A Few Of Chris Schilling's Favourite Things From The Year | Winter Spectacular 2024
Good Things For Bad Times
If you’re in or adjacent to the games industry – or the games media industry – then chances are, unless you developed or published Balatro, you’ve not had a great year. On a global level, it’s been pretty disastrous for reasons I’m sure I don’t need to go into. On a personal level, it’s been pretty disastrous for reasons I don’t really want to go into. Not least since I’ve recently been trying a different method for dealing with difficult times. If I’m struggling, then rather than spend too much time venting or wallowing I’ll make an effort to put something positive into the world — be it a supportive message to an online acquaintance or a donation to charity, for instance — as if that might go a small way to redressing some sort of karmic imbalance. It might even be just an act of self-care: I’ve found pleasure in expanding my cooking and baking repertoire (spaghetti all’assassina, where have you been all my life?) and I’ve also developed a love for a particular brand of artisanal soaps. Hey, if nothing else, I’ll finish 2024 smelling better than I did when it began.
Anyway. The point being, when Lexi Luddy kindly invited me to write something for startmenu’s Winter Spectacular — and you’d better believe I’m keen to celebrate the end of this particular 12 months — I quickly realised that the best thing to do to mark the occasion would be to celebrate some of the videogame things I most enjoyed this year. A bog-standard GOTY list simply wouldn’t do, I reckoned, and only partly because I think I still have an invite to publish such a thing elsewhere. Instead, I figured I’d pick a selection of the gaming moments that made 2024 just about tolerable. Because, however challenging things get, there is always a spark of joy to be found somewhere. We just have to be ready to look for it.
Flock: Nature Is Healing
Earlier this year I was summoned to hospital for what should have been a routine procedure. Several hours later, I was in A&E with my wife, calmly suggesting — a life of catastrophising having granted me a beatific serenity in emergency situations — that she alert the triage nurse since I was about to black out from loss of blood. Five days and five sleepless nights later, I came home, exhausted and, thanks to being discharged before I could have a third transfusion, newly anaemic. (Like I said, not my favourite year of all time.) I wasn’t really compos mentis enough to play anything, or so I thought. But Hollow Ponds’ freshly minted creature collector was there for me, its comfortingly tranquil vibe proving the ideal medicine for my blancmange-like brain.
This might sound like a stinging indictment: The Perfect Game To Play When You’re Incapable Of Coherent Thought. But God love Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg and writer Pip Warr and everyone else who made this thing because its colourful, friendly, big-hearted ambiance was the equivalent of one of the comfy scarves you unlock after gathering up enough of the balloon-animal beasts that populate its world. To don my critics’ cap for a moment, I think it’s further proof – following the equally cosy hug that is Paradise Marsh – that magical realism, as opposed to photorealism, is how you most effectively capture the wonder of the natural world. This is what it really feels like when you’re walking in the woods and you close your eyes and take a deep breath and properly lose yourself in your surroundings. Flock probably won’t win any awards, but it was there for me when I most needed it and for that I will treasure it forever.
Crow Country: Parkstrife!
A couple of years ago, I spoke to SFB Games about what was then something of a sideline. The studio was beavering away on a new Detective Grimoire game — since revealed as The Mermaid Mask — but during lockdown, creative director Adam Vian had decided to pursue a retro-styled survival horror project, one that had evidently begun to grow beyond its original scope. The result might be the most purely entertaining thing I’ve played all year — at once indebted to PSone-era frightfests but built with a level of care and craft in its script and puzzle design that puts it beyond anything from that time. There’s a particular type of enemy that looks like a melted robot baby and it’s fucking horrible, but I think my favourite bit is one of those sequences where the joy is in the anticipation of it all kicking off: the kind where genre-savvy players will instinctively know exactly what is going to happen and start giggling and squirming in advance. It’s the kind of game that has people saying “They really do make ‘em like they used to” but that’s not quite true. These days, they make ‘em better still.
Lorelei And The Laser Eyes: Past, Remastered
I’ve purposely restricted myself to one entry per game because otherwise Simogo’s mesmerising puzzler would take up at least five spots here. I could talk about its soundtrack, which brought me close to tears on two occasions. I could talk about the moment it fully embraces its survival-horror influences and a space that was unsettling but safe becomes genuinely dangerous. I could talk about its dazzling endgame, a multi-part riddle involving a supercomputer and what amounts to an interactive recap that forms arguably the year’s finest climax. I could talk about its mastery of perspective. I could talk about its playful and hilarious Resident Evil-referencing jumpscare. But instead I’m going to talk about a tiny flourish that is emblematic of everything good about Simogo’s ninth full release. It comes at the start, when your protagonist is invited to walk down a woodland path to the gates of the Hotel Letztes Jahr, the labyrinthine setting for much of the game. But you can delay your arrival if you like, and climb back into the driver’s seat to listen to the radio. Turn it on, and you’re treated to one of a number of remixed versions of songs from Simogo’s back catalogue. Indulgent? Possibly. Irresistible? Indubitably.
Xenosphere: Surprise!
Ideally, you should just play this free game from Ynglet and Knytt creator Nifflas without reading a single thing about it. Arriving on the cusp of my final Edge deadline, I decided to play it purely as a fan of its makers’ work, even if it looked like a fairly standard momentum-based platformer. In hindsight, I should have known Nifflas would have a trick up his sleeve, but there was no way I could have predicted where it would end up. I really don’t want to say more than that because its genius lies in the way it completely upends your expectations, other than to congratulate everyone involved (not least 1Neila1, who supplies the game’s art and…well, you’ll see). Xenosphere came into my life at a particularly bittersweet moment: I was tired and burned out, yet I found it wholly reinvigorating. Here, when I needed it most, was a reminder of why I decided to write about video games in the first place.
UFO 50: You’ll Believe A Tank Can Fly
When I first started writing about games, I set up a website where we’d award two review scores: a ‘head’ score and a ‘heart’ score. It made a kind of sense at the time, when game reviews still felt a bit more like product reviews and were scored accordingly. I can’t remember which particular game inspired it – if there even was one – but the idea was that sometimes you play something that you know is deeply flawed but you still kind of love it anyway, and sometimes you come across a game where you can recognise its many qualities but somehow it rubs you up the wrong way.
All of which is a slightly long-winded way of saying that if I allowed my head to overrule my heart, UFO 50 would be my game of the year (and even if I didn’t, it’d be top three). Mossmouth’s retro-themed compendium, built around a fictional 1980s console and the group of pioneering designers who made all its games, is an astonishing accomplishment – not least for the way it tells a story through that software. Over 50 games we see these game-makers find ways around the hardware limitations that make the ‘later’ titles more sophisticated, and witness evolutions in game design that feel both true to the time and ahead of it. If most of my favourites arrive in the console’s later years, there’s one in the first two rows that stands out. Warptank is one of those classically literal game titles: you’re a tank that can warp from floor to ceiling and back at the push of a button. In that sense, it’s a bit like a vehicular take on Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV, as you make your way through bite-sized sectors as efficiently as possible. It’s instantly graspable, wonderfully smart and economical in its design, and its soundtrack is fantastic.
Cars: April fuel
The most exasperating day of the year for anyone remotely invested in games (and particularly those who write about them) surely has to be the 1st of April. Throughout the day, studios will often ‘announce’ fake games and related products that, in many cases, seem genuinely interesting. The result is either pointless or disappointing: by now, most people know not to pay such reveals any mind, and the few that forget the date and are fooled invariably find it more frustrating than fun. There are, however, exceptions: this year saw Playables (aka Mario von Rickenbach and Michael Frei) release a vehicular spin on their fascinating interactive animation Kids. Cars offers up many of the same vignettes, but simply replacing crowds of soft figures with fleets of hard-edged automobiles gives it an altogether different, and palpably darker, feel. Worth 10 minutes of anyone’s time, I reckon, and the rare April Fools’ Day trick that’s more like a treat.
Children Of The Sun: The Sound Of Violence
I have played better games this year than René Rother’s tale of a telekinetic sniper who only has a single bullet to take bloody revenge on the cult to which she once belonged (mate, just pack a full mag next time). But when I close my eyes and tune the real world out it’s the one I can still hear. Which says a lot when it has to compete with these colours: an aggressively oversaturated palette that feels like the visual equivalent of being punched in the face and having a laser pen aimed directly at your retinas when you stumble groggily back to your feet. Maybe it’s the repetition that ensures its sounds lodge in your brain. Rare is the mission that you complete first time, and even if you do take out all the cultists in one go (each kill granting you the chance to redirect your lone round toward another skull or heart or crotchal region) there’s an optional objective — hinted at by the level name — and leaderboards to tempt you back. In any case, the plucked bass guitar as you circle an encampment to find the perfect spot to fire from, and the drumsticks nervily tapping the ride cymbal, and the squall of feedback as your guided missile finds its final resting place and its path is plotted out from above: these are all permanently embedded in my brain, as deeply as a bullet to the head.
Phoenix Springs: Inland Empire
Calligram Studio’s noir-soaked adventure is one of at least two games I’ve played this year (the other being the deservedly award-winning detective visual novella No Case Should Remain Unsolved) that understand that the inner workings of the human brain are really fucking weird. It’s nice to see developers properly thinking about this stuff: a lot of video games tend to assume that our thoughts are neatly arranged and compartmentalised, when really we’re making mad, abstract connections between the tangible and intangible all the time.
To get reductive about it, Phoenix Springs is a point-and-click adventure, after a fashion. But as the taciturn Iris investigates her brother’s disappearance, she doesn’t gather up objects from a scene so much as thoughts — and so your job feels less like trying to interpret the kind of game logic that wants you to USE one thing ON another as pulling red threads between pins on a kind of cerebral evidence board. It’s a smart way of acclimatising you to a new way of processing ideas before the story goes full David Lynch. And while that has seemingly put off as many as it has drawn in, there’s something to be said for a game that makes an effort to rethink how we think.
Animal Well: Creature Comforts
This year, I have learned never to describe a game as a solo project, since someone somewhere will invariably take the hump with you — citing the fact that external collaborators, whether it be publishers or localisation teams, or marketers, or whoever, were involved in some small way with the process that eventually got it into the hands of players.
Billy Basso might have spent several years making Animal Well on his own, then, but I feel duty-bound to say that, strictly speaking, it is not a solo project. Nevertheless, it clearly has the spirit of one: this is a singular game that feels like the product of one person’s imagination. And the corollary of that is that, while it’s primarily a singleplayer adventure, the eponymous well, with its myriad secrets and mysteries, is a place that’s best tackled communally. I vividly recall being envious of stories about the collective of critics that amassed around Dark Souls in the run-up to its release, the tales of camaraderie that emerged as a result of a group of people helping one another figure out its idiosyncrasies. I had already played a good chunk of Animal Well before anyone else got their hands on it, thanks to an early preview build that had been incrementally updated over time (each patch deleting my previous save, effectively turning it into a Roguelike of sorts). So it was a genuine thrill to both aid passage to those who had hit roadblocks, and also to marvel at how my fellow reviewers caught up and eventually overtook me. Then came the rather chastening chaser, as the game’s release date arrived and those who remained in the reviewer Discord were by turns amused and aghast at how quickly players made discoveries it had collectively taken us weeks to work out. Still, it’s undoubtedly one of the most memorable experiences I’ve ever had reviewing a game.
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