
League of Legends
League of Legends
i regret to inform you that i've been particularly fascinated with league (and other MOBAs like dota) and how it functions as a team sport. i watched some videos from Coach Cupcake on youtube and while they're particularly dry it's good for people who like watching team sports and seeing all the pieces moving at the same time. obviously toxicity will always be a problem in this genre unless you do something radically different but i do think that there's something to watching league that can really stimulate the mind if you want to dig into that kind of thing
Palia
Palia
unfortunately it somehow seems to have become even buggier than when i played a closed beta(? alpha maybe?) months ago, so not really interested in trying this one further

i know people are saying the concept (combat-free MMO) is stupid but tbh that's the thing i like most about this
Holo X Break
Holo X Break
very very happy that polka is finally in a game but 1. i don't like side-scroller beat em ups, 2. i never felt like there was too much strategy to this one, either in terms of planning or in terms of mechanical complexity
Farm Keeper
Farm Keeper
a neat turn-based puzzle game where you're asked to have a certain amount of income available every few days for "rent" while using your economy of limited actions to farm up some money (or you can use the products as inputs for a more valuable output)

i dont find this as addictive as some do - i feel like i already "get it" after a run or two and dont really feel inclined to try more
Six Ages: Ride like the Wind
Six Ages: Ride like the Wind
A decent clan management game with some gorgeous art (and you gotta give it bonus points for using Central Asian cultures and aesthetics) but I wish the randomness were weighted a little more - combat feels like a losing proposition because your choices don't really (seem to) correspond to a particular outcome. There's a lot of cool stuff here though and I like the system of advisors and how they can give you horrible ass advice based on their biases
Lightyear Frontier
Lightyear Frontier
Decently fun, the game looks great, I think the devs have really done a good job of nailing down mechanics that can be fun here, but they've stretched out the early game progression beyond its limits. Getting basic upgrades is a real pain in the ass so you have two possibilities: you either spend all your time on the farm overloaded with resources because you can't build anything, or you explore and realize that you can't do anything because you need tool upgrades to interact with half the game outside your starting region. There's a lot of potential here but I really think they need to compress early progression for this to retain its audience
Graveyard Keeper
Graveyard Keeper
one of those games that jams every "cozy game" staple into the same .exe but i think it largely works here - you can struggle a lot if you use your early resources unwisely and i wish there was better logging for objectives, but otherwise i think the loops here of turning crafted objects and beautification efforts into research works really well and i actually like basically all of it except the combat. it would also be nice to have more inventory space, i hate managing chests in these games, but that comes with the territory i think. these are mostly early game impressions and i really hope the moment-to-moment gameplay remains the same for much of this but i can easily see this turning into the kind of game where you have to grind for particularly valuable items and if that hunch is right, i'm glad i haven't gotten there yet
Supermarket Simulator
Supermarket Simulator
made more engaging than your average tycoon game through the sheer tactility of it - ordering new goods by interacting with a physical computer, taking the boxes from the street to the shelves to stock the goods, then the empty boxes to the trash. as a result it's more mesmerizing than interesting but i think it's fine to have games that exist in this space. SUPER early access, it's not too expensive but if you're on the fence about this one then you should just wait until it's spent some more time in the oven
Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2
Review
The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story
The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story
Review
Snake Farm
Snake Farm
aside from the simple and obvious joy of firing piercing attacks through a bunch of really long snakes i'm not really sure what's supposed to hook me here. it's a fine enough game but as i play more, i find more critiques and fewer things i actually enjoy
Horizon's Gate
Horizon's Gate
Overworld is not dissimilar from early Mount & Blade, but seafaring - lots of trading, recruiting people, manning ships, slowly accruing equipment and doing favors, allying yourself with a major faction. I'm not really big on the Fire Emblem-style combat (others may have a better comparison, but that's what I think of) but there's quite a bit to explore and a lot of jobs to do besides pure combat
Dyson Sphere Program
Dyson Sphere Program
I really want to like this but I don't really vibe with the difficulty curve of Factorio/Satisfactory/you-get-the-point style games. I don't mind complex logistical operations in games but I like it to ramp up a little more slowly than a lot of these games do, where you tend to research conveyor belts and are immediately hit in the face with this huge spike where you've got 4-5 different forking supply chains that will then fork further and further as the game goes on. For some this will sound like a dream, I just want the game to be a little gentler with it, and the interfaces this game (and Factorio) uses do not make things easy on the player.
Infinite Craft
Infinite Craft
Pretty cool to play one of these elemental combination games that can produce anything until you reach the point where the game is just producing nonsense words. At that point it just feels like you're just typing two words into Google and hitting "I'm feeling lucky" instead of actually playing a game.
Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling
Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling
I don't have any particularly interesting insights about this, especially since I never played Paper Mario, but this is just a good time. I love the action prompts in the middle of turn-based combat, but I wish the story was a little meatier
Idle Cave Miner
Idle Cave Miner
Arguably more interesting than most idle games because you actually make visible, tangible progress as you go (instead of having everything represented through ever-increasing numbers) but hard to say too much more about it. If you must play an idle game on your phone this is a decent pick, but in reality you never have to limit your options like this
The Coffin of Andy and Leyley
The Coffin of Andy and Leyley
I like to give games that are maligned on this site (but popular elsewhere) a shot but this is really asking a lot of me. Estimating by average runtime it seems I played between 25-50% of this and my interest only ever waned as the interesting premise disappears into the background to make room for more obviously shocking material.

The art is decent and the overall style does a good job of conveying how dingy and stale the setting is but I'd be hard pressed to find anything else about this that I appreciate too much
Thriving City: Song
Thriving City: Song
Demo

Very well tutorialized - my main issue with this is that the 45-degree tilt (like classic isometric games) makes it difficult to tell how "marking" resources works - think cutting down trees or foraging.

Other than that I don't have any major complaints. The game is gorgeous and has a decently large selection of buildings. It would be nice if the names of your citizens were transliterated so you can develop an attachment to them, but I think the work involved in implementing this would far outweigh the benefits for the average player
Maboroshi Caravan
Maboroshi Caravan
slow-paced, unglamorous auto-play adventure game. i think this will appeal to very few people (especially with its poor tutorialization and clumsy translation) but i truly enjoy the idea of sitting with the caravan on this slow, grueling journey as you take in and liberate lost souls.
Kanjozoku Game Racer
Kanjozoku Game Racer
HoloParade
HoloParade
extremely grindy. i respect the attempt to add more mechanics to what is essentially a flash game but i really don't think it makes the gameplay any more compelling. i'm sure there's some real strategic depth here but playing through the early levels is so mind-numbing that i don't really want to stick around and find out
Bright Lights of Svetlov
Bright Lights of Svetlov
There are some technical issues and some untranslated lines but overall I think this is an interesting experience. My only real thing with recommending this is that I think a lot of people will drop it while the game is still "do chores in a Soviet apartment" which is pretty interesting as a peek into this setting, but the game does try to do more with its story. It's a little clumsy in its storytelling but if I made this game I would be beaming with pride over this thing.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Review
Nimrods: GunCraft Survivor
Nimrods: GunCraft Survivor
Demo

The idea of building a really strong gun and then passing it onto your drone (who will follow the same upgrade path on your next run) is neat, but there are so many of these games coming out right now that I just don't see any reason to play this one over any of the others.
The Surge 2
The Surge 2
Neyasnoe
Neyasnoe
The Surge
The Surge
i've felt bad for a pretty long time that my joke review of this game was the top review for so long - i didnt really feel like i had given the game a fair chance but this was before i really had standards for what i wanted to put on the site. i still maintain that they shouldve made an action game about a guy in a wheelchair but i've since removed the part about the game feeling like complete ass because after playing this again.... i don't believe that at all

i do prefer my action games to be a bit more on the swift and graceful side but i can respect the big, chunky, lumbering moves here because everything still feels responsive. i picked this up again after being inspired by curse's review and they're right to bring up fighting games and 3d brawlers when talking about this game's combat. the game does a lot to reward spacing and being deliberate with your moves and when it all clicks in your head it can be delicious.

i like targeting individual body parts but i really wish trying to hit a specific part was less finicky. there were plenty of occasions early on where i get chunked by someone as i'm backpedalling because it wont let me pick the guy's legs. eventually you learn to just deal with it or drop the game entirely but all in all i think this is a much more rewarding experience than i was willing to give it credit for several years ago
First Cut: Samurai Duel
First Cut: Samurai Duel
bushido blade by way of nidhogg
Fruit Salad
Fruit Salad
hard to say too much about another suika game clone but it gets the job done. it feels like it starts dropping advanced fruits much later than other games of this type which is a bit of a pain but seems to reward planning a bit more
Glass Wings
Glass Wings
needs a little bit more meat to it before i can recommend it to anyone but this is a solid base for a larger project. its animated well but the main things holding this back are twofold:

1. inconsistent snapping - sometimes your character will jump a full meter higher in the air to grab onto a zipline, and other times you'll graze the thing as your character sails right past. the game seems to treat runner vision objects differently from unpainted versions of those same objects which can be confusing at times, esp if you miss a jump and need to find a way to recover

2. the environments can use some punch-up. we can't use all the same tricks as mirror's edge without the same budget but ME felt like you were existing on top of a city that was constantly moving and in motion. the moments in which you break through buildings felt like places where people were actually meant to exist - austere places, but places designed around people. on the roofs you see a lot of support structures for everything that exists in the building. no concrete recommendations here, but i hope i at least got the message across
Palworld
Palworld
Wildmender
Wildmender
Really hard not to love this thing despite its obvious flaws (lackluster combat, performance issues, some confusing mechanics). The devs just kinda swung for the fences here and the actual act of turning a desert oasis into a lush garden tickles a part of my brain that few other games do... terraforming the place and creating little irrigation ditches by hand is just so satisfying. up there with terraforming in the latest animal crossing game but much more gratifying since the game responds mechanically to that kind of customization
Hundred Days
Hundred Days
drafting a longer piece of writing about this one but this completely failed to resonate with me. there are two other farming games i quite like that take a really intense interest in their subject, but they depict them in radically different ways that still succeed in making the player feel involved in the actual process of farming - something this game doesn't do
Saleblazers
Saleblazers
very similar vibes to Craftopia but with more restraint, although that's not a high bar to clear. the action portions of the game are fine thanks to snappy and responsive controls, but i think some are going to be turned off by the stiff animations. the shopkeeping seems very silly but that's to be expected since you can just pick up literal trash off the ground and sell it back to the people who put it there - not that it's really worth your time to do so. there's a fair amount to manage but my fear with this one is that it'll start feeling pretty bare once you make it out of the early game.... we'll see!
Rail Route
Rail Route
Has a fair amount of bugs and enough unintuitive mechanics that you frequently can't tell which is which, but when it works, it works beautifully. The clean-cut graphics are super pleasing and better for visual clarity than the more realistic renders you'd see in something like Railway Empire or Transport Fever. This does backfire sometimes when something is poorly explained, but if you think you'd like a game about being a train dispatcher, play the demo (and then almost certainly buy it afterward).
Tea Garden Simulator
Tea Garden Simulator
Monster Train
Monster Train
I was never too big on Slay the Spire so it shouldn't really be surprising that games like this that are more refinement than reinvention (or so I hear) aren't really my speed either.

I like the mechanic of managing different floors of enemies but I am baffled as to why you'd set a game on a hell train and then have the enemies progress vertically instead of hopping horizontally between train cars.
Astronarch
Astronarch
Really neat to see this idea of a single-player auto-battler. The number of characters available to unlock is overwhelming but I think the ideas for each character are strong enough that you can create some interesting synergies. I haven't played it enough to speak on game balance yet but it feels decently challenging with the starting characters and items - I'll probably revisit this periodically in the way a lot of people revisit Slay the Spire.
Drug Dealer Simulator
Drug Dealer Simulator
I'm not gonna lie to you, I expected this to be complete trash. I still saw some pretty serious bugs - I couldn't read any of my character's "text messages", for one - but otherwise I was pleasantly surprised. Business sims tend to very rapidly move away from personal involvement in selling things, assuming they depict it at all, so there's a unique gameplay fantasy here when it comes to managing inventory space, navigating between locations inconspicuously, and doling out the goods. I don't think the RPG systems are necessary at all and the fact that your conscience(?) talks to you like the Postal Dude is a bit grating, but like I said, I was expecting this to be a much more cynical work than it actually is.
Sprawl
Sprawl
the world is the best part of this, hands down. makes a great first impression but it calls back to doom so frequently that i think it actually harms this game. there's paying homage and i think this crosses the line into a place where the average player would just say "well, why don't I just play the new Doom games instead"
The Gnorp Apologue
The Gnorp Apologue
it's fine, it's worth the money and that's about the highest praise i'm willing to give. it's funnier than other incremental games that try to be funny and i like that all the bells and whistles all come back to either 1. hitting the rock, or 2. collecting shards from the rock, but i hate games that rely on resetting your game to progress past these difficulty spikes (if you can call them that). it's less reliant on this resetting/prestiging mechanic than most idle games but i do think i'd like it a lot more if it were balanced around slogging away at a single, persistent save.
Class of '09
Class of '09
I'd played the Re-Up before this and I'm grateful that I did because the endings that I was present for during a friend's stream have all of the weaknesses of the Re-Up without most of the strengths. Worth noting that we only did 3 or 4 endings but this game loses a lot of room for jokes by having its characters introduce themselves to one another - if you play the Re-Up first you don't need any exposition to understand that Nicole and Jecka are each other's closest friend.
Pesticide Not Required
Pesticide Not Required
curious little thing. i played the "prologue" that's currently available on steam and it could be decently fun but it's extremely easy in its current state, the game basically plays itself unless you're completely unable to dodge enemies. with some tweaking i think you'd have something really interesting here because the farming/fishing/mining mechanics requires you to position in a way that keeps you from doing the classic Survivors game "strafe in a circle forever" strat.

could maybe use a more visible cursor for people playing on KBM and a couple weapons can make things look really messy in ways that can actively sabotage you, specifically the water jet weapon (covers a lot of the screen at high ranks) and the mole turret weapon (looks like an enemy)
The Sims 4: For Rent
The Sims 4: For Rent
$40 for a different flavor of apartments is already going to be a hard sell for people who bought... the last apartment DLC, but this one feels really poorly executed. The Sims 4 already feels awkward when you can be standing outside someone's front yard but have to go through a loading screen to step through the front gate.

Unsurprisingly, this means that it's terribly awkward trying to turn a normal house into two separate rental units, where you can edit the entire property at once but to actually have your sim visit the other half of the house you just edited, you've gotta sit through another loading screen. This DLC wants you to regularly interact with each unit but this system means that you never feel like neighbors living in the same building - in terms of the actual difficulty of visiting them, they may as well be in another city entirely.
White Middle Class Guy Simulator
White Middle Class Guy Simulator
anything substantial i could write about this would require more time than the game did to make
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition
at times i find myself thinking that this is the most charming game of all time. upon hitting act 2, though, it started eroding my good will pretty quickly - i'll likely write a review for this once i'm done but i think jade is done horribly dirty by the game's creators who seem to all identify most heavily with Rab, a one trillion year old man with an 8th grader's grasp on sexuality. the pacing also gets all fucked up here and there was one point where i turned cheat engine on for an encounter that was only moderately difficult (the gyldenhal) because i wanted to be done with it so badly. i'm back to enjoying myself again but act 2 in general has been a real stain on a game that i would've been content to give a 9/10 or 10/10 before this
Life in Adventure
Life in Adventure
Not a bad premise but it's common to run into scenarios that hint at a follow-up, only to have the next event be completely disconnected from what you just did. If individual events were longer or chained together in some substantial way i think this would be a much more interesting game
Fading Afternoon
Fading Afternoon
I'm a sucker for Shin Yeo's catalog because he seems to really enjoy making these moody little beat-em-ups where atmosphere is king. As always I think he succeeds in creating that atmosphere, and I think this is the version of Yeo's combat that I've enjoyed the most (I'm not typically a fan of the genre) but the counter is a little too powerful.

This is also the most mechanically "open" of his games and it's entirely possible to play the whole thing without punching anyone, just whiling away the time by shooting pool and talking to Maruyama's old friends and vibing. My only real objection is that the game opens up extremely slowly if you play it this way, as it's clearly balanced around players who engage in the combat at least a little bit. Ringo's greater emphasis on narrative flow prevents this from being an issue, but since this game will straight up hide locations from you until certain triggers have occurred, I wouldn't blame someone for feeling like they're being nudged a little too firmly towards a combat-heavy playstyle that they don't like, esp given how sparse this game's narrative beats already are.
An Outcry
An Outcry
I haven't played too many of these RPGMaker joints so I'm not sure if the "hidden choice" mechanic that this game uses is truly novel, but the way these opportunities are baked into the narrative makes for a pretty compelling design choice and I hope the developer finds the inspiration to use this again in a future project

all in all just a really solid project. good music, good art, i like the prose. the flow of combat here seems pretty simple and solved, but my dislike for the combat stems more my own hangups with the kind of 2d turn-based combat that RPGmaker enables than anything the game is doing especially poorly
Offworld Trading Company
Offworld Trading Company
Lightning-fast (for a game of this type) and respectably difficult (for a game of this type) game about competing to quickly exploit the natural resources of another planet, usually Mars. It has some really effective tutorials that teach you everything you need to know in a very digestible way but once you start playing games on your own it can be very punishing - you can only claim a very small amount of tiles to start and so you need to know what resources should be claimed and when, or else you'll stall out early and get bought out by the competition. I can see the potential for this gameplay loop to be super rewarding for those that master it but to be frank, I don't have the patience for it - I've got other games that scratch this itch that don't require that time investment.
Surviving Mars
Surviving Mars
A neat concept for a city-builder - I really like that it asks you to balance the needs of domes (humans living in little bubbles with extremely limited space) and external production of power/water/etc, but in practice this is only for the most devoted of logistics people. There are a ton of resources to manage and the tutorial just throws you into the deep end immediately by asking you to juggle work shifts, drone communication ranges, building maintenance, resource stockpiles, etc.
Golazo! 2
Golazo! 2
Golazo had a lot of potential but some extremely obvious flaws (and missing QOL features) so I was very happy to visit this site and see that Golazo 2 was a thing that exists...

...and it's just the exact same game! There are no volume sliders, the controls feel inconsistent, etc. They've added a small-scale FIFA Street-esque mode, but personally I'd rather they skip that entirely and work on refining what's already there.

1 Comment


Good list


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