Ashley’s Top 5 Games of 2024
Howdy ho, fellow gameplay enjoyers! It’s that time of year again, the time when every single blogger is required by blogger law to publish some sort of year-in-review list. Luckily for me, I’ve been doing this for a couple years, so I have a semblance of good standing to cash in as I ride this trend.
I played a lot of video games this year. Like, a lot. I put over 700 hours of the past year into Elden Ring alone, plus around three to four hundred hours scattered across various other games for a pretty staggering total playtime that I’m more than a little embarrassed to announce publicly. It turns out being unemployed and living with your parents for eight whole months offers a lot of free time, and I have the particular kind of addictive personality that makes doing HellDivers 2 missions seem a great deal more appealing than undergoing the traumatizing process of applying for jobs in a labor environment that’s extremely punishing to autistic trannies (well, it actually punishes most people due to low wages, but that’s a topic for another essay). It seems like games are getting more and more fun, diverse, and interesting as the world gets progressively worse, which is a Monkey’s Paw bargain for which I’m less than enthused. I can only be grateful that I get to bury my head in the quagmire of graduate school for the next four years.
Anyway, here’s my list. I did my best to make it concise since I know I have a tendency to ramble, but it’s my blog and I get to do with it what I like. You thought I was here improving my skills as an essayist and trying to leverage this into a potential writing career? You fool! You utter clown! This is a space for me to make a fool of myself in public and yap incoherently about the nonsense topics constantly swirling in my brain. If I was more than a fetus in the age of message boards and gaudy web 2.0 personal websites, I would have been unstoppable; nevertheless, we do the best with what we have.
5: House Flipper 2
As a politically-engaged individual, I abhor the real-life practice of house flipping – buying a house, renovating it, and selling it for a profit – because it exacerbates the upward push on housing prices, contributes to the gentrification of neighbourhoods, and generally results in some extremely blasé architecture dominating residential avenues. That said, I very much enjoy the act of renovation when real-world stakes are removed and I can simply focus on creating the quirkiest, cutest, and coziest little homes for imaginary digital people – and House Flipper 2 delivers on that fantasy in spades. Given the intensity of my real life and the other games on this list, I’ve greatly enjoyed being able to sit back, paint walls, and arrange furniture in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.
4: V Rising
This top-down vampire basebuilding RPG finally got its full release this year, and it’s a testament to its ability to keep the attention of a group of distractible, neurodivergent queers that my friends and I actually finished the whole damn thing. Beyond offering a potent vehicle for the zero-to-hero hot exploitative vampire noble fantasy, V Rising actually has some compelling core gameplay systems. The upgrade grind takes enough time that progressing to a higher level feels significant, but it never took so long as to make me lose interest. Building a vampiric castle feels amazing: the build tools are powerful and the materials diverse enough to accommodate many different vampire fantasies, and it just becomes that much sweeter to lure unsuspecting civilians into your palace so you can convert them into blood bags or servants. The bosses are challenging but not insurmountable, and exploring new environments across the game’s huge map always fills me with a sense of wonder.
3: Street Fighter 6
Shortly after moving to Toronto, I set a goal for myself: I wanted to play fighting games, not to simply button mash my way through a campaign, but to really learn the genre’s unique control schemes and principles behind dueling an opponent. Street Fighter 6 has thus far proved an excellent vehicle for that project, and I’m happy to say that I’ve already climbed to mid-Silver on Cammy! This may mean nothing to you normal people, but it’s something I’m extremely proud of given that I’ve been afraid to play fighting games every since I first played Super Smash Bros.: Brawl on my friend’s Wii in 2009. Street Fighter 6 has an engaging and diverse roster of playable characters, immaculate game feel, and, most importantly, reliable matchmaking with a large and diverse player base. Oh, and the characters are super hot to look at. Just sayin’.
2: Escape From Tarkov
Escape From Tarkov takes after the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise which inspired it in many ways, not least because it is A: a blob of clunky, janky, and glitchy Slavic weirdness, and B: a totally unique and thus-far unparalleled tactical extraction shooter experience. Like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, Tarkov is a brutal ordeal, sporting unforgiving survival mechanics and extremely deep combat and movement systems. It’s also a PvP shooter six years into its development cycle, meaning that many of its diehard proponents have logged hundreds or even thousands of hours into learning its caprices, rendering the new player experience even more challenging. Yet, it’s currently my favourite shooter by a significant margin.
Most of today’s competitive shooters don’t encourage slow, tactical play. After my friends and I bought Battlefield: 2042 on sale this year and played for a few dozen hours, our efforts at making tactical plays were continually stymied by enemy players running around in our team’s back line with submachine guns and driving vehicles to back-cap our objectives. The sense of a true battlefront was watered down in favour of arcade-style gameplay, with run-and-gun gamers hampering the effectiveness and fun factor of my group’s slower playstyle. Even in battle royale-style games such as Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds and Apex Legends, my friends and I found that mindless, aggressive play frequently went unpunished while we struggled even as we made superior tactical decisions to our opponents.
I’m certain at this point that Tarkov provides the tactical experience I’ve been craving. It’s a dark forest shooter in which every action makes noise which can be heard by other players, meaning that constantly sprinting around the map is generally inadvisable. Its survival mechanics incentivise careful planning for each raid, and its gunplay (which is far more Arma than Call of Duty) makes twitchy, reflex-based gaming less crucial than in other extraction shooters. Tarkov’s maps are extremely detailed given their size, and the lack of an in-game minimap or compass makes memorization and a good sense of direction crucial to success in any given raid. What’s more, players lose all of their inventory when they die, meaning that each raid’s stakes increase the more loot a player is carrying. And you will die in Tarkov – a lot. Player characters are extremely fragile and healing oneself takes several inputs and a large amount of time, meaning that fights need to be approached carefully and one wrong step can result in a trip back to the main menu. Body armor and helmets mitigate some of this frailty, but not much: any player can get killed by a single shot to the face or a few to the legs. In short, you don’t want to get shot in this game if you can avoid it.
All of this combines to form a gameplay loop where solid tactical thinking and deep knowledge of the game’s systems are paramount. Fights can be won by repositioning to a find a different angle or lost by impatiently peeking into a doorway. Holding angles, listening carefully for the sounds of other players or NPCs, even identifying the source and proximity of enemies’ gunshots by sound alone are extremely important. Slow playstyles thrive in this environment: sometimes the soundest strategy is to simply sit and listen for a few minutes. Every Tarkov raid is just as tense as the last, no matter how good your aim is or how much you’ve paid for your gear. Even small victories feel impactful and hard-won, especially after repeated losses. Each combat engagement is a different, complex puzzle with myriad solutions. In short, Escape From Tarkov is the most absorbing shooter I’ve ever played.
1: Elden Ring
I’d never finished Elden Ring until after its Shadow of the Erdtree DLC released this past summer. I played the game for about 50 hours shortly after its initial release and bounced off after a few hours of fighting Malenia whilst being woefully undergeared and underleveled. My interest was re-piqued by a few YouTube creators sharing builds that I thought looked interesting, and by a couple friends who wanted to play through the game cooperatively with me. My initial experience of Elden Ring was marred by the game’s differences in difficulty scaling and overall scope from Dark Souls 3 and my misunderstanding of a few key game mechanics. Once I wrapped my head around buffs using the Wondrous Physick, various talismans, and some useful support spells, though, I gained a proficiency in Elden Ring that matched my mastery of prior entries by studio FromSoftware. With friends, I beat the game and gained the confidence I needed to attempt more challenging solo runs.
Then, Elden Ring’s DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, released. This expansion is hard – really hard – so hard that it got initially review-bombed by players who felt it was unfairly so. It also has some janky boss hitboxes and doesn’t run particularly smoothly on most PCs, which makes it all the more impressive when I say that Shadow of the Erdtree is the best experience – DLC or no – FromSoftware have ever offered. The variety and artistry of the new weapons, environments, and bosses is on a level of absurd coolness which somewhat makes up for the DLC’s technical problems, and it possesses what are, in my opinion, the most powerful NPC storylines to date. You’ve got the Ahab analogue Igon, a dragon hunter in search of his nemesis Bayle the Dread; the Hornsent, scion of a culture of oppressors-turned-oppressed, on a revenge mission against the demigod Messmer; and Leda, the murderous former zealot who has pledged service to the Empyrean Miquella. I just named those three off the top of my head, and I honestly don’t know if I could do the same for any of the base game’s NPC quest-givers. These fleshed-out stories grant real emotional weight to player actions which honestly feel a bit lacking in other FromSoft titles.
Then there are the bosses. Rellana, Divine Beast Dancing Lion, Messmer, Scadutree Avatar, Midra, Bayle the Dread, and Consort Radahn are some of the studio’s coolest and most challenging fights to date. Each offers a vastly different experience from the next. Midra’s entire moveset is synced to his soundtrack; Bayle is a cinematic spectacle fight which would make Michael Bay jealous; Dancing Lion is sick as hell, and Consort Radahn is (as I have previously discussed) first in pushing players to the absolute limits of what the game’s engine and mechanics will tolerate. What’s more, running around in between these incredible fights and NPC quests and picking up awesome new weapons and spells (the light greatsword class is fucking insane and I’m so glad they’re in the game) are rendered all the more mind-boggling by the game’s environments. From the eldritch Finger Ruins to the lightning-struck Cragged Peak to the imposing Shadow Keep to the suspended spiral city of Enir-Elim to the gorgeous and plaintive Cerulean Coast, all overcast by the dying Scadutree, Shadow of the Erdtree provides amazement around every corner and challenge to match.
When determining which games were my favourites each year, I ask myself: which of these games did I finish and immediately begin a new playthrough? I’ve done this in Elden Ring not once, not twice, but dozens of times over the past six months. I’ve explored every nook of the game’s massive world and discovered something new nearly every playthrough, and I could easily continue to do so for hundreds of hours to come. I probably won’t be able to, though, because FromSoft recently announced Elden Ring: Nightreign, a battle-royale/roguelike spinoff of the Elden Ring IP with a strong co-op focus and dedicated character progression paths which seems to incorporate lore elements from previous FromSoft titles. Given my experience with Elden Ring so far, I’m absolutely psyched to play this new offering and proudly cast Elden Ring: Nightreign as the game I’m most excited to try in 2025.
Onward Through the Swirling Toilet of Time
Beyond Nightreign, there are a few games I’m looking forward to playing in 2025. I recently bought Dragon Age: the Veilguard on sale and have heard it’s one of Bioware’s more solid offerings; Baldur’s Gate 3 is supposed to get another major content update sometime in the winter; Monster Hunter: Wilds looks absolutely incredible; S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Shadow of Chornobyl 2 will hopefully get some bugs ironed out in the near future; and Hollow Knight: Silksong’s embattled development has got to be wrapping up sooner rather than later, right? …Right?
Outside of gaming, though, things are unfortunately looking rather rough. I don’t think many non-racist folks see the future of politics in North America with anything but utter dread, and my trans community is under more stress than ever thanks to the political efforts of more than a few incurious and politically ambitious dillweeds. I for one have long been tired of being used as a wedge issue, so I’m aiming to continue to engage in nonviolent political activism with my trans siblings in the year to come. To my cis friends and readers: y’all are gonna need to step it up for us. We’re doing everything we can, but it’s not enough against the powerful political lobbies that have decided to legislate us out of public life. Take a few naps this week, drink your relaxing hot beverage of choice, and get ready to roll up your sleeves, because there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. To my trans siblings: take good care of yourselves and each other. I’ll always be here fighting for you. See you in the new year.