2024's Games of the Year, Pt. 1

Yes, this is a retro video game publication, but I find plenty of time for new stuff, too.

Understanding the past requires understanding the present, and vice versa, so hey. It’s time for the best of 2024 at this retro-focused publication.

Eligibility rules! For one, I had to have actually played the game, and in a meaningful way. That seems an obvious point I shouldn’t have to make, but I’m making it so I can follow it up by saying that if a game you love from 2024 isn’t here, it’s most likely just because I haven’t played it yet, not because I hated it. I had to decide between buying Metaphor: ReFantazio or playing a bunch of other, smaller games instead, so I went with the latter. No offense intended, time is simply time, and brand new RPGs of that scale aren’t cheap, either. Second, I’m skipping console ports of games that have been out for some time on Steam et al, but make concessions to, say, itch.io titles that are now on Steam, especially if the new launch brought major changes. And last, this is a remake-and-remaster-free zone: 2024 was loaded with killer brand new releases, and as amazing as Dragon Quest III HD-2D was, as much as it’s lovely to have Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door back where you can buy it, there simply wasn’t room for them here. A re-release that made its way to North America for the first time is eligible, however. This is a retro games newsletter, you know.

Once again, due to the sheer scope of releases I got my hands on, I’ll be splitting 20 games up over three parts instead of 15, and some honorable mentions on a couple of those days, as well. This list isn’t ranked, though, as usual, I did sneakily split up my very favorites across the whole thing instead of stacking. Let’s get to it.

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Balatro

Developer: LocalThunk
Publisher: Playstack
Android, iOS, Switch, Playstation 4/5, Xbox One/Series S|X, Windows, macOS
Feb. 20

Let’s just get this one out of the way upfront. Maybe the most telling thing about Balatro is that I resisted playing it until about a month ago. I knew what it was, I knew how I was going to receive it, and, like when I put about 60 hours into Slay the Spire and went, “okay time to walk away,” I sort of preemptively backed off of this one. And then I was sitting at my daughter’s gymnastics/tumbling class for an hour with nothing to do and some Play Store credit on my Android phone, and, well. I wasn’t wrong.

Luckily, I can shut the Balatro part of my brain off and do or play something else, but it’s something else when you do get into it. I love poker, can’t get enough of it, but I also love having to learn new and modified systems, so Balatro makes a ton of sense to my brain. As you peel back layers and find further complexities, strategies to deploy, cards and modifications that impact your score for better or for worse, and move away from the voice in your head telling you what the best way to win poker is and start listening to the one telling you how to win at Balatro, which is not poker… that’s when it really comes together. You’ve never been so adamant that two pair was the winning strategy before, not something flashier, but here, it works.

This is not my favorite roguelike of the year — we’ll get there — but it’s certainly the most fascinating new take on that established genre for some time now, and I’m curious to see what springs out of it. Whether by developer LocalThunk, or by someone else who, upon playing Balatro, had a lightbulb go off for their own transformative project.

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Shadow Generations

Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: Sega
Switch, Playstation 4/5, Xbox One/Series S|X, Windows
Oct. 25

No remakes or remasters, as promised, but Shadow Generations is merely included in one — this is a brand new game that just happens to be packaged with one that existed before 2024, a la Bowser’s Fury pairing up with Super Mario 3D World for its Switch re-release a few years back. Here’s what I said for Paste, in my sort-of-review feature of the game:

Shadow Generations is the real star of the show here, and worth a look. While it has its own minor weaknesses—the overworld is something of a blend of Sonic Generations’ style with that of Sonic Frontiers, owing to both its visual design as well as its open-world approach—the levels themselves are fantastic. This is the best Sonic has been in ages, and it doesn’t even feature the titular blue hedgehog in anything besides a cameo. As fast and pleasing as Sonic Generations levels feel in its remastered form, Shadow Generations is faster, built from-the-ground-up for hardware that can handle Sega’s ambition, which stretched beyond what they produced for the former. There is so much going on here, constantly, and nearly everything was designed with the idea of keeping you moving and active, and not feeling like you’re on rails. There are pitfalls and instant deaths, yes, but the moments for these are so much more obvious than they were in Sonic Generations that the literal signposting for them is gone. Instead, most of the time when you fall and you weren’t already out in a huge, open space over a canyon or what have you, you simply end up on an alternate path where you can keep pressing forward. These levels are expertly paced and tightly designed in a way that makes you wonder why anyone ever seriously pursued the idea of “open-world Sonic” to begin with, when they could have been doing something like this instead.

I’m not what you’d call a Shadow the Hedgehog guy, and I’m real hit-or-miss with a lot of 3D Sonic, but Shadow Generations ruled.

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Bakeru

Developer: Good-Feel
Publisher: Spike Chunsoft
Switch, Windows
Sep. 3

Good-Feel has made a habit of contract work for Nintendo, and in fact did release a game in collaboration with them this year in Princess Peach: Showtime! (exclamation point theirs). On rare occasions, though, the developer — founded initially by former Konami developers — branches out and does something on their own through another publisher. Bakeru is one such project, and it’s one you know Good-Feel has been thinking about for a long time.

You see, Bakeru is a spiritual successor to the Goemon games — you know, The Legend of the Mystical Ninja, or Goemon’s Great Adventure, those games — and another in a now-long line of “former Konami employee integral to beloved series goes independent and makes Legally Distinct From ‘Sequel’ because Konami lost interest, anyway” titles. Castlevania to Bloodstained, Sukoiden to Eiyuden Chronicle, and now, Goemon to Bakeru. Like with Castlevania and Bloodstained, the series originator isn’t behind Bakeru, no, but Etsunobu Ebisu, founder of Good-Feel, would eventually become the lead on the Goemon games, and was involved enough early on that Goemon’s sidekick, Ebisumaru, is even modeled and named after him. He produced Bakeru, but several of their employees also worked on Goemon back at Konami, as well, including company chairman Shigeharu Umezaki.

You play as Bakeru, a tanuki with shapeshifting abilities who can appear as a human and wields a mystical drum that banishes evil spirits. Japan is full of evil spirits, you see, and they’re throwing a massive party across the entire country, one that’s going to send the country spiraling because it’s being hosted by evil spirits and demons. You’ll smack these foes around with the bachi — taiko drum sticks — you’ve got on hand, defeating and banishing them in the process, while also utilizing your shapeshifting to take on the form of various established heroes who, for one reason or another, aren’t in a position to help you out in your quest. Or simply don’t want to, why bother, you’ve got this covered, anyway.

There’s some wonderful, goofy humor throughout the game, which pops with vibrant color and sound throughout, and in traditional Goemon style, it doesn’t stick with just the one genre or attempt to make any kind of sense you’d consider consistent unless you’re familiar with what the games do. There are giant mech battles, for one. Where does a shape-shifting tanuki get a mech? Well, the giant teapot airship he flies around in turns into one, of course. There’s a robot (?) dog that serves as a race car or a jet ski or a ship for on-rails shoot ‘em up stages, depending, and while there are some pretty standard collectibles to find in this 3D platformer, there’s also a very not-standard one, too. You find little bits of trivia from a guy who looks like he’s dressed as a poo emoji, and the trivia has little to do with Bakeru, the game, except for that the trivia is sometimes location-based, since you are in Japan and all. Did you know that the food served on luxury liners leaving Japan is considered exported, so there’s no sales tax on it? Now you do! And you didn’t even have to play Bakeru to find out. (But you should play, anyway.)

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Parking Garage Rally Circuit

Developer: Walaber Entertainment
Publisher: Walaber Entertainment
Windows
Sep. 20

Playstation throwbacks are everywhere you look, but Sega Saturn throwbacks? Now that’s a rarity. That’s exactly what Parking Garage Rally Circuit is, however, with a visual design that’s very obviously Saturn-inspired if you know what that looks like — it’s different than what Playstation design looks like, in the same way that’s different from what Nintendo 64 design looks like, and so on — and it’s got that Sega racer level of fine-tuned difficulty, as well.

What makes it really stand out for me, however, is what it blended that Sega-style racer with, and that’s Mario Kart. Not in terms of items or the chaos that arises from them, but in terms of drifting: the constant, nearly Mario Kart DS levels of making drifting happen even when drifting shouldn’t be happening in order to shave fractions of a second off of your time. It’s got a multiplayer component, but you don’t even need to go there if you don’t want to, because the single-player experience isn’t a lonely one: you’re the only car on the track, always, but you’re also constantly racing ghosts. Post a better time than the ghosts, and get tougher ghosts for next time. Rinse, repeat, check the online leaderboards, and repeat again.

You can see, at every checkpoint, how far behind or ahead you are of these ghosts, which gives you an indication of how much every little action and decision you make is helping or hindering you, which informs how you’ll handle the next lap or similar track construction. It just feels incredible to play, with my only complaint being that, on occasion, the physics get a little wonky, especially on some jumps. It’s fine, though, it’s more that you just have to learn that oh, it turns out going at a breakneck pace before this jump is going to send you careening off track once you land, so… don’t.

The track design deserves a mention, as well: each one is a modified parking garage, or series of parking garages connected together into a track, and it makes them pretty different from the kinds of racers you’re used to that might feel even a little bit like this one to play. There aren’t a ton of tracks to choose from, no, but there’s more than there used to be in Saturn-era racers, for one, and two, the goal here is to master each track as much as possible on each of three difficulty levels, which are represented by more powerful cars that are faster, yes, but see the previous thing about losing control if you’re going too fast in the wrong places.

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Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Developer: Ubisoft Montpelier
Publisher: Ubisoft
Switch, Playstation 4/5, Xbox One/Series S|X, Windows, macOS
Jan. 18

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to have an Ubisoft game on this list this year — their whole vibe just isn’t my vibe these days — but their new go at Prince of Persia was fantastic. It took me some time to believe as much, because the combat system expects a little too much out of you early on for what you’re capable of doing, leading to a bunch of frustrating deaths, but between an eventual advanced in-game tutorial and difficulty sliders that let you customize everything in extreme ways, I eventually got over it. Plus, it’s better to think of this game as being more about movement than combat — you know how Metroid games feel incredible to play when you’re just flying through them at a million miles per hour, unhindered by anything, rattling off your various movement powers to keep it all going? They made an entire game out of that feeling, and built environmental platforming puzzles, optional and otherwise, out of it.

Once you get to that version of The Lost Crown, well, it becomes pretty clear how this ended up making it on my end-year list. A shame that it didn’t sell like wild, though, because Ubisoft already broke up the team and decided they didn’t want to do anything like this again. So I guess 2025’s list will be more like what I expected 2024’s to be, in that it’ll be sans Ubisoft.

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Unicorn Overlord

Developer: Vanillaware
Publisher: Sega
Switch, Playstation 4/5, Xbox One/Series S|X
March 8

Unicorn Overlord is, in some ways, the exact opposite of their previous title, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. That game was practically laser-focused on its story and narrative, which is not to say that gameplay was ignored, not by a longshot. But the gameplay was all in service of telling this story, and telling it in a specific way, to the point that the real-time strategy elements ended up being as central to that idea as the more adventure game parts that took up much more of the game — maybe that wasn’t apparent at first, but eventually, it all came together to show as much.

Unicorn Overlord, however, tilts the scales the other way. There’s story, yes, but it exists entirely in service of excuses to experience the gameplay systems. The story is aggressively fine, in that you’re not even going to remember all of the details of it shortly after playing or maybe even while playing, but that’s also fine. You’re not there for the story. You’re there to immediately crank the difficulty up to hard from the start so the game can punish you for your mistakes and you can learn from them, pushing you toward developing some intricate systems for handling various roadblocks in front of you. Roadblocks that will only get much taller and wider and harder to get by as you go.

If you’ve played Ogre Battle 64, you’ve got a sense of what you’re getting into here, as far as gameplay goes. You build up these various teams and move them around a real-time map, fighting battles with enemies you bump into on said map, except one key difference here is that the emphasis is far more on the specific makeup of you and your opponents’ teams. You could brute force your way through a bunch of Ogre Battle 64 without specific configurations, so long as you were strong enough, but in Unicorn Overlord, strength is just part of the equation. Everything is a very large game of rock-paper-scissors that’s slowly revealed to you. This kind of character can avoid attacks from anyone! Well, except this other new class of character introduced once you get comfortable with that. This class of character can block attacks, this kind will heal you, this kind will attack the front row, this kind the back, this kind ignores positioning when attacking, and so on and on.

Battles play out on their own, based on not just the characters and classes you include in a party, but also macros you can fine tune in a way that is difficult to believe. Like Final Fantasy XII’s gambit system, you’re building up an army of “if-then” statements. If your party’s health drops below 50 percent, this character who can attack or heal will always heal. Or you can choose 40 percent, or whatever percent, or switch it to an individual instead of party, and so on. You can do this for so much, but you won’t have to on even normal — the real sicko experience is on the harder difficulties, because it forces you to engage with all of the systems. And those systems? They’re the entire point.

Another way to put it is that Balatro somehow isn’t the game from 2024 that asks the most of you in terms of figuring out how every little thing will impact your run. Oh, and Unicorn Overlord is Vanillaware’s typically gorgeous experience, even “just” on the Switch.

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1000xResist

Developer: Sunset Visitor
Publisher: Fellow Traveler Games
Switch, Windows
May 9

What a brilliant game. Like the aforementioned 13 Sentinels, 1000xResist is narrative-heavy — it is an adventure game, after all — but it uses some non-traditional systems for the genre to push that story forward. In ways that expose some of the emptiness behind the design of some of 2024’s AAA games, even. It feels like it should be an action-adventure game, since you control a character from a third-person perspective and spend your time navigating various environments, even solving some environmental puzzles, but those puzzles are also all, for the most part, about exploration and conversation. The method of navigation might differ from an Ace Attorney or a SCUMM engine game, but this is the same family as those.

It also stands out as media that didn’t memory-hole the COVID-19 pandemic, to use the words of Unwinnable’s Emily Price from earlier this year:

The game’s creative director Remy Siu said that the team wanted to give players a sense of familiarity when they encountered the Occupant disease. “[The pandemic] was something we all went through. That’s pretty rare. To say that almost every human on this planet went through this together at the same time.” Another goal was to encourage players not just to recognize the pandemic, but to remember it. “Our hope was to be able to give space for people to think about those things again, now with a bit of distance. We knew probably (and desperately hoped) that by the time 1000xRESIST released, things would have improved regarding survival outcomes. So, it would come as a reminder – Hey! We went through this thing together. We’re maybe still going through it. We maybe haven’t even really come to understand the fallout. Let’s not forget it happened, even though we just want to ‘get back to it.’ How do we reconcile the memories that we had before, to the memories we are making now (if we can at all)?”

I don’t have 1000xResist here because it covers an important topic, though, or at least not entirely because of that. 1000xResist is one of my favorite games of 2024 because I couldn’t pry myself away from it, because the tale it was telling was so engrossing, so moving, so spectacularly thought out, that even as I started to see how it was playing out before it could tell me, I didn’t mind one bit. I love an adventure game, and 1000xResist is a gripping, instant classic of the genre, one you owe yourself the time with.

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Honorable Mentions

Gimmick 2: As I put it when reviewing Gimmick 2 this fall:

In order to successfully devise and implement a strategy for a given challenge, you need to understand Gimmick! 2’s physics. For one, there’s no run button: you must create all of the momentum for jumps and running yourself by heading downhill, or launching yourself off of your star, the riding of which is a trick to figure out all its own, given you have to catch it on the rebound after it’s bounced off an obstacle. You have to understand where this star is going to go after you charge it and throw it — where it will go based on what it’s going to hit, where it will go depending on your height when you release it, whether you throw it from a standing position or jumping forward in the air, or as you fly down from a high above platform. You need to use the star to hit switches, to insert it into star-shaped symbols in order to create platforms that will only exist as long as the star is inserted — meaning that, should you need to use the star again while you’re on one of those platforms, you’re going to have to do without or topple below. It’s the only way you have of defeating enemies, some of which need to be struck multiple times, and since it doesn’t fire off in a straight line — it’s always bouncing until it comes to a stop — even the act of defeating a basic enemy is something that requires thought.

Nine Sols: Now here’s a game that probably could have made the main list if only I’d gotten further into it, but alas, I didn’t start playing until it hit Game Pass, and was unexpectedly interrupted by Indiana Jones and the Great Circle before I could get more than a few hours in. What I played, though, was compelling both from a gameplay and exploration perspective, as well as narratively: it’s not often I’m interested in what’s going on in a pathfinder-style game outside of exploration and how it feels to move around, but Nine Sols has me intrigued on the story side. It helps that, while the game expects quite a bit from you on the combat side, you can also turn things down (but not back up, unlike The Lost Crown) if you’re more interested in the tale it’s telling than how many times you can block and counter enemy attacks.

Antonblast: Another that I just haven’t spent enough time with yet, but I’ve played enough to know that it (1) understands what made the Wario Land games it’s so heavily and obviously inspired by work and (2) like last year’s Pizza Tower, has plenty of its own things to say about how these games should be. You have to race back after the halfway point as levels fall apart around you, making it to the exit before the failure point, but you’re also heavily concerned with exploration and point scoring and explosions. So many explosions. Blast is right there in the name, and it doesn’t fail to deliver, either.

Mirage Feathers: An easy recommendation if you’re into classic super scaler style games like Space Harrier or After Burner, to the point that, while playing it, I posted something along the lines of “Mirage Feathers does a really good job of answering the question of ‘What if Space Harrier was also After Burner?’” It’s just pure action… well, once you get past the surprisingly lengthy prologue that sets up the relationship between the game’s central characters. After that, though, it’s high-speed super scaler-style shooter fun, with incessant waves of enemies, special attacks, and basically never letting go of the fire button if you know what’s good for you.

Doronko Wanko: Bandai Namco decided to release a game where you play as a little adorable pomeranian whose only goal in life is to completely ruin their owner’s house. Roll around in mud, track it everywhere, knock stuff over, just mess that put-together house up. If Katamari Damacy has you essentially picking everything up, Doronko Wanko is the opposite. You’ll only spend about 30 minutes to an hour playing until you’ve done everything there is to do, but there’s something very satisfying about that time. You start out with mud on you, but you can also cover yourself in whatever liquids and substances you find in spillable containers throughout the house — you can mess up what needs to be messed up and find your way to the game’s ending in a hurry, but each room also has badges you can receive for creative filthing up, which gives you some reason to experiment beyond “I wonder what happens if I do this.” It’s fun, it’s free, and you get to mess things up without consequence. What more can you ask for?

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