[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 … 2020 … 2021 … 2022 … 2023]

Wow, I’ve really been dragging my feet on this yearly recap– start of April and I’m just getting around to firming up the notes and hitting publish. I haven’t gotten to play any new games for 2025 because every time I think about it, I remember I still have this outstanding task.

I started off 2024 by attempting to play more games on my old Chromebook reformatted years ago for Linux, with a relatively weak CPU and integrated GPU. I have an impressive number of Steam games that support the platform. I later used another small form factor Linux computer. Very simple and slick gaming experience.

This is also the year that I fell off the wagon and started playing They Are Billions once more. However, the real highlight is this odd FMV-based game called Immortality. Doughlings: Arcade was also a major highlight, the kind of game that starts affecting your vision after playing it too long, as you still see ghosts of the game’s motion everywhere you look.

Stats:

• 2651 Steam hours by the end of 2024, minus 2420 by the end of 2023, so 231 hours in Steam. More than 70% of that came from Billions.
• Steam Replay Report
• SteamDB stats
• Steam Hunters: 2058 total achievements by the end, 193 in 2024, which is 3 more than my Steam Replay Report above indicates, since they seem to generate that report a few days in advance of the end of the year.

The Games:

1. Vampire Survivors: Started the year off strong by sinking a bit of time into a session of my top game from last year. Every time I start it up, I need to scrub through the achievement list in order to find a specific goal for playing in this round. And then they dropped new Konami-oriented DLC in the spring (which I later realized corresponded with a new Contra title). I didn’t play that one too much but I absolutely played the next DLC that came out last year, based on Konami’s Castlevania franchise. This was a brilliant crossover since V.S. obviously apes the Castlevania style so brazenly.
2. Cosmic Express: The first game I attempted to play via Steam on my Linux laptop (low-power, reformatted Chromebook). The gameplay reminds me of Freshly Frosted. It’s in a category I could fairly label “Zen Puzzler” as it has a cartoonish art style featuring a pleasant, soft color palette and relaxing music, while tutorializing without a single spoken or written word– such is the simplicity of the game play. I always have 2 modes of thinking for a game like this: 1) This game sure is trivial; this feels kindergarten-level; 2) Wow! The difficulty sure ramped up quickly. I played for about an hour on my first attempt and played through branching levels until I hit dead ends on all of them. Still hunting for an achievement.
3. Flowing Lights: I initially classified this as a racing game under my Steam categories, assuming that is was some intense space racing action. Incorrect, it’s more of a puzzle game as you have to figure out how to defeat enemies in each section by avoiding their firing patterns and also using nearby gravity anomalies. It also adapts for 4K fullscreen on first launch, which is a minor thing I greatly appreciate. The chill music almost puts it into the “zen puzzler” category, except that it’s a bit more memorable as it reminds me of old school MOD tracker music.
4. Dear Esther: Landmark Edition: I’m pretty sure I picked this up as a freebie on Steam some time back. I suspected it was some manner of adventure game. The game is set on an island and starts at a stone walk up into an abandoned house. I turned around and started walking into the water and earned my first achievement after less than a minute of gameplay, for drowning. At least I can scratch this off the achievement hunt straight away. It seems to be a walking simulator, but a darn pretty one, that has no problems at full 4K resolution on my aging desktop. Every so often, an unseen narrator cuts in and reads another letter to his Esther. Really, it feels like a simulator of hiking up a mountain during blustery weather while listening to a particularly slow-moving audiobook. I eventually made my own goals for myself, like discovering the source of the mountain stream on this island. I also wandered by the narrow trail alongside the stream was delineated with a barbed wire barrier. Seems unnecessary. I eventually saw the game through to the end as it’s mostly a guided tour, and thus, only a matter of time until you finish.
5. Divide By Sheep: This is an odd little puzzler that I’ve had in my collection for awhile. Typically, when I look at the Steam Store trailer or screenshots for a puzzle game, I can pretty well figure out what the game is all about. Not so with this game. Every time I have watched the trailer video for this game, it made zero sense. Once I played it, the pieces started to fall into place. Broadly, it has to do with saving sheep, but not all of them. You have to use various facilities available to sacrifice a certain number of sheep (and sometimes wolves) so that just the right number of sheep (or wolves) is saved.
6. Lara Croft GO: I started getting back into this great puzzle game when I realized there were still who chapters I hadn’t played yet.
7. Road To Ballhalla: Charming zen puzzler where you roll a ball around a course avoiding all manner of dangers. It didn’t really grab me but I played it just long enough to clear it off of both SteamDB (5 minutes of playtime) and SteamHunters (1 achievement).
8. Inertial Drift: Twilight Rivals Edition (Amazon Luna): Very good-looking racing game that I assume is supposed to ape the style of Initial D, a game I’ve seen in arcades a few times.
9. DeathComing: I tried to get back into this death-oriented puzzle game but it was slowgoing.
10. They Are Billions: After 2.5 years of staying clean, I reached a point where I realized that this is the only game I really wanted to play. Much to my shame, I reinstalled it and sunk 22 hours into it before I realized I had had enough… at least those were my notes earlier in the year. However, I still managed to play about 160 hours throughout the year.
11. Destroy All Humans!: Remaster of an older game that I picked up in a Humble Bundle. I have always been enamored with the campy 1950’s sci-fi aesthetic and this game absolutely delivers.
12. A Little To The Left: A novel puzzle game I picked up in a Humble Bundle. It’s always refreshing to see a unique art style in a game. The puzzles are quite varied and diverse and give you very few clues on how you’re supposed to tidy up or organize the components. There’s a puzzle about organizing 8-bit NES cartridges. I got stuck on a calendar level after 20 minutes and still hadn’t scored any achievements. Fortunately, there is an achievement for taking a hint in the in-game hint system.
13. Roundguard: Fascinating twist on the Peggle/Pachinko formula, tranforming it into a fantasy RPG hack & slash dungeon crawler thing. I got into it for a bit, harvesting achievements.
14. Doughlings: Arcade: A great little Breakout/Arkanoid-inspired game that absorbed me for about 2 hours the first time I started it up as I was listening to some audio material. It hits the right notes in the soundtrack and also in the game design, constantly ramping up the challenge and also the player’s abilities. Then I played it for 5 more hours the following day which resulted in being unable to read text on a screen without hallucinating fragments of the text falling. By now, I’ve mostly finished the game and earned many of the achievements.
15. Doughlings: Invasion: I enjoyed the Breakout-style Doughings: Arcade so much that I was eager to jump into Doughlings: Invasion, which turns out to be a Space Invaders clone. This didn’t do anything for me. I didn’t even care to hang around long enough to earn an achievement.
16. Wanted: Dead: At one point, I had been splurging on various bundles. I picked this one up in a bundle about female protaganists. Apparently from people who were responsible for the 3D Ninja Gaiden games, which piqued my curiosity. I selected it as a game to unwind with and enjoy when my birthday rolled around. It’s pretty intense and the kind of action game I know I’ll never master, but it’s still fun to dip my toe in. At least it has an achievement progression which allowed me to grab a few before my initial play session came to a close.
17. Duck Souls: This puzzle platformer came up for cheap and I mostly bought it on the strength of its name alone. Very brutal difficulty, what I classify as an “impossible platformer”. Still fun to play.
18. Flower: Art house game that gives you no guidance and just plops you in to figure it out. I failed to figure it out. Blow a flower petal around a field and then power up by collecting more petals? It felt like a 3DMark graphical demo with limited interactivity.
19. Death’s Gambit: Afterlife: I picked this up in a pack of Metroidvania games on Humble Bundle. I played it a little bit and was impressed by how it laid out the various character classes for you at the beginning of the game.
20. Mighty Switch Force! Collection: Mighty Switch Force! (Amazon Luna): One of the May freebies on Amazon Luna and it looked pretty cute. Then I saw it was by WayForward, a developer I adore from many of their past works. It’s sort of a puzzle-platformer and I jumped right into the first of the 4 games bundled and immediately cottoned to the gameplay. True to form, I used Amazon Luna as a trial service and prompty wishlisted the game on Steam. WayForward just does everything right with their games, from the graphics/aesthetic to the music to the gameplay.
21. XCOM: Enemy Within: I suddenly got an itch to play this old game, one of my top played games, again after leaving it alone for 6 years. It didn’t run at first but I visited the Steam forums and found a bunch of people having the same problem, roughly a month after Steam records that I last played the game. Turns out that choosing the Steam option to verify file integrity does the trick for fixing it. I gave it a few hours of gameplay on a new game before getting bored. Maybe it will inspire me to move onto other turn-based games. At the very least, I could audition XCOM 2 or XCOM Chimera Squad, both of which I have owned forever. While Enemy Within is still fun, the 2012-era graphics are starting to feel a bit dated.
22. Machinika Museum: A freebie sometime during the past year. Novel, casual puzzle game that tosses you in and just says, “figure it out!” So you figure out what various mechanical artifacts are for.
23. Duke of Alpha Centauri: Cheap acquisition during the Steam Summer Sale. It’s a cozy little shmup game. No problem getting an achievement here– it’s the type of game that has a crazy number of achievements. In fact, I scored 24 of them just from 7 minutes of playtime through the tutorial and the first level. The graphics are surprisingly taxing on my video card, but at least it knows how to go fullscreen at 4K on first boot. The music is great as well.
24. Cube Runner: This comes from the same studio as Duke of Alpha Centauri and it really shows in the music. It’s another of those impossible platformers, the kind that are greatly frustrating but inexplicably hook you. And the designers came up with some platforming mechanics I never would have thought of. Lots of progression-based achievements in this one as well.
25. Tomato Jones: I picked this up just based on the clever name and the cartoonish graphics. It turns out to be a platformer (perhaps of the “impossible platformer” sub-genre). It reminds me somewhat of Marble Madness in only because you have to carefully control a sphere through treacherous terrain. I’m fascinated that the game was authored in Python using the pygame library.
26. Islands of Insight: This has to be the most breathtakingly beautiful block puzzle game I have ever experienced. Also the most computationally intensive. I’ve long lamented that there seems to be little reason to own powerful gaming GPUs if you don’t care about FPS games (as I don’t), since those tend to be the titles that actually take full advantage of such hardware. It’s refreshing to see another game type that can really flex the hardware. This was a freebie on Steam circa June, it took awhile to download and possibly longer to boot up the first time– it’s a good thing I’m always eyeing performance via Windows Task Manager via a separate monitor, so I knew that the game was still doing something on first boot (like using more GB of RAM than I have ever seen used on my 32 GB system before, and also using all of my RTX 2070’s 8 GB of VRAM). But in the end, it was worth it for a brief romp through this world. You wander around, exploring the beautiful terrain, and occasionally solve a puzzle in order to advance. The game promises 10k puzzles. Not sure if that’s true. It’s also an MMO game and presumably, there is some feature to solve puzzles collaboratively.
27. The Ascent: I’ve had my eye on this game since it first came out and it went on sale for cheap enough this year that I took the plunge. It’s rather spectacular, graphically, and surprisingly not stressful at all on my GPU, even at 4K/max settings (consistently less than 5% on my RTX 2070). Turns out that all those hyper-detailed, multi-layered locales which are elaborately illuminated in real time actually don’t take that much computing muscle. The cyberpunk-inspired setting really makes me want to explore the constructed world in a way no fantasy setting ever entices me. I suppose it’s sort of a fantasy dungeon-crawl-type game, just transposed onto a sci-fi setting.
28. Gods Will Be Watching: I’m really not sure what to make of this narrative-driven point and click adventure. Perhaps the most curious thing about this pixelated game is that it uses slightly more GPU muscle than The Ascent.
29. Chorus: A pretty space combat game where the character seems to have some kind of force-like powers for controlling her ship.
30. Overcooked (Amazon Luna): A charming little cooking-themed time management game that I tried via Amazon’s Luna streaming service. I grasped the concept pretty quickly but was ready to move on just as quickly.
31. Mahjong Epic (iPad): Booted this up on my iPad and got sucked in for a few hours, again.
32. A Dark Room (Android): In the middle of the year, I became curious about the concept of an “idle game” (a.k.a. an incremental game). I researched the exemplars of the genre and this was the first recommendation I tried. This sets the tone for idle games in that you are really thrust into the situation.
33. Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD: Curiously, I had just been contemplating that I never bother paying more than about $5 for a game. Unless it’s for a new entry in a series that I really enjoy. And then the fifth installment of Kingdom Rush dropped (actually for a slight launch discount) and I went straight to work. It’s impressive that the series continues to evolve its formula. This installment allows you to swap out different types of towers and also field 2 separate hero units at once.
34. Blazing Chrome: A pitch-perfect homage to SNES-style run & gun games (really nailing the “Mode 7” graphics), most obviously influenced by Contra III: Alien Wars, though mostly on the camp side, and it’s Terminator robots rather than aliens as the enemy. It’s also just as brutally difficult as the games it’s based on.
35. Lake: The best summation I can think of for the game simply entitled “Lake” is a cozy Hallmark movie transformed into a video game. It’s also a 1986 period piece. An MIT-educated engineer working hard at a software company producing DOS-based productivity software, and takes a vacation to her hometown, the sleepy lake-encircling Oregon town referenced in the title. Her parents are apparently vacationing in Florida, and she… takes over her father’s US Postal Service route, which is generally not how these things work, but whatever. This and a few other clues in the decor (like a sign for “Cola Cerveza”, which translates to “Cola Beer”) clued me in that this might be a non-American outfit doing the developing. This turns out to be the case (dev house is Dutch). Still, it’s really darn pretty, even if the graphics aren’t especially detailed. They really put my RTX 2070 to work in the 4K resolution, and the texture pop-in during some of the opening scenes is appalling. But still pretty overall. Also, while you drive a mail truck, you can’t go GTA mode. The vehicle is stopped cold by buildings, cars, and people.
36. Tropico 6: I tried this Caribbean Island city builder game a few years ago but the tutorial bored me too much, as tutorials often do. I got the full game along with a pile of DLC through a Humble Bundle and went to work again, bolstered by my experience with Banished last year. It works a lot better if I just jump in with both feet and see what I can possibly figure out.
37. VVVVVV: Older game that I picked up in a Humble Bundle recently. I think I played it on mobile well over a decade ago, which of course is the worst way to play any platformer (with touchscreen controls). It falls into the category of “precision platformer” (what I can “impossible platformer”). Fun to play in short bursts, like the other such genre entries in my collection. The wildest part was on first boot when it announced that it was compiling Vulkan shaders– humorous because I associate that with more complex graphics than are on offer here. No strike against it since it’s still fun.
38. Hacknet: I have numerous “hacking” games in my Steam collection, but this might be the first time I have actually played one of them. It’s a crazy experience– I have a lot of knowledge when it comes to computers, programming, Unix-like environments, and how hacking is performed, and this game presents a simplified, scaled-down view of all these elements. Sort of like how American Truck Simulator is not built anywhere close to full scale (where — and I know from experience — a trip that ought to take at least 4 hours only takes 20 minutes in the game). But it can be difficult to turn off one’s brain for long enough to really engage with the experience, rather than try to map everything in the game onto real world counterparts. It’s probably the same feeling a real chemist gets when trying to play SpaceChem (a game I quite enjoy, but I’m no chemist). I got my first achievement in short order, for figuring out how to short circuit the tutorial, thus finishing it faster than par– all because I was just experimenting with the interface in a “hmm, I wonder what happens if I do this?” manner. Truly in keeping with the hacker spirit.
39. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: This was my first exposure to the Ace Combat franchise. I only played briefly because I just can’t get the hang of flying simulators. Just sort of spinning around and around.
40. GYLT: Continuing my tradition of playing a new game on Halloween night after passing out candy, I scrubbed through my unplayed list, seeking a game with at least a minimal spooky factor. Based on its screenshot, this looked like it fit the bill. I was not wrong. It sort of feels like a PG-13-rated H.P. Lovecraft adventure. Creepy monsters, but not too horrifying. It’s fair to say I love the atmosphere on this one. It’s well put together and kept me interested.
41. Tetraminos: Also gave this a whirl on Halloween night. A gussied up variation of Tetris with a few more pieces thrown in. The background graphics can be way too distracting.
42. Diplomacy Is Not An Option: For the first time since Halloween night, I finally got a chance to give a new game a whirl. It was during the American Thanksgiving holiday time, which is when I have my ad-hoc tradition of scrubbing through my tower defense collection. There was an entire Humble Bundle earlier this year which consisted entirely of TD games, so now is the prime time to actually try some. This game must be appreciated for its unique, simplistic (yet still GPU-taxing) visual style. Rather than simple tower defense, this actually looks to be a strong replacement for my beloved They Are Billions game with the need to maintain an entire serfdom in order to fund the defense.
43. IMMORTALITY: This is a strange game indeed. But strange can be good. The gameplay revolves around reviewing video footage of an actress in order to figure out… something about her. I found it quite engrossing even if I don’t quite understand what the objective of the game is. It’s also the first game I have ever encountered with “Content Warning” on the main menu of options. Lots of things, including “Murder: asphyxia, knife, and firearm.” I read that and immediately thought, “Whoa! Spoiler warning much?!” I once attended a presentation from famed film critic Roger Ebert who explained that Pulp Fiction replicated the experience of watching a movie in bits and pieces over the course of a few weeks, viewed from the retail counter of a busy video rental shop. This makes sense when you realize that the film’s director, Quentin Tarantino, worked at such an establishment. And thus it is with IMMORTALITY: It’s the experience of watching, not one, but three very different movies in short clips, out of order, and trying to piece together what the movies are about, while also trying to decipher something broader, possibly supernatural, connecting the movies. I think one reason that I find the game fascinating is that I have passing interest in “behind the scenes” material demonstrating how stuff gets made, stuff such as movies, and this game is comprised mostly of that type of material. Some scenes are the actual finished scenes from the movies, some are table reads, some are screen tests or dress rehearsals.
44. Isle of Arrows: Tried this for my yearly Thanksgiving tower defense romp. It promises to be a sort of minimalist zen TD game. It didn’t grab me in any appreciable way, and I have other TD games to get to.
45. Element TD 2: Another one from the Humble Bundle TD bundle that I got to try over Thanksgiving. More graphically impressive than Isle of Arrows and moving music.. But ultimately, I couldn’t find what made it special and moved on pretty quickly.
46. Crysis Remastered: I’m normally not one for FPS games, but this Crysis series looked cool and was part of a Humble Bundle later in the year. It also allows you to play it a super-duper high-tech power armor that frankly seems to give numerous unfair advantages vs. your opponents, like stealth. It was still difficult for me, but I kept pushing through because it did a good job of engrossing me in the story.
47. Pluviophile: I stayed in for New Years Eve and fired up the They Are Billions weekly Community Challenge, which I bombed relatively early. With 45 minutes left in the year, I decided to take the plunge for 1 new game to count toward the calendar year of 2024. Pluviophile (which is a person who likes rain) is a pretty walking simulator, reminding me of the Dear Esther walking sim which I played very early in the year. Also a good complement to Crysis: Remastered, which I largely enjoy as a beautiful walking simulator, albeit one broken up by bouts of extreme violence.

There! Now that I’ve finally written this up, I can allow myself to play some games for calendar year 2025.

[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 … 2020 … 2021 … 2022 ]

Round-up time! I definitely got more gaming done this year vs last. Whereas, I only got 38 hours logged into Steam games last year (while delving into various other platforms like Amazon Luna, Epic, Apple Arcade, and Google Play), I got my Steam hours up this year. SteamDB profile indicates that I finished at 2420 hours, minus 2300 hours (ending point for 2022), equals 120 hours on Steam. I dipped into Amazon Luna occasionally, but rarely stayed due to the streaming latency. And the record below shows I didn’t game at all on Epic, Android, iOS, or many other platforms.

I think my Steam Replay Report from 2023 is slightly more interesting than the one from 2022. 256 achievements, and those were mostly deliberate, though some were holdovers from previous years. They didn’t click until I booted up the game again this year. This was motivated by a new achievement hunt after I learned of the site called Steam Hunters which provides a whole new way to look at your Steam gaming.

Vampire Survivors dominated (and I think that will continue well into the future) and accounted for exactly half of the achievements earned. Then there was Banished, which I only meant to enter into briefly in order to gain an achievement, but ended up staying for 15 hours before the achievement showed up — and enjoyed every minute.

1. Vampire Survivors: I’ve heard a lot of positive buzz around this, but few more details beyond the heavily populated albeit pixelated screenshots. It sort of dumps you in and leaves you to figure it out. I wasn’t impressed at first (possibly because my computer was in a laggy state when I first played it), but after a reboot, it started to click. Before I knew it, I had sunk a dozen hours into it in a weekend, finally reaching the cartoonishly chaotic endgame state for a given level. Then I just kept on playing and playing, and suddenly it was February and realized I had only played this game. New updates and DLCs would be rolled out throughout the year and I would quickly sink my teeth into those as well. This game is the main reason I got any significant playtime this year as well as a load of achievements.
2. Metal Slug: A month and a half into the year, I’m finally getting around to playing some game that is not Vampire Survivors. Many Metal Slug games came up for cheap in an SNK sale in February, so it seemed like a good opportunity to fill in that gap in my gaming history. I dropped $2 on the original version. These were always mainstays in the arcades I frequented in the late 80s/early 90s, but I never dropped a token in. I absolutely see the charm in the detailed visuals.
3. Astral Traveler: This reminded me a bit of S.T.U.N. Runner. But it didn’t grab me at all, as I only sunk a few minutes into it and quickly moved on. I later rediscovered it while scrubbing through my games for an achievement hunt and didn’t remember playing it at all earlier in the year, such was the impact that it made. Even the motivation of collecting a single achievement didn’t help me understand what I was supposed to be doing in this game.
4. Yakuza Kiwami (Amazon Luna): The first Luna game I have tried this year (I didn’t even bother with any of the January freebies). I had to visit the Wikipedia page in advance of playing just to see how confused I would be, jumping into a random point in the series. Fortunately, this is a remake of the original entry in the franchise. I actually greatly enjoyed myself and this made me long for the opportunity to really be able to sit down and immerse myself in an open world crime game.
5. Spec Ops: The Line: Morally complex military shooter game from a decade ago that was on sale for cheap enough. It grabbed me pretty quick with its amazing set pieces and I put a few hours into it. I wanted to continue as far as I could into the story, but one of the game play segments got to be too much for me and I ended up putting the game away and just watching the cut scenes edited together on YouTube.
6. Mega Man 11 (Amazon Luna): Freebie on Luna that I really wanted to enjoy. Couldn’t get through one level and I meant to visit other levels before the month was out, just to see the creativity on display. But alas.
7. Slayaway Camp: Another game that I played for free on a different service that I then proceeded to purchase on good old Steam. What can I say? I just can’t get into mobile/handheld gaming, but I love whiling away some time on a good puzzle game with clever aesthetics (in this case, 80s slasher horror flicks).
8. Resident Evil 4: Chainsaw Demo: I was eager to try the demo of this remake to see just how amazing the graphics could be. I didn’t last long here. Indeed, it reminds me of my attempts to play other remakes in the series.
9. StarCraft (Remastered): Time to get back to the roots using this title. I didn’t put much time in, though.
10. Steel Assault: This came up for sale on Steam. I was eager to play it again after demoing it on Amazon Luna last year. Again, probably not the usage model that Amazon had in mind for the Luna service, i.e., “try on Luna before you give you money to Steam”. I feel like it’s more playable on Steam, perhaps due to no possibility of network latency.
11. Yakuza Kiwami 2 (Amazon Luna): I enjoyed the first Yakuza Kiwami game on Luna. I was unsure whether I would be able to follow this game, not having finished the first one. Fortunately, it had a lot of “would you like to learn more about this?” segments as you amble around the opening of the game, which fill you in on the various story pieces you may have missed from the previous installment. This is the kind off game that makes me wish I had the time to indulge in open world time sinks.
12. Resident Evil 2 Remake (Amazon Luna): Another Luna freebie that I had to try before its free month expired. Very fun to revisit this one with its vastly upgraded visuals. I particularly respect how they maintained the mid-90s aesthetics with the technology (payphones, CRT computer monitors, fax machines). When I played the game, however, the game’s landing page on the Luna site illustrated why one shouldn’t get too invested in this game streaming tech as the landing page announced that it was slated to leave streaming soon. Ultimately, I didn’t play very long because I find these games are really quite brutally difficult.
13. Endzone: A World Apart (Amazon Luna): An Amazon Luna monthly freebie, a post-apocalyptic colony builder. I think the major twist here is that it requires a controller. These types of games are quite complex in the UI and ordinarily require a mouse and keyboard. I almost gave up a few times during the tutorial as I struggled to accomplish the goals laid out because I couldn’t figure out how to reach the required menu item in the UI.
14. SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (Amazon Luna): This might be the first time I’ve suffered through even a little of a card-based video game (though I think my beloved Plants vs. Zombies had a sort of card mode). Also my first introduction to the SteamWorld franchise. I generally have never been able to comprehend random cards as a core gameplay mechanic in video games (at least games that aren’t simulating normal card games). I guess the graphics were pretty enough, with a sort of watercolor-influenced aesthetic.
15. Infectonator! Survivors: I rewatched Shaun of the Dead for the first time in like 15 years. It made me want to play this game again. Got sucked into it for a few nights.
16. Arcade Paradise (Amazon Luna): Seemed promising but turned into a massive disappointment. Basically, you work a menial job to earn money for the privilege of playing some arcade games. You have to do laundry in a laundromat, pick up trash around the same place, and… unclog the toilet. This is where I lost it, not because it was such an ugly chore, but I genuinely couldn’t get a grip on the control scheme and actually unclog the darn toilet. So I never did get to see what the arcade games were like. Reading online, though, it sounds like they were nothing special.
17. F-Zero (SNES Mini Retro): Always gotta take a few laps around the track from time to time, even if I’ve never gotten very far overall in the game.
18. Zen Chess: Mate in One: Simple chess puzzler that was on sale. Hard not to like, at least if you know the rules of chess, and much better than that weird chess puzzler I tried last year. The music has me wondering if there is a standard set of tunes for these simple zen puzzle games, because the soundtracks seem to run together in my mind.
19. Zuma Deluxe: I purchased this awhile back and saw it was still on my “Not Played Yet” Steam list, so I sunk a few minutes into it. I remember this being one of the earlier mobile games I played and enjoyed, circa 2010, before the dark times, when mobile games started to decline before outright sucking. Unfortunately, this desktop version suffers from a few problems: Can’t be full-screened, even though the option is there, thus it can be difficult to play without occasionally clicking out side the small-ish window; and the “mouse to rotate a wheel” core gameplay mechanic feels frustratingly inaccurate. I later figured out that the fullscreen option works if I disable hardware acceleration. So it’s possible to play in 4K, albeit at a stretched aspect ratio, and at the small cost to my sanity as it shifts video modes and screws up all my desktop windows.
20. Devil May Cry 5 (Amazon Luna): I was trying to get back into sampling Amazon Luna games, but the experience of trying out DMC5 was too punishing. Suddenly, the streaming just can’t keep up and I bailed a minute into the action. I still have the earlier DMC collection on Steam to work through, if I get the motivation.
21. Orbital Bullet (Amazon Luna): A game with a fascinating aesthetic, in which our hero runs around the perimeter of various small asteroids. Pretty, and sounded good, but it failed to hook me in any appreciable way.
22. CARRION: I have an ad-hoc tradition of playing some game on Halloween night after I shut down the house’s trick-or-treating operation. Often, it’s a scary-themed game. This year I chose CARRION, which I’ve had my eye on since it released about 3 years ago, and came up for sale just before Halloween. It’s exceptionally novel, you have to give it that much.
23. Ride 4 (Amazon Luna): This is the first time I have heard of the Ride franchise, which is apparently the 2-wheel version of realistic racing simulators such as Gran Turismo. It didn’t click, at all. First, the same streaming issues that plagued DMC5 a few days earlier cropped up here. Then, the game won’t allow you to cleanly exit unless you finish the tutorial window! Good thing the browser window can be axed.
24. Tiny Lands (Amazon Luna): This is an interesting idea: a video game in which you are tasked with finding the differences between 2 nearly identical images, like puzzles that used to appear in the newspaper. This is more advanced though, since the pictures are actually 3D rendered scenes which you need to rotate and zoom in order to discern the variations. It was a fun romp for a few minutes. I always found that the fifth and final difference was the hardest to find.
25. Peggle Nights: Enjoying Zuma Deluxe so much, I remembered that I hadn’t worked through this similar classic (by today’s standards) casual game that I had purchased on Steam some time ago.

Okay, quick break for a weird tangent here: I sometimes check into my profile on the SteamDB site, which can track your game library and playtime (if you set your Steam profile as public). It lists a certain number of games in my library as having been “played”. Around November, I learned of a separate site called Steam Hunters, which specializes in tracking achievements. When I checked my profile on this site, I noticed a gulf of about 100 games vs. SteamDB’s “played” count. It turns out that SteamDB counts a game has “played” if you have a total of 5 minutes of playtime, obviously a low bar. Meanwhile, Steam Hunters counts a game as “started” when you actually earn your first achievement in a game.

Thus, I set out on a meta-goal to narrow the gap between these 2 numbers.

26. Banished: The first game I noticed that has 5+ minutes (roughly 7) of total playtime on Steam, but no achievements earned yet was this colony simulation. I started it once, maybe twice before, but the tutorial bored me too much to continue. Tutorials often do that to me. Anyway, the way I wanted to work this achievement goal was to play until I organically earned my first achievement, so I went in with no knowledge of how to earn my first one. I read a brief guide from the Steam Community page regarding Banished that gave me some pointers as I delved into the game again this time, just bumbling around and figuring things out as I went. This reminds me of the way that I approached my beloved They Are Billions, figuring out new things every time I sat down to play, for like the first 50 hours. I restarted my colony a few times as I figured out more and more things. The general colony portion reminds me strongly of Exodus Borealis, a game I briefly fell in love with last year, particularly in the seasonal mechanics tied to the rapid life/death cycle. I finally scored my first achievement after about 14 hours– to think, I just wanted to get in and out with some achievement, but alas. Hey, at least I was having fun. After getting the achievement (for constructing one of each building type in my colony), I somewhat lost motivation to keep playing. My colony had reached an equilibrium at around 45 colonists. Reading some reviews of the game, it seems there are some wonky mechanics surrounding how effectively colonists can breed. If you don’t nail that correctly, your colony will never really get off the ground. Still, this experience makes me want to try my hand at some other more complex games by just poking around to see what I can figure out.
27. Chip’s Challenge 2: The second game I tried for my “try to get an achievement” challenge. This time, I only had to invest about 14 minutes rather than 14 hours in order to hit that first achievement in this classic block puzzler, by completing the first 5 levels.
28. Mega Man Legacy Collection: Mega Man 2: Looking for games that I’ve played but not scored any achievements on, I saw that there’s an achievement for finishing Mega Man 2 in this Mega Man collection. Mega Man 2 was my first exposure to the franchise and remains my favorite. I decided to cheat somewhat by looking up the optimal order for challenging the robot masters. But by the time I reached the third stage, I still got too frustrated/overcome with the realization that I should be doing something better with my time that I elected to move on. Strange to think that I completed this game in under 24 hours when I rented it as a kid.
29. NiGHTS Into Dreams: Next up on my achievement hunt… this just isn’t going great. I actually tried on this game, but I have no idea what’s going on and then the graphics made me feel ill after a few minutes. No harvesting from here. I had to go lay down while wondering what it would have been like to spend a bunch of cash in the mid-1990s for both a Sega Saturn and this game and then getting sick every time you tried to play it.
30. Pinball FX3: Next on the achievement hunt, I apparently played this game for 6 or 7 minutes previously. My notes from my previous play session showed that the game messed up my monitor resolution and also featured an extensive tutorial (on pinball). It also had an annoying voiceover for menu navigation. On this playthrough, the resolution was already correct, the game didn’t bother me with a tutorial, and I shut off the voiceover. I wondered how hard it would be to score an achievement, but I managed to grab 2 of them on just a single playthrough of the default board, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
31. QUBIC: I played this all the way back in 2018. I remember it being a novel little puzzle game that cost a dollar. But my notes indicated that the achievements were broken. So I decided to fire it back up and see if that functionality has been fixed sometime in the last 5 years, and maybe grab 1 or 2 of the 141 (!!) available achievements. Turns out all I needed to do is launch the game and I got 74 overdue achievements. It’s playing havoc on my Steam client while I’m writing these notes, giving me about 3 achievements every 10 seconds or so.
32. Sine Mora EX: I’ve wanted to revisit this shmup game ever since I sampled it in 2019, and my achievement hunt provided the impetus. I still have no idea what’s going on with the story, or who the factions are, but the visuals are absolutely stunning and it actually taxes my (somewhat aging) video card at full 4K in the process, same as it did 4 years ago. I exited the game after an hour to find that I did, in fact, earn an achievement.
33. Ball of Wonder: I was surprised to notice that I hadn’t scored any achievements on this despite feeling like I had played it a lot. It turns out I had only played it 4 hours, but it was a great time waster. I fired it up one more time and quickly received a few progress achievements (destroy X amount of Y-type blocks in this Arkanoid/Breakout clone).
34. Stars In Shadow: At long last, I did something in a 4X game. Motivated by my achievement hunt, and bolstered by success at figuring out how to play Banished, I decided to jump into this game and just poke around. Honestly, it’s very approachable, with a very cartoonish style and obvious aesthetic differences among the various races. And I even earned an achievement a few minutes in.
35. Zombo Buster Advance: Thanksgiving time! The time of year when I have an ad-hoc tradition of sinking into some tower defense game or another. I played Zombo Buster Rising a few years ago but was quickly annoyed with it because it felt like a mobile game that was ported to Steam, which turned out to be correct. This one is different and apparently has never visited a mobile platform. Advance has somewhat deeper gameplay than Rising, but not by much. It grabbed me long enough to score an achievement, then I went back to scrubbing through other unplayed TD games.
36. Planet TD: Another unplayed tower defense acquisition in my collection. It’s fairly uninspired. Neither the towers nor the enemies are particularly distinctive. I cleared the first 2 levels while struggling to remain awake. At least I scored 11/61 achievements so I don’t need to revisit for the achievement hunt.
37. FTL: Faster Than Light: The old roguelike indie darling that took me forever to warm up to. I hadn’t played it in forever and noticed that, despite playing it for well more than 13 hours, I had never scored even a single achievement. So I fired it up and immediately scored 2 achievements. I guess they were a relatively recent addition. Sure enough, seems that they didn’t arrive until January, 2020. I still went on to play it quite a bit in December.
38. Lumencraft: This is supposed to have some tower defense elements to it after awhile of digging and grinding up crystals. I might have to spend more time with it.
39. Gravity Island: This game is so challenging that I couldn’t even make it past the initial language selection screen. Or perhaps I was encountering some odd bug. Also forces a resolution change and messed up desktop windows, which is always a strike against a game.
40. Alien Shooter TD: I’m surprised that I missed this game during my annual Thanksgiving tower defense celebration, when I was scrubbing my library in search of unplayed TD games. Around Christmas, I got around to playing it. It didn’t impress me, especially since the graphics felt really primitive, as in early-era 3D graphics, even though this game dates to 2017. I should have guessed by the “TD” tacked onto the end of the title that “Alien Shooter” is the name of a franchise and that the earlier games actually do date back to the early 3D games. This TD game featured a game play innovation I hadn’t seen yet: The need to constantly purchase more ammo for your soldiers. I was about the abandon it before scoring an achievement, but then I crossed the threshold for a fairly basic one, so I won’t need to revisit this.
41. Girls Like Robots: Another revisit for the achievement. I really had to force myself to get through the first act. It just doesn’t grab me, but I got that precious achievement. What a chore.
42. Besiege: Apparently, I tried this briefly prior to this playthrough, but I couldn’t find any record of that fact among the pages of these yearly recaps. The achievement hunt gives me renewed motivation to figure it out. This is sort of a physics simulation and mechanical engineering workshop that allows you to create a siege vehicle that will destroy various medieval fortified positions. It’s sort of grabbing me this time around. I scored my first achievement pretty early on, but I hope to get back to it.
43. Bloodrayne Betrayal (Legacy): I haven’t visited this game in a long time (6+ years), but the achievement hunt marches on. I remember sampling this game a few times and enjoying it quite a bit, despite the miserable reviews, and the fact that I only had 26 minutes of playtime invested. I’m still enjoying it on this playthrough. However, I got stuck at one point. Then I decided to delve into what the achievements require exactly and they seem pretty advanced (no “baby’s first achievement” here). So this will likely remain a hole in the achievement hunt.
44. Bloodrayne Betrayal: Fresh Bites (Amazon Luna): The last game I played, also on the last day of the year. After playing the legacy version, I wanted to dip into this remaster/alternate artwork edition. It didn’t grab me, though, as the streaming latency still made the experience too arduous. I didn’t stick around long enough to appreciate the graphical differences.

So by the end of the year, I managed to narrow the game between SteamDB’s “played” games and Steam Hunters’ “started” games by at least a dozen.