My Favorite Games of 2024 — Dinaburg Writes

I’m certain that somewhere in the depths of either the MIT or NYU Press’ back catalogues, there’s a book about why games are fun. Whatever conclusion is reached, that secret ingredient didn’t make the translation from Suikoden, one of my favorite RPGs of all time, to Eiyuden Chronicles, the homage/spiritual sequel that was crowdfunded and released this year.

I even liked Eiyuden Chronicles: Uprising, which was a little side-scrolling action-platformer set in the world of the about-to-be-released Eiyuden. The main game itself might get better, but I have no drive to play beyond what I already did; It felt like I was using the WASD keys to pilot an adobe flash game or emulated SegaCD RPG. Watching your little guy slide around the screen was simply not pleasant, the auto-battle prioritizes the lens moves which slows everything to.a crawl, and the music was not instantly iconic like Suikoden’s was. Truly the greatest heartbreak of 2024.

On the other side of the spectrum, Stray Gods exists. It was among the smaller calm-down games I picked up early in 2024 after finishing the interminable Chapter 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3 in early February (savvy readers of My Favorite Games 2023 will note that I wrote a lot about BG3 Chapters 1 and 2 and nothing about Chapter 3. That is because I had just started chapter 3 while writing up my list. It is…not very good.).

Stray Gods is very much like an early 2010s Telltale Walking Dead game: functionally, a Choose Your Own Adventure book with moving images. The story has you follow Grace, a cool girl that becomes a Greek Muse: you make a few choices, get to hear a few Broadway-style songs, just generally vibe with a Hellenistic pantheon murder-mystery. Very fun characters, really nice singing, relatively strong illusion of choice (that I will not break because I will probably never play it again). What I liked about it the most is that Grace has a series of “stances” that translate roughly into musical styles—aggressive Rock, calmer Soliloquizing—that are Mass Effect color-coded but you can, instead of the Bioware “Say what each character wants to hear to accrue ‘friendship meter’ with them, ” hold Grace to a particular vibe and she’ll do better or worse at interactions without one of them being a failstate.

Almost like you’re telling your own roleplaying story—my favorite thing! Good work, Stray Gods!

Hey, it’s Grace and her friend what died (spoiler?)

Street Fighter 6 also finally hit a price-point where I could jump in (and cross-up), but I think I’ll end up with more time in the Marvel vs. Capcom Collection throughout 2025.

After the bonkers gameplay hours of so many heavy hitters in 2023, I spent my spare time less on videogames this year. Don’t fret, though—a year is a long time, and I still found a solid handful of titles incredibly compelling. I truly didn’t play much beyond what made the list itself, though, and even the game I played the most this year was “only” fifty hours.

One note: I did sink some time into Duolingo, and I mention this in a videogame-related setting only to scorn it. Whoever has tried to “gameify” (barf x10) that app is…bad…at…it. Like, they simply don’t understand why people play games. And this is coming from me, a person who just admitted that it is hard to articulate why Suikoden is fun and Eiyuden is not.

I actually like the app. I like the idea of a little universe of characters, I like the random off-beat phrases to help you remember structure (how many French people have pet owls?), I like the bizarreness of Duo and their sense of marketing whimsy. But any aspect that has “videogame” injected into it is bad. Take the hot streaks. If you, like me, use any sort of facebook time to see what your parents, older siblings, or people you went to high school with but don’t care enough about to actually talk to are doing, you’ve seen someone somewhere post a six-hundred-day duolingo streak. I get it: from the app’s perspective, motivating someone to do a little bit of practice every day is a better way to help them learn a language; constant engagement keeps you from dropping the habit of opening Duolingo; its nice to brag about small, attainable goals.

But jeez, bird—you hand out streak freezes like they’re candy on Halloween. Sincerely, if your streak doesn’t break when you don’t practice, what’s the point? I agree you don’t want people to get discouraged or feel “punished” if their life takes them away from their German lesson, but the streaks don’t actually do anything. You don’t get more points on the leaderboard. You don’t have a gem-earning multiplier. It doesn’t give you more challenging lessons, or open up different types of learning (don’t even get me started in locking some of the learning varietals behind the MAX and SUPER paywalls).

Hey, here’s an actual gameplay suggestion that took me 30 seconds to think of—when you’re on a hotstreak, Duo looks like a firebird. What’s another mythological conception of firebird? Phoenix. Phoenixes come back to life. Using up your streak by bringing you “back” after running out of hearts is dumb, but making your streak days the amount of maximum hearts you can accrue is cool. Phoenix is life. You have 600 days? You can store up to 600 hearts. Anyone with a 100-day streak deserves that many tries to get their foreign-language sentencing correct.

There are already other ways to get more hearts—watch ads, pay-to-win, simply wait, do a practice—so it doesn’t break any aspect of the app. You can already pay for unlimited heats so being able to store a lot doesn’t hurt anything from a “balance” aspect. There’s an incentive to practice every day beyond “bird is red.” Just, like, either gameify the app in a way that actually makes it even a little bit of a game or don’t do it at all, please.

Anyway, onto some games that are fun.

5. Star Wars Jedi Fallen order

the game did well at capturing the Star Wars vibe

I am as surprised as anyone that a Star Wars game is on my list ever, let alone in 2024. Of the two “throwback” games I picked up for very cheap this year, Fallen Order was very fun. Also, I beat the whole game, which surprised me more. It don’t think the game was long enough to internalize the punctuation in the title, however.

The gist? You’re running around some planets, unlocking powers and abilities and doors Super Metroid style, playing with a lightsaber and being strong and fun and cool. Literally that’s it. You get to change your clothes, and sometimes the game wants you to pay real money for different clothing colors, but you don’t need to, so why would you?

JEDI: FO made me think a lot about game difficulty options. I start most things on “hard” for a very specific reason—if you need to prioritize making your character survive, sometimes you can’t choose to “do it all.” Put another way, if you’re squeaking your way through the world then it would be a lot more challenging to delve deeply into the “harder” zones to fish up some advanced items or sequence-break. If you get to choose your power-ups, harder difficulties sometime force you to emphasize gameplay systems that pay off in short-term power gain, even if they might stymie your longer-term build “optimizations”.

Metroid-y or Soul’s-y games handle this approach well, I think—if you can breeze through all the combat, then exploring to get some esoteric abilities or items really isn’t that useful. Exploring to find something strong so you can keep exploring to find more strong things is a fun gameplay loop, to me, but when it all evens out to “choose the color of your oatmeal” then I don’t really care.

That said, I moved JEDI: FO back down the normal difficulty setting pretty quickly. “Hard” in this game just made things take more lightsaber hits, and I think I would prefer that a lightsaber just murders whatever it touches. Bushido Blade x Masters of Teras Kasi when? (you better believe I had to append “star wars game” to my googling of “masters of tara casa” before it came up. I feel pretty good about getting that close based on remembered EGM adverts alone). Exploring in JEDI: FO was still fun because the world was pretty, and you got some well-timed orchestral swells in that Star Wars way that still speaks to my soul.

4. Game demos

It is a hoary old chestnut that when you have time to play videogames [aka childhood] you lack the finances to buy them, but once you can have disposable income [aka adulthood] you lack the time. This also works for the vagaries of funemployment.

I think the most exciting thing to happen in 2024 videogames was the brisk resurgence of game demos, which solves both the time (they’re short…mostly!) and the price (they’re free…also mostly!) issues so that no matter where you are in your videogame lifespan, demos can scratch an itch.

I love game demos. Historically, I remember spending hours on my Pentium PC (with MMX technology!) fiddling with like one map of Heroes of Might and Magic (IV? V? VI?) from one of those PC-gaming magazine demo discs. Game demos used to come with magazines; what a world. Another big winner for me in my PlayStation lifecycle was the demo disc with Warhawk and a single level of Parappa that I loved (though through the internet I have realized I conflated two discs); I didn’t have a memory card for a good long while, so not worrying about saving progress in a game was a boon, as well as the reason I can still blast through Resident Evil 1 fast enough to get the rocket launcher.

Of course I remember all of the demos for the Finals Fantasy across the years, particularly 8 and 12, and how they got me to buy games I don’t think I really cared much about. I’m pretty sure they let me rent the FF7 demo from Blockbuster—sheesh, renting PS1 games was such a gamble; some people clearly used them like coasters—and I certainly remember asking for a demo disc with Brave Fencer Musashi the first time I rented it, and it being lost or stolen by the next time. I rented a lot of games in my time.

Jump forward to downloadables and I can vividly recall first moving to NYC and playing the Pac-Man Championship Edition and Geometry Wars 2 (pacifist only, natch) XBOX demos while sleeping on a couch, and debating whether I could skip dollars slices for a day or two to buy full games (I couldn’t).

In 2024 you can interpret a game like Reynatis as a metonym for all demos. I don’t know why, but the impulse to play this C-tier action RPG really hit me hard. The demo was exactly what the game would have been—slightly tedious, a little ugly, with probably one or two things interesting enough to have made it worthwhile to play if this was 2010 and I spent all my free time blasting through a Gamefly queue.

But with so little time to spend and so many inarguably better games I liked playing way more available to me, the 15 minutes I spent on the demo more than sated my novelty-lust.

Unicorn Overlord’s demo did the opposite—it made me want to buy the game more, but I knew I didn’t have the wherewithal to handle any more strategy/tactics gameplay after so many BG3 hours. It lingers still on my wishlist, to be purchased the moment it hits the inevitable Vanillaware 75% off (don’t fret, Vanillaware fans, I paid full price for Odin Sphere on PS2, and forked over wads of cash for 13 Sentinel’s, Muramasa, and Dragon’s Crown. We can all keep them in business, one game at a time!).

Two SaGa games had demos—Emerald Beyond reminded me that Scarlet Grace defeated my sensibilities after a dozen or so hours, and Romancing 2 seems amazing, but, as we will see in about three paragraphs, another traditional turn-based RPG demo captured my heart (and time) this year.

It is no surprise that I love MMOs because I say it all the time—having a chance to at least try New World: Aeternum was appreciated, even if I really didn’t like the game and mostly forgot I tried it at the time of this writing. And I’m someone who really liked Black Desert Online.

Visions of Mana and Granblue Fantasy: Relink both had the same gameplay issue as each other—they felt a little floaty—and also opposite problems—I love the Mana aesthetic and don’t give a squat about Granblue lore. Either way, they’d be better than Reynatis, but I think I got all I needed from their respective demos. Other demos I wanted to play but haven’t yet: Rise of the Rōnin; Shadow of the Ninja Reborn; Path of Exile 2 (this one is technically a beta and also costs money, but is probably worth it!); Ys X; Kunitsu-Gami (definitely Reynatis vibes; I can’t even state why I want to try this).

Finally, Metaphor: Refantazio has a huge demo—I finished it in about 7 hours. If you’ve played and liked a Persona game before, you don’t really need this demo, but it makes two key changes that will undoubtedly make the full game my 2025 number one: first, its setting is now fantasy, and second, its gameplay structure removed monster-collecting. Unless something truly astounding happens to video games in 2025, I will talk about this a lot more next year, but for background and bona fides: I bounced so hard off of Persona 3; got the absolute worst possible ending for Persona 4; golden-pathed Persona 5 on my first playthrough; scrubbed out of Devil Survivor, SMT IV and V; eventually let Tokyo Mirage Session #FE fade out for no real reason.

I don’t really love Persona or mainline SMT games because I do not like monster collecting. It is why l hold the heterodox opinion that Dragon Quest 7 is more fun than Dragon Quest 5. Guess what game fixes that? If you guessed Tokyo Mirage Session, you’re right, but also, c’mon.

I would like to carry my save over…and carry the game over into my top game of 2025!

When I mentioned earlier that gameplay difficulty can create more interesting choices, I am directly talking about Metaphor and other sorts of time-limited games: if you cannot simply breeze through a dungeon in the limited days you’re given, you can’t intentionally min/max your stats and relationships; but it makes it more exciting when you do things that directly increase your gameplay power, be because then you can get through dungeons faster and increase other aspects of your power. I am certain, like almost every console RPG ever, that the game will get easier as your character-build options open up, but having strong characters when there is nothing that can challenge them is basically kneecapping the experience in the first place. Might as well be playing Duolingo if you can cruise through the game without planning out your character’s movesets. I played the demo on hard, I’ll play Metaphor on hard, and sometimes I think I’ll have to pick dungeon adventuring for level-ups over friendship meters. Yay!

3. Cyberpunk 2077

I’m still playing Cyberpunk. It’s good. It’s a good game. I really like my V: I traditionally alternate creating boys and girls when a game let you create your own character, but the male V that I created first just didn’t sit right. There are three options for your backstory, and I wanted V to be a burned-out ex-corporate M&A type; the dude was just too mellow but my lady V is just the right amount of jaded. She’s kind of the backbone of why I like the game because I find the actual plot and the little stories a bit tedious. This is a structural flaw in open world games—linearly constrained quests trigger once you get to a certain location—and it is more apparent after something like Zelda:BotW or even BG3 where the stories feel more integrated into the exploration and less like a little chute you start sliding down once you get to a geofenced “quest zone”. I don’t much feel like I’m roleplaying so much as I’ve crafted a really fun character who I then get to steer through some Call of Duty levels with a random assortment of skills and weapons.

But she’s really fun. I do not know how I ended up unintentionally enjoying first-person melee combat, but I did. Do. Still do. I will continue to play this game, I think, throughout early 2025 because it’s relatively forgiving. I didn’t understand how the hacker deck upgrades worked for 20 hours (mine was “level 1” until I found a level 3 “burn” program, and realized I couldn’t use it because my “deck” wasn’t upgraded). For those of us with a more fantasy bent: I was using level one firebolt even after having access to level six fireball.

I didn’t understand clothing sometimes had armor.

I simply didn’t overthink the RPG upgrade systems and mostly relied on action gameplay—running, hiding, stealth, headshots, &c—to get through combat. And it was fine. Fun, even. And when I finally did realize there were so many points of character power growth available to me, V turned into an absolute walking tank. Pretty nice moment of payoff that I created for myself unintentionally.

The ease of simply playing the game means it will be really easy to take a Metaphor: Refantazio-sized break in Cyberpunk and still jump back in when I want to drive around in dystopian LA. It’s odd looking back at the way something like Shining Force Gaiden handled town exploration felt insulting to me in 1993—towns were menus, not maps that a little guy could walk around on—but now that ease and abstraction is what I want. Having what are essentially menu options hidden on a map where you slowly walk your “cursor” around just to be allowed to click on the different missions is kind of…tedious…unless finding the “execute mission” button/person is really fun (like in, say, PS2 Spider-man 2 or newer Insomniac Spider-man games, where swinging around is definitely the best part). If the bulk of the game is within the missions, and the missions are activated by an attenuated menu selection process that is simply dressed up to look like you are meeting a some quest-giver, but finding that person simply consists of piloting your little guy around (who may as well be dressed like a mouse cursor) until you can click “accept” after some dialogue boxes, then its not really an open world, it’s just a big, fancy, mostly empty, walkin’ around RPG town in-between the battle sequences. Constrained by plot—checkpoints won’t let you pass until X amount of missions are done; the bridge is out; the fog’s too thick; we don’t want you to go over there yet because the story triggers won’t make sense until the world-state changes due to scripted events in the opening tutorial missions)—open worlds often feel anything but, and Cyberpunk is no exception. It can still be fun to drive your car around, but your only real goal is to get to the next mission-start geofence. The only things I’ve ever found during non-story-event exploration are handfuls of enemies to blast through and some quest objects I’m not allowed to interact with yet.

2. tunic

if you don’t love this instantly, don’t bother with TUNIC.

I was always going to like Tunic. The art in the NES Zelda instruction booklet inserted itself into my brain the first time my sister had to babysit for some older neighborhood kids and I was forced to tag along—they had an NES, they had Zelda, and I knew then that I wanted it. Before that, our cousins had Excitebike and Duck Hunt and as objects of play those did not do it for me. I am not being contrarian when I say I enjoyed our copy of Atari E.T. more than many early NES games—E.T. felt like a mysterious adventure and I was young and uncoordinated enough that I was never going to make it very far into a game that required dexterity anyway—dying quickly in E.T. wasn’t much different from failing at video games that were “better” designed.

Jumping ahead to what are now considered tween years, it was other kids talking about upgrading the Master Sword in the gold pyramid during Little League that got me begging my parents for an SNES—they had (very kindly) bought me a Genesis for Christmas when I came back from a vacation absolutely videogame-obsessed (finding a Street Fighter 2 cabinet at Cosmic Fantasy would obliterate any 10-year-old; a teen taught me, in person, about special moves!)—but the Genesis did not really focus on the types of games I liked. When SEGA didn’t get Street Fighter 2 and everyone else had the SUPER Nintendo, well, I knew what had to be done: begging. When the PlayStation finally arrive, I was old enough to mow lawns, but the precedent had been established—I would end up with an N64 and Ocarina of Time, eventually, through the historical connection to, “We always get a new Nintendo when there is a new Zelda game!”

This nostalgia trip is what Tunic does, if you’re an oldhead; Proust’s Madeleine, thy name is Tunic.

The game is chock full of Zelda-style obscura, the types of things you’d learn on the playground, but they’re all hidden like little riddles in an instruction booklet that you find pages of as you play through the game. The most bold part, however, is that the game has these hidden secrets that are not gated by in-game progress, even though the developers know that the internet exists—you could just read about Tunic’s secrets, do them right away, and voila, game over. Or you could just look up a JPG of the entire instruction manual from the jump. You could obviate any sense of wonder in this relatively simple 3/4s view actionRPG by just, like, going to GameFAQs.

But don’t do that. If you’re old and you had Zelda NES and you’re not sure why you knew how to get into the 8th Dungeon but you did know, then Tunic is for you. Let yourself get stuck, sometimes. Don’t check if you’re going the right way. It’s not a long game, but it is pretty dense—steep in it, and it’ll bring you back to your parent’s rec room or basement or where ever your NES was hooked up. And if, like me, you end one page short of fully unlocking the way through the Golden Path, but you’re pretty sure you know how to do it, leave it there. I don’t think the reality of outside confirmation that you were right or wrong could match the half-faded wonder of mostly understanding how your inputs on the controller interact with the outputs on screen. This is the true mystique and magic of video games—never knowing exactly what might happen next.

1. Dragon’s dogma 2

Off the bat, I will admit Dragon’s Dogma 2 not as good as the first one (and I didn’t even play Dark Arisen!). But Dragon’s Dogma and Dark Souls are locked in relentless battle for my favorite game of the entire XBOX360 generation (Lost Odyssey & Dead Space are up there, too, somehow). Note: I don’t consider Elden Ring to be as good as Dark Souls. You can’t top the “what the hell is going on, but also I love it” aspect of DD1. DD2 still has hidden mechanics that are slightly incomprehensible, but it’s been a bit more streamlined, makes a bit more sense.

As I mentioned when talking about Tunic, what I like best about video games is that you can play them without completely understanding them. To me, in fact, not understanding why things happen as I muddle forward is the best part; once you can see the wireframe, you can start to see where you could do “better.” It’s hard to avoid wanting to be graded, and harder still to not do what is expected of you once you know how the system promotes itself.

But squeaking your way through a game without worrying about optimization is the best feeling. I’d rather get stuck somewhere hard in a game than always be overleveled, overprepared, or guided by a walkthrough.

DD2 at its heart is more Nights of the Round than Monster Hunter.

In the Dragon’s Dogma series, your little guys are walking around, smashing bad guys, sometimes answering the call to adventure. That’s really it. But the first time a character falls off a deadly cliff and is caught by another member of your adventuring party, you will whoop and cheer. How could you not? And you can’t make that moment happen. The characters just do things, and without obsessive levels of preparation and note-taking (and even then, maybe just luck?), you can’t trigger your pawn to catch your Arisen from a cliff-fall that would kill her. These moments just happen.

There’s not a lot of substance to dig into for DD2, though. Once it fizzles out for you, it’s out. How many times can you slaughter goblins and high-five each other? Exactly the amount you do until you want to stop. I don’t know how far I am in the game. I don’t care at all about the plot or the story—this is a game I would love to be more MMO-like: just let me run around, smashing goblins and changing professions, finding new cities and trying to get through challenging areas to find stronger items to smash more goblins. Don’t make me be, like, the Princess of Whatever. Goblins exist, and I must smash.

absolutely no way to know what to expect with this…thing.

Only once did I find myself doing something I didn’t like—I switched to the fighter class after masters everything else except Magic Archer—which I have heard about but haven’t found yet—and I hated it. I thought that maybe I might end up liking it by the end. And I didn’t. And then I stopped playing. My desire to “optimize” (gotta collect all the skills!) defeated the inherent joy in just playing all the other classes (don’t want those job EXPs to go to waste).

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a beautiful, fun, exciting game that I enjoy the actual act of physically playing, but I don’t think it understood exactly why the first game was one of the best games of its generation. And while I can’t tell you why Suikoden was amazing and Eiyuden is not, the distinction between DD1 & DD2 is clear to me: sometimes, less is more.