[blog] The Archive of Ruben

So, I have decided to start a blog here. Well, it’s not entirely accurate to say that I'm starting a blog here, it’s more like continuing one here. A bit about my history then. I’ve actually been writing a blog since 2017, just, obviously, not on this site (or in English for that matter). However, the site where I was doing this is now kinda dead. Okay, not really, not completely, but the blogging part of it certainly is. Which, honestly, was dead for quite some time now, and really, it hasn’t been all that "lively" even when I started back then. This part, I honestly wasn’t all that bothered about. I knew when I began that it wasn’t a high-traffic place, and I was fine about blogging in a small and somewhat forgotten part of the net. It was, as that Star Wars: Rogue One reaction image says, a peaceful life.

Until now that is. The real problem, though, was actually a slew of technical problems with the site. I kinda got fed up with it, and decided it was time to move on (toward greener pastures, hopefully). I thought about simply moving to a site more geared toward blogging since the previous one wasn’t primarily about that. However, that solution felt a bit, for lack of a better word, lonely.

That leads us here, the HowLongToBeat site, on which I’ve been active for quite a few years now. This seemed like the best place to start anew. Well, to continue, more like.

As an important note, English is not my native language. After nearly two decades of daily use I would like to believe I’m proficient enough in it, but let me apologize in advance, if what I’m about to write sounds slightly off (and hopefully only slightly) or isn’t entirely grammatically correct.

So, what am I going to write about? Mostly games that I’ve beaten, occasionally visual novels too. What I’m not going to write about, are games that I’m currently playing. So don’t expect weekly status updates about what I’m doing. As to how frequently I’m going to write here, not that frequently, I’m afraid. Even before, my average post count was one a month, and while there were occasions of multiple posts in a single month, there were also times when I didn’t post anything for an entire month.

The unfortunate reality is, I don’t always have much to say about a particular game. Even if I finish at least a couple of games every month, sometimes, I just don’t have anything meaningful to say, so simply I don’t write anything. For example, I recently finished Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, and I would be hard-pressed to say much more about it than I managed in the "Post your wins" thread. If anything, I will likely still be more active on that thread than here. In many ways, this blog will be the place where my extended thoughts on games can be read. (If I have extended thoughts, that is.)

Also, the very first actual post, the one after this, may not exactly be indicative of the majority of my work that you will be seeing here. Most other posts won’t be quite as long, or go quite as deep as the Disco vs. Torment will. It’s just that I put a lot of thought into why I didn’t really click with Tides of Numenera, and why, in contrast, I did with Disco Elysium. I don't have such strong feelings about most games, so such blog posts don’t happen all that often.

I guess that’s about it for this introduction. So, hello there people of the internet, and welcome to my blog: The Archive of Ruben.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

Torment: Tides of Numenera is an old-school CRPG, inspired by Planescape: Torment. Inspired so much, in fact, that it took part of its title.



A spiritual successor that aims to imitate by presenting a very unique world and story, without the usual tropes you come to expect from role-playing games. In which they succeed, the world of Numenera is a thoroughly unique place and the story is missing the usual cliches too.

As for the gameplay, there’s an interesting approach here, because there are only a few battles throughout the whole game. I only found like 3-to 4 combat situations in the first 10 hours, and half of those could be avoided as well. Hell, the game doesn’t actually call them battles either, but these "Crisis" situations, so it’s clear from the naming alone that the devs were going for something slightly different. Not that the actual combat was all that satisfying. Although I can’t exactly outright say that it’s bad, because I just spent so little time with it, that I just can’t really judge it for what it is. There might be some depth to it that I missed, but it fell pretty flat for me.

Instead of violent altercations, they tried to gameify the dialogue a bit. As a cornerstone of the genre, there are quite a lot of skill checks in the game, except it’s not a binary you can pass it or you can’t type of system. In this game, you have three different pools called: Might, Speed, and Intelect. For example, if you come across a skill check to pickpocket, it uses your character's Speed pool, you attempt it, and on a separate slider, you can decide how many points you’re going to put into it, with more points increasing your chance of success. However, your character only has ten points in their Speed pool, and who knows when the next such skill check will come. So you have to think carefully and sometimes take risks, since, especially in the early game, you can’t easily refill these pools. Or you can just savescum until you succeed since it’s chance-based. One thing to note here is that it’s not just your main character who can do these skill checks, your party members can contribute as well, so it's wise to put together your party to cover as many specializations as you can. If I were to mention one small problem with this system, is that, between your entire party, it’s all too easy to specialize in absolutely everything as the game goes on, and trivialize skill checks. That’s just a small gripe, though, the system works well enough, and it’s kind of fun.

Now, if there’s one word with which I would describe this game’s world and story, it would be different. It’s truly different from any other RPG that I played. Different, however, doesn’t necessarily mean better. Honestly, I can’t say that game managed to grab me all that much. It might have been too different even, at least for my taste.

The world and story are interesting with a lot of weird and bizarre ideas, however, they are all weird, every single one of them, and when everything is weird, then nothing is. Every new location, every character, every new quest and plotthread has some wildly new and bizarre idea behind it, and when everything is this weird then that's just the norm of this universe. I could never get all that attached to anything because I could just never get a baseline understanding of… well, anything, really. It made me feel that trying to learn anything about this world is a moot point because it most likely will never come up again. The moment we move on from something, the next quest, location, or character will be defined by a brand-new set of rules and concepts. None of which is to say that what was there was badly written, there were some genuinely engaging stories in the game.

Planescape: Torment, for all its weirdness, had its roots in traditional D&D fantasy. I had, at least, a baseline understanding of things. It’s precisely because of that baseline understanding, that you could (or at least I could) appreciate all the weird twists that the game introduced to usual fantasy tropes and storytelling. In contrast, for Numenera I sometimes felt that it was only weird, to be weirder, and because Planescape: Torment did that too. It honestly felt a little self-serving. (Of course, though, I can’t really speak for developer intent, but to me, it felt like they overdid it.)

Also worth mentioning is that the main plot thread concerning our main character is very, very reminiscent of Planescape: Torment. Naturally, with their own interpretation of it, but it felt a bit overly familiar. For all the effort the game puts into being different, they might have followed in the footsteps of Planescape: Torment’s main plot a bit too faithfully. It might have been better if the game didn’t try to be such a faithful spiritual successor.

Another problem of mine was the variety, or rather, the lack of it. As interesting as the stories and quests could be, there wasn’t much variety in the way they were told. I’m mainly talking about humor, there is very little levity in this game. It’s one weird situation after the other, always seriously told. All of which, coupled with my above-mentioned gripes, meant that after a while, especially concerning side questing, the experience grew stale for me. At least, depending on how much I found any newly introduced sci-fi concept intriguing. I also want to reiterate that the game isn’t actually badly written, not as far as I could judge, it was just a bit too much for me at times, without a chance for a breather.

Endless text and dialogue that, after the freshness of the initial weirdness wore off, I just got tired of.

None of this was helped by how little of the game is voiced. Now, I don’t want to needlessly criticize the game, since this type of game is rarely Triple-A, and considering how much text there is, the limited voicework is little wonder. Still, it would have helped a lot. I bring this point up specifically because the other subject of my writing managed to pull it off.

In the end, I want to emphasize, that despite my many issues, Torment: Tides of Numenera is not a bad game. Not at all. It creates a genuinely unique and different world with some clever solutions. If you want a serious sci-fi story with a lot of meat and unique ideas then you can’t go wrong with the game. For me, however, it seemed the game wants to be too faithful a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment and tries to be too different from everything, and in its overeager attempt it becomes hard to connect with.



No Truce with the Furies.

Or Disco Elysium, if you are so inclined. I find the project name No Truce With the Furies to be much cooler sounding. Though I do understand why it ended up with Disco Elysium, and I can also see how that describes the game better.

This is another old-school CRPG, which, yet again, is inspired by Planescape: Torment. However, unlike Numenera which couldn’t deny its source even if it didn’t literally take its title from there, in the case of Disco Elysium I would not have immediately traced it back to Planescape: Torment.

I compare these two games to one another not just because of the shared lineage, but because I simply happened to play them one after the other.

The game, this time around, takes place in a much more grounded, and closer to our times world, even when compared to generic fantasy, much less compared to the bizarre world of Numenera. We get a world like ours at the beginning of the 20th century, where, instead of trying to find our creator god while avoiding a cosmic horror, we are a police officer tasked with solving a (seemingly) simple murder case.

(Although I called its setting more grounded I wouldn’t really call it mundane, considering the sheer ubiquity of generic vaguely medieval D&D-esque fantasy the early 20th-century setting is probably a way more exotic one. I’m not actually going anywhere with this, I just thought it was ironic.)

My biggest question about this game was this: Is it really that good? Less of a question, honestly, and more like a fear. Because I only ever heard good things about this game. A rare, unanimous praise that called this title a modern masterpiece, the kind of praise you don’t hear every day. When you put the bar that high, however, you cannot not be anxious about clearing it. Thankfully, though, Disco Elysium is actually, really that good.

Due to in big part the way your skills work. It’s such a clever and unique solution that I don’t actually even want to spoil it for anyone. You better see that for yourself. Unless, of course, you already learned about what skills do in this game, it’s a five-year-old title at this point, that’s plenty of time to hear about things even if you didn’t go out of your way to learn about the game. Let’s just say that Disco Elysium approaches the usual RPG skills in a very unique and incredibly entertaining way, it defines your character and role-playing in ways I have never seen before.

What I would like to talk about, is the way skill checks work, which is another clever solution that the game employs. In most RPGs (of this kind) skill checks are the all-caps SOLUTION to every problem. Provided you can pass them skill checks are the de facto best solution to every situation and quest. Not so much in Disco Elysium, here you can’t convince the local bartender cafeteria manager to give you a room for free just because you maxed out your charisma, persuasion, and bartering skills. In this game, you can’t solve every problem perfectly or convince everyone of everything just because you put a few extra points into your skills. Well, that’s just what the game doesn’t do with skill checks, what it does is that it offers positive modifiers for them if you do specific actions. For example, you come across a freezer that has been on for decades and is now frozen shut because of it. You would need a lot of strength to force it open. Unless you are smart enough to unplug it first and let it defrost because that gives a positive modifier to the chance to succeed at that skill check. If you also equip a prybar before attempting, then your chances increase yet again. All on top of your baseline strength stat. This sort of logic applies to conversations too, instead with information. If you do your detective work properly, which is what you are supposed to do, then you can catch people lying, or already know key information before a conversation, then you can increase your chances to succeed in dialogue-based skill checks. It’s a very rewarding system since it motivates the players to do their detective work seriously by chasing down leads and putting in the legwork. None of this is to say that investing in your skills is pointless, that very much has its uses, it's just that there are other ways to succeed than simply building your character right. The above-mentioned is most prominently true for story critical skill checks, the ones that you really need to succeed at to progress.

This game’s battle system is worth a mention because it doesn’t have any. Indeed, Disco Elysium does not possess a formal combat system, making it that much more unorthodox as an RPG. The only thing you are going to be doing during the game is walking up and down the map talking to people and occasionally interacting with the environment. (While playing I actually got a flashback to playing point-and-click adventure games.) Endless dialogue and text that without variety could easily run out of steam. Similar to what happened to my experience with Numenera. Except this game nails it, even without a combat system. The writing is excellent in Disco Elysium, and humorous too! This is one of the funniest games I ever played, it constantly cracked me up. And not because they filled the text with jokes and gags, the game is plenty serious many times, if anything the whole world has a more somber and melancholic feel to it. The game simply aims to entertain with its dialogue and does a damn good job at that. Thanks to this the game feels engaging throughout even though all you do is read dialogue, and don’t have that much quote-on-quote "variety".

The strength of the writing is further enhanced with the excellent voicework, because, unlike Tides of Numenera, almost the entire game is voiced. Every line of dialogue and almost every line of narration too. It gives an awful lot to the experience. Now, I understand that full-voice acting is a modern-day luxury. Old CRPGs didn’t have it and maybe thanks to that, the people who grew up with those games, who are the target audience for these newer ones too, and who I imagine to be an older kind of gamer, might be used to the lack of voice acting. Add that these types of old-school RPGs are usually not Triple-A with an incredible amount of text, and it’s no wonder why the voiceover is so limited. But damn it, Disco Elysium is one of the best examples of how much voice acting can add to these narratives.

So yes, Disco Elysium feels like a much more varied experience than Numenera, despite the latter’s much more unique ideas. Or maybe exactly because of them. Disco Elysium could always surprise me with how certain quest of plot beats went because they often went very differently from how expected them. Expected based on my genre knowledge and gaming experience. A kind of surprise I never got from Numenera, because everything was just too different there.

I’m reminded about a certain writing advice that was given about working with familiar tropes, I don’t remember where I read it, but I think it was actually several different sources giving the same advice. It was about how when you are using well-worn tropes you should avoid copying them as is because that just leads to clichés. Putting your own twist on it is what makes it entertaining, and when people recognize the trope being used they would be excited about its execution here, so that even those who would groan after recognizing the familiar trope would be pleasantly surprised about your different execution of it. Also, your rendition of said trope should avoid being too different, too alien, because in that case, it would just be impossible to connect with it.

Now, I’m not saying that’s exactly how it went with Tides of Numenera. That they took well-worn tropes and twisted them too much. However, this analogy might just accurately describe my experience with the game, that it was too alien for me to connect with.

As to how fair comparing Disco Elysium and Torment: Tides of Numenera actually is… that’s a different question that I don’t have a definite answer for. Somewhat maybe, considering their shared source of inspiration, and same genre, but I personally mostly did it because I happened to play them after each other. They went with very different approaches and probably for different goals too. Despite my gripes with Numenera, its approach was not inherently wrong. Heck, I wouldn’t call it bad either, it’s a fascinating game with a lot of interesting ideas. However, if you only had time for one, I would definitely and wholeheartedly recommend No Truce With the Furies. And not just to hard-core fans of CRPGs but to any enjoyer of role-playing games.

I have both of these games in my backlog, although it will likely be years before I get to them. Interesting comparison!

Necromunda: Hired Gun is an FPS game set in the Warhammer 40k universe, on the titular planet Necromunda, playing as the titular hired gun. If there is one thing to note here, is that although the game is set in Warhammer 40k world, it’s not one of its more recognizable parts. At least not for me. Not the typical front-line battlefield where the fate of the universe is decided, where you can find every iconic element of the setting from space marines to orcs and everything in between.

Necromunda is more like a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland (at least the parts you will navigate), which mostly consists of ruined, long-abandoned buildings and other gargantuan complexes, ruled by all sorts of criminal gangs. It’s a bit more like Mad Max, or the game series Rage, than what you might expect if you are only familiar with the Dawn of War games. None of which is to say that you can’t find elements of the 41st millennium everywhere, the immense and oversized nature of the setting shines through the architecture of the environment.

The environments, in fact, are one of the best parts of the game. They look great, they are varied, and a fair few of them are quite big too. The actual best part, though, is the way you can traverse these locations. Because between your pretty fast base movement speed, dashing, double jumping (and you can jump pretty high) and your grappling hook, you can quite literally fly through these places. As I mentioned, the size of the maps does allow for that, there is some nice verticality there. All this combined and the movement feels great, blitzing through the maps in a hail of gunfire is a pretty neat experience.

The most important part of an FPS, however, is the gunplay, and the game is pretty good on that front too. It takes a bit to unlock your entire arsenal, but once it happens you get a decent selection, and using most of them is pretty satisfying. You also need to get somewhat used to the game’s pace, as this is a fast-paced one, more like the new DOOM games than something like Call of Duty. Once you really get into the groove, though, it’s a real blast.

Another thing, that’s worth mentioning is that this is not a Triple-A game. Which makes some of its achievements all the more impressive. Graphical fidelity might not entirely be up there, but the game looks pretty good nonetheless. There may be a little too much gray and brown in it, but that’s more of an unfortunate stylistic choice. The gameplay is up there with the best of them, too… with uhh… one exception.

Jank.

Once you get over the looks, you will not mistake this title for a Triple-A release for a second. From the way your inventory works to animations to all the bugs and glitches, both big and small, it’s obvious that the game was made on a budget. It’s not that extremely smooth experience, you get from big-budget titles where the devs take sandpaper to every rough edge. It took me five minutes after starting the game to encounter my first problem in the form of a visual glitch on the character selection menu, it took another five for me to fall off the map, and into the infinite void. Another ten minutes later and managed to open a treasure chest from behind, so the lid of the chest opened into my character and trapped me completely. Thankfully though, it wasn’t that bad after that, I never encountered that many bugs in succession, and I never lost much progress even when I did. Maybe I got extremely unlucky at the beginning of the game. That being said, it’s undeniable that Necromunda has a lot of bugs and glitches that can make the experience more trying. I can’t make any guarantees about the amount of glitches anyone will run into, but my experience certainly wasn’t ruined by them.

Honestly though, sometimes I’d rather take an unpolished gem like this game, instead of a Triple-A experience that was smoothed to perfection but is otherwise bland and forgetable.

There’s also the story. The game technically has one, but honestly, the less said about it the better. I can’t even say that much about it because it was just kind of confusing, despite it being very simple and straightforward. The plot lacks a lot of setup, to put it simply. The game just never really establishes the important bits, about who’s who, what’s what, and why any of this is a big deal. It’s a mess, really. The story is mostly just an excuse to bring you to all kinds of fun places to shoot up. However, those places really ARE fun to shoot up so I forgive the game for this. The story is obviously not what the experience is about.

All in all, Necromunda: Hired Gun is a really fun FPS game that I can recommend, with the caveat that this is not a big-budget release, so there’s a fair bit of jank to get over.

Persona 5: Strikers

Persona 5: Strikers is a spin-off game to the original Persona 5, with everyone’s favorite Phantom Thieves back to steal more hearths. Unlike the previous entry, however, they didn’t manage to steal mine with this attempt.

Strikers switches the genre from turn-based JRPG to action. I guess, maybe you could even say call it an action RPG, but honestly, I wouldn’t go that far, the game barely has any meaningful RPG elements. I believe the style of hack-and-slash that the game goes for is called musou, characterized by the literal metric ton of enemies you fight simultaneously. (My experience in that style is extremely limited, though.) In Strikers battles consist of dozens of canon fodder enemies, who are easily mowed down, and a few elites that are more difficult to get rid of.

In one word, the battle system is a mess.

Despite the ability to cut down hundreds of enemies, you are deceptively fragile. You can be easily staggered and each strike takes significant chunks of your health. Elite enemies, on the other hand, aren’t so easily staggered and have inflated HP pools. You could hammer away at them for quite a while without really making a dent. Then there’s the chaos on the battlefield, although elites telegraph their attacks, that is not always easy to see with all the cannon fodder swarming around, not to mention all the effects and attacks flying around. Cannon-fodder, that you can’t quite ignore either, because if they do hit you, while they don’t do much damage, they will stagger you, and that will leave you open for a world of hurt.

The use of persona is still here, as well as the ability to switch between them, but their implementation leaves much to be desired. There’s a button, which if you press it down allows you to switch between the personas, while the game freezes time. Now, this is kind of the default state for a turn-based game, thus doesn’t feel out of place, however, that is not the case for a real-time action game. Here, everyone on the battlefield is awkwardly frozen mid-battle while you fiddle around with menus.

It’s an awkward system that breaks the flow of the battle. On top of that, it’s not even really worth it. The point of persona use would be the same as in the main game, to hit enemy weaknesses. This was instrumental to your success back then, but here and now? Not so much. You obviously do more damage if you hit enemy elemental weaknesses, and practically wipe out smaller enemies but using skills in such a capacity is neither all that useful nor that satisfying. The cannon fodder can be wiped out easier and for the elites, it’s not a satisfying solution because constantly freezing time and spamming skill is boring and not all that useful because you don’t do particularly significant damage, and quickly run out of SP (read: your mana in this game). The other use of skills on elites and bosses would be to quickly deplete their shell gauges or break bars, or whatever they were called. What happens when you deplete this shell gauge is that enemies get stunned for a few seconds. A few seconds, for a hell of a lot of work because breaking these shell gauges is no mean feat. It takes a lot of damage to break them with the best way being hitting the enemy with their elemental weakness via skills. But as said, using skills sucks. This shell gauge mechanic is a lot of work for very little reward, honestly, it feels like a completely useless element that was tacked on for no good reason.

The one good thing about combat is that using your characters' basic attacks, their light and heavy attacks, and the resulting combos, is a fairly satisfying system. It looks good, and there’s a bit of variety too, as you can control not just your main character, but every member of your party, with all their unique (though not that different) move sets.

That’s all the good, and as you can see, the bad outweighs it by a lot. The gameplay is annoying and boring at best and horrible at worst. After ten hours I bumped the difficulty down from normal to easy, and even that only made the gameplay bearable. Barely bearable. I should also add, that Stirkers is no short game, it clocks around 40 hours, so this adventure is not a breezy experience either. It’s not short enough for me to be able to overlook such glaring problems with the gameplay. There was a point halfway through the game where I was so fed up with it that I considered dropping it altogether and watching the rest of it on Youtube. At least the story would have been worth a watch…

The story, you see, is actually good, at times even great. The things that made the original game work shine through here as well. The story is really worth experiencing if you liked what the original had to offer. However… not quite as good. As good as the story of Strikers gets, it never reaches the same heights as the base game. For one, our main group doesn’t receive much in terms of progression, their stories, arcs, and developments are mostly done. The entire extended cast is dropped too, so we only have one antagonist per dungeon and a handful of new characters. None of which is bad, as I said, but compare that to the original Persona 5. The game was introducing and developing the sizable main cast, while there were a dozen other character stories going on, on top of the villain of the week and the main plot. That game was dense. Perhaps too dense even, there could be an argument that the base game was suffering from bloat, but all those stories were excellent. Now, the fact that Stikers dropped the social-sim element, though painful, is understandable, and so is the scaled-back amount of stories.

However, Strikers is not a stand-alone spin-off, it’s a direct continuation of the base game, starting with Strikers would be a horrible idea. Considering that you likely already played the first game invites comparison. In fact, you cannot not compare the two games. And stacked against its predecessor Stikers comes short in every regard. Especially the above-mentioned gameplay.

In the end, what can I say? Is Persona 5: Strikers worth your time? If can get on well with the gameplay then absolutely, there’s a great story to experience there and as far as I could see others didn’t seem to have such a bad time with the gameplay. Whatever you do, however, don’t expect the same mind-blowing quality of the original Persona 5.

2024 is over. I usually write one post about my year to sum it all up. This is it.

This one is essentially going to be a top list of all the best (and the not-so-best) of the games I played in 2024. Not just the games that came out that year, but any game I happened to play in that timeframe. (Also, some of this post might be familiar, if you saw my similar post around the site.)

In short summary, I played a lot more games in 2024 than in previous years, in fact, it was my personal best since 2019. This mostly comes down to the simple reason that I haven’t played any gigantic RPGs or visual novels. I’m mostly satisfied with the overall quality of the games I played, not just with their quantity. However, it's worth noting that I had much more negative experiences and disappointments in 2024 than in recent years.

Before we get into my actual favorites, let’s get the honorary mentions, the music, and the disappointments out of the way. I’m going to group up my negative experiences where I will talk about not just bad games, but ones that disappointed me in some way.

The not-so-best.

Chicken Police – This one hurts the most because I loved the first game. I had high expectations for this one, but it wasn’t even as coherent a whole as its predecessor. It’s not an outright bad game but quality goes down as time progresses and the ending was pretty bad.

The Outer Worlds - Again, this one ain’t bad either, but it is painfully mediocre. Everything in it works, but the devs had only one idea to build the game from, and it’s not even an original one. It lacks that spark of creativity that I would expect from Obsidian, the game is really not the new New Vegas.

High On Life – I thoroughly disliked the gunplay, and the humor, which the game is built on, is a huge miss for me. Everyone is motor-mouth, and every jokes goes on just that bit longer to make it feel obnoxious.

Industria – This game just suffers from too great an ambition. In some ways it’s impressive, considering how small a release it is, but the story is a mess that chooses its storytelling instrument wrongly, and the combat is quite mediocre.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III – This is a soulless piece of cash grab. I’m talking about the campaign here, that’s the only thing I come for in this series nowadays.

Drakengard II – Playing this game is still a largely miserable experience. If only slightly less so than in the first game.

Persona 5 Strikers – I really wanted to love this, because Persona 5 is great, but this comparison does not do the game any service. The story is still great but I had an awful time with the gameplay, as my post above describes it in detail.

The honorable mentions.

Merchant of the Skies – A simple, fairly short, and not all that difficult little management game that nonetheless is really engaging to play. There is a little narrative to it too, but it's the gameplay that managed to hook me in.

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance – Finally the game that managed to live up to the series fame. At least for me, the previous episodes had rather forgettable stories, only carried by their stellar gameplay. Here, though, the story is great as well.

System Shock (Remake) – A bit too combat-heavy for my taste in immersive sims, but considering it's among the first of its kind I don’t really mind. It’s a very well-put-together game that doesn’t hold your hand and expects you to figure your way around the map and your objectives.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 – I honestly barely remember the first game, but this second one, I won’t forget. It took a couple of pages out of other strategy games, and introduced some light management elements, and the main thing, the grand space battles, are still incredibly fun.

Trepang2 – A spiritual successor to F.E.A.R., a fast-paced FPS that’s a blast to play. You need to get a bit used to its speed, but once you do, it’s a ton of fun.

Scarlet Nexus – So this game is a bit of a mess, especially the way the story is told. The overall narrative, however, is a wild ride that keeps on giving, and the cast is pretty likable. The combat can be pretty fun too.

Ghost of Tsushima – It’s a slick and smooth experience of a samurai story. That story is a bit more predictable than I would like, but it is exceptionally presented. The open world can get tiring but is generally enjoyable to explore. A very coherent and satisfying experience.

Video Game Music

Lastly, before my favourites of the year, I want to write a couple of words about video game music, because I love video game music. Now, I’m not an expert on music by any stretch, but I do have my favourites and I do like to make a few mentions of them in these end of year lists.

The battle themes of Scarlet Nexus are all pretty great, such as: The OSF - Advance!, Opposed Viewpoints, Turbulence, or The Unforgiven.

Similarly Yakuza Kiwami 1 & 2 can also deliver pretty kick-ass music, when it’s time to kick ass: The Wicked, Clan Battle, Heading for Kamuro Hills, or Break off. But also when you’re managing a cabaret club, and I cannot not include this hilarious little song the name of which I don’t know but it’s the anthem of Majima Construction.

What better song would you listen to when fighting a huge space battle in the Warhammer: 40k universe, then For The Glory Of The Emperor.

The mid battle recruitment themes of Fire Emblem games are always their catchiest tunes and this is no different in Fire Emblem: The Radiant Dawn with Stalwarts Unite.

The music of Disco Elysium is generally very atmospheric but the songs that play during are last big encounters (Mercenary Tribunal and Meeting the Posse) are truly nice. As is God, Please, which is actually fan made, but since it’s so good I had to include it.

I may have mixed feeling about Persona 5 Strikers, but when it comes to catchy tunes the Persona series never fails to deliver. As spin of, Strikers contains a lot of remixes from the main game, which are still good, but what I want to mention are two dungeon themes that were really good: Wonderland and Anti HERO.

Ghost Trick is a title that also knows how to bring on the beat, with such song as Scars of Trauma, and my absolute favorite of the year:



This one perfectly encapsulates the moment, when the titular character finally gets himself together and decides to oppose his fate.

Now than, let’s get onto my favourite games of 2024.

5. Necromunda: Hired Gun



It’s a fast-paced FPS game set in the Warhammer: 40k universe, although not one of its more well-known corners, there won’t be Orks and Space Marines here, still, the universe will be recognizable in many ways. The story is a mess, and the game is quite janky due to its lower-budgeted nature, but who cares, when the shooting is this fun. Because the shooting and gunplay, coupled with the extreme freedom of movement make playing the game stupidly fun.

4. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty



It’s more Cyberpunk 2077. That’s all you really need. The game delivers more of that excellence that you fell in love with in the base game. Except, since this is an expansion, the limited scope means this is a more curated serving with fewer of those samey side activities. The stories and the characters are great and Night City is still one hell of a place to experience.

3. Total War: Warhammer 3



At this point you probably know what you’re going to get, it’s mostly the same thing as the previous two except even more refined and even more varied. If you loved what the previous games had to offer, then the third game is just as addicting. Yeah, you probably should invest in the DLCs, because those are the ones that really complete the experience, but Total War: Warhammer 3 is the best that this experience so far offered.

2. Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2



The first game was honestly fairly forgettable, but not his one, this one is incredibly fun. They refined the combat to make it really satisfying, and made the plot, though nothing special, maximally deliver on the kind of pathos, that only 40k can deliver. It’s power fantasy turned up to eleven, an experience that constantly delivers set pieces that are cool as hell while injecting adrenaline straight into your veins.

1. No Truce with the Furies



Although I liked this title more, Disco Elysium is my undisputed number one in 2024. It’s a combat-less CRPG that relies entirely on the strength of its writing. And it delivers! The way this game is written, how your character build interacts, and narrates your game is simply amazing. Just listening and reading the game’s dialogue is extremely engaging. The game is a masterpiece that everyone owes it to themselves to try.