This Week In Retro: 2024

2024: High Hopes

by Diamond Feit

Forgive me for lumping two very different popular beliefs together, but I want to make it clear that I'm neither a religious nor a superstitious person. I grew up in a Jewish household but stopped practicing decades ago in my teens; every year the arrival of Hanukkah comes as a complete surprise. I don't put much faith in fortune tellers or horoscopes either, especially when I see compatibility charts that insist I should have wed my first girlfriend—a Pisces—while telling me that my current marriage is dangerous because she's a Sagitarrius and I'm a Scorpio.

I bring this up because I like to have a little fun now and then, which led me to tell anyone who would listen that 2024 was going to be good for me because it's the Year of the Dragon. Again, I don't actually trust that nature will grant me additional luck every twelve years, but since I've got the coolest sign on Chinese restaurant placemats, I might as well enjoy it when the calendar says it's my turn to celebrate.

On this final day of 2024, I don't know that I saw any extra returns this year compared to any other year. In contrast to 2021 and 2023 I did not get laid off by any large corporations, but only because I took those past dismissals as a sign to stick to self-employment. Hence I spent the last 12 months focused on exploring my own interests like podcasting and writing while avoiding the profession of teaching English like most people avoid door-to-door sales agents.

Do I view the events of 2024 fondly? On a personal level, I'd say yes! I traveled to two new cities I had never seen before, I got back into reading books in a big way, and I feel more pride in my writing with each piece that I complete. As someone who routinely looks backwards at my past work—writing about retro games necessitates looking at previously published articles and columns, including my own—I can see how far I've come in the last five years and it motivates me to keep pushing forward.

In that spirit, I'd like to spend my final entry of the year looking back at my last 12 months through the video games I enjoyed. As with my personal life, I found a lot to celebrate in 2024, especially in the field of indie projects that explored new means of storytelling and gameplay.

I kicked off my year with an extremely on-brand computer game set in 1996, one that recreates the Windows 95 experience and took me back to my days of providing customer support over the phone. Home Safety Hotline puts you in the role of a new hire at the eponymous company, fielding panicked questions from hapless callers desperate for answers. The game presents you with a database of common household problems like carpenter ants or carbon monoxide and counts on you to correctly decipher the issue plaguing each homeowner.

Home Safety Hotline keeps things interesting by increasing the stakes as each in-game day passes. The more time you spend on the job, the larger your database grows and the information takes a turn for the bizarre. In between fielding queries about droppings in kitchens or moisture in basements, you start to hear from people worried about nocturnal creatures cleaning their living room or waking up to irritated skin due to a case of Bed Teeth. The game even throws in scheduled "maintenance" hours that disable your quick reference tools and forces you to troubleshoot based on your memory alone.

Adding to the fun, your Home Safety Hotline supervisor and every concerned caller are all played by actors who impart their dialogue with frustration and fear. Sending a caller the wrong information prompts them to call back and complain, often with darkly humorous results as they fall victim to a supernatural pest. Make too many mistakes and you'll receive verbal reprimands regarding your performance; failure to heed these threats will get you fired and cursed with a most inconvenient termination clause.

Home Safety Hotline seals the deal with its overall presentation, giving you access to a mock Windows desktop that recaptures the look and feel of a mid-1990s PC. Your inbox includes missives from work alongside mysterious emails warning you of danger. Short video files help breathe life into this world with odd local ads, junk science documentaries, and a nature guide that includes ominous hiking tips. Completing the game unlocks behind-the-scenes photos from the creators outlining their favorite details about how they came up with so many delightfully devilish creatures.

I love the handmade feel that Home Safety Hotline exudes from its eerie encyclopedia of horrors to its live-action video segments. You can tell the people who came together to bring this project to life had so much fun mocking up monsters and running around in the woods. Developer Night Signal Entertainment has already released a downloadable add-on to Home Safety Hotline that includes four more days of holiday-themed callers and cryptids, making this one of the most up-to-date recommendations on my list.

Funnily enough, the next few games that dominated my year all had a zoological theme, including a large number of frogs. An SGF livestream introduced me to The Frog Detective, a trilogy of recent releases about a crime-solving amphibian. While the gameplay does nothing new—you interview other animals and help them find what they need in order to get some Big Clue that advances the story—the characters and dialogue are adorably amusing. I've written many a column up to this point about the challenges of telling jokes in video games but The Frog Detective gets everything right; the three cases are now sold together as a bundle on various platforms.

I found a much older but no less amusing frog-centric game on my Nintendo Switch when I finally sat down to play The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls. Originally released exclusively for the Game Boy in Japan, Nintendo added it to the Switch Online library this year for anyone to play—provided you can read Japanese, as Nintendo never localized the game into any other languages.

At first glance The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls resembles the handheld Legend of Zelda games, but this 1992 adventure has its own particular flow. The heroic Prince Sablé carries a sword and shield, but players cannot freely duel with the many enemies roaming Mille-Feuille Kingdom. Instead, all combat unfolds automatically based on the strength of the prince's equipment and his current shape. You see, as the prince undertakes his great quest, he imbibes magical potions that transform his body. As a human, frog, or snake, Prince Sablé's abilities change, and all three forms serve a function in his travels.

Whether exploring the overworld from a top-down perspective or jumping and swimming inside of side-scrolling dungeons, The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls takes players on a fanciful journey. The prince must thoroughly explore Mille-Feuille Kingdom to locate and rescue Princess Tiramisu in a land where just about everyone and everything has a silly, often food-based name. Nintendo even pokes fun at themselves with an in-game corporation called Nantendo, home to an eccentric inventor whose gadgets prove crucial to the prince's endeavors.

With no official translation, The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls has found a limited yet dedicated cult audience abroad due to its sense of humor and unusual status as a first-party Nintendo gag game. As such, curious players can take advantage of walkthroughs or fan-made English patches to experience the legend of Tiramisu. If nothing else, you'll learn why there's a man living in a frog-filled hut in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.

Yet amongst all the beast-based antics I encountered in 2024, nothing topped Animal Well. Most indie games suddenly appear from the ether and catch me by surprise but ever since I played the demo at the 2022 Tokyo Game Show, I knew that solo developer Billy Basso was cooking up a one-of-a-kind creation. I even picked Animal Well as my most anticipated game of this year back in January before I knew its exact release date.

Despite its bestial moniker, Animal Well players do not control an animal but rather a nondescript blob. The game opens in a dark yet serene place, beckoning you to inch forward and discover what lies ahead; each dimly-lit biome is bursting with colors and teeming with life, some of it hostile but much of it passive. A good number of these creatures have no quarrel with the player character and prefer to feed or rest or go about their routine ambivalent to your actions.

A few larger critters in Animal Well might qualify as bosses in other games but in this reality their only role is that of obstacle to overcome. Your blob collects a number of items as they scoot around but none of them act as weapons; you can distract or even startle the local population with your inventory but you never fight or defeat anything you encounter. Animal Well instead offers layers upon layers of mysteries for players to uncover via platforming challenges and puzzle solving. Besides brief descriptions for the pickups you find, the game features very little text and even fewer explanations.

Many writers and storefronts have compared Animal Well to Metroid and similar 2D action games set in large interconnected worlds, but with its lack of explicit narrative, combat, or even named characters it's hard to categorize Basso's passion project alongside Samus Aran's exploits. If anything I consider Animal Well the platonic ideal of its own genre, a game that welcomes players to take their time and find their own way, a chill hang-out experience I could only compare to Fez. 

In between these digital safaris I made an impulse decision to fly to Chicago in the spring, as I had never seen the Windy City with mine own eyes. Oh sure, like millions of Americans I've changed planes at O'Hare Airport, but unless I leave a transportation hub and walk around the streets, it doesn't count as a visit. In my head, I thought I might make a whirlwind tour of Chicago's many museums, possibly catch a game in one of the city's venerable ballparks, then take a quick jaunt to nearby Milwaukee for the Midwest Gaming Classic. A lot to accomplish in a single week, but I liked my odds.

Mother Nature had other plans, for she dumped rain onto Chi-town every single day I spent there. This forced me to purchase an umbrella and drastically revise my travel plans, abandoning all outdoor activities in favor of indoor destinations with minimal time spent exposed to the elements. Fortunately for me, this had no impact on my quest to eat Chicago-style deep-dish pizza and discover whatever the hell they serve in Portillo's (Answer: The best milkshake I've ever had in my life thanks to the inclusion of chocolate cake in the mix).

The weather also did not dampen my hopes to finally check out the Galloping Ghost Arcade, a massive collection of amusements in suburban Chicago. Actually getting out to the site proved challenging—I had to board a commuter train and then walk down muddy streets for 15 minutes—but once inside I found the crush of lights and sounds intoxicating. Life in Japan has acclimated me to visiting the occasional working arcade in 2024, but the sheer scale of Galloping Ghost triggered feelings I haven't felt in decades; the sense of being completely surrounded by video games, all of them crying out for attention, each one a unique portal into another world.

Galloping Ghost stuffs an impossible number of machines inside a TARDIS-like location that kept going and going as I turned each corner. In a classic American move favoring quantity over quality, I discovered a disappointing percentage of the cabinets in poor condition, with burnt-in monitors and unresponsive controls rendering certain games unplayable. Still, the absolute amount of options justified the journey I made through a wintry mix of sleet and snow.

I did manage to visit Milwaukee for a mini-Retronauts reunion, a lively panel for a packed crowd at the Midwest Gaming Classic, and a hootenanny of a podcast recorded in the Hyatt Regency hotel. Given our professional obligations I had even less time to see the city of Milwaukee than I did Chicago, but I did hit a delightfully cramped bookstore, eat the single largest mozzarella stick I've yet to eat, and pay my respects to The Fonz.

As summer thawed my still-frosty bones following my excursion to the Central time zone, I found myself playing catch up with the extraordinary amount of intriguing indies all released on May 9, 2024. Besides the aforementioned Animal Well, two other games I had demoed and eagerly wished to experience were Crow Country and 1000xRESIST. It took me months to remove both from my backlog and ultimately I'm still astonished by the breadth and depth of quality in these very different games that all launched in the same 24-hour period this year—and that's not counting at least three other titles from that day which I have yet to play.

I'll start with the easier of the two to describe: Crow Country follows in the tradition of developers celebrating the look of pre-rendered backgrounds on original PlayStation games while also hearkening back to classic third-person fixed-camera survival horror. However, SFB Games went the extra mile by recapturing the aesthetic of those 90s games while marrying them with modern free-swinging camera controls.

In other words, even though Crow Country dresses itself as a long-lost Resident Evil clone, everything on screen exists as a 3D object. This combination of old-meets-new gives Crow Country an aura unlike any other game I've played, as if the characters and monsters inhabit a tiny diorama. This presentation injects an air of verisimilitude into the setting of a shuttered amusement park, one that protagonist Mara Forest investigates in hopes of locating its missing owner, Edward Crow.

It helps that the eponymous Crow Country is actually chockablock with life, ensuring Mara seldom spends any of her time inside the park alone. Her search for Edward Crow leads her to meet a few of his remaining employees, a lawyer seeking financial restitution for an on-site accident that injured a client, and scores of inhuman beings that crawl throughout the grounds. Mara brings a gun with her and can find new weapons as she pushes deeper into the park's lesser-seen corners, but the game periodically repopulates the hallways with an increasing number of threats. This forces players to continuously decide which situations call for fighting and which are best avoided through fancy footwork as they manage Mara's health and resources.

Crow Country ties all of these characters and creepers together with a genuinely surprising story, all of it centered around the highly compelling lead of Mara herself. Unlike the business-first heroes of Resident Evil or the barely-sane stars of Silent Hill, Mara keeps her wits about her at all times, even commenting on the park's crumbling charms as she pursues the reclusive Crow. Her internal dialogue balances horror and humor as she laments her situation without giving in to despair; I hope SFB Games see fit to write her another adventure in the future.

I wish I knew how to explain 1000xRESIST without resorting to hyperbole or contradictions. Somehow the team at Sunset Visitor debuted with a sprawling science-fiction epic that takes place far in the future that also happens to revolve around Chinese immigrants coming to terms with their new lives in North America in the present day. 1000xRESIST takes a dose of the COVID-19 pandemic and expands it into a post-apocalyptic scenario, yet thanks to a sort of time travel the player experiences life before, during, and long after the viral outbreak. It's a budget title making the most of limited animations and oft-repeated 3D models yet voice actors bring every single line of dialogue to life in a way that will break your heart at least once.

Players assume the role of Watcher in 1000xRESIST, a dedicated Sister who communes with the Allmother in order to research the matriarch's memories of the distant past. These Communions take the form of three-dimensional spaces that Watcher explores, examining the relics she finds and talking to the people whom the Allmother once knew. An AI assistant named Secretary aids Watcher, offering facts to help bring context to the images she sees and allowing her to manipulate time, giving her control over the order in which she witnesses these historical events.

Watcher and the other Sisters serve the Allmother in their eternal struggle against the Occupants, mysterious beings who came to Earth from deep space whose arrival immediately preceded a viral outbreak that killed most of humanity. As the Allmother combats the Occupants in the future, Watcher studies the past to learn what she can about their foes and, if possible, discover why they seek to eliminate us. Yet she uncovers more than she ever expected which leads to a violent confrontation at the start of the game, one that players will not understand until much later.

1000xRESIST doesn't expect players to fight the Occupants or sneak past guards or solve puzzles; this is a narrative-first experience, not an action game or a detective simulation. However, players have enough agency through their control of Watcher and jumping between time periods that it gives the story more impact. In this sense, we adopt Watcher's role as our own as we observe the events together, building a relationship with these characters over hours of gameplay.

Perhaps this sense of shared duty is why 1000xRESIST still sits with me months after I rolled the credits. It took me about as long to play this game as it would to watch a modern season of television on a streaming service, yet since I had to steer Watcher forward and dig up uncomfortable truths, it hit harder than if I had simply sat on my couch without a controller in hand. It also helps that the game has incredible art direction, drenching every scene in bold colors and lighting that gives 1000xRESIST a vividness all its own.

I spent the month of August hiding from Japanese summer back in New York, taking an extended trip to the city of my birth once more so I could see my distant family and take part in two game events while in town. My gambit worked in that I ate my fill of delicious dishes and enjoyed weeks of reasonable temperatures but I also came home to discover that I had missed nothing; Japanese summer in 2024 lasted well into October and I wore a T-shirt outdoors as late as November. At this point I wonder how long they'll insist Japan has a unique sense of "the four seasons" when fall only exists as a holiday weekend in between sweltering heat and bitter cold.

Lucky for me Nintendo gave me a good reason to stay indoors as often as possible with the release of a brand-new Legend of Zelda game. Even luckier, it eschewed the usual trappings and offered a brand-new take on the genre by trapping Link in a shadowy realm of darkness so that Princess Zelda could finally take center stage. I had a great time saving Hyrule in Echoes of Wisdom, even if the overall game teetered on an unbalanced mechanic at its core.

Few big-budget games dare to start with a cold-open, especially ones from long-running franchises, but it says a lot about Nintendo and Zelda that Echoes of Wisdom leaps into the action before bothering to display a title screen. With nearly 40 years of history at this point, it's fair to assume we all recognize the young fellow in a green tunic wielding a magic sword in a dark castle. Even longtime antagonist Ganon knows how this goes; his first words when you enter his throne room are "So. It's you again."

Of course, part of the twist this time around is that Ganon doesn't represent the ultimate evil just as Link doesn't act as the lone hero. Players get a few minutes of the usual fare before defeating Ganon as Link only to see our champion sink into an abyss. Link manages to fire one arrow before he disappears at Zelda trapped in a gem and it weakens her prison enough to set her loose. With Link gone, players lead Zelda out of the darkness and into a kingdom still at risk from rifts tearing everything apart.

Zelda realizes the true nature of the crisis once the rifts display an affinity for swallowing and then copying people, starting with her royal father whose doppelganger promptly frames her for Hyrule's woes. Trapped in a cell, Zelda makes a new friend who grants her a copy ability of her own; by "learning" the forms of various objects and even other monsters, Zelda breaks out of jail and roams the kingdom to seal the rifts and clear her name.

The new copy mechanic of Echoes of Wisdom provides players with a near-infinite number of solutions to each situation. Stacked beds let Zelda climb above most walls and across narrow gaps while defeating monsters adds them to her personal collection to be summoned at any time. Zelda can clone these critters to fight on her behalf or just toss them around as tools unto themselves; I found that an explosive fish solved a great deal of her problems, even on dry land.

What threw me was Zelda's eventual ability to copy Link himself, giving her access to his agility and weapons for a limited time. I stayed true to the spirit of Echoes of Wisdom and relied on her cloning powers as much as possible, but at times I felt like activating Swordfighter mode and just killing everything was the best answer—particularly against bosses with limited windows of vulnerability. I hated having to choose between cleverly exploiting Zelda's magical menagerie and the raw efficiency of Link's combat prowess.

I'm pleased that Nintendo managed to ship games starring Princesses Peach and Zelda in 2024, and I hope the company continues to experiment with new concepts and scenarios to make the most of their female characters. Given the legacy of Mario and Link as leading men though, I worry that the women's outings will be seen by the public as automatically lesser. Princess Zelda transforming into Link to fight her battles strikes me as an unnecessary concession, a statement that whatever powers she might have, it's Link who ultimately saves the day.

Even if it never felt like autumn, spooky season still arrived this year right on time. A long-awaited remake of Silent Hill 2 took up most of the oxygen and media attention this October, with new players and longtime fans both curious about how a game with such a sterling reputation would fare in the hands of another studio. I never played the original 2001 game on PS2, so when livestreamers began booting up the remake I tuned in to see and hear what they thought of this reprise, but the impression I got as a viewer was so strong I decided I had to play this one for myself—inexperience be damned.

For whatever reason I also decided that I should dust off my Twitch and YouTube channels so I might share and archive my entire Silent Hill 2 playthrough for the internet at large. I don't know if I ever found a strong identity as a streamer myself, but I used to stream games a few years ago and I don't recall why I stopped. Hence I returned to the world of survival horror and playing video games for the public this fall to little acclaim but respectable results.

As far as Silent Hill 2 goes, that game needs no introduction. I wish Konami still kept the original version in circulation but if you jump in blind as I did, I think the 2024 edition stands beautifully on its own. Developer Bloober Time had plenty of time and money to recreate the sights of Silent Hill in shocking detail, but more importantly, they had the care and attention to make the fog-cloaked ghost town a living, breathing character. An absence of loading screens and an increase in real estate goes a long way towards convincing players they're really running around a city that used to house people and welcome tourists before something went horribly wrong.

Whether you know James Sunderland's life story or can't tell him apart from any other video game protagonist searching for his missing wife, Silent Hill 2 gets its hooks into you right away. It takes its time at the outset, leading players on a leisurely stroll through the woods where no actual danger appears but the threat of unseen horrors linger all the same. It took me nearly an hour to find my first monster in Silent Hill 2 and I assure you my nerves were rattling all the while.

Even once I reached the climax and lowered the curtain on James' saga, I knew Silent Hill 2 held more secrets and alternate endings in store. So I kept playing and started a new game, this time determined to find every scribbled note and strange Polaroid. Thanks to online guides I managed to gather all the pieces I needed to complete the story and get all the endings at once. I even planned ahead and announced to the internet I would broadcast the finale, a promise I fulfilled for my largest streaming audience yet—still a single digit number of viewers, but a record turnout is a record turnout.

In any other year, a stunning game I felt motivated to earn a Platinum trophy for would qualify as my top pick, but 2024 has over-delivered to the point that I can't even call Silent Hill 2 my favorite horror game of the year. That honor instead falls to the indie Mouthwashing that dropped shortly before Konami's blockbuster, making an immediate splash with critics and building a small but vocal fanbase. 

Like Crow Country, Mouthwashing imitates the low-resolution 3D graphics of the original PlayStation, though it uses a first-person camera to both shutter the player inside the cramped environment and better frame the action. During play the game pretends to freeze, using pixelated artifacting as a means to jump cut between different time periods in the story. These deliberate glitches, along with occasional screen-filling text messages, break the fourth wall by addressing the player directly but not to the point that it interferes with immersion.

Mouthwashing takes place on board an outer space cargo vessel called the Tulpar—property of the Pony Express corporation—in the midst of a year-long haul to a distant port. Only five crew members oversee all operations, including the captain. As the game opens, "0 Days Before the Crash" appears on screen inside the cockpit, informing us immediately that there will be no smooth sailing on this voyage. In fact, the first act the player takes is deliberately steering the craft into harm's way against the advice of the computer.

Like 1000xRESIST, Mouthwashing unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, showing players what happened before the Tulpar's collision and how the crew responds in the months that follow. The entire tale takes less than three hours to play and I recommend you do so rather than read about it, but I can tell you that no one on board fares particularly well trapped inside a wrecked spaceship, least of all the captain whose mangled body has become a kind of mascot for the game in publicity images and fan-made tributes.

Mouthwashing works as a story thanks to its memorable characters and its focus on the structures they live in that fail to protect them. In the tradition of other sci-fi classics like Alien, it uses its futuristic outer space setting to tell a story about people who could easily live in our current political and economic climate. Mouthwashing doesn't even need a homicidal xenomorph to stand in for the horrors of capitalism; the human beings aboard the Tulpar do enough damage to each other on their own.

When I wrote above that I view the events of 2024 fondly on a personal level, it is due to the rewarding trips I took and the phenomenal quality of the movies, tv shows, and video games I had the pleasure of experiencing this year. This column is closing in on 5000 words and yet I haven't even raved about Amazon Prime's Fallout series, the new X-Men '97 cartoon, the return of Doctor Who, or a half-dozen explicitly queer films that I won't soon forget.

Yet as my spirits soared and gave me hope that things truly do get better over time, 2024 also showed me that we have a long way to go. The ongoing apartheid in Gaza has produced an endless stream of sickening images, compounded by the fact that the United States government continues its unwavering support of the Israeli armed forces despite the bloodshed. Organized, coordinated online harassment campaigns reared their ugly head again this year, echoing the worst parts of GamerGate from a decade earlier, except this time with the blessing of Twitter's new owner.

As if ruining a social network I've used to connect with people since 2008 wasn't enough, that same aspiring despot threw his entire financial weight behind the worst person to ever run for president (so far), helping Donald Trump win an election and casting a black shadow over the years to come. Surviving 2024 has required me to compartmentalize and focus my attention on the positives in life, no matter how small, because actually absorbing the utter derangement in the world at large would plummet me into despair.

So while it might not mean much or even seem misguided in the big picture, I maintain that I enjoyed myself in 2024. That doesn't mean I didn't react with abject horror or sorrow at certain news stories or political trends, it just means that I refuse to give in to said terrors. Going forward I vow to do what I can to help people and push back against the tide but my options are limited; rejecting fascism on my ballot did not impede its march on Washington and what little income I make goes towards keeping my family housed and fed.

I wouldn't dare tell you, the person reading this, how to handle yourself in the next 12 months. Everything I do at this point, I do because I don't have any better ideas. I love my friends and family, I love expressing myself, and I wish to maintain these joys for as long as life lets me. Speaking of which, writing these columns provides me with a tremendous sense of satisfaction, so I owe my gratitude to everyone out there who supports my work.

I'll see you all in 2025, whatever that looks like. 

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.