Been watching my partner play Metaphor: ReFantazio and it's basically a better version of the Persona games without the forced romance or weird shit that persona games do. It looks like it took all the best elements of those games and improved upon them. The story is pretty good so far 20 hours in. Gameplay is typical persona/jrpg gameplay but I like the choice of either enganging an enemy and transitioning to a turn-based fight, or just wacking it with your sword and keep it moving if you're stronger than the enemy. More rpgs need this.

I was recently playing Watch Dogs 2, since it was on gamepass and I thought I'd give it a shot. I think the story is pretty cool 3-5 hours in but I also put it down about a week ago and have no desire to pick it back up. The gameplay wasn't really doing it for me. Just kinda felt like a clunkier GTA game with some sci-fi elements. The characters seemed interesting, though.

Honestly, been looking for a game to really scratch that itch and I haven't found one I really enjoy in a minute. I need to buy a mini pc to play Baldur's Gate 3. Oh, and I'm looking forward to Date Everything because I love goofy shit.

Top game of the year for me was Stepmania, no contest. Super fun to play with the family, fantastic cardio workout, sick tunes if you skip all the J-pop songs.

Half Life Alyx has been remarkable, amazing VR game. Unlike most games where you just press a button to reload your firearm you actually have to physically grab a new magazine from your backpack, unload your pistol and put the new magazine in. I once dropped the magazine on the ground when a head crab was coming towards me and I just about had a panic attack.

I also recently tried learning how to play Victoria3. So far I haven’t been able to figure out how to play more than 2 hours without crashing my economy, but I found a YouTube channel that has twenty or so 40+ minute long “beginner tutorials” so I’ll learn eventually 🙃

Valve did a great job at boosting the number of Linux users, all thanks to Steam Deck and now planning to release SteamOS to OEMs. So I feel that Windows will lose its users once Windows 10 extended support expires next year. 2025 will be the great year for Linux to shine.

My favorite game of the year was Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. Owlcat finally got it right with the ship battles as the "mini-game" and their TTRPG bona-fides really shined with this. Great writing, cool characters, nice voice acting. The choices, while not necessarily true "choices matter" (TM), allow for some great RP moments. The battle system is a little chunky at times since so many characters need to recast buffs most turns and so that gets a little repetitive, especially when you get stuck doing some of the "random" encounters while bouncing around in your space ship.

But, small details aside, it's a long, text heavy, rewarding CRPG. With BioWare's corpse jacked by EA, Owlcat has really become my go to for CRPGs. I honestly like it more than BG3.

Hmm what did I play this year. A lot of unfinished games. A lot of gamepass. This year was a story of “my partner is away for the weekend, I will play 20 hours over the next two days and then never have a chance to finish the game” lol.

Early in the year I played a bunch of Deliverance: Kingdom Come, but dropped off. Definitely want to come back to it. I played lots of persona 5 (I think that was this year…) and Like a Dragon: Ishin, but they both left game pass before I could finish them 😔 there was one week where I played a LOT of vampire survivors.

I’m not sure if it was this year or last but emulated a bunch of random shit, got decently far in Pokémon heart gold before my laptop died. And I beat Metroid zero mission!! (Extremely rare glimmer_twin finished game). Then on my new laptop I played like 5 seasons of football manager 2024. Also got addicted to Stellaris for the first time.

Right at the start of the year I was trying to get some use out of my switch so I finished Mario Odyssey and played some random indie stuff I don’t remember.

There was also a whole bunch of random stuff on gamepass I dabbled in. Banjo kazooie, more indie stuff. Lately I played a fair bit of crash bandicoot remaster over a couple of days and did like 5 runs on frostpunk before getting annoyed that I lost with thirty seconds left in the big storm.

And most recently I reinstalled CKIII. May god have mercy on my soul.

Almost done Halls of Torment and getting kinda burnt out, might drop it and come back later.

Got Darktide with a friend and have been having a good time playing through missions. It is DARK on some of them, to the point that my friend's favorite special ability to have on a weapon is "has a flashlight". Overall gameplay is good, one of the grenade options for ogryn is just whipping a large rock at enemies, and it is extremely satisfying. Progression seems a bit weird; weapon stats are capped by a character's weapon mastery level as opposed to overall character level, which means you're heavily encouraged to main something. On the plus side, it looks like you can kinda skip that by just buying a bunch of shit weapons and sacrificing them for mastery XP at the forge, but that's obviously kinda lame. Sadly no solo-only play, which is weird, because VT2 with bots was fine.

Top games I played this year prior to December (most of them did not come out this year lol):

1. Shadow of the Erdtree - No surprises here, the biggest problem I have with the game is that I played it for like 20 hours in 3 days and burned out
2. Victoria 3 - I'd played it before at launch, but picked up a legit copy during a sale and had a lot of fun playing Big Communism Simulator.
3. Vampire Survivors - Played through the Contra and Amogus DLCs earlier this year and had a good time utterly breaking things with the new Darkanas in the last big update
4. Total Warhammer 2 - Was waiting to get all the DLC when it went on sale for years, and had a good run going through a variety of campaigns earlier this year. This has problems (a lot of the campaigns are just not very interesting, the mid-to-end game is almost always a grind), but overall still very good
5. One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 - A dumb fun musou game. Does a terrible job of actually explaining what happens in One Piece. The post-game grind is dumb and I didn't even attempt it.
6. Halls of Torment - A solid Vampire Survivors clone, this time themed around Diablo 1. Some of the classes are bad (Norseman), and the level variety isn't particularly interesting, but otherwise good.
7. Risk of Rain 2 - The new DLC broke the game at launch, and a lot of the new content is still bad (glares at Chef), but the recent updates have returned it to actually being a fun game. There are no longer giant swathes of items that I don't want to pick up.
8. Monster Hunter Rise - Nowhere near as good as World, feels grindy in comparison, perhaps because the story is so much weaker? The base-game endboss sucks lol. Sadly both my friends I was playing with burned out before we could start Sunbreak, and though I played a bit on my own, I don't know if I'll ever finish it.
9. Yakuza 7 - The JRPG combat is a fun bit initially, and could probably have worked for something shorter, but this is a 70 hour game that never gets more complex than 3 party members attacking and the last one using healing abilities. It ends up feeling extremely tedious (with a huge difficulty spike partway through the campaign which can fuck you over if you haven't been grinding out the side content). Main Story is terrible (which seems to be the case for Yakuza games?), Side Stories are charming, minigames range in quality from "actually pretty fun" like Dragon Kart to "I'm not touching this with a 10-foot pole" like mahjong, koi-koi, poker, or blackjack. I do not understand how people are able to play through these as fast as they come out, I feel like I need to take a few years off between games.
10. Hi-Fi Rush - I honestly don't get the hype. For a musical spectacle fighter, the integration of the music wasn't that great. Something like this lives or dies in its boss fights, and the only one I consider good is Wolfgang. Not by coincidence, that's also the only one with really well integrated music. Comparing it to MGRR, it just doesn't even come close.

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Balatro was pretty fun, wondering what the creator is gonna do next after the game, assuming they dont just retire of off Balatro.

Other than that I don't really have much, all the AAA games I legally obtained were just mediocre, like Cities Skylines 2, just being too car brained and entirely Usian city design focused. Maybe I'll try out that Soviet city builder but it seems a little too complicated for me

Might pick up Hades 2 sometime next year if it has a 1.0 release, as it stands I don't want to play games unfinished as I have a hatred of beta testing games in steam "early-access" wasting my time

Still playing Cyberpunk 2077 here. Been playing it for about three weeks now. I'm blown away by how much better this game is now, when you compare it to the complete dogshit it was when it came out. Loving the plot. Phantom Liberty has some insane action set pieces that are more exciting than most Hollywood films these days. From complete failure to probably one of my top 10 RPGs of all time, I say that's quite the comeback.

Next one on the list is the new Indiana Jones. Looking forward to that one!

My ranking of games I've played this year is as follows. This was a great year for time well wasted and I will be shocked if next year is somehow better.

1. (Honorary) Disco Elysium. I technically played this for a few hours this year, so I can still put this in my #1 slot.

2. Elden Ring (which I got in late December 2023). I loved every minute of my 100+ hours in it. The world building is amazing, even if I don't understand it, the combat is some of the most fun I've had in a game ever, and it looks stellar. I haven't beat it yet, and I honestly don't want to because of how great this is.

3. Dwarf Fortress. All games on this list are fun, but only this one is !FUN!. My dwarfy highlights of this year include: losing a fortress to aggressive unicorns, sealing off a 4-year-old vampire who killed 6 in the mayor's office for the rest of time, losing a fort to a titan who slipped in through a tiny hole in the ceiling (I hate trees), creating my first 200 pop fort (with way, way, way too many goblin citizens), and creating bearmurded-the Hexbear fort.

4. Stardew Valley (first played this year). This game was an incredible way to get rid of stress and I loved letting hours pass by as I calmly tended to my hundreds of melons and industrial blobfish caviar production facility.

5. Silent Hill 2 (2024 remake) (first played this year). This was my introduction to the world of Silent Hill, and what a world it is. I have never seen a game produce that level of unease in me and produce true horror without using jumpscares or other cheap methods.

6. Assetto Corsa (first played this year). Vroom.

7. Battlefield 1 (first played this year). I installed windows on a usb hdd with terrible read speed just to play this game. It took 2 hours to install and 20 minutes to load each time. I regret nothing.

8. Factorio. The factory didn't grow as much as it should have, but I enjoyed what I was able to do in my limited time with it this year.

9. Sekiro (first played this year). I would rate this much higher if I was good enough to beat the first boss.

(Dis)honorable mentions:

1. CS2. I regret playing this game. This sucks ass, everyone who plays it is a terrible person, and I'm bad at this.

2. Trackmaina (2024). To experience Ubisoft's Trackmania, do the following. First, shove pennies up your asshole. Secondly, put the hose of a shopvac up your rear end and turn it on. It's worse than the game from 2008 and serves only to extract money.

3. EVE Online. See above.

Working on Dragon Warrior (Quest) I via a romhack that re-translates the game to be closer to the Japanese and also changes the sprites to be closer to the JP release too. Also Final Fantasy I via a another re-translation that closer to JP and removes some of the censorship like the church cross being removed. So funny how uppity Nintendo was about Western releases of JP games to not offend Sunday School moms when looking at the eshop today and there's fucking hentai games now.

Trying out the new Indiana Jones game, honestly really gets the tone right, also gonna try out some indie games as well (Coven and Caravan Sandwitch)

I'm playing the Marvel slop. I played Overwatch back before Activision ruined it and I'm enjoying it now.

Caves of Qud. I've made it the furthest I've ever gone so far with my future-seeing buff chef. Using precognition I was able to force favorable mutations and rng cooking effects, and explore safely through spacetime vortexes, and now he's a veritable God with such low cooldown on abilities that the cooldown on precognition is less than the active duration, meaning there is never a moment he can be killed without rewinding time and trying again.

I was saving this for the next weekly, so I'll talk about what I'm still playing and my favorite game this year.

I haven't really beat many games this year, but these are the ones I have finished:

Ratchet & Clank, Clickolding, Pillars of Eternity, The Walking Dead (Arcade), Ballionaire

I've become less interested in games and have read more books this year than prior years instead. In 2023, I had a PS2 phase where I went back to play stuff like Sly Cooper, God of War, and Ratchet & Clank early 2024. I stopped there because I wasn't really enjoying myself and found that some of the games aged less well than others.

I've gotten like 450/500 achievements in Halls of Torment based on another Hexbear user posting about it, so that's probably my top game of the year. It's a very good "bullet heaven" game like Vampire Survivor but has way more interesting classes and progression. You do hit a certain point where you basically can't lose though, especially if you use Shield Maiden block build.

Ballionaire was okay, but very short and very easy. Clickolding was a meme game. The Walking Dead arcade game kind of sucks but I do still like games like that and you get to use a giant crossbow controller in it. Ratchet & Clank aged better than both God of War or Sly Cooper, I think, but still had some sections that were kind of frustrating or required really precise timing. The humor doesn't really hold up. Pillars of Eternity was okay but I'm a noted real-time with pause hater and think it's one of the worst control schemes in video games. I liked the story/writing and the companions, just ignored all the Kickstarter gold name NPCs, and plan to continue into the 2nd game sometime this year.

I've put more hours into Lord of the Rings Online than anything else because it's a very huge comfort game and I've been reading Tolkien stuff alongside it to really get in the mood. I recommend it for anyone really into the setting or who wants a slower-paced MMO that doesn't require grouping for content, daily grinding, and isn't really focused on raiding.