End of Year Update

It's cool to hear you've been enjoying UFO 50, its such a fascinating title that one. Do you have a favourite game(s) from the collection of the ones you've played?

My favorite AAA game was ... ummm I only played two non-indie games so would be Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. On the other hand, I played 104 - 2024 indie games and my top 5 were: 1 Balatro 2 The Rise of the Golden Idol 3 Minishoot' Adventures 4 Lorelei and the Laser Eyes 5 Arco

Thank you for an amazing year on youtube, so good it motivated me to create a patreon account and subscribe to you. I am really liking those posts and am not regretting the fuzzy tier subscription one bit. And your writing style fits your video style so well that I can read the posts in your voice mentally, which is amazing. As far as my 2024 gaming goes, I don't think I played a single game releasedthis year. I discovered the Mass Effect trilogy (great games, can recommend), played a lot of modded Terraria, used Fortnite to connect with online friends and participated in Minecraft modding. So a great year all around for me, even with no new releases. (P.S. so sorry for the absence of line breaks, blame mobile website sucking.)

my Nintendo year in review featured a single game played for a single hour. Looks like the Switch rested a bit this year. Surprising, really; I certainly hadn't thought that'd be the case. I'm strongly looking forward to seeing what the coming year has in store for us, although I suspect that the next Nintendo console isn't going to release before the Christmas season of 2025. I can't say I've got anything on my radar except for Metroid Prime 4, which I've been awaiting very patiently.

Happy Holidays Ceave! My personal goty is Neva for sure, incredible little game by the Gris devs (which is also an incredible game). But, since apparently DLCs count now the Blasphemous 2 DLC also released this year and I had an incredible time with it. I look forward to your next videos and to everything to come this year!

Nine sols was excellent, especially if you were a fan of Hollow Knight. Some will find it a bit linear and story heavy, but the boss fights are all consistently great and I really enjoyed the story.

Strongly encourage you to come back to Nine Sols. I found the game a bit slow in the early stretch but as it opens up (both in terms of level/world design, and storytelling) it becomes truly phenomenal - a top-5 modern metroidvania (alongside Hollow Knight and Blasphemous, my top picks in that very competitive genre). It's a wonderful game, and the final boss is the hardest one I fought all year (yes, harder than Consort Radhan).

My favorite game this year is Garbanzo Quest, a 2D platformer very much in the style of Super Mario World, with that sort of overworld map and lots of secrets. It's super weird and charming, and it ramps up in difficulty really gradually until it reaches Celeste levels of difficulty. I haven't seen it get much attention but everybody I've talked to who's played it also loved it - I think you might like it too! And you can play as a dog!

As someone who only recently completed Mario & Luigi Brothership, I totally recommend giving it a chance after all if you can! I know what (some of) the reviews said, and I won't sit here and pretend the game didn't have any flaws (including some of which were quite baffling to me). However, what I will claim is that for ever thing the game does badly, there's also a couple of things it does really frickin' well. At least in my humble onion, the critical reviews on the game (which aren't even that many) blow most of its flaws way out of proportion. Like, I will agree to many of the criticisms that were mentioned on paper, but think none of them affected the game nearly as negatively for me as these reviews made it sound. I do think it's true that the game is kinda long and has slow placing, which will make it a bit more difficult to replay than other Mario RPGs, but it has some stuff that is totally worth experiencing at least once. I'd also say the game's slow pacing isn't necessarily from it being handholdy (although sure, that does happen here and there), but rather from its slow speed in general (caused by animations, load times etc.). Anyways, not only does it have a pretty cool combat mechanic that gets better and more in-depth the further you progress (I really, really loved combat in this game), but especially towards the end, it also has some story beats, locations, cutscenes, events and a general atmosphere that I've never seen before in a Mario game. One story segment outright reminded me of recent indie games (in the best way possible). You might think I'm exaggerating, but I do consider that moment to be one of the coolest I've experienced in a Mario game to date! (Not just in a Mario RPG, but the entire Mario franchise). I mean, can you belive that Brothership actually manages to make Bowser's minions sort of interesting again? This feels so wild to say about a Mario RPG in 2024, where most of people's complaints in recent years have been that Mario RPGs are no longer allowed to make established Mario characters unique anymore. Somehow, they've found a compromise that almost fully solves this longstanding problem by not only allowing games to feel unique again, but also allow them to make established characters feel at least (sort of) fresh again. I won't say the solution is perfect yet (TTYD's "anything goes" approach still takes the cake in that regard), but I can at least see a viable future in Brothership's approach. Let me put it like this: When I finally did start seeing vanilla Goombas and Koopas in the game, at the very least my reaction was no longer "thanks, I hate it". Basically, my overall stance on Brothership is this: If Paper Jam Bros. was "Mario & Luigi done differently and worse", then Brothership Bros. was "Mario & Luigi done differently, but in a good way". Anyways, with that little advertisement out of the way, I can say that I totally aggree with your picks of Astro Bot and Animal Well as your games of the year. I honestly would have picked the exact same games! Astro Bot felt like finally getting a Super Mario Galaxy 3 after all these years, just with a very different brand of nostalgia, and Animal Well was just such a fulfilling and meaningful experience to me overall. I (expectedly) wasn't able to solve every single puzzle on my own, but whenever I did solve a puzzle, it felt simply amazing, and at the very least, I was able to solve the hardest puzzle in the game myself (the "BDTP" one).

Happy holidays Ceave and thanks for the great content this year! I didn't actually play many games that came out this year, I think my favorite recently released game would have to be Roboquest, it's a very fun fps rougelike game (even if it did technically come out in November last year), and if that does not count I'll give the trophy to Vellum, a great 3rd person rougelike. Maybe I'll give animal well and UFO 50 a go, I don't own a ps5 and I can't justify getting one just for astrobot, although I have my fingers crossed that it'll get ported to PC one day.

Happy Holidays Ceave and thanks for always making awesome videos, can't wait to find out what you are going to cook in the 2025 for us. My gaming 2024 was kind of weird: due to having lost my job around december 2023 I could not spend as much as I did in the past years so I ventured into some weird adventures. (Don't worry, it's not like I had to face a severe situation, it just felt wrong spending 60€ on day 1 releases when not having a stable income). So I divided my gaming time between different activities, like trimming my backlog, playing Europa Universalis 4 and replaying some of my favorite games (to name some... Sekiro, Bloodborne, Nier Automata, Xenoblade 1&2, FF7 OG because screw the remake). I also used some of my time to speedrun both Super Metroid and Metroid Dread but decided to stop for several reasons (speedrunning is kinda harsh on your body and I'm going to be 40 very soon). But, if I have to be honest, while I clearly see that there have been good videogames released this year, for me it was mostly not interesting, especially because I've never been much into AAA gaming. (So, in a sense, I'm happy Astrobot won at the Game Awards because it's an opportunity to have some people understand that you don't need a 300 million dollars budget to please gamers). The only mainstream title I directly experienced was the Elden Ring DLC... and I cannot complain because I went in knowing it was a "more of the same" thing. That said, there is a game released this year that I bought (day one, too) and played: Unicorn Overlord. Being a fan of tactical rpg like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics I could not miss the closest thing to Ogre Battle 64 the market saw in two decades and, while not a perfect game (to be honest, it's a bit flawed in some parts), supporting Vanillaware is something I'm proud of. They can be weird and controversial at times, but they are unique, there is no other studio like them (13 Sentinels was definitely a curve ball to the whole industry and I game I only have praise for). A 2024 released game I'm 100% going to play in the future is Metaphor, by the Persona team. I think it's a game that took many by surprise but we Atlus fan knew they were working on a fantasy game since around 2019-2020.

My favorite "AAA" this year was Shadow Generations, but I put that between quotes because the Sonic franchise is really AA. It's known but they don't put a lot of money in it like everyone else. My GOTY goes to Nine Sols, not that it's perfect, but it slightly edged out the competition. I was surprised the Zelda video didn't go deep into the topic you discussed in the last Patreon post, about echoes covering the functionality of around 12 dungeon items but inefficiently. I thought it was a very interesting angle that people don't talk about much.

Animal Well is an incredibly well-crafted game, and I absolutely adore the developers. Not to mention, it was published by Big Mode, Dunkey's publishing company. So, it's a treasure all around. I'm glad you found some great games hidden among the bloat.