Jay Weaver’s Favourite Games From His Favourite Gaming Year Were About How It All Sucks, Actually | Winter Spectacular 2024
2023 left a lot of weight on the video game industry, and 2024 is going to leave a lot more weight on the video game industry – especially so as it carves onward into another year, understaffed and perpetually growing without stability. Subsequently, it feels only logical that a lot of the experiences produced during the last year embody cynicism. What contradicts this and poses some confusion – perhaps just to me but hopefully others too – is that I liked a lot of experiences that came out from this last year, a lot more than other years.
Part of this can be attributed to how I am increasingly more open-minded than my prior self, aware of more games than just the AAA industry’s newest wallet drains, and I finally have a laptop with good enough specifications to justify perusing Steam’s latest releases. Also, importantly, there has been a natural and constant increase in the number of brilliant new creatives creating games.
Unbeknownst to me is whether today sucks, as many of my favourite games insinuated. Intended or not, insinuation is one thing, and my interpretation is another.
Wrong Organ’s Mouthwashing was released in September this year and is likely to become my favourite release from this year as it decisively and thematically follows from How Fish Is Made (Wrong Organ, 2022) – one of my favourite games of all time. The foremost question to Mouthwashing is deciphering where the line should be drawn as to how much our mistakes make us monsters. The foremost issue suggested by Mouthwashing that deconstructs this question, what rots its significance and fouls the conversation: capitalism, the present-day landscape, and class infrastructure make us monsters. The meaning we assign ourselves doesn’t matter when it can’t materialise into consequence beyond a nine-to-five.
It has become routine to think about this moment every couple hours or so since playing Mouthwashing for the first time
Swansea, the character I related to the most from the game – depressingly, I suppose – foretold his decline and strove for change. In the game’s best moment, he makes it clear that after years of being a drunkard, years of stagnation, a “vision of [his] bloated body in some ditch” is what pushes him to be productive, enter the life of a blue-collar, and stagnate into capitalism instead.
This May, Sunset Visitor released 1000xResist, a game about a lot. Another favourite of mine – maybe of all time but time will tell – 1000xResist tells the stories of alien encounters, school life, COVID-19, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests to explore the impact and withstanding of our memory, and to capture our mortality in its most cosmically insignificant and vulnerable state. Reminiscent of the themes of Charlie Kaufman’s filmography – more media that connected with me personally – the game proposed that truth exists predominantly in thoughts, hence it’s the societal dementia of thought that threatens the permanence of our actions and their consequences.
Shadows of the Erdtree is the paid expansion to Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware, that released in June of this year and has since been nominated for Geoff Keighley’s esteemed Game of the Year. In the last few years, it has begun to feel like From Software has a reserved spot for at least one category nomination per annual The Game Awards (TGA). This isn’t underserved, obviously, but it does oft feel like the studio won’t go a year without reminding me that I’m existentially unimportant, making all the wrong choices at any given stage of my life, and really – really – bad at video games. Beyond this, Shadows of the Erdtree’s TGA nomination is strange as the possibility was proposed of 2024’s GOTY requiring you to pay for and play over a hundred hours of 2022’s GOTY before becoming a playable and justifiable purchase.
Dragon Dogma 2’s poorly received microtransactions all felt like they were deliberate exclusions added back last minute to capture vulnerable players who disliked the game’s intentional abrasiveness
From March and July of this year, Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Sandlot’s Earth Defense Force 6 both shy their best moments hours into the game hidden from the gaming public – something I theorise is at least partly responsible for their mixed critical receptions. Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t actually start until around thirty to sixty hours of playtime, assuming the correct side quest has been completed prior, after achieving a secret ending and seeing the game's proper title card appear for the first time. Entering the Unmoored World after attempting suicide during the game’s final boss sends we the player into a ‘rogue-like’ of sorts. Earth Defense Force 6, every five to ten hours or so, sends we the player into the next entry in the franchise, with a new user interface, higher stakes, and larger bugs - that’s right, you make a headstart on EDF 7. Earth Defense Force 6 frequently insinuates that it is not good enough for the player of 2024 just to be EDF 6, it has to be more, and Dragon’s Dogma 2 believes that it is too much.
Mossmouth’s UFO 50 from September and Digital Eclipse’s Tetris Forever from November both feel like games about how the past was better than today. UFO 50 reflects positively on the massive leaps and bounds made forward by technology before the 2000s – progression that feels more like small jumps and hops today – and it reflects positively on how fascinating the history of game development was at this time. Meanwhile, Tetris Forever spotlights the mechanical purity of Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov, 1984), a game that feels like it never needs to change and can never be made again.
Video games aren’t the only type of media that Turbo Kid shows a great deal of appreciation for
Commiserating with the cynicism that the games of 2024 tried to project onto me, enlightenment eventually struck. Outerminds Inc.’s Turbo Kid from April of this year is an excellent ‘Metroidvania’ that captures and projects how its many inspirations from past decades form an overall better and constructive experience today – it would also be indubitably correct in this philosophy, actually.
Mullet Madjack (HAMMER95, 2024) was a game about how the dopamine loops of today’s social media are unhealthy and perpetuate negative feedback cycles. Despite this, it gave me some pretty good dopamine, a great soundtrack to write this piece to, and I knew exactly when to stop playing. Mech Builder (Don Pachi, 2024) reminded me that I was often in dire need of escapism this year, but it did provide good escapism when I wanted. Tetris Forever highlighted how gaming history still has many stories that are yet to be told, and it cemented Tetris as a game that will exist forever, immortalising its mechanical purity. UFO 50, an excellent game in innumerable regards, somehow replicated the mechanical purity of Tetris in all forty-nine of its games – Barbuta (UFO Soft, 1982) does not exist, it is only an experience I reflect on with equal hate and love. Earth Defence Force 6 and Dragon’s Dogma 2 both objectively released this year and are excellent experiences from their first hours to their eightieths. 1000xResist is an experience that I will continue to reflect on for much of the future as it stays in my memory for as long as I exist, and that’s enough resonance to be important to me.
My truest thoughts that theorised on my present and future this last year developed into a vision of my body in some ditch, still with a blue-collar job in retail and stagnation behind me. Motivated with a keyboard under my hands, I hope that I can continue to write and produce, stagnating into a job that I can be content with instead. I intend to change enough now that if nothing else changes in the future, I’ll be happy. 2025 likely won’t be my favourite year in gaming – I need to find a career and finish my dissertation – but if the industry continues on its current path, then 2026 will become my new favourite gaming year, then 2027, then 2000 after I finally experience Jet Set Radio (Smilebit) and Majora’s Mask (Nintendo) to add to my time with Deus Ex (Ion Storm) and Baldur’s Gate 2 (BioWare), then 2028 and so on.
UFO 50 opening with Barbuta felt like how Sekiro opened with the Chained Ogre or how Game of Thrones starts with incest - I understand and appreciate it in retrospect but boy, that was a scary start
As for Shadows of the Erdtree, I’m just glad that FromSoftware is still developing masterful arthouse experiences with high visibility year after year that I get to struggle with for multiple months at a time – even if I can’t agree with the expansion’s GOTY nomination.
Here’s to hoping that many more of my favourite games will release in my future favourite gaming years. Here’s to hoping that I can enjoy many more experiences about how the present and future suck. Here’s to hoping that Sony doesn’t purchase FromSoftware.
