Melos's 2024 GOTY List

Happy 2025 everyone! First, I'd like to shout out my Backloggd Reviews with other thoughts on games. Let’s get right to it… (by the way, this list was part of another list of GOTY lists, in case you want to see that.)

Square (dir. Akitoshi Kawazu) - Romancing Saga (1992, SNES, EN Fan Translation)

If I could name a game that represents serendipity to me it would be Romancing Saga. You wander an authored world, no quest log in hand, with only a small backstory about your chosen character. Eventually, something memorable happens. Stories start out of nowhere, or, you stumble upon the end of a story. An NPC's dialogue leads to finding a weird village, leading to a 4-dungeon fetch quest gag. What gives it meaning to me is it's all hand-authored. It also doesn’t have the level of self-seriousness that turns me off of most games’ approach to high fantasy. There's some immersive theatre (e.g. "Sleep No More") aspect to wandering between all these stories and myths, and, rather than random generation that would guarantee something interesting to happen to you, in Romancing Saga there's the chance that nothing will happen to you. But that only makes the moments of something all the greater. I'm still thinking about this game and what it did, 7 months on.

I cleared SNES RS2 too, and played some RS3, but they were a bit more traditional and less memorable for me personally.

Love ♥ Game (Sylvie & Aria) - Sylvie RPG / Funeral song for the elemental lords (2024)

I love these two games, which are both riffs and responses to often-overlooked '80s Japanese adventure games (such as Golvellius), as well as love game's long history of unique adventure platforming games. Also Sylvie RPG features bump combat! Surprising and charming, the games are built around quick-to-understand exploration and action premises that blossom out into memorable challenges and moments of adventure. A reminder of all the ways of expression that adventure games still have available, should they choose to ignore the more rigid and popular styles of design.

Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson & co. - Consume Me (Unreleased as of Jan 5 2025)

This… isn't out yet, but I played it as part of my judging for the 2025 IGF. It's really good! I'm allowed to talk about the game, but I'd rather leave descriptions to a minimum. This was a really well-done mixture of vignette-style personal games, Japanese life sims/simulations. To quote the current Itch.io page - "Consume Me is about the cut-throat competitiveness of dieting where the opposing team is yourself." It's that, but in this latest version there's also a kind of coming-of-age story that places it as a landmark work in the field of (East) Asian-(North) American games in the same way 2024's 1000X Resist was). Keep an eye out!

Nathalie Lawhead - Individualism in the dead internet age (2024)

A beautiful museum-essay-game that reminded me of the history of personal computing and my place within it as consumer and creator. Reinforced my beliefs and aspirations for the medium of games and creative software and how we ought to gather around and celebrate what artistically and community-oriented individuals and groups are doing.

Honorable Mentions

Bedibug's Ocarina of Time Sudoku - Adapting puzzles like sudoku to a narrative conceit (OoT Dungeons as Sudokus) works really well. Super creative! Personally I don’t actually enjoy puzzle games too much, but once they are fit inside of a fictional world, or just have some kind of written narrative element or conceit to it, the abstract numbers and symbols feel a lot more meaningful to me.

Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity (2024, PC) - A "jank-em-up" 3D platformer, a fever dream Super Monkey Ball, a hallucinating version of Zelda TotK's platforming puzzles. You explore a network of levels with a metaphysical theme. There are dozens of forms to transform into, such a set of 10 tiny balls, a growing ball, a tiny car, demanding strange methods to exploring the world. The metaphysical narrative remained a bit elusive, but I enjoyed the unique sense of place the game had.

Xuan Yuan Sword 3: Mists Beyond the Mountains - A Taiwanese RPG set during the Tang Dynasty (600-900). Beautiful painted backgrounds and a grand road story taking you on foot from Europe to China. Sadly the localization is poor and the turn-based combat pretty flat… but it’s a solid recommendation if you’re also curious about the historical period as well as Taiwan’s history of game design.

This brings to mind a related thing, which is I really like the idea of historical fiction games… but I’d like them to be more speculative, incorrect, fantastical, zoomed in on speculating on certain historical dynamics we likely will never know the day-to-day specifics of. For example, something I’ve been personally interested in was the Chinese monks who worked to translate Buddhism into Chinese society from 100 BC - 200 AD. What is it like to live in a time where you can’t easily see the place a text is coming from, what kind of responsibility do you feel towards translating stuff, etc? What’s the “sense of the unknown” like from then? That kind of awe-inspiring feeling is something I think more people should tune into nowadays: the awe-inspiring breadth and depth of e.g. all the art/games/humanity you could possibly experience from individual creators (should you choose to venture forth), rather than the usual prepackaged and easy-to-fall-into fantasies sold through corpgames. Or the awe of something as unknowable as how our stomachs work, compared to the usual mundane “awe” towards space. Yawn!

Square (dir. akitoshi kawazu) - Unlimited Saga (2002, PS2): Didn't love my few hours with it, but the way its battle system tries to embody a physical intuition with LP/HP damage, and its board-game world reminds me how RPGs tend to be to convention in both battle system, narrative, and visual representation of the world. So I appreciate Unlimited Saga for being different. I should make more time for TTRPG-inspired work..

Game Freak (Dir. satoshi tajiri) - Pokemon Blue (GB, 1996)- I was struck by the striking representation of the Japanese outer suburbs and the feeling of walking around it, and how Pokemon weaves a sense of childlike rumor and myth into it. And just how bizarre some of the dialogue is. It’s a bit unfortunate, then, that the game became such a big franchise. Almost immediately after with Pokemon Gold, despite oddities like the night system, the quality falls off a cliff… straight into a series that’s just a content mill for stuffed animals, anime, and goodies. (The linked blog post I wrote BEFORE replaying Gold - which tbh is noticeably more “franchise-ified” than Blue/Red)

Sylvanian Family Games (GB/GBA) - Certainly these leave much to be desired, but it’s a fascinating 5-7 game series trying to bring the titular toy series' world to life, while clearly being tied up in requirements to keep the setting almost bizarrely fixated on traditional family values like arriving back home by 5 PM, or keeping the writing at a fairly infantile level. I’m not sure I’d recommend these beyond just being curious about adventure games as a format, but I think about them now and then. I liked how the setting remained the same between games and you’d see places reimagined or fleshed out from game to game.

Wario Land 3 (~2000? GBC) - Essentially a metroidvania split over a ton of levels you revisit to find different treasures (like revisiting SM64 levels for stars), there’s a level of surprise with how the game leads you through the levels. It’s a fairly obtuse game, easy to get stuck in, with very frustrating puzzle platforming, but structurally I like how unpredictable this is, and the opportunities it brings to mind for storytelling in an open platforming world. It reminds me of some of our vision early on for Angeline Era where the game would focus a lot on wild exploration weaving between levels and the world map. The game didn’t turn out like that, but I’d like to try to do that one day with the same engine and tools one day.