As the year draws to a close, I want to reflect on some of the most memorable and emotional gaming experiences I had in the last 12 months. 2024 has been a year in which I was gradually introduced to a variety of new games, after Stardew Valley took me ‘hostage’ since I started playing it in 2021. The gaming platform and provider, Steam played a major role in this change in my gaming, since it began to notify me of new games and offer a variety of impressive discounts. So, I gradually started looking into these new adventures and I was surprised at the range of emotions I experienced while playing them. Some of these games touched me on such a deep level that I felt transformed after I played them, and I wanted to share my impressions, in case I may inspire you to give them a try.

1) Strange Horticulture (2022), Bad Viking

A game with probably one of the most haunting atmospheres you could envision, Strange Horticulture is about a mysterious shopkeeper who is trying to keep her mind intact. She is putting clues together and identifying new plants, cataloguing and dealing with the townsfolk odd requests, while also trying to keep a rising depression at bay. As the shopkeeper, you also get to travel to collect plants and gather information. The plants are poetically named and the collection is large. The pervasive sense of dread that looms over the entire game matched by the constant rain, smoked oaky graphics and flowing controls make it such an engrossing play! It’s like nothing I’ve ever played before; kind of like a weird blend of Murder, She Wrote meets Plants versus Zombies meets the constant gloomy weather of Blade Runner and the heavy sadness engulfing Dark Water. The only downside of this game is that it ends too soon, as I think I finished it in roughly 4 hours. The highlight is that it has a number of alternative endings so you can play over and over again and meet a different conclusion. The same creators are now preparing a new game called Strange Antiquities, and if it’s half as good as this one, then I’m already excited about it. If you don’t enjoy daylight and like plants (which may sound like an oxymoron), give this sullen gem a try.

2) Sally Face (2016), Portable Moose

If Strange Horticulture grazed the surface of a potential depressive episode taking over our main character, in Sally Face issues related to murder, disfigurement, soul snatching, suicide and involvement with a satanic cult are tackle in such a direct way that it packs a powerful emotional punch. The difficult themes and gore present in the game are somewhat softened by the caricature-like drawings of the main characters and difficulty of some of the puzzles involved. Needless to say, the game begins with a night-marish situation and continues very much so for the entirety of 5 episodes. Just as a heads up: it gets worse for the main characters rather than easier for them, as they find themselves involved in a plot that is bigger than the building in which you are initially conducting your personal investigation. Time passes, characters grow but so too does the darkness and it is this passing of time and watching how they developed from deep childhood trauma, that makes the game so emotional as well as the fate of its main character and the way he manages to somehow be forever connected to the girls of his dreams (it’s not what you’d expect!).

To be honest, Sally Face had me crying towards the end, after I compulsively played through all the episodes in just two days because I really wanted to know what was going on with Sal and his group of friends. Again, it’s not a game I would recommend to everyone as it will only please a select few, but if you have any Scorpio/Capricorn/Pisces energy in your chart and you grew up in the post-communist 90s environment listening to Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ on repeat, then you are going to love this game. And on a final note, I would say that escaping into a game in which you need to keep your character alive and to care for their depression, well this temporarily takes your mind off your own; and it’s a liberating feeling.

3) Paradise Killer (2020), Kaizen Game Works

At the polar opposite to Sally Face is Paradise Killer, which in my humble opinion is the best game I played in 2024! You play as the exiled investigator Lady Love Dies, a heart-adorned goddess of the law who is called back from her exiled state after serving 3M days because there was a problem in the creation of the latest version of Paradise Island, that problem being that the entire ruling council was murdered by a common citizen, one Henry Division. Until the crimes are solved, no one can escape this version of the island in order to be updated/uploaded into the new one, a more perfect version of Paradise, also known as sequence 25. What follows is sheer beauty as you get to explore paradise, collect clues and blood crystals, order funny drinks from vending machines and chat with some criminally over-developed characters.. all while enjoying some vapour-wave, synth music in the background and preparing your incriminatory case for the Judge. It’s colourful, smooth, esoteric, funny, brash and pleasant, it’s the perfect game to play during a summer holiday. And despite being a walk’n’talk adventure it never gets boring, as you always feel like there is more to discover in the kitschy-cool environment or more conversations to be had with the usual suspects. Plus Shinji is the best antidote to any creeping sadness or melancholy you may be feeling. Please, do yourself a favour and play it over the upcoming holidays.

4) Botany Manor (2024), Whitethorn Games

This game is the lighter, brighter and breezier alternative to Strange Horticulture. You play as botanist Arabella Green who is writing a book on the special and peculiar behaviours of rare plants. In the process you get to explore an English countryside manor, gather clues and cultivate magical flora until you grow specific plants. Even if you may feel green with envy at the gorgeous environment of Ms Green’s homestead, at least you get to practice your green thumb (ok, I’ll stop now) and escape your immediate reality in this beautifully sunlight game replete with inventive puzzles (my favourite was making the apple cider to water the seeds of the Pixie Tears pot). The graphics and game mechanics take a little bit of adjusting to, but the game leads to such a subtly heart-breaking and yet oddly empowering conclusion that you may just miss it if you don’t pay attention. Like an unfolding rose, this game is filled with minute, pretty details that will make you want to re-play it several times. I know I will.

5) Pools (2024), Tensori

ICONIC. This game is so innocent looking at first glance that you may be mysteriously sucked into giving it a random chance to ‘see what all the fuss is about’, only to be faced with such deep primordial fears that you feel like pushing the lid down on your laptop and seeking professional help. On the surface pools is a beautifully design minimalist, liminal masterpiece in which you get thrown from a ladder onto an odd and super clean environment in which you just walk around splashing in pools. You don’t know how you got there; you don’t know who put you there, you don’t even know how you look, nor can you look out the windows that populate the space because they are brimming with powerful white light. Are you on a spaceship? Are you an alien? Are you a person who bought a ticket to an underwater adventure-land only to be met with this string of water-filled rooms? How do you get out? And what even is out in this context? The game is advertised as “rooms filled with pools, a game which has no monsters but can invoke fears of getting lost, the dark, and tight spaces”. And wow! those fears can become so palpable: from being met with a deep howl or whispers in the dark, to walking in an unlit room knee-deep in water and randomly being touched by large inflatable ducks, to finally finding a light under the water only to see a ladder going down into the pool and a pair of human hands reaching out from below towards you.

The worst was probably the ending to chapter one in which you have to walk on a thin sliver only to reach a small diving platform but the trick is that there is not water around you just pitch-black darkness, literally encouraging you to jump from a great height straight into the unknown/the pitch-black darkness around you. I had to gather all the courage I had to jump and once I landed into the next chapter, I went out for a run just to emotionally self-regulate. Without a doubt this game is free therapy, if you are brave enough to slide on its glistening, wet tiles and you enjoy random, self-induced thrills. By the way, at the time of writing this, I am still trying to find my way out of level 2 and I am reliant upon game maps made by more experienced players.

6) Grim Fandango Remastered (2015), Double Fine Production

A classic game, not only in the genre it is part of (noir adventure) but overall, a classic as part of the string of awesome Lucas Arts Entertainment Games that were released during the 90s and that populated many of our after-school hours. The first time I played it, I think I was about 14 -15ish and I was so captivated by the story and the graphics (I always had a thing for art deco and El Dia de Los Muertos, and this game combined them both!!) only to be disappointed by the game mechanics. I got perpetually stuck in the first part of the game, not really understanding how to throw the rope made of ties to the other side of the building in order to make it stick (see, this was in the dark ages, a time before the existence of play-throughs). The game was also clunky to play on an old-fashioned computer keyboard and the rising frustration that I felt eventually made me abandon the game since I had other hobbies to focus on (like painting my bedroom door while listening to Garbage or Creed). Cut to 26 years later and here I was on a cold October day when I suddenly received a notification from Steam that Grim Fandango (the remastered version) can now be purchased for 3 dollars. I clicked all the way until I heard Many Calavera’s voice enticing me to pick up the note in his info-tube and never looked back.

And this is how I managed to fulfill a teenage dream, to finally play this game and find out exactly what actually made the fandango so grim. Oh boy, and the story is actually EPIC. It spans across years and continents, somehow driven by our main character’s (travel agent to the dead, Manuel ‘Manny’ Calavera) capacity to transform every opportunity thrown his way into a lucrative business operation: he owns a restaurant, he sails and leads a ship and all throughout it, he never stops searching for his sweetheart, a woman with a heart of gold called Mercedes ‘Meche’ Colomar. On his adventures, Manny is helped and somewhat also perturbed by his close friend, the gentle giant Glotis.

It is a deeply funny and life-inspiring game, despite the grim nature of the proceedings with many adorable little details that give you food for thought: such as seeing skeletons transform into fertile soil for flowers once they are killed. Grim manages to tell a sweeping story about difficult topics such as death, divorce, betrayal, exile and exploitation without ever falling into melodrama and always, always making fun of itself and this is why it’s such an amazing game that reaches your heart at the same time. It’s like watching a movie, a beautifully designed, cleverly scripted, demented movie that borrows elements from Casablanca, Key Largo and the Maltese Falcon (all those Humphrey Bogart classics, which true fans will appreciate). It took me 26 years to see Meche and Manny together in that amazing final cut scene, but I think in this case the wait was certainly worth it!

I wish I could extend this list to 10 games but that would be untrue as I only played and loved the 6 ones above. Honourable mention goes to: Potion Craft – The Alchemist Simulator, a game that is pretty decent and fun but a bit repetitive; Melatonin – a game which sounds and looks better than it actually is to play, as passing to new levels is strangely difficult and the story is uninspiring; and The Unavowed, a dark game I enjoyed playing but simply hated the ending, so it didn’t make this list. All of the above-mentioned games will be included in gameplays on my second YouTube channel The Eden Nearby, so it’s worth subscribing in order to be notified when I upload each clip. Comment down below and let me know what games you played this year, if at all, and what games have made it into your top 10.

With universal love,

Lexi