Flinn's 2024 Indie Gaming Highlights
it's been a good year for indies
I'm kicking off 2025, my Year of Making Stuff, with a look back at ten games I loved from 2024. I don't have a tidy list or defined criteria, but it's my hope that just talking about these games will convince you to give one or two of them a shot.
As a gamer, I find myself most drawn to games with puzzles and mechanics that, first and foremost, support the narrative. I enjoy falling in love with worlds and characters, and I'm willing to suspend my disbelief or overlook missteps in a game's execution if the characters and story are compelling enough to me. Every passing year decreases my patience for games that are brutally hard without at least a semi-solid narrative to back them up, so expect to see a focus on narrative and spoilers, too.
Here are my top games of the year, presented in no particular order. Expect to see lots of indies. Are they fun to play? Sure! Do they feature strong stories? Most of them! Will you enjoy them? Maybe!
Tip: Un-redact a spoiler by hovering your mouse over the bars.
Game Mechanic of the Year - Cryptmaster
2024's top speed-typing test
Steam link for Crypmaster
I debated about whether to put this on the list because in the end, I did really enjoy Cryptmaster despite having a couple gripes. Paul Hart and Lee Williams spent a tremendous amount of effort on map design, writing, and fine-tuning a remarkable typing interface that allows players to type enemies to death, and I can't be too angry at it in the end.
Cryptmaster puts players in charge of a band of newly un-dead adventurers, resurrected by the titular Cryptmaster for his own ends. The adventurers, in the Cryptmaster's thrall, are tasked with climbing up through the layers of world that have sprung up over the crypt in order to reach the world of the living, where the Cryptmaster has a score to settle. The four-person party is composed of a typical fighter-bard-mage-rogue setup, allowing the player to learn and use a wide variety of skills. Battles can be fought in real time or turn-based combat, both of which keep the true speed-typists from dominating battle by limiting the amount of actions the adventurers can take before the enemy's move.
I picked Cryptmaster up very shortly after it released, before a few key quality of life updates came out. Personally, the rotating minimap completely kneecapped my ability to explore—my brain is just incompatible with maps that think the world revolves around me. I had drawn out an actual map of the second major area, the Bonehouses, before a static map toggle was released as part of a patch. At that point, we blitzed through the rest of the game, practically unstoppable.
But we don't need to talk about my nonexistent sense of direction. What makes Cryptmaster special is that innovative control scheme: a typing test that drives your journey through crypts, battles, card games, riddles, and more. Excellent voice acting, underpinned by some prescient writing, heightens the experience further.
The Cryptmaster features heavily in the game by giving you directions, deadpanning about your surroundings, and even headlining a minigame in which he opens a treasure chest and makes you guess what's inside. The experience is comparable to an in-person tabletop gaming session: I tell the Cryptmaster to lick the mystery object (ostensibly so I can get a sense of whether the object is edible). He tells me there's no way he's putting his tongue on that and takes away another of my remaining guesses. We go back and forth like this until I guess it, or until he gets fed up with my idiocy and makes me leave. After all, this is his game.
As a keyboard-based game, players are also free to type words outside of battle and conversation, speaking to the Cryptmaster as a tabletop player might talk to the gamemaster. You're limited to single words, but there's no shortage of evil fun to be had, from grumbling nonsense to outright swearing at the Cryptmaster. The developers' foresight in writing fully voiced responses to a broad swath of player possibilities (telling a father to swear around his kid, responding "eleven" to a scale of one to ten, trying to lose the tutorial) speaks to a deep love of the adventure genre and a knowledge of what makes players tick.
Script assess: Ludonarrative consonants consonance
Or, better known as "gameplay and story integration." What I missed the most in Cryptmaster was the story of the heroes and the Underlands in whole. Maybe because I suck at directions, I had a hard time locating the pockets of story hidden around the world. While the final boss felt appropriately difficult (possibly because I'd only managed to unlock about half the skills), I felt the runup to the ending came too quickly. It sounds like there's been a small expansion update to the Downwood area since I finished the game, so there might be a rerun in my future to see if I can straighten out my thoughts on the story. But even if I can't, I came to Cryptmaster for the uniqueness of the controls and mechanics, and thoroughly enjoyed the bits where I wasn't getting lost trying to find all the riddle skulls.
Incidentally, the riddle skulls and item chest guessing games were my favorite part. The free response approach with the keyboard-centric control scheme made for an excellent puzzle-solving experience: instead of brute-forcing multiple options, I had no option but to solve them for real. While the riddle-giving skulls are forgiving enough to give you unlimited tries at a riddle, the Cryptmaster only gives you a handful of guesses. I liked this push and pull of freedom and pressure, which made me feel confident enough to have fun with the game's free-wheeling attitude without completely removing all incentives for me to try harder and do better.
Verdict
Cryptmaster presents an old-school adventure blended with the freedom of expression that comes with tabletop gaming. The unique control mechanics, hammy voice acting, and dry wit are sure to hook any players who want to be a brat to a railroading DM.
Metroidvania of the Year - Crypt Custodian
2024's top game by a returning solo dev
Steam link for Crypt Custodian
The Game Awards are not and should never be the be-all, end-all of gaming accolades, but if Astro Bot's Game Awards win has taught us anything, it's that wholesome games are good games, too. Art doesn't have to be painful to strike a chord, and things that are grimdark don't carry more inherent artistic value than things that are bright and sunny. Solo dev Kyle Thompson's surprise release, Crypt Custodian, highlights this idea's next logical step: a sunny game can still be bittersweet—even sad—without sacrificing that foundational optimism.
Players take control of a bug-eyed black cat named Pluto. Pluto is brand-new to the afterlife and wants to spend time reminiscing about the owners who rescued him off the streets, but the afterlife proves a little unforgiving. After committing some anti-ceramic shenanigans almost immediately upon arrival, Pluto is sentenced to an after-lifetime of janitorial work. Turns out the afterlife is quite dusty... better get to work!
Steam link for Kyle Thompson's games, which include Crypt Custodian, Islets, and Sheepo
Thompson's artistic vision of comfort isn't compromised by the game's morbid subject matter. In your adventures around the afterlife, you'll pick up stories and memories of the other animals you meet. Since this is the afterlife, you'll sometimes get a grim picture of how they ended up here. Trauma and tragedy serve as the driving force of the story, but never fully overshadow the optimistic angle Pluto takes to the world of Crypt Custodian. Pluto is under no misconceptions about why he's here or what happened to him, but he chooses kindness even when others are being a jerk to him. Not everyone in the game has such an easygoing attitude, and part of the game's charm is offering them a friendly paw anyway.
Crypt Custodian certainly hits all the wholesome platformer buttons for me: charming hand-drawn art, a fun and varied cast of broadly kind characters, and a heartfelt narrative about grief. A well-developed map function, smooth combat mechanics, and excellent platform puzzle variety make for a tricky-not-finicky experience that left me feeling warm and fuzzy. The game offers some real challenges even for veterans of the genre, but plenty of flexibility for gamers who are more interested in the story than the challenge.
Script assess: Crying feels good
If you've ever lost a beloved pet, Crypt Custodian's story is likely to hurt you emotionally at times. This game is pretty close to narratively perfect as a platformer can get for me. I remember thinking the story was slowing down at points, but I also think that's a natural feature of metroidvania exploration. The game isn't solely driven by narrative, as your progress through the game's puzzles really determine the pace at which you explore the game, meet characters, and find more things to do.
I wish some of the buddies' photographs, which tell the stories of how they ended up in the afterlife, were placed in a more linear pickup order. There's plenty of dialogue to carry your relationships with the buddies even if you aren't interested in the photo collection, but I found myself a little frustrated at some points, such as knowing how a particular friend had died, but not much else beyond what they felt like telling me. Maybe that's the fault of the explorer more than the designer, and Crypt Custodian's map is stupendously large to boot. Every inch contains something new to explore, so you're almost certain to miss a thing or two here and there.
All told, I would have liked a little more debriefing with Kendra. While I appreciated that the game didn't pressure her to handle her grief or pop back into optimism immediately, I wished there had been a little more story about her. That said, Kendra not wanting to share that story with Pluto is a perfectly valid reaction, too.
Verdict
Crypt Custodian presents players with metroidvania puzzle platforming that lives in an accessible story about grief. The gameplay pushes players into difficult challenges in exchange for satisfying rewards, both in terms of unlocking mechanics and in unraveling story.
Soulslike of the Year - Another Crab's Treasure
2024's top anticapitalist propa-game-da
Steam link for Another Crab's Treasure
Continuing the argument that colors aren't bad, my 2024's soulslike crown goes to Another Crab's Treasure, developed by Aggro Crab. This Seattle-based team's 2020 dungeon-crawler Going Under was a singular anti-capitalist, anti-corporate polemic that openly presented its politics via office supply violence. The art design translated the sanitized Corporate Memphis style into a fun, colorful cast that populated the satirical experience of thanklessly climbing the corporate (dungeon) ladder. To my immense delight, Another Crab's Treasure not only follows in these footsteps, but grows beyond them.
Steam link for Going Under
Instead of Going Under's beleaguered intern, Another Crab's Treasure puts gives us Kril, a little hermit crab armed with a discarded fork and the various pieces of trash that he uses as shells. The first thing we see in the tutorial is Kril losing his house (read: getting taxed out of his shell), kicking off a game-wide quest to get it back by whatever means necessary. Despite Kril's nervous attitude, it turns out he's an excellent fighter when put to the test, earning this game its affectionate Crab Souls nickname.
Despite its cartoony aesthetic and sunny color palette, this game is not meant for kids. They're a peripheral demographic who can absolutely enjoy Another Crab's Treasure, but it wasn't purposely made for the little ones. The political angle of this game is blatant, unmissable, and can get quite grim. The world's undersea characters are outfitted with garbage and use microplastics as currency. Kril's adventure kicks off with a need to reclaim something stolen through capitalist exploitation. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is used as a boss platform. This is a nature-loving game that is mad as hell about the state of environmental care, and it's hard to leave the experience of playing it without sharing some of that same fire.
Script assess: Almost no notes (but that's subjective)
For some, the writing in Another Crab's Treasure may come across as heavy-handed or cringey at times. There are plenty of puns about "crabitalism," minced insults about an opponent being a "mussel shucker," and similar. If this brand of pun-based humor tends to bounce off you, you might find it tedious where I found it charming and perfectly in line with the game's character.
What the writing definitely isn't, though, is boring. ACT is a game steeped in love for the soulslike genre, from familiar mechanics dressed up in a coat of sparkly underwater paint to shell-shatteringly tough encounters with bosses. Each NPC sparkles with personality in dialogue and art design alike. I was particularly fond of Nemma and her orange peel hairdo, as well as the union-busting, Bloodborne shoutout Inkerton. Rooting for Kril is easy, but beating the final boss is harder.
I quite liked the game's ending, but for a lot of the story, I predicted it happening slightly differently. After all this hullabaloo about retrieving his stolen shell, I came out of the final boss fight absolutely certain that Kril would get it back, only to find that he had outgrown it. While Kril giving the shell to a shell-less neighbor also felt fitting and in keeping with the game's themes, I felt there was a bit of a missed opportunity there to consider how we all change, whether we want to or not. In the end, this is neither here nor there: the ending is still excellent, and the credits track by Defsharp, "The Mess I Made," is a certified heartripper.
Verdict
Another Crab's Treasure is a comedic look at consumption and capitalism by way of a thoroughly enjoyable soulslike. The game's fun and colorful aesthetic doesn't disguise the crystal-clear politics, but underscores the importance of community care and hope in the face of giant piles of garbage. An important message to carry into 2025, I think.
Horror Game of the Year - Mouthwashing
2024's top game that made me feel like chewing gravel
Steam link for Mouthwashing
This year's indie horror smash hit Mouthwashing was brought to us by Wrong Organ, the unhinged minds behind 2022's How Fish Is Made. The story is existentially terrifying and understated all at once, rooted in what starts out looking a bit like a scifi workplace drama. In a nutshell, Mouthwashing feels like a natural thematic extension of the surreal discomfort that suffuses the entire experience of playing Fish. This is a game that will make your teeth itch with static that's just a bit too loud to ignore. (Maybe that's what all the mouthwash is really for.)
Steam link for How Fish Is Made
Mouthwashing puts players aboard the Tulpar, a long-haul freighter that ships cargo for Pony Express, an interplanetary postal service. The five-person crew consists of a variety of personalities and emotions that range from plucky to searing rage, depending on the crewmate and the current state of the ship's story. The narrative is told non-linearly, bouncing back and forth between the leadup and aftermath of a crash that incapacitated the captain and ravaged the ship. Players are unable to change the outcome of the crash or do anything to calm the mounting tensions aboard the ship, leaving us to not only watch the descent into despair, but actively participate in it.
I appreciated the relative lack of jumpscares, shock-value violence, and other gimmicky horror mainstays. Instead, Mouthwashing's greatest strength is in its understanding of the game as a medium. So much of the horror comes from the player engaging with inputs: for example, artifacting takes over the screen or obscures a section of the ship because you looked at something you shouldn't—or don't want to—see. I had a bit of fussy trouble with one or two unintuitive puzzles, but otherwise felt that the mechanics supported the narrative exceptionally well. The game's relatively short runtime packs a heavy narrative into a deft little package perfect for a free afternoon.
Script assess: Nonlinear horror brilliance
Each member of Mouthwashing's cast comes across as a real person with real problems, and it's this interpersonal ping-pong that drove me through a narrative that becomes viscerally uncomfortable the longer it goes. The story doesn't hold your hand or deliver you gently into the situation by way of long introductions or team-building sections that acquaint you with the crewmates. Instead, you're thrown bodily into the worst days of their lives.
It strikes me that so much of the horror in this game goes un- or understated, but is unmistakable in its effect on the crew. Co-pilot Jimmy's heavily implied assault on medic Anya might never be outright confirmed, but the far-reaching consequences reverberate through the entire narrative and become inescapable. The game's clever bait-and-switch about Jimmy being responsible for the crash rather than the ship's captain, Curly, forces the player to recontextualize everything they thought they knew, especially when it comes to things Jimmy has said.
I want to particularly shout out the devastating ludonarrative impact of players being made to force-feed the mutilated Captain Curly, beginning with his painkillers. It's a remarkably grisly task that doesn't even start fun, but graduates to a grotesque minigame in which players navigate his "lovingly" "prepared" "dinner" as it slowly slides down his digestive tract. Mouthwashing is unrelenting in its depiction of body horror, and though this won't jive with every player, the ones who stick it out are treated to an exceptionally disconcerting story.
If you're being pedantic and/or particularly bad faith about it, you could start a debate over whether Mouthwashing "counts" as a horror game. True, there are no supernatural elements or monsters of the folkloric or Hollywood variety. But I think Mouthwashing's approach to monstrosity from a human standpoint is what makes it so horrifying. If our worst moments don't make us monsters, then what does?
Verdict
Mouthwashing is a standout horror game that uses its short runtime to cram thumbtacks down your throat and pour cinnamon whisky after it. It's a game that demands your full attention and uses its violence and body horror to horrifying effect. While it won't be to everyone's taste, it's worth a play for anyone looking for some good old humans-are-monsters terror.
Visual Novel of the Year - Pro Philosopher 2: Governments and Grievances
2024's top Ace Attorney-like
Steam link for Pro Philosopher 2: Governments & Grievances
Something you need to know about me as a gamer is that I love Ace Attorney. Those games were my personality in high school, and my love of the visual novel medium endured so hard that I made a short visual novel as a final project in grad school. Suffice to say, I love a good Ace Attorney-like, and the Pro Philosopher duology holds a very, very special place in my heart as a standout pair of titles.
Intelligble Games's Pro Philosopher 2: Governments and Grievances is the long-awaited sequel to 2013's browser-based Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher, this time following Socrates' daughter Ariadne as she returns to the Intelligible Realm for another round of debate with some dead guys. As an obvious shoutout to the Ace Attorney series, this duology prominently features dialogue-heavy debate segments not unlike AA's cross-examinations. Where Socrates Jones was more openly an edutainment game (albeit a well-disguised one), Governments & Grievances contains a much stronger story and better-developed characters that still honor and build on what Socrates began. Instead of trying to figure out the nature of morality itself, Governments & Grievances focuses on political theory.
Steam link for Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher
My breakaway favorite thing about Governments & Grievances is its art direction, which has notably improved since Socrates. I cackled with laughter at each new animation, which all contributed to a distinct and memorable characterization alongside dialogue box effects, sound design, and the writing itself. Each philosopher that Ariadne goes to bat against has such a unique personality that it's impossible to get fully upset at them, even when they're proving difficult to debate. The fun design choices breathe life into conversations that would otherwise run the risk of coming across as dry and boring. After all, you're debating political philosophy with a bunch of dead guys. Intelligible Games blends the Ace Attorney character design philosophy of distinct silhouettes and booming personality with real-world philosophy, cleverly distracting players from the fact that they're learning. (My top tier fave: Karl Marx, doing his best Christian Bale Batman voice and learning about Nerf bullets.)
Script assess: Familiar problems in unfamiliar territory
Accounting student Ariadne's conflict with her mother, career politician Pythia Smith, is brilliantly realized, and this interpersonal drama carries the game from start to finish. The human problems of a daughter and mother who have grown apart remain central to the movement of the plot, which feels like impressive narrative growth for the successor to an edutainment game about heady philosophical concepts. I appreciated the pair's ups and downs as they untangled the questions of whether politics will always require moral compromise, and whether that success is worth it in the end.
Coming back from Socrates Jones, I did wish that Jones himself hadn't been sidelined so hard, but I think I can see the rationale. Although the narrative felt complete at the end of Governments & Grievances, I can only hope that Intelligible Games picks back up to continue the series, perhaps for Pro Philosopher 3: For A Dollar, Name A Woman.
Verdict
Pro Philosopher 2 runs players through familiar Ace Attorney-like mechanics without ever giving up its focus on fun. The family drama that anchors the plot never gets too heavy for the game's humor to pick back up, and the art design is bound to delight any genre connoisseur.
Visual Novel Runner Up - Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
2024's top mad-libs mystery
Steam link for Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, from Berlin-based Happy Broccoli Games, was an unexpected hit for me despite its short runtime and simple aesthetic. The titular Duck Detective, Eugene McQuacklin, is hired to investigate a lunch theft at a bus service station in true detective game fashion. Players guide McQuacklin through the familiar beats of such a mystery, from noting clues in the surrounding area to interrogating witnesses. You're then tasked with plugging the keywords you pick up from your investigation into McQuacklin's notebook to form full sentence "deducktions" about the crime.
This game is fully voice acted by exceptional actors, which is a rare plus for me: I usually turn off voices in visual novels since my partner and I "play" by voice acting it out ourselves, but the writing's hammy melodrama filtered through the cute animal aesthetic hit my funny bone just right. McQuacklin desperately swearing off the bread crumbs, this time for real I swear, sets the tone for a game that knows its genre roots as well as the shape of the story it wants to tell. The voice acting added a charming, noir-esque flavor to each animal's personality. I'm particularly fond of overworked and underappreciated Laura, holding the office together with her bare hands while everyone else gets wrapped up in their own drama.
Script assess: What are we doing and why are we doing it
Though I've seen the game billed as a successor to 2018's Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope, I don't think that's quite accurate. Where Obra Dinn bills itself as an insurance mystery and comes across much more like filling out paperwork alongside a murder-heavy mystery, Duck Detective keeps its narrative light and fun. Most information can be gleaned from the engaging conversations between McQuacklin and others. I found there was no need for the kind of visual nitpicking necessary to crack Obra Dinn, making Duck Detective a much more relaxing experience.
Steam link to Return of the Obra Dinn
Instead, I argue that Duck Detective's lighter and softer story brings it closer to 2022's The Case of the Golden Idol by Color Gray Games. Duck Detective's keywords are divided into specific, color-coded "genres" of word that can be organized into different areas of the detective's notepad before deploying them to solve the mystery. Each character has their own page on which McQuacklin notes down things like characteristics and possible motives for the crime, creating a stepladder approach to clue acquisition. Before you can solve a full sentence "deducktion," you'll need to have all the information first. Where Obra Dinn is content to let you flounder, Duck Detective takes after Golden Idol by giving you a clear picture of how much you know and what you have left to discover.
Duck Detective's multiple-choice ending was a surprise, though I felt it didn't quite stick the landing as far as making a statement about guilt and innocence. This might have something to do with the Telltale Games-esque display of arrest stats instead of a narrative breakdown of McQuacklin's own conclusions about humanity (animal-ity?) after cracking the whole case. It would have been interesting to see the writing attempt to tackle my first crack at the ending: since the game lets you choose who to arrest, I wanted to see what would happen if you arrested no one at all. Turns out, the game kicks you back to the start of the sequence, stating that someone must be arrested, which feels like lost narrative potential to me. I would have liked to see the game justify potential endings beyond what we got—for example, McQuacklin keeping his beak shut about the salami smuggling scheme in order to sell out and pay his rent. I'm a big champion of games letting players make bad or stupid decisions if they want to, and I wish Duck Detective had the narrative capacity to roll with decisions it might consider "bad endings."
Verdict
The first Duck Detective game is a tricky mystery disguised as a goofy slice of ham. From the writing and art design down to the voice acting, the game satisfies the cozy mystery itch with a gaggle of charming characters. I'll definitely be picking up the sequel, The Ghost of Glamping, when it arrives later in 2025.
Honorable Mention: The Rise of the Golden Idol
pretty good sequel that speedwalks in the hope that others will one day run
Steam link for The Rise of the Golden Idol
To say I have a love-hate relationship with the Golden Idol series is to misrepresent the situation somewhat. I enjoy the games and had a good time both with the 2022 original, The Case of the Golden Idol, and with this year's sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol. I have different issues with each game, none of which ultimately impacted my enjoyment of the mad-libs puzzle mechanics.
For me, Case's story was a bit more convoluted than I could hold in my brain at once, maybe partly due to the presentation of the story being limited to what could be shown in single screens and deduction documents. I started out with a riveted curiosity that fell off a cliff when I realized that, for all the phenomenal cosmic power offered by an artifact like the titular Golden Idol, the game was leading up to nothing more than an old man obsessing over a young woman he can't have. As that story kept building, I lost interest in the narrative and continued playing solely for the satisfaction of solving the puzzles.
Steam link to The Case of the Golden Idol
Conversely, I felt that Rise picked up where Case left off mechanically, expanding greatly on the core elements of gameplay and mystery at the expense of a more engaging story. The documents in Rise now include what felt to me like more of a guided path through the mystery. More scene-specific puzzles beyond matching names and faces, such as naming all the birds in a conservatory or translating a dance-based language, help lead the player through all the information there is to find before turning them loose on the broader question of "what happened here." Although I enjoyed the ride mechanically, I found Rise's story ultimately wasn't as interesting to me as Case's tense buildup. This might have something to do with the stakes being constantly heightened to the point of absurdity in Case, where Rise tends not to stray from the realm of plausibility—y'know, once you roll with the fact that an artifact like the Golden Idol itself exists within the realm of the story.
Verdict
The Rise of the Golden Idol takes what worked about its first installment and evolves to its benefit. Though I found the story lacking, I still enjoyed the unique puzzles and grimy art style. I'll gladly get in the pit and fight on behalf of Color Gray Games for bringing the mad-libs mystery mechanic out of its infancy and paving the way for other games to spin up their own takes on it.
Life Sim of the Year - Starstruck Vagabond
2024's top post-dad game
Steam link for Starstruck Vagabond
I'm a huge fan of "dad games." As defined by industry critic, writer, and indie developer Yahtzee Croshaw, the "dad game" is a broad genre of games that have gamified the experience of doing a good job at something simple and satisfying. Think of games like Sim City and the more recent Power Wash Simulator that give you a task. The satisfaction of the gameplay loop comes from completing that task well. Evolving past this is the "post-dad game," which merges this satisfaction with more explicitly game-y mechanics and often add scifi/fantasy/adventure elements to give the game more of a narrative.
Croshaw's Starstruck Vagabond crashed into my life with such force that I think I literally spent a 40-hour week on it on release. After a brief tutorial, players are put in charge of a dinky, trash-tier starship and a couple crates of goods to deliver. Play mostly consists of flying the ship around the galaxy to different planets to drop off orders, pick up more, and progress the story of why and how you got here.
Narratively, Starstruck Vagabond opens with the question of what will become of you as the last person from Earth. After a cryo-sleep incident, you're awoken thousands of years in the future, and in so doing become the last person from the Earth Federation left alive. There are humans/humanoids, sure, but none of them are from Earth. Everyone and everything you know and love is gone. So, of course, you're thrown into an exploitative alien capitalist hellscape as the Earth Federation's last remaining citizen and de facto leader. What did you expect, a free ride? In this economy? The gameplay loop largely focuses on you fixing up the ship, exploring the galaxy, chatting with your crew, and dealing with soul-crushing economic exploitation by continuing to need money, you ungenerous nitwit.
This gameplay loop speaks to me with such precision that I think I must have been a very satisfied farmer in a previous life. There are cooking and gardening mechanics to fill your commute time between planets with. I can enjoy party banter between the teddy bear and the snake lady. I can dress up my captain in outfits that let me match a silly hat with a badass duster jacket if I want. While I don't thrive on collect-a-thons and usually skip achievements that need me to gather all 900 pinecones, I gladly flew my ship to every corner of the galaxy to find the last seeds I needed to fully round out my garden and snap pictures of silly historical monuments. Croshaw's acerbic personality shines through most of the flavor text and in key moments of dialogue with its varied cast of characters. In particular, each of nine possible crewmates have a different and distinct personality according to the game's own alignment chart of attitude and motivation. There's not a wasted word in here, and a bunch of them are bound to get under your skin.
Script assess: Personality masterclass
I'm going to tear apart an upholstered couch with my teeth if I hear another gamer whine about how a game's story doesn't make sense to them, or how it doesn't "resonate" with a "universal audience." I'm of the opinion that writing for everyone ultimately means writing for no one. By which I mean: If you rigorously focus-group your writing and take a look at it from every possible perspective to make sure you're including something everyone can enjoy, the end result feels diluted and diminished as a result. With the rough edges filed off, personalities become round balls of broadly agreeable and/or understandable traits. They're fine. But we can do better than fine, as Croshaw shows with Starstruck Vagabond.
I have nothing but respect for Croshaw's eye for character interaction and development. Almost without exception, each and every crew member I met across my two playthroughs (so as to meet everyone) drove me straight up the wall when we first met. While not every personality is loud or bombastic, each one is fully committed to their bit to a point that just barely avoids excess. It would be faster to list the moments that didn't annoy me. And yet, there was a subtle shift in my reaction as a player to these characters who were constantly underfoot when I was sprinting off to fix a hull breach or steer away from an asteroid. The constant presence becomes familiar, and familiarity begins to feel safe. I sent my Captain Montag out to report for duty with the raggest, taggest bunch of misfits and came to value every one of them, whether it was purely for their comedic value or because they'd legitimately grown on me.
I appreciated, too, that romance isn't forced on the player. Anyone familiar with life sims like Stardew Valley and its ilk will likely see a friendship mechanic and immediately translate it into a romance meter. And yes, while you can work your way up to a romantic relationship with your crewmates, it's neither forced upon you nor implied that this is a gold standard end point for its relationships. I rejected all romantic advances toward my captain and never once felt like I was missing out on story or skipping something critical to the character development of either Captain Montag or the crewmates. I think it's this well-rounded eye for connection that helps the game stick the landing where others tend to peter out.
Major endgame spoilers incoming: The final act of Vagabond involves the crewmate with whom you have the strongest bond performing a heroic sacrifice to get you out of a particularly nasty jam. This action sticks in the long term, and you are left to play the postgame without whichever character this is for you. For me, it was Burlap, an apathetic alien who bonds with you over their perceived lack of ability to relate to humanity. While I don't remember word for word what Burlap's final message to me said, I do recall being unable to relate even the gist of it to my partner because of how hard I started crying when I tried. Burlap's sudden, final absence made that claustrophobic ship feel emptier and less familiar, a grief experience that resonates loud and clear.
I applaud the refusal to give the player a way out from this. In less brave hands, there might have been a deus ex machina, some applied phlebotinum, or a last-minute rescue plan that bails the player out from the persistent bad feeling of losing a valued crewmate. Instead, we're left to struggle through the rest of the game without them, and that's a bold narrative choice I think more games could stand to make.
Verdict
Starstruck Vagabond is a grand-slam dad game that takes everything I love about life sims and makes it funny, engaging, and exquisitely frustrating on a human level. The writing showcases Croshaw's keen comedic eye as well as an understanding of how and why humans will pack bond with anything, given half a chance.
Action Platformer of the Year - Nine Sols
2024's top Oldboy corridor fight shoutout
Steam link for Nine Sols
Look, I'm a Journey to the West fan just like every other person of culture. I can usually hold my own in the soulslike circuit if I have the right accessibility options. I don't feel the need to add my voice to the avalanche of people talking up Black Myth Wukong, so as much as I love that stinkin' monkey, I'm not going to. Instead, I want to spotlight another of 2024's Chinese mythology/folklore adaptations: Nine Sols by Red Candle Games, which I think hasn't gotten anywhere close to the attention it deserves.
Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games is responsible for 2017's Detention (which got a Netflix miniseries adaptation that I quite enjoyed) and 2019's Devotion (which remains turbo-banned in China for Pooh-related Easter eggs). Both of these are remarkable slow-burn horror games that deserve your attention. You should absolutely play them, now that they're available DRM-free on the Red Candle website.
The Red Candle Games site, where you can grab Detention and Devotion
That said, I'm here to evangelize the stylistic departure they made with Nine Sols, a 2D action platformer set in a scifi/fantasy adaptation of the Chinese myth of Chang'e and Hou Yi, the Lord Archer who shot down nine of the ten suns. Red Candle describes the setting as "Taopunk," a combination of Taoism and cyberpunk that inflects the futuristic technology with a Chinese fantasy overtone.
Protagonist Yi is a Solarian, an anthro-cat-like species from the planet Penglai. The game's story sends Yi on a quest to find the nine titular Sol Seals, held by other surviving Solarians and Yi's colleagues on the project that brought them to this "pale blue planet," understood by the player to be Earth. The deadly Tianhuo virus drove the Solarians to technological extremes to try to contain the virus, which brough the Solarians to Earth in the midst of a crisis-level project failure. The exact shape of this failure gradually becomes clear as Yi fights his way through robots, monsters, virtual reality, and other aspects of the crisis as he hunts down his former colleagues in an attempt to salvage what little might still be left.
This game is beautifully hand-drawn with 2D sprites against a background that sometimes goes 3D for parallax and atmosphere. The futuristic backdrop might seem like an odd choice for a mythological adaptation, and you might worry that going in without any knowledge of the base myth might leave you a bit confused. I'm confident you'll still find enough to love in the slick combat that combines a parry-centric style with familiar soulslike mechanics, richly detailed environments that are a joy to explore, and messy character relationships that revolve around duty and love. Red Candle's horror roots come out to play in choice moments of player stress, bleeding into one boss encounter (Lady Ethereal) particularly strongly.
Script assess: Breaking free of genre expectations
My gaming wishlist for 2025 includes more studios bending genre expectations and tropes the way that Nine Sols smashes together this ancient myth and a hard scifi setting. Even for those without a solid mythological background, there's so much to enjoy. Characters with mythical foundations are reimagined to be more than just a shoutout. Instead of modernizing this adaptation by just putting all the same guys in space, Nine Sols features a cast that holds their own as characters with motivations and flair distinct from the myth. The cast is much expanded from the blueprint of the myth, too: the game reworks Hou Yi into Yi, whose chief connection is his little sister Heng rather than the mythical Hou Yi's wife, Chang'e. Playing further into the game contains familiar names and plot beats for mythology buffs alongside cracking-tough bosses and collection goals for gamers.
By this point, I hope it will not surprise you to hear that I am weak in the soul for characters I can bond with. Nine Sols gives us a picture-perfect morality chain in the form of Shuanshuan, a little boy who can become something akin to Yi's adopted son, should the player be willing to put in the work. Collectibles found throughout the main narrative can be brought back to the base, the Four Seasons Pavilion, and given to him as gifts, unlocking special dialogue and adding bits of Shuanshuan's presence to the area. Bringing home a board game opens up scenes of him playing. Art scrolls give him the art bug, and he'll start drawing pictures of you and all his other friends to decorate the Pavilion with. Sheet music inspires him to take up music lessons. Shuanshuan's "little boy who won't clean his room" tendencies start to envelop the Pavilion like a hug, taking a sterile scifi space and making it feel lived in, natural, and warm.
Developing Yi's relationship with Shuanshuan this way opens up parts of Yi's personality that are otherwise quite thoroughly suppressed. In the main game, Yi is comically serious and keeps others at arm's length. Bonding with Shuanshuan not only loosens him up a bit, but also helps open the door to the game's golden ending: allowing Yi to grow closer to humanity via bonding with Shuanshuan opens up the choice for him to perform a heroic sacrifice by shooting a bomb-laden arrow that saves humanity and wipes out the Tianhuo virus for good.
Verdict
Nine Sols is a 2D action platformer that roots its punishing soulslike combat in a scifi-fantasy take on a well-loved Chinese myth. Its smooth combat system feels good to master, and its engaging characters carry a familiar narrative into new territory that welcomes mythology buffs as well as gamers just in it for a good time.
Existential Game of the Year - 1000xResist
THE Chinese-futurist diaspora game of all time
Steam link for 1000xResist
In the interest of full disclosure, I hated Sunset Visitor's 1000xResist when I started it, a feeling that endured through most of the runtime. My partner described this game's raison d'être best: "It lays out a bunch of bad feelings side by side and just makes you look at them for a while." But the longer I let 1000xResist percolate in my brain, the more inescapable I found its story. There's a claustrophobic inevitability that hits me close to the soul, which manifested as a deep resistance to the story it was telling me.
For the first few hours of 1000xResist, I was expecting a story about diasporic exceptionalism: a story that looks at immigrant experiences by valorizing the difficulty of leaving behind a homeland and calling out the new home's surroundings for making this transition difficult and, in some cases, necessary. It's a familiar enough pattern of storytelling that posits that life as an immigrant or an immigrant's descendants is hard, but that struggle itself creates merit and unique perspective that non-immigrants can't properly conceive of. Mapping a story about family and generational conflict onto these points is fairly easy and quite familiar, and 1000xResist initially duped me into thinking this was one in a long line of similar stories. I think maybe that's why it hurt me so much: what the game really insists on is much harder to grapple with.
1000xResist uses a nonlinear style and a scifi setting to tell its story. Players initially take control of a clone called Watcher in the distant future, gradually coming to realize that this entire futuristic world is populated by clones of the same woman: the ALLMOTHER, who players saw Watcher murder in the game's opening. We realize something's gone horribly wrong on Earth when the game takes us back into the ALLMOTHER's memories and shows us a pretty normal, familiar-looking high school. Watcher observes human students, not clones, walking the halls and gossiping about an upcoming dance. Then, things derail as we learn more about the clone society: even though all the clones share the same origin, mutations and distinct personalities set them apart and make for a society that is much less in lockstep than Watcher might think.
And honestly, this barely scratches the surface of 1000xResist's narrative. The story continued building past every single point that I thought a climax would come. There are aliens called Occupants that pose a greater-scope problem. There's a prolonged torture segment that seriously tests you, the player's, allegiance to the truth. As players unravel more of the ALLMOTHER's backstory as normal high school student Iris, they come to understand more about how the clones' struggles mirror their mother's own. The clone society breaks down in the days following Iris's murder and begins falling into eerily familiar patterns of state violence and suppression.
There are still familiar diaspora story beats, don't get me wrong. Iris clashed with her parents, who fled the backlash of the 2019 Hong Kong protests for Canada. In clone-generated motherhood, she becomes an authoritarian figure not unlike the one she accused her own mother of being in her struggle to fit in with her Canadian contemporaries. Further, after creating her clone society, Iris accidentally recreated a pseudo-Confucian society where every clone knows her role and her place in a rigid society that functions best when everyone performs their functions. That the game opens with Watcher murdering the ALLMOTHER begins to feel like a violent, but expected consequence of this pattern of generational trauma ratcheted up to a scifi extreme. Players live these echoes of the past and create Watcher's own memories of them in turn. Since everyone is a clone, aren't these memories meant to be communal? At what point does history become history, separate from who they are now?
Just like Iris, Watcher and the other clones try to derive purpose from integration into the societal structure that's expected of them. Players watch them fail to find this purpose as expectations and hopes die again and again. It's this brutal cycle of trauma and disaster that brings the player closer and closer to understanding the game's central thesis: Sometimes, actions that Hollywood storytelling have deemed "bad" really are the right answer, even if they still aren't "good." Violent rebellion, running away, and leaving behind a home you still long for are presented as a valid solution to breaking the cycle of trauma inherent to Iris's (and her family's) experience of diaspora.
Rant: Universality is not the point
Look, I harped on this in the Starstruck Vagabond section, but I'm going to do it again. I am sick to death of narratives built in a focus group test tube that are only released once the test audience fully understands them. Not every game is "for" every gamer. Not every story will click with every reader. That's not a flaw of the narrative design, that's the breadth of human experience. Y'all have got to stop taking it so personally when you don't understand something. Weird stories that I didn't totally get or that weren't written "for me" have been the bedrock of some of the most foundational gaming, reading, and watching experiences I've ever had.
1000xResist is a game about Hong Kong diaspora, with a pre-apocalypse hat tip toward the contemporary Chinese-Canadian experience. My guess is that 1000xResist will resonate strongest with children of immigrants, people with intimate/family ties to Hong Kong, and anyone else for whom "home" is no longer a real place that still exists. My folks aren't Hongkongers or Canadians. I'm a fourth-generation Chinese-American and I don't know the names of any of my family that might still be somewhere in China, let along where they are. So, like, is this game "for" someone like me? Personally, I don't think it matters. I don't think it matters to the game, either. If you don't get it, there are plenty of other games out there for you, and that's fine. But if you do get it, if it does resonate with you, 1000xResist is poised to be one of the most emotionally impactful games you play, precisely for that reason.
1000xResist's narrative about diasporic loss, places that come to exist only in memory, and the march of time eroding the concept of home strike brilliantly at the hearts of players like me who let their guard down out of a rote familiarity with diaspora stories. 1000xResist presents a reverence for tradition and heritage as part of diaspora's problem in a way that doesn't conflict, but meshes nicely with the central thesis about memory. Instead of a diasporic exceptionalist narrative that looks backward and memorializes where we came from, 1000xResist is a narrative that demands we look forward and trust the future to the young people who will have to take what we give them and make a life from it. We don't get to decide whether they take us along, and it's not for us to decide that it's wrong of them not to. It's not wrong to long for a place that feels more like home than the only one you've ever known. Nor is it wrong to think on the lessons learned by those who came before you. But 1000xResist posits that breaking this cycle of longing, searching, remembering, and recreating is the only way to be free from the hold that this particular nostalgia has on descendants of diaspora.
Script assess: Gameplay and story dissonance
I can talk about 1000xResist for ages, but the only thing I will never be stoked on is its gameplay. The overwhelmingly large bulk of its gameplay consists of walking around and talking to people. The voice cast is excellent and, as I hope I've shown, the effect of the writing is unmatched. Where I think this game struggles is its only real "game" mechanic, which involves maneuvering your character through the air to points in 3D space via zipline-esque points. I felt these sections took me out of gameplay and distracted from the game's true strength, especially given that some points are located above you or behind obstacles that make it hard to discern what path the game wants you to take. For me, the game would have been improved immensely without these sections entirely. The value in 1000xResist, and the reason you should buy and play this game in full, is fully in its story.
The only other thing I'd classify as "gameplay" in 1000xResist is the final, multiple-choice-ending sequence, which demonstrates a thoroughness of consideration for consequence that I wish other story-rich games gave to multiple endings. The player is given the responsibility of determining which characters to "keep" or "erase" from the new world, which can lead to positive and negative outcomes depending on the specific combination the player chooses. Most strikingly, taking the most holier-than-thou, altruistic route of allowing all characters to live is presented as an objectively wrong choice, given that one of the characters immediately shoots you down in any ending where they're allowed to live. This is a game that will not allow you to be a hero that shoulders the full burden of the world. It's not possible, it's not advisable, and it's not right. It shows us both the value and impact of violent rebellion, and demands that we take a side.
Verdict
1000xResist is a singular experience suffused with diasporic trauma, hope for the future, and complex thoughts about memory that I'm still unpacking after having long since put the game down. Come to this game for its central thesis about home, presented in a winding, layered narrative that does a truly laudable job of keeping things clear despite being populated primarily by clones of one woman.
Happy New Year
That's my top 10-ish of 2024 all wrapped up! I hope I've inspired you to pick up a few titles you weren't sure about or that didn't cross your radar to begin with. Indie gaming is doing amazingly, and I think it's more important than ever to support homegrown, niche, and small titles. I hope you have a delightful 2025 in terms of games, stories, and fun.