Unlike 2023's holy ghost story which I think was ultimately a failure (though it means more than I can possibly express that there are people for whom it did work for and reach), 2024 is a game where I worked on a game I remain proud of! It's not that there are things I wouldn't do differently, butt given the circumstances of it being a game jam game I'm so proud of what we achieved in such a short time. And "We" really is the key word here: this would be frankly nothing without the rest of the team: Cone's music, Vis' art, Gyudemen's logo, and of course, my co-writer Squigglydot, all transformed this from gundam fanfic into something I think - mostly - works. They did incredible work and I'm so proud to have worked with them.

As ever, some of the best gaming to be had in 2023 was not in Video form, but in Board form. I've long felt that any analysis of Games that explicitly excludes Sport, Table, and Folk games is doomed to an incomplete at best understanding of the medium, and maybe the larger failure of the Backloggd oeuvre is partly rooted in it's laser focus on video games to the exclusion of all else. This year I had tremendous fun with Twilight Imperium, Chinatown, Decrypto, Arkham Horror the Card Game, the Final Fantasy TCG, Ra, Sheriff of Nottingham, and a whole bunch of itch.io solo print-and-play RPGs. It's a rich medium! Maybe 2024 is the time to check it out?

EXCLUSIVE: WORLD'S BIGGEST MORROWIND FAN FINALLY PLAYS MORROWIND

A game that has enticed for years but has always repelled me in the moment, 2023 was the year I finally saw through the main quest of Morrowind. And I enjoyed it! Undoubtedly the most cohesive Bethesda game to such an extent that it increasingly reads like a total anomaly: Starfield came in for a bit of a kicking this year for it's procgen world and radiant quests but it's worth remembering that Daggerfall had those too: in many ways the Bethesda mode has always been generative rather than hand-crafted, aiming to produce lavish environs for you to do Chat-GPT video gaming inside for as long as you so wish. It's just that so many of the games have had conter-impulses inside them that push against their anonymity, until now, I suppose. Morrowind is the exception, one where the dream of a procedurally generated world was abandoned for one made by human hands, with real history, real borders, and real limitations. I don't think I'm actually going to become a Morrowind Person, but certainly, Morrowind offered me what I think I really want from a game: memories that gild themselves as time goes by.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms was always waiting for me to fall in love with it, I think. It has Cao Cao after all - the literal blueprint for one of my all time favorite types of guy, the super-genius anime mastermind who's actually a complete tool and idiot. Cao Cao ran so Lelouch and Light Yagami could walk, etc etc. I think I just needed a way in, and Total War Three Kingdoms, by offering a character-focused spin on Total War that emphasized the romantic superhuman feats of the legendary novel, accomplished that with aplomb, making what is, to me, easily the best Total War ever made and a game I happily plowed over 60 hours into over two months, and will likely put many more into over the coming year.

Probably the most I've enjoyed a Fromsoft game since Dark Souls II or Bloodborne, and honestly I'm just so happy to see them get out of that mold, after Elden Ring felt so much like a dead end. Ultimately this isn't that much more fresh than Elden Ring was - this cheerily lifts from works like Char's Counterattack with reckless abandon - but unlike Elden Ring and very much like the original Dark Souls, it puts the effort in to make it's influences and origins feel fresh and engaging, to explore coherently why these ideas still resonate, rather than simply operate within them. My bias towards mech fiction undoubtedly helps my feelings towards it - there's a kind of shallow engagement I found in how many times I could point my finger to the screen at a moment, image, or robot lifted straight from the Universal Century - but there's enough here to make ACVI still feel like it's own thing, and From hasn't really made a game like that in a very long time. Really really enjoyed this.

"Go, then. There are other worlds than these."

Akitoshi Kawazu is plainly one of the unsung kings of game design. While Final Fantasy reinvents itself narratively and aesthetically over and over again, his SaGa series - along with The Last Remnant, which is something of an unofficial SaGa game imo and is also very good - quietly has made far more radical shifts in gameplay with each installment, imagining a far different world of the JRPG, one that is narratively light but full of cavernous systems that the player must learn to exist alongside rather than master, and the freedom to explore their worlds and stories and systems to an extent that puts even modern open world games to shame. And it all started here: with a game astonishes with the sheer volume of imagination spilling out of it's tiny game boy cartridge, an early work of video game metafiction and deconstruction that still works, provided you are willing to invest yourself in it.

SaGa isn't my favorite series, but it's maybe the one that makes me love video games the very most. Magical from word go.

This is a real cheat, because this is not new to me: I've played Mask of the Betrayer twice before, and it's left a huge impact on me both times. But playing it again after petering out of Baldur's Gate 3 after I finished its first act really demonstrated what a special game this is. It's still a D&D game, but it pushes itself up against the fringes of what a D&D game set in the Forgotten Realms can do and be, and tells a story that is about what it means to push up against the possibility of the world that we live in. The story of a doomed crusade against a foundational injustice of the world that might never be undone remains so powerful, and when you're standing on the Fugue plane with an angel, a hagspawn, a bear god, and a red wizard with multiple bodies, minds, and souls, siegeing the gates of heaven itself, you wonder why games insist on taking us back to the Sword Coast again and again and again to fight evil cults and mindflayers. Baldur's Gate 3 is not a bad game, but it's one so bereft of imagination and wonder that Mask of the Betrayer effortlessly inspires in me.

Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have to be the way that it is. Role-playing games don't have to be the way that you think they have to be. The world doesn't have to be the way that it is. It can be better.

I played 90 hours of Street Fighter 6 this year, which might not seem like a lot, but it's a lot for me. I don't know if I'll ever be a fighting game person, but SF6 really brought me into it with it's supremely confident presentation and efforts to bring the social elements of local play into the online space. I don't want to go on for too long about it, because frankly given my lack of experience here I think anything I write of why I love SF6 would read more like talking broadly about the appeal of fighting games rather than this game in particular, and I'm frustrated enough by how many Baldur's Gate 3 pieces feel like that to know that it's not something I want to subject people to. I'll leave that one to the experts. Just know that I loved this a lot, I loved spending time getting my ass beat in lobbies, and I'm a Juri kinnie now. I know! Embarrassing.

Don't really want to talk too much about this one, I'm just delighted that after bouncing off so many others, I finally have a fucked-up visual novel to be exceedingly Normal about. Maybe the best late title card in video games? Loooove this one and am very excited to get to the DLC!

Self-evidently brilliant to such an extent that to talk about it even a little feels like taking something away from it. Just play it right now. Don't look at anything, not even the store page, which gives too much away. It's low on cost and low on time and more than worth what you have to give it on both counts.

My Andreas was a bookworm. It seemed right, you know? When I play RPGs, I usually crank up the Intelligence/Wisdom stats, not just because I enjoy the fantasy of being socially capable, but also because talking well solves 50% of the interactions in much of these games. So, someone who knew a lot seemed like the way to go. Except, it wasn't. Sure, being a bookworm came in handy sometimes. But more often it didn't. It annoyed people when Andreas spoke in quotes and words they didn't recognize or understand, the way he flaunted his knowledge without caring. It soured some of Andreas' interactions, left him unable to convince people when perhaps he could. I realized that if I wanted to do right, then I would have to do right, not simply speak right. Hearts cannot turn with a word in a right place and a right time, only acts can do that. Faith, and doing unto others, as I would have done to me.

I've already waxed lyrical on this plenty in my review, which I still think is pretty good. But I just can't stop thinking about Final Fantasy Type-0. It has remained in my mind and grew within it each passing month of 2023. It's so rare to find a game that just feels like it was made for you, to speak in your language and reach you in ways that it, frankly and evidently, utterly fails to do for seemingly anybody else. So often it feels like the complaints I have for something is that it is utterly safe, without any difficulties or edges, and also without anything to hold onto. Type-0 is nothing but friction, nothing but difficulty: it's a game that challenges at every turn - in gameplay, in narrative coherency, but one which uses that to find beautiful meaning in so many of it's decisions. In a world where so many games feel fit to a template, Type-0 feels purposeful at almost every step, and those steps march towards a story that is crushingly sad in a way I cannot get enough of.
Unloved, forgotten. But I remember it. And I am still here.