As you may have heard, I lost my job earlier this year. I was the managing editor at Kotaku Australia until its demise in July 2024, and my entire life revolved around that beloved site’s daily operation. They say you shouldn’t make your job your whole life. They say that because making your job your whole life is a very unhealthy to do. But I had to: Kotaku Australia was an institution. Millions of Australians visited us every month. Serving that readership was a responsibility I took very seriously.
I confess I felt lost without my job. Directionless. A huge part of myself had been taken away from me and, I have to say, being suddenly out of work at the age of 40 is a scary prospect. Unsure what to do with myself, I did what I’ve always done: I kept playing video games. I’d spent a decade chewing through games as fast as I could in order to create coverage around them. Now I was just back to playing games because I love them, or because they were helping me switch off the panic sirens in my head.
There were a few that kept me sane over the five months (god it’s only been five months) since the great redundancy, and I’d like to use this end-of-year piece to talk about them. Four of these titles are among the best new games I played in 2024. One of them is an older title I’ve always meant to go back to, but never found the time for. They are all games that kept me going in what has been a challenging second half of 2024.
Read: Astro Bot is GamesHub’s Game of the Year 2024
David Smith’s GOTY List
Balatro
God bless you, Localthunk. Balatro was without a doubt the best game of 2024. I think I’ve played at least one run of Balatro every day since I got my hands on it in February. A masterclass in roguelike deckbuilder design, the conceit is simplicity itself – poker as a cutthroat dungeon crawler. Each run has the player accrue different Joker cards that stack buffs and multipliers on your deck of playing cards. Between rounds (or Blinds), you can use your winnings to purchase new Jokers or upgrade your playing cards to further juice your build.
It’s addictive, its moreish, and its conceit is simplicity itself. Balatro gave me a game I could play for hours. It gave me small problems I could solve, and it gave me jolts of much-needed dopamine at a moment when such a chemical felt in short supply.
My game of the year.
Red Dead Redemption 2
If Balatro gave me problems to solve, replying Red Dead Redemption 2 on my PC let me pretend to be someone else for a while. There’s been plenty of ink spilled on the many virtues of Red Dead Redemption 2 over the years, and I don’t feel the need to repeat them here. It’s every bit as much the masterpiece and triumph that it was at launch in 2018. But what pulled me through this playthrough to the bitter end was the game’s ability to engross the player in what frequently feels uncannily like a living world. I can become Arthur Morgan for a few hours, ignore our shared responsibilities and exist in a world that moves far more slowly than the real one.
I spent hours doing odd jobs around the camp – hunting, fishing, chasing down debts, gathering supplies. Periodically, I’d ride lazily into town and browse the shelves in various shops. Buy Arthur a bath or a drink at the saloon. Misclick and accidentally punch a horse. Flee the town pursued by a constabulary that considers horse punching a crime graver than murder. You know how it goes.
None of it progressed the story. All of it made me feel better. Cheers, Arthur, it was nice to see you again.
Helldivers 2
I’d already played a lot of Helldivers 2 around its launch earlier in the year. After the site went away, it helped me keep in touch with friends in other states. It’s a strange and funny thing that a game as fundamentally silly as Helldivers 2 kept me from feeling horribly lonely.
It’s not the kind of game that allows for long periods of downtime that can be used for banter, conversations or proper catching up (unless you take a break between rounds on the bridge). But what it is good for making you feel things. Helldivers 2 has made me laugh so hard I can’t breathe. It’s made me so angry that I need to turn it off and do something else for a while. I’ve been splattered by misplaced Walking Barrages and flattened by the hellpods of returning team mates. I’ve hauled our squad to victory, overrun by Automaton forces, the last man left standing in an action movie made just for me.
Even on the days where I just felt numb and slug-like, Helldivers 2 dragged a smile out of me. To be surrounded by familiar voices, winning and losing together mission by mission, was (and continues to be) a special part of a special game.
Astro Bot
When my father died in 2017, Super Mario Odyssey wound up being the game that led me out of the fog of grief. Strange to say, but that game unlocked the first shock of joy I’d felt in months.
Astro Bot, a game very much cut from the 3D Mario cloth, led me out of the grief of losing a job that meant the world to me. There isn’t a serious bone in its body. Every part of it is designed to feel like playing with an especially interesting toy. Sure, there’s little PlayStation robots to collect, but I’ve never had the kind of nostalgia for the brand that makes others gasp and shriek at the sight of them. Rather, it was how hard Astro Bot works to elicit joy through its gameplay.
I 100%ed every level. I beat every challenge level. I unlocked every trophy. I didn’t want it to end because I was afraid the pleasure it had brought me might evaporate once the final credits rolled.
It didn’t. Thank god.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
There had to be a dad game on this list or it wouldn’t be complete.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 suffered a very turbulent launch due to a new reliance on server-side technology that buttresses its sim. As a result, it took me a day or so to get into the sim, a frustrating game of wait-and-see as one system or another crumpled under the pressure of thousands of pilots all piling in for a look.
But as with real-world aviation, once you’re above the clouds, it’s possible to feel your frustration with these problems melting away. I spent weeks flying around the world, one major airport to the next. I crossed Australia from Melbourne to Darwin and then headed through Indonesia before making a left at Singapore and heading for Sri Lanka. I crossed the African continent from Somalia to Algeria, made my way north through Spain and out to Ireland before turning back and travelling east across Europe.
Half of aviation is process, the strict following of checklists for every single part of operating an aircraft. This is a pleasant distraction when you’re feeling unmoored, because it creates a sense of purpose, comfort and routine – not unlike what I’d had working on the old site. The other half of aviation is sitting at cruise altitude with the autopilot on, monitoring the information you have at hand but otherwise having a little time to think. It was during these long stints between various countries and airports that I was finally able to sort through what had happened to me and come to terms with it.
Sometimes you just have to crash out for a few months and suffer an existential crisis before you can figure out your next move. All of these games, whether they arrived this year or not, gave me little parts of myself back. I head home to see my family for Christmas knowing that I’m in a better place mentally than I have been in months and it’s thanks to the work and art of thousands of talented creatives I’ve never met but who were there for me nevertheless.
Good riddance, 2024. You might have sucked, but the games you contained were very, very good.
