GAMES BEATEN IN 2024

Well, here I am again. I'm... five months late with my first entry here, partially because I'm too broke to feel comfortable buying most new game releases and partially just because of that frustrating BrainWall that my mind likes to build as an inexplicable defense against actually finishing anything. Or starting anything, for that matter. Oops!

But that's not enough to stop me. I'm stronger than BrainWall.

Here's a thing most people only know of from a trivia tidbit about a much more famous game, if they've even heard of it at all: Narbacular Drop is a student project by a team called Nuclear Monkey Software from the DigiPen Institute of Technology, circa 2005. It places you in the control of a character named "Princess No-Knees", who cannot jump and therefore must navigate puzzle levels by magically placing two doors on any non-metallic surface, one blue and one orange, that always connect to each other.

This might sound familiar.

As you might have guessed with improbably extreme precision, this game appeared at a career day showcase and caught the attention of a few representatives from Valve Software. The devteam was invited to come present it at Valve's headquarters... and all of them were promptly hired to rework their concept into what would become a little game called Portal. Maybe you've heard of it? I dunno, it's pretty obscure. Kind of a hidden gem. But enough about that! We're not talking about Portal! We're talking about Narbacular Drop!!! Did you know narbacular isn't even a word they made it up for SEO!!!

The game opens with an explanation of the plot that progresses through its slides way too fast for any human being to realistically read, which is not helped by the fact that the way the words wrap around the illustrations in that "you accidentally dragged an image into the middle of a text document" sort of way that would be difficult to parse if you had all the time in the world. Regardless, it tells us that a demon has kidnapped our protagonist and the spirit of the mountain (named "Wally") is not happy about its taking up residence in his domain, so Wally makes a deal with the princess to use his reality-warping portal powers to help her escape, in exchange for her assistance in defeating it. Simple enough! We are then treated to a few infographics, each featuring distractingly fast two-frame animations, about the basic controls and mechanics that look like they were made in all of three minutes. This is a compliment.

The ideas presented here are all exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from the genesis of this mechanic, and as such it's not particularly hard if you're at all familiar with its successors. You've got all the classics: escape a room by placing a portal above an unreachable platform or beyond a fence, stand on a switch and put a portal behind the door that it opens, use portals to relocate objects to new advantageous locations. The usual fare. This is all presented in a more fantasy context rather than the sterile sci-fi lab we know and love, featuring a few elements that... did not make it over, including "lava turtles" who need to be dropped in the lava in order to uneventfully ferry you to the end of the level and the lovable demonic minion "Impy" who is not fully coded and therefore cannot do anything to you aside from kinda bumping into you. He has collision, at least? But he's just around sometimes.

It is very clear that this is a proof-of-concept tech demo for the mechanic, and it's... definitely rough around the edges. The majority of the game's playtime will be taken up by one stage that's particularly janky, requiring you to place a couple of perpetually-rolling boulders on switches inside small pits, except those switches are finicky enough that if you don't center the portal well enough it just won't count as pressed. It's very easy to just lose a boulder and softlock yourself if you mistakenly place the wrong colored portal at any point while transporting them. They don't spawn on first load, so it's impossible to do the entire game in one deathless run without tabbing into the menu and manually reloading. The level's turtle takes an eternity and a half to enter a rideable state after you drop it into the lava, so if you don't know that and throw yourself past it into the soup you'll just have to start the entire thing over. Impy is there.

Aside from the one problematic level and the fact that it's clearly unfinished—there's no sound effects and one total song with a very noticeable loop, it lacks the restriction on shooting portals through portals in a way that lets you skip entire stages, and the game abruptly ends after six levels with no demon in sight, giving you a level name pop-up for the final stage and then immediately announcing that You won!, roll credits—there's clearly something special here and it's no surprise Valve snatched it up and turned it into what is widely considered one of the greatest games ever made. It's really neat to see the humble beginnings of something that would become something so deeply influential, and while the particular way you need to twist your brain to think with portals might have long since dulled the mechanic's sheer novelty, there's still absolutely a magic to seeing the first time someone ever did it.

Wow! It's a game with some personal history, sort of! I have been aware of this game's developer for a very long time. Most probably know sylvie as the creator of cat planet, which was in turn covered 14 whole years ago in what is far and away the most popular video by noted old-guard let's player raocow. Rao has long fallen into relative internet obscurity, though a certain very online-videogames-brained demographic of my generation has still broadly heard of him at least through said video. But he's also still extremely active and the only LPer I watch with any regularity right now (and it's not the first time he's come up in these articles), so it's just a fun little bit of mythology to me, and the surrounding community holds a certain reverence for sylvie as the person who put our guy on the map.

Kittey Defense An Exquisite Game Of Strategy And Wits In Which You Must Defend Yonder Castle From A Veritable Onslaught Of Kitteys, which you can play in your browser and will henceforth be referred to as Kittey Defense because I am a coward and a bastard, catches your eye in any list of games for obvious reasons, as it did for me as I was scrolling along through her website. While its title, exquisite as the game itself, is clearly exceptional, it's otherwise a solid baseline of the sort of thing you can expect from this dev—very cute, very simplistic graphics, relatively minimal context for the gameplay, girls and cats are there. There is little to be said about the premise that is not directly stated in the name of the game, and I think that's beautiful. This is another way video games are art. I am saying this genuinely.

As described, you play as support to a girl who must Defend a Castle from Kitteys. You do this by launching bubbles at them that harmlessly carry them away on the wind, and if you can't do so fast enough they will wear away the wall and flood into your castle's vulnerable heart, causing you to Perish. The game progresses on its own automatically; instead of an active participant, you provide the girl with a selection of upgrades: RAT, the recharge rate before you can fire again, SPD, the bubbles' traveling speed, NUM, the number of bubbles fired at once, and LIM, the maximum limit of how many bubbles can be on screen before you can fire another volley. You must find the optimal balance of these to efficiently dispatch a staggering number of kitteys, and you get 1 money for every kittey bubbled that you can spend progressively more of to upgrade any one of these or heal some damage to the wall. It took me a run or two of experimenting to figure out how the game actually worked and even longer before I could consistently get past wave 6, but it's super satisfying to finally get the right balance and see humongous swathes of kitteys being swept away. There are 16 waves, and your ending is determined by how much money you have remaining at the end. (I've only gotten the best ending once; I keep coming up one or two upgrades' worth short.)

It's barebones enough that there's no audio, but it's visually charming enough to make up for it and it gets to be so chaotic that if there WAS audio it'd probably turn into the loudest thing in the universe very quickly. The sprites have a fluid little bounce to their singular animations, and the kitteys are simplified down to legless little jellybeans. The fact that the title makes up a not inconsiderable amount of the text in the game. Its separate endings make for a really fun challenge and I can't stop going back for more runs even having already beaten the hardest one, because now the challenge is getting there consistently. It's good! It's a good little game that does exactly what it claims to do. It is, in fact, a game where you use strategy and wits to defend your castle against a veritable onslaught of kitteys. But is it exquisite? I like to think so.

It's Monster Hunter's 20th anniversary this year! And they released another doomed-to-be-forgotten phone game about it like a month ago! This one kind of ballooned until it was big enough its own article, because these things always end up super underdocumented and somebody's gotta talk about them before they're gone forever. For a budget thing, it's fine. You could definitely do worse with games to play on your phone.

Hey, it's one of those games that's Kind Of A Big Deal! Somehow this one has been a blind spot for me until now, despite literally being one of the two games that one of my favorite genres is named after. I've been kind of marginally familiar with it, and I've listened to the soundtrack on its own plenty of times, but somehow I just never got around to it and I'm not sure why. (Actually, I do know why, and it's because PS emulation was scary and intimidating for a long time and then the first time I actually attempted to play it was on a worse emulator and a worse computer. Also my videogames muscle memory was seriously conflicting with the backslide and I could not adapt at the time.) Regardless, a few days ago I watched a video about the shockingly feature-complete port of this game for the Tiger Game.com, because of course I did, and I thought to myself "god the footage of the original looks gorgeous, I should play the actually good version of this game".

So I did! And to the surprise of no one, it's really good! (Because it matters to specify, I played the NA PS1 version.)

For those unaware: this game is a direct sequel the to previous 'vania Rondo of Blood, which had the traditional series premise of "Dracula is back and the latest vampire slayer in the Belmont family needs to go raid his castle and destroy him again, as happens every 100 years". SoTN mixes this up; it's set only five years later, the castle is already back for reasons unknown, and Richter Belmont has gone missing, so it's up to Dracula's rebel son Alucard (real name Adrian) to investigate what's going on and probably go kill his awful dad again.

Everyone and their dog has talked about this game far more extensively and eloquently than I could hope to here, but something that really struck me is that beyond the great visuals and music, there's a ton of flavor to this game that really makes it feel special compared to its imitators. Like, I didn't go into this game expecting it to be funny, but it is in fact very funny. It's not like there's any jokes written into the dialogue. Aesthetically and narratively this game takes itself completely seriously. But also, it has an item called the "Secret Boots" that just make you one pixel taller. You can find a box of explicitly New York style pizza in Dracula's Evil Castle in the year 1797, which you have to throw on the floor to eat. You can wear a pair of coolguy sunglasses that lower your INT stat. If you turn into a bat and you have a bat familiar, it will attract additional regular bats who get confused and leave when you change back. You can visit a room where you would expect something major and important to be and there's nothing there except some peanuts on the ground, which will heal you by 50HP but only if you throw it into the air and can catch it perfectly in your mouth. It's doing this kind of thing constantly. It rules. I love it. I love that this game is incredibly dumb.

It's a little hard to quantify why this all works as well as it does while somehow not breaking the tone of this Cool Gothic Horror Fantasy with a brooding prettyboy dhampir protagonist, and I think it really just comes down to confidence. This game is completely unshakeable in the bits it commits to, and they're all subtle enough that none of them actively feel like in-your-face Comedy Attempts. A lot of them are things you might not even process as jokes until you really think about it. It's an impressive balancing act that they manage to execute perfectly in a way that I could only really compare to like, the way people see Muppets as regular actors, if that makes sense? The way something about the nature of the silliness meshes so seamlessly with the rest of the package that it doesn't feel out of place at all. Like sure, Alucard's doing stupid parlor tricks on his quest to defeat Lord Dadcula and wearing sunglasses like he did in Captain N. I'll accept that into my worldview.

As for the actual gameplay and structure of the world, it definitely shows that this was one of the genre's formative entries. Lots of the heavy backtracking that people tend to bemoan with this sort of game and gets streamlined out of more "modern" metroidvanias, but like... I was so charmed so consistently by this game that I didn't really care. That's just kind of what you get with a game as open-ended as this one becomes, and in a way, I've felt like modern game design tends to sand inconveniences down a little too much anyway. The openness does mean the difficulty balancing is sort of all over the place, though. You'll just as frequently be functionally bulletproof as you might end up having to marathon through a long difficult stretch culminating in a boss like it's Dark Souls. This isn't a bad thing, for the record. I'm into this weird non-balance where you can be power tripping through one area and get smoked in the next. Keeps you on your toes.

Enemies can randomly drop equipment that might majorly turn the tide in your favor, which adds an interesting element of uniqueness to individual playthroughs. I managed to get the strongest weapon in the game, the Crissaegrim, off of a random drop and it turned the entire rest of the second half into such a cakewalk I wanted to go back and run another file without it so I could experience the intended difficulty. (I didn't decide to stop using it for the current run because it is also incredibly funny to melt things instantly with my turbosword.) Also, I feel like it is important to note that the enemy that drops this weapon is called Schmoo, and it's basically just a bloody sheet ghost with a bug-eyed skull face that looks straight off of the shelves of Spirit Halloween. That's one of the other best things about this game. Every enemy looks like a particularly creative Halloween decoration. This is a compliment of the highest order.

On the note of the second half of the game, though: even knowing in advance what the twist to it is does not make it any less awesome. If you know, you know. It's an extremely bold concept and I can only imagine what it must have been like to be playing this blind on release and experiencing it for the first time. Although, knowing now how development cycles in video games have always tended to be, it's a little funny to look at it and realize how much the origin of the idea was probably as a cheap way to effectively double the game's content. This is probably the coolest cost-cutting measure of all time.

In all: I'm super glad I played this game and, given some time to sit on this one, I think it's a pretty surefire bet that this is going to sit among my favorites for a long time coming. It's absolutely earned its reputation, and I think it came along at just the right time for me, honestly. I've felt like I've been stuck in a rut for months and this is the first time in a while that a game has gripped me hard enough to blow through the whole thing in a matter of days. I feel rejuvenated. I feel like I can actually start working on populating this page with other games now. Thank you Castlevania for fixing my brain.

...But before that, I'm still busy being obsessed with this game, and there's a bunch of replay value in the form of special modes you can activate by naming your save files certain things. (The PS1 version is missing a notable one that gets added in later versions, so I'll have to get around to that some other time. It's fine. This is already way too long anyway.) Let's take a look at these!

RICHTER: This one is the best-known of the original alt modes by a wide margin, and it's definitely the most interesting, because as the name implies it allows you to play through the entire rest of the game as Richter using his moveset from the brief Dracula fight in the game's intro. The way this starts out had me thinking "Oh! They want me to play through the game like an older Castlevania, when they were still linear." Richter cannot access any of Alucard's progression items or equipment, with ordinary hearts taking their place at their original locations, and he's locked at level 1. He's as strong as he's ever going to be, and that's strong enough to power through most combat without much of an issue, because he also has access to incredibly powerful screen-clearing special moves for every subweapon that Alucard does not. There's not really any reason to explore or stray from the golden path, because Richter is already perfect.

Where this mode gets really interesting is when you get to Alucard's mobility upgrade checks. Because, you see, Alucard can gain the ability to turn into a bat, and so a significant portion of this game is designed around the expectation that you will be able to fly. Richter cannot do this, because he is a normal human man. Ostensibly.

So of course, the only natural thing to do when presented with this dilemma is using Richter's advanced movement inputs to spam the flying uppercut that launches him fifty feet in the air.

I feel like it says a lot that there were so many times I thought to myself "Surely THIS is the most ridiculous thing in this game" that I still have no definitive answer, but Richter's second half is up there pretty much the entire time. It's so funny how far removed we are from the initial concept of playing the game like a Classicvania. This entire thing turns into an extremely contrived navigation puzzle where you have to do your best to get this guy from point A to point B purely using the power of his fists to gain infinite height. Ascend this evil tower that can kill you in seconds if you're not careful, exclusively via weird and kind of finicky input combos. This mode is extremely aware that it's a dumb non-canon bonus thing and it is embracing that as hard as it can. The part of me that has bad ideas wants to go for map completion on this file just to see what kinds of comically hostile and inaccessible places I can get this guy through.

X-X!V"Q: This odd filename will start you out in an alternate state colloquially known as Luck Mode or Thief Mode; what it does is significantly handicap all of your starting stats with the exception of luck, which instead starts completely maxed out with a bonus item that adds even more on top of that. Luck affects a handful of things, most importantly rare item droprates from enemies and critical hits, so the gist of this one is that even the weakest enemies take significant effort to defeat but everything will randomly drop stronger equipment much more often than they would on a normal save.

This one started out promising, because having a fraction of the strength and health you'd normally begin with recontextualizes things you normally wouldn't think twice about into a serious threat, and you actually have to strategize and make the best use of everything at your disposal. The opening of this run had me using my shield and backslide way more than I ever even normally think about them, because any unnecessary damage is going to take out a notable chunk of your health and they therefore become pretty much mandatory. I was walled at the first boss for a little bit until I figured out the ideal strat was just to whack both guys at once so neither of them gets an opening to attack. It was a fun puzzle! The way luck factors into crit mechanics in this game also means that in this mode they can just randomly deal WAY more damage than you'd ever be expected to at this point, so you can also just get a free one-hit kill off on something every now and then.

Unfortunately, after you've beaten another boss and made it to the library, the experience starts to converge pretty heavily with the normal playthrough. The thing about having better droprates from enemies means that you get a lot more money in this mode, which means you can just... buy much better equipment even earlier than you normally could. Equipment stats are fully additive, so there's fundamentally not much of a noticeable difference when their numbers get high enough. I was a little disappointed by this after the intro to the game felt so radically different. I would love to see what it'd be like if the equipment and health/heart upgrades were actively rebalanced around this ruleset.

AXEARMOR: Maybe the most "bonus" of the three original bonus modes, which is a completely stupid and meaningless statement, but it's true either way: this thing sort of has the energy of like, a big head mode cheat code. As its name implies, all this mode does is start you off with a set of Axe Lord Armor in your inventory, which turns you into an Axe Knight when worn. Rather than turn you into a copy of the Axe Knight enemy with the same throwing attacks, it puts Alucard into a smaller set with its own sprite that only comes with a very strong basic chop. While wearing this his jump height can only clear the absolute smallest ledges in the game, and he cannot interact with most environmental objects like doors or save points, so you just have to constantly go into the menu to take this thing off and put it back on again. Alucard will yell "What??" every single time you do this to him.

What makes this item really, really funny is that instead of making it slow and clunky like most games would, the designers appear to have started by doing that before realizing it wasn't fun and then cranked up the speed of the entire thing by like 400% without actually changing any of the animations. Axe Armor Alucard moves faster than his usual unencumbered self and the only way I can think to describe it is "skittering around like a bug". It's like if a fly was wearing a really big heavy pair of boots and every time it walked it went CLOMPCLOMPCLOMPCLOMPCLOMPCLOMP. I can't believe how many different items in this game are contenders for the stupidest item in this game. It's so awesome.

Every time you get hit Alucard will fall down and helplessly quiver on the ground like a baby for a second, and if he idles for more than a couple seconds he will start pumping his axe into the air and yelling, even during cutscenes while he or someone else is supposed to be talking. I have such a deep respect for the way this game puts you in control of this tragic, elegantly handsome half-vampire protagonist and then just constantly goes out of its way to put him into situations that present him as a fundamentally uncool dork. The narrative tone will not stand in the way of the game's designers, who are here to remind you he is still a dumb little toy for you to play with first and foremost. I think that's beautiful.

I know that the inconvenience of having to constantly take this thing off and put it back on is part of the joke, but really I'm mostly just sad that there are so many stretches of this game that are fully incompatible with it, and it only becomes more inaccessibly vertical as you get deeper in. In an ideal world I would never have to keep this thing off for more than like a minute. Please make the castle horizontal for me next time.

Whoops! After installing MHPuzzles I ended up falling into a mobile games-flavored mental pit for a while that I only eventually managed to fish myself out of once Castlevania wrestled my attention away. Downloading Bluestacks may have been a mistake. But have I gotten anything of value out of it?? Well, there's these. I might be going a little out of order by listing these after SotN, and I never actually "beat" them, but they were a major enough part of my videogames experience this year that I still ought to mention them.

I mentioned in MHPuzzles' article that I did end up biting for at least one ad that it showed me when I ceded to turning off my adblocker; that game was NecroMerger, which stood out from the crowd in such a way that hit on my exact aesthetic sensibilities on top of just being clear leaps and bounds ahead of... basically everything else. Like, in an environment where every single ad is both lying to you and baiting you to outperform a hypothetical idiot, you're giving me an entire really charming animation that also accurately conveys what the game's about?? And it's about feeding monsters to a spooky tentacled thing??? That's like a breath of fresh air in an ocean of sludge. Like come on, man. How could I not.

NecroMerger is an idle merge game with a simple premise: you are an evil wizard, and you have to summon monsters to feed to your eldritch world-devourer so it can grow up big and strong. Monsters passively generate resources that can be used to spawn parts to make more monsters, and merging like monsters of the same level together means they become more filling for the devourer and do more damage to the pesky champions that routinely raid your evil dungeon. You progress by satiating enough of its cravings to level it up and unlock new features, and using that in turn to accomplish a checklist of goals that unlock critical spawn stations for new minions.

It's also just... exactly as charming as the little animated ad leads on! Which is extremely impressive, because most phone games have zero charm to their ads or their actual product. The music's super catchy, the pixel art is fantastic and animated to bounce along to the beat, and the characters and creatures all have cute little comments that they'll idly make whenever you let them sit on the board for awhile. It's good! It's just a genuinely good game with a ton of content. It's not perfect—it's annoying how your lair space always feels a bit too cramped for what you need to do, and like, it does still have ads, though they're opt-in and incorporated fairly well into the mechanics. But it's absolutely a diamond in the rough that is the play store.

I was satisfied with just this game for about a month, and then I decided I would bite with the other game I'd been seeing ads for from the same dev: Idle Apocalypse. These devs had earned my trust by now, and the ads were also very cute complete animations, so what's the harm? This one predates NecroMerger by a few years, hence its being listed first up at the top of this section, and also because it ended up consuming my life even more.

Instead of a merge-hybrid, Apocalypse is purely an idle game: it has a similar premise of a world-ending evil wizard (who is implied to be related to the other guy), but instead of feeding an eldritch whatsit until it can devour the planet, you are instead building a comically tall tower to strengthen a family of otherworldly idols you are summoning through a dark portal. (Do you get it. Idle. Idol.) You have a growing collection of resources that each floor can generate, and need to use those resources to power other floors in turn or upgrade them to generate something new, and so on. It's a matter of item management and keeping all of your floors in check so you don't end up running out of anything while you save up for big important things like boosts for the power of the idols. Once they're as powered up as they can get, you can start the apocalypse, the pesky priest accompanying the band of champions you're fighting off heals the world, and the game resets. For each successive apocalypse you can use the souls you earn to net yourself huge benefits and progress further every run.

Where this game maybe caused my downfall was the fact that it cuts your tower's productivity down by a considerable degree when the game isn't active. So I just muted the game and left it open all of the time. This is not how you are intended to play this. It is not supposed to be the only thing you do for like, a week straight. You're not supposed to be actively thinking "man my relationship with this game probably isn't healthy" and then only being forced to stop playing it all day because you got a job and now you have to do something else. Oopsie! The Mobile Game Story.

This compounded on the fact that a lot of the sense of serious progression comes from duplicate rooms you can buy with gems, which you can earn for free by watching ads at a pace that is honestly entirely reasonable. Unfortunately for me, I started to recognize that I should probably get to the "end" of this game's content ASAP to have a more normal relationship with it, and so I decided to expedite the process a little bit by using the game's built-in system to earn gems by playing other games and proceeded to get sucked into the big pile of slop I downloaded to afford the last floor I wanted. For like, two weeks straight. This may not have been my smartest moment!! But, I'm also not going to blame the game itself for it. That's mostly on me.

I like this game a lot too! It's got all the same hallmarks that NecroMerger does: great music, great pixel art, cute dialogue. But I can't deny that its design is far more in the standard phone game realm of encouraging some unhealthy habits. It's still a clear cut above 99% of mobile games out there, although that's not exactly the highest bar to clear.

These games form a sort of duology by a dev called Grumpy Rhino Games, which if Apocalypse's credits page is to be believed is a team of just three people, and you can kind of immediately tell because it absolutely has the energy of an indie passion project that you'd be able to find just as easily on Steam or itch. (They also have a third game called Idle Mastermind that I am refraining from downloading for my own sake.) I just kind of wish they'd actually branch out to there, instead of restricting themselves to the phone game market and its inherent brand of attention vortexes. Ultimately, there's still a load of stuff in both games that I haven't seen, but... I feel like it's probably for the best that I put on the brakes for now.