Five Favorite things from 2024
The one promise I kept from the start of 2024 was to carefully maintain a letterboxd and a backloggd, which you can look at to see the movies I watched and the games I played. But these are the ones I want to highlight. I've purposefully excluded things from 2023 (so no Poor Things or Fallen Leaves, which I did love in 2024), and I only picked out five things that I wanted to talk about; this is not a comprehensive list of what I enjoyed.
Balatro
The remarkable thing about Balatro is that it's not really a roguelite, not exactly. Most roguelites are balanced around being basically impossible to beat at first, with the metaprogression letting you claw back a little equity after each run, eventually 'retuning' the game to be beatable. This is how Hades works, for example; at the start of progression you have very little health and a player of normal skill couldn't really make it through Elysium at all.
Balatro does not work like that. While it has metaprogression, it is possible to win your very first game; metaprogression gives you more options (and some of those options are required to achieve the the extreme scores needed for deep endless runs), but it doesn't really put you over the hump of simply winning a normal run.
I actually did just install Balatro on a new device and won the first run very easily. It really is a skill game, which I think is an underrated aspect of its success; learning to win at Balatro is like unfolding a puzzle, one that most players chip away at over the course of many play sessions.
Exordia
Seth Dickinson claims this novel started out as a fun one-off to write in between installments of his Baru Cormorant novels. It is very much not a fun one-off; it is (and here's a warning), definitely the first of a series. It's fairly long. And it's pretty substantially deranged. I loved every page of it.
I'd describe Exordia, somewhat crassly, as Michael Crichton by way of Jeff VanDerMeer and Tom Clancy. It's a lot more ambitious than its side project origins suggest; the novel has a good half-dozen or more viewpoint characters, and it pivots gleefully between miltech jargon spew, operatic space drama, and extremely conceptual science fiction.
Challengers
Here's a movie that is 1. squarely intended for adults, 2. fun. What a fucking miracle! Those are not supposed to get made any more! They've been banned by the Powers that Be!
This description makes it sound like a throwback to the adult dramas of yesteryear but it's really not; it looks like nothing else. It's shot very much with the film technology of today. It's just that, unlike so many other movies, that technology is being used to make a movie that looks like something, rather than a pseudo-movie that looks like nothing.
That something is a sweaty fujoshi-gazing fantasia that puts the erotic thriller in a blender with a sports movie. And that soundtrack! It really makes the movie; somehow full of unmisteakeable Reznor/Ross electronica that still perfectly fills so much of the movie with cheeky, irreverent energy.
This movie is like an antidote to the 'everyone is hot and no one is horny' vapors. Yes, it's a movie about three perfectly beautiful people making out with one another, but those perfectly beautiful people are wonderfully embodied within their sports-movie milieu. One of the best moments in this movie is an insert of Zendaya applying moisturizer to her ACL surgery scar. There's sweat. There's sports tape peeling off Mike Faist's perfectly sculpted shoulder. A dick gets slapped (no spoilers on whose).
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
There's really no particular touchstone for this game that I know of; it's a point-and-click adventure, but the puzzle design is shies away from the usual 'medium-sized dry goods' design you expect from the genre. Instead, Lorelei is a tangled web of logic, language, and math puzzles that build on top of one another. Very few things I played this year really suggested a wavelength, a type of sicko as strongly as this game; people who vibe with this style of puzzle design should love this.
Star Wars: Outlaws + Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
These two AAA games are so powerfully milieu-pilled. They both felt like a step forward in the design of this type of game. They both carefully consider how the affordances of their respective genres should really look, feel, and fit into their respective worlds.
Outlaws, for example, has a stealth recovery mechanic. These are pretty standard – a typical version is to slow down time so you can gun down the guard who spotted you before the alarm is raised. But that game's version sees Kay Vess, the titular outlaw, put her hands up and start fast-talking the guards.
Great Circle works a similar magic trick. It's very easy to see a modern AAA Indiana Jones game and assume it must be an Uncharted-alike, but in reality, this game is an immersive sim with a big emphasis on stealth, character, exploration, and puzzle solving. The game hardly ever features anything that could be described as a 'combat section'.
Ultimately, both of those games are built out of fairly standard parts, but there's a degree of care in adjusting those individual parts to fit the setting and characters.