You know all those games we were talking about potentially being the thing this year around the time that Geoff Keighley was putting on his best corporate forced smile and preparing to take to the stage at The Game Awards?
They can all go do one.
Well, maybe aside from Balatro, because everyone likes Balatro.
But I digress, I’m not here to write about Balatro, no matter how many spare moments it’s robbed us all of. I’m here to write about my personal games of the year. There are three of them, because I’m an indecisive prick.
Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Fallout: London. Thank Goodness You’re Here.
Three games which have come to be in very different ways, and for different reasons.
I’ll start off with Infinite Wealth, as 2024 did. Dropping in January (categorically the best month because it’s the one I was born in) Like A Dragon 8 faced a tough task. It had to out-do its critically-acclaimed direct predecessor, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, as well as somehow give iconic series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu a better ending than the one from Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. You know, the ending that had all of us Yakuza-heads bawling like babies just a few months earlier.
In my estimation, it did a better job of both than it had any right to. It’s really two games. One’s a love letter to how far the long-unbeaten, but mentally bruised prize-fighter has come before he goes out to have what he believes could well be his final fight – the one in which the inevitable uppercut of time will knock him to the canvas through the gloves of his latest opponent. The other is the next chapter in the tale of someone whose life is all about approaching things in a way that Kiryu never has – to rely on others to do the fighting for you.
You can argue that RGG bringing Kiryu back for what is his third attempt at a retirement tour gets in the way of letting Ichiban Kasuga’s portion of the tale (which is supposed to have him properly establish himself as the face of the franchise after his excellent debut) do just that. To me, with Kiryu in there, you get an entire package that’s a lot more balanced in the tale it’s trying to tell. It’s ‘Doing It Yourself’ versus ‘Doing It With Help’, and (spoiler alert) it ends with the guy who represents the former finally accepting the help he needs.
Fallout: London, meanwhile, is set on sadness island, which is a lot less nice than Hawaii. While Shadow of the Erdtree has had us all debating whether DLC should be eligible for GOTY consideration, I’d argue Team FOLON’s massive creation makes a pretty good case that if DLC’s allowed, mods should be, too.
It’s an incredible achievement in and of itself that a huge volunteer-led project like this actually got over the release finish line in a form anything close to what it did, and it’s kind of a tragedy that that initial release build ended up being so buggy. If you can get past that, the mod’s not just a nice little extension to Fallout 4 – it’s exactly the kind of expansive, interesting attempt at taking the Fallout series beyond its North American roots that I’d have been impressed to have seen a professional studio with fairly hefty publisher backing deliver.
I’m not sure it’ll ever eclipse New Vegas on my list of best Fallout games, even with the fixes, but as someone who didn’t quite enjoy the first series of Amazon’s Fallout TV show as much as others simply because it didn’t really have capacity to offer the kind of different, unique take on the series’ world I’m looking for, I’m really glad London did just that.
Finally, Thank Goodness You’re Here from indie studio Coal Supper is the kind of game that, once you’ve shown it to someone, you don’t really have to explain why you love it. I might be from somewhere slightly north of Yorkshire, but this picture of the quaint and quirky English town is one that’ll speak to you no matter where in our crap nation that you happened to grow up, assuming you did so in a house without access to a butler and pony both called Giles.
It’s a hilarious love letter to working class people living working class lives, and in a year when we’ve had more and more soulless slop shovelled onto our plates, including the AI crap clogging up the socials, the simple and human deserves to be celebrated.
Alright, you can bring all those other games back in now.