Game of the Year 2024 Top 5

2024 turned out to be a hell of a year for my personal gaming in general. Yes, there were some old safe classics I played and they made the list, but the new games were bangers as you'll see in the top 5 here. 

 

5. Silent Hill 2 (PS5)

My expectations that both Blooper Team could pull this off and Konami would allow someone to pull this off were lower than any scale known to man. It was so low, that I didn't add a Silent Hill, one of my favorite game franchises, to any of my wish lists because I assumed I wanted nothing to do with this. But they did it. The crazy bastards did it. They stuck their hands in a dark hole and pulled a hell of a game out.

Granted, Blooper team did have one of the best videogame stories ever written as a premise. And they already had an idea of the look and feel. But they didn't phone it in. This is the remake Silent Hill fans deserve. 

There were new areas to explore. There were new puzzles that still felt like they belonged in Silent Hill. 

The weakest parts of the game are generally the boss fights. Most of the fights are very difficult to actually skill your way through them. You sort of have to take a few hits. The exception is most of the pyramid head fights. They found a way to make those very tense while giving you the ability to get through them if you were good enough. 

My other issue is the labyrinth. It's never my favorite part of Silent Hill, but usually it's a fairly small section. This labyrinth was annoying in every way possible. A turning puzzle that rotated a cubed room around giving you access to other paths. It wasn't clear as to what you were trying to do at first. Then the floors are all made of cages where Mandarin enemies hang below to hit you and interrupt your running. The combat scenarios weren't particularly interesting and didn't have any sort of checkpoint system. So you could get to the third encounter, die, and then have to play them all over again. 

Besides those couple of gripes, I was happy with this. Blooper Team played with liminal space in an interesting way. Even when not in the nightmare world, you felt unsettled. 

4. Helldivers 2 (PS5)

Helldivers 2 took Helldivers, put it in third person, and made it feel like a movie. 

I cannot believe how much ordinance can explode on the screen at the same time with no slowdown. There were too many times where I was running through the jungle, fighting the robots, and we'd get overwhelmed. And then we'd start calling in air strikes all around us, reminding me of classic Vietnam films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now. Trees falling over, explosions all around, and just praying that you didn't inadvertently call in explosives on top of your buddies. 

It's a tough game for sure, especially if you were like me and started late. I was generally 10 levels behind my buddies, making me a burden as I was getting destroyed every few minutes. But it rewards buddying up, even in an uneven situation. Sometimes 2 of the over leveled players would go on a scouting mission, while I did some cleanup work with an over leveled buddy. 

The humor was perfect. A lambasting of the nationalist propaganda. Perfectly encapsulating what made Starship Troopers so special. Sure, they are just ripping off Aliens, Starship Troopers, and Starcraft... but an homage of some of the best sci-fi of the past 50 years is the right thing to rip off, if you are going to rip it off. 

I was having a blast with Helldivers 2, and then my PlayStation plus expired and I no longer could play online. I still stare sometimes at that $80 a year price, asking myself if it's worth it. 

Better yet, maybe I'll just get it for my Steam Deck. 

3. Elden Ring (Steamdeck)

I'm back on my bullshit. Elden Ring again. My brother and I started a game with the Seemless coop mod. It changes the game dynamic. I think for the good. 

There's less grinding to try and get ready for the next area. Sure, things get easier, but there's something here. Something that makes me excited for an official 3 player release. Margit is still going to kick your ass. You're still going to wander into places you aren't ready for yet. The main difference is you aren't re-running that ruin just grinding out levels until the numbers make sense. You can make real progress, in shorter time. I trims the fat. 

And kudos to the mod creator. There are some issues for sure, but this is more stable than it should be. Sometimes we'll get a hard crash. Sometimes the mod doesn't auto-update on the Steamdeck. Sometimes the hero's grave chariots get confused as to where to go and get locked into a wall. But overall, this thing works and the mod did this in their spare time. 

2. Starfield (Xbox Series S)

I'm a huge Bethesda head but the lukewarm reception to Starfield had me worried. Unfortunately, I don't have a machine that can run Starfield at high settings. My gaming machine broke a few years back, it's not available on the PS5, and I was only able to get my hands on a Series S. So I held off on playing. 

That is until I bought a couple months of GamePass so a friend and I could play some Gears of War. I figured, "Well, it's included. I might as well download it and see how it goes."

I had a blast with Starfield. It's some of the best combat Bethesda has ever done. I love the factions and world. 

I was even surprised that the load times for the Series S, weren't all that bad. 

My biggest complaint is that there are entire systems that aren't explained well. For instance, there's this huge settlement system that I had to research to find out what benefits it provided and how to hook up multiple settlements to each other. Even with all the reading, I never really figured out how to make the settlements auto-use resources it was trading. 

There's also a sort of "magic" system that feels a little half hearted. I unlocked all of the abilities and used them maybe half a dozen times. The equivalent is the shout system in Skyrim, except these shouts really have no use cases that a shotgun can't fulfill. 

I also wish that the skill tree was designed slightly differently. There are things that I desperately want to be able to do, but I have to unlock 15 skills in the same category to get to it. Many of the skills (especially the early ones) don't really matter or mean anything until you get farther in the game. 

It seems like I have a ton of complaints, and I do, but it's only because I loved the world so much. I loved the gameplay loop. I didn't feel the lack of exploration as a negative, I saw it was a guided tour of the cools things Bethesda wanted you to see. It's not what I always want from a Bethesda game, but it's exactly what I wanted from this game. 

1. Alan Wake 2 (PS5)

Alan Wake 2 did just about everything right. Story filled with intrigue, varied tasks and environments, fantastic acting, fantastic writing. It's the sequel I've wanted for years. 

The combat was tighter. The Remedy-verse expanded greatly over Control. It's just so different from anything else out there. There's spooks, there's lovable NPCs. The environments dripping in atmosphere.

And probably most important, the game doesn't take itself too seriously. When you look at horror games like Silent Hill, there's not much levity. It's you, darkness, horrors, and depression with an occasional plot beat with an NPC. 

Alan Wake gives you breaks. You can wander the sleepy fishing resort part of town before you head into the woods to face your fears. The town is populated with David Lynch-esque characters. Each NPC has an uncanny valley amount of weird, where you believe they exist, but there's still something off. 

There's the (don't click the link if you don't want a spoiler) metal song, Old Gods of Asgard. There's the fully filmed commercials by the Koskela Brothers. There's the surreal interviews with Mr. Door on his talk show. 

They even had the guts to have a black female protagonist. Like come on, who else is doing that?

I know Alan Wake 2 didn't fly off the shelves when it came out, but I hope this comet has a long tail and gets the sales to a level where we get a third, because I'm not done with Alan Wake or the Remedy-verse. I want more.