Welcome back to Critical Distance‘s annual roundup of great videogame blogging! We’ve taken one more trip around the Sun in our ongoing mission to highlight and archive some of the best, most thought-provoking and poignant writing about games, whether that writing comes from the academic, professional or amateur realm. As always, some absolutely incredible work got published and sent our way in 2024, work that furthers our understanding of games as a medium and artform, pokes at various gaming practices, and brings “gamer culture” into conversation with the world writ large, and vice versa.
Senior Curator Chris Lawrence, with the help of the Critical Distance Discord community and various other supporters, put together 49 weeks’ worth of roundups, recording conversations on the myriad of games and “gamer discourses” that came out this year as they happened. Combined with monthly supporter updates at Patreon and a decent run at trying to bring the TMIVGV feature back, 2024 was truly a packed year for thoughts on videogames. A major thank you must go out to those who submitted pieces for consideration this past month as well. Without further ado, here’s our look back at the year in videogame blogging for 2024.
Rebirth, Remake, Reminisce
This year was once again full of games that stretched the definition of “remake” or “remaster,” and suitably, critics had some thoughts about them. Starting things off, Paste Magazine‘s Jackson Tyler dives into developer decisions and fan expectations in the Final Fantasy VII Remake series, wondering what the point is in attempting to answer that one question. In a similar vein, following a preview event for Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Polygon’s Jay Castello ruminates on the legacy of the Metal Gear franchise’s creative origins and Konami’s self-evidently selfish motives in remaking the now-21-year-old game. Elsewhere, at Bullet Points Monthly, Astrid Anne Rose puts another Konami remake, Silent Hill 2, under the microscope to uncover the streamer-era cravenness at its grossly-lengthened core. From Jay Marksman’s perspective, remakes don’t replace their predecessors, no matter how hard they try – and they should stop trying. And as Aidan Moher demonstrates through reporting, more than a few game developers are even treating remakes as opportunities to try to tell new stories.
Industrial Tensions
Remakes and remasters are but one symptom of an overtly conservative and skittish games industry. This year many critics looked past the games and laser-focused their attention on the industry itself—an industry rife with even more layoffs and studio closures. Ted Litchfield and Wes Fenlon started the year out at PC Gamer by creating a visualization of the 16,000 layoffs that took place in 2023. Deep-Hell‘s Skeleton fed Microsoft to the fire over its merger with Activision-Blizzard. Brendan Sinclair, formerly of Games Industry dot Biz, dug into both Microsoft and Sony’s use of conflict metals for the production of their consoles. And Bijan Stephen daydreams an industry that actually bothers treating its employees with respect.
Kamiab Ghorbanpour reported on how the Persian dub of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown came together, while Matt Cox delivered, word-for-word, the largest headline of the year in his PC Gamer article on the localization of Thank Goodness You’re Here. Meanwhile, Phoenix Simms made a convincing argument in defense of the labor rights of voiceover actors for Container Magazine.
Francisco Dominguez talked to developers behind Saltsea Chronicles and Jusant to uncover their views on game design and sustainability, while Anna C. Webster examined the use – and possible appropriation – of Algonquin folklore in Until Dawn. Finally, Lotus took a stab at interrogating the so-called “Triple-I Initiative,” and its implications for further blurred lines between independent video games and games made by major corporations.
Tech Specs
One of the recurring arguments that took place this year revolved around the presence of yellow paint in videogames. Kayin argued that yellow paint angst was essentially a red herring, a distraction from the possibility that AAA games are getting more frictionless and less willing to do anything but hold players’ hands. On a similar track (though not explicitly about yellow paint) was Noah Caldwell-Gervais’s Baffler essay, where he argued against industrially-mandated and manufactured unchallenging drivel.
Elsewhere, ghoulnoise walked us through the process of creating a constructed language, or conlang, explicitly designed for singing in Jett: The Far Shore, and Xiri wrote down the process he used in developing the cutscenes for HITM3. Critic Jeremy Signor lovingly detailed a beginner’s path into Kaizo Mario platforming sickodom.
Finally, Gabrielle de la Puente reflected on what a 2017 game about being a worker after AI nonsense took hold got right, and Anna Weiner picked apart Unreal Engine’s entertainment dominance. To wrap this section up, Diego Nicolás Argüello investigates the corporeal, material, and structural stresses of VR QA and testing.
Art/Games
Patricia Hernandez put forward a spicy take that the games industry has not escaped from the gravity well of that one Roger Ebert post from 2010. Samantha Trzinski at Gamers With Glasses reviewed some art made about games in the form of Stephen Sexton’s If All The World and Love Were Young. James Tregonning explored how games have changed our relationship to art, while Crushed made a Cohost post recapping Electronic Gaming Monthly‘s bizarre obsession with “nongames” in the Wii era.
Digital Spaces
The centerpiece of the discussion around digital spaces and nostalgia in 2024 was Liz Ryerson’s essay, “Let’s Play Life,” which was itself a semi-sequel to 2023’s “The California Problem.” Taken as a set, these posts chart a course from the naive idealism of the early Internet to the more cynical nostalgia-chasing of many reactionary forces on social media, especially YouTube. Of particular interest in “Let’s Play Life” is Ryerson’s account of Pokecapn’s Sonic 06 let’s play on the Something Awful forums, which often took a more intimate and complicated parasocial form than the let’s plays of the YouTube era.
Elsewhere game designer Frank Lantz mused on the ludic provenance of the Backrooms, as did Nathalie Lawhead and Luis Aguasvivas. Erin Donegan brooded on questions of idealized personhood in life sims, Sabrina Imbler confronted the possibility that being a billionaire is unethical in any context, even in something like Neopets, and Duncan Fyfe found out what happens when “Press F to Pay Respects” breaks meme containment.
Günseli Yalcinkaya spent some time with people and groups trying to preserve memories and moments in strange corners of the web for Dazed Digital, while Alexis Ong explored early game websites and their capacity for community-building.
Games in Community
Matteo Lupetti broke down the work that went into making the Italian games festival Zona Warpa. Joseph Earl Thomas embedded inside the competitive Pokémon community and reported back at The Paris Review. Anne Sullivan and Anastasia Salter built communities inside and out of their feminist game studies classes. These stories each in their own ways demonstrate why community is important and necessary for a healthy culture to thrive.
They’re joined by Rowan Zeoli’s reporting on the TTRPG community affected by Hurricane Helene, Victoria Kennedy’s interview with the developers of the social platform/game Kind Words, and Stephen Wilds chronicle of how a game both out-of-time and ahead-of-time came into its own and found its community.
Preserving History
Roxy S. tells the tale of a toylike MSX dungeon crawler two decades in the making for Kritiqal. Anna Washenko chronicled the enduring power of words and choices on a screen through conversations with their pioneers and proponents. In Sam Howitt’s final Final Fantasy game review (for the moment), they take on a game that takes on the entire series’ history. Jimmy Maher looks at the game which both calcified Blizzard’s design ethos and established gaming as a national sport. Madeline Blondeau situates the history and context of the esoteric, edgy, and avant-garde entries that continue to define the legacy of Sega’s iconic Genesis. Cameron Kunzelman meets a guy at a lighthouse and asks if Columbia is any good. Vidyasaur reviews the ambivalent, open-ended legacy of the fourth Monkey Island, and the era of adventure games it serves as a bookend to.
Political Play
Yoel Villahermosa Serrano details the othering tropes, white saviors, and Indigenous mouthpieces that continue to dominate western gaming’s engagement with Latin America, in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and elsewhere. Caitlin Cooper delves into a game about the pivotal role of journalism in post-revolutionary Mexico, and talks to the game’s creators about their journey, outlook, and goals. Joshua M. Henson measures the true worth of Wolfenstein II‘s revolutionaries by who they make room for at their table. Juliette Taing highlights Uncharted: The Lost Legacy‘s complicity in furthering Hindu nationalist sensibilities. Gita Jackson tires of the bad-faith discourse swirling around an Assassin’s Creed game.
Elsewhere, Kastel thinks about how future generations of Chinese diaspora will receive a difficult, remarkable game in 1000xRESIST. Janus Rose reflects on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the moral imperative to stand up against the violence of militant imperialism. Both Peter Sahui and Sam Dee consider the highly political themes, narrative and simulation qualities of Suzerain. Both at Polygon, Jack Sheehan and Zoë Hannah gamed election season with looks at the modding community around The Campaign Trail and the game Democratic Socialism Simulator, respectively. And finally, the Gamers With Glasses crew outlines some antifascist principles of criticism and play.
Gaza and Games
Skeleton treks through a digital warzone that bears only superficial semblance to the real thing. Sara at Game Assist situates Palestine in a historical context that extends beyond myopic views of the conflict between the besieged state and Israel, all with the help of the Assassin’s Creed series. Giovanni Colantonio approaches TLOU2‘s reissue of a three-year old game as already a work out of time. Nicole Carpenter highlights a stylish graffiti skating game and the team’s efforts to crowdfund a path to secure their programmer’s safety. (Related: another Palestinian developer is raising money to fully fund his next game, Dreams on a Pillow.) Finally: a collective work, but organized by Hippolyte Caubet, this video examines the role of the commercial games industry in normalizing the dehumanization of Palestinian and Arab communities and nations, and charts a path for the industry out of this complicity.
Theories and Frameworks
Hannah Nicklin weighs the responsibility of worldbuilding in the world that we have, for both creators and the medium. Hayley Toth interrogates the ways in which we ascribe value to different reading practices through a save-scummer’s approach to Disco Elysium. Melos Han-Tani proposes new perspectives on understanding the relationships players form with games, designers, and design. Elizabeth Sandifer probes the ideological and ontological limitations of simulation in tabletop play. gurnburial talks process on cutting games apart and stitching them together in productive new ways. Moira Hicks turns over ongoing questions about what play can but does not always add to narrative experience.
Axes of Identity
In this set of essays, writers explored race, gender, sexuality and sex, and how those things affected their relationship with or were affected by games. It would be remiss of us not to mention the entirety of BP Games, Inc.’s Adult Analysis Anthology, a standout series of 19 critical essays about porn games. Some of the individual articles included in the anthology especially worth highlighting include Bigg’s original call to action; Callisto Jupiter-Four asking who actually has the agency and privilege to write unsafe erotica–often not queer creators! (content notification for brief mentions of rape); and Lynn “wintermute” Robinson’s examination of the conflicting porn archetypes that ultimately inform a restrictive framework for gender in Tales of Androgyny.
Elsewhere, we saw John Paul Brammer navigate relationships and his sexuality between games of Super Smash Bros. Misty De Méo explored the history and critique around Takashi Murakami’s multimodal, polarizing pornographic figure. Taylor Hicklen understands the pulse beneath Clickolding‘s subversive beat (content notification for discussions of systemic queerphobia and suicide). And Joey Wawzonek provides historical and cultural context for Hudson Soft’s very early strip-janken game.
Regarding the subject of race and Blackness specifically, the cornerstone piece was Kishonna L. Gray’s application of necropolitics to the virtual deathworlds of modern gaming. In the paper, Dr. Gray interrogates the ways in which games like The Last of Us and Battlefield 1‘s use Black death to either further white character stories or tutorialize game mechanics (by literally throwing Black bodies at a war machine in the case of Battlefield 1). She writes, “Necropolitical narratives justify continued violence in physical and digital spaces. In these games in particular, they can be understood as spac-es where creators have the sovereign right to kill Black characters.”
From there, many of the other articles concerned with race follow similar threads. Nicanor Gordon juxtaposed El Paso, Elsewhere and its principal players against the racist foundations of western fantasy and horror; he also used FF7 Rebirth as a springboard to unravel the dehumanizing, hypersexualizing, and neutering antiblack stereotypes that permeate popular media. Yussef Cole reckoned with the ways in which childhood nostalgia tilts our reception of retro revivals like Robocop: Rogue City. And Trone Dowd chats with a variety of industry creatives about getting past moving from one stereotype to the next towards more nuanced representation.
On issues of gender and feminism, we start with a pair of articles analyzing Kingdom Hearts, of all games: Latonya “Penn” Pennington muses on gender identity and transition via Kingdom Hearts, while Grace Benfell looks back at the character everyone is rightly upset got a raw deal. Megan B. Wells presents a loose chronology of gender expressivity in games over the years. Pao Yumol dissects Final Fantasy VII Remake/Rebirth to peer into the gender of it all. Drew Mackie excavates an extensive multimedia history of Birdo’s variously-gendered depictions over the years and generations (bonus: Yoshi might be trans too!).
Meanwhile, Ashley Schofield surveys the state of sapphic visibility across entertainment media. Issy Van Der Velde investigates feminine embodiment and audience framing in Stellar Blade. And Ana Diaz unpacks a recent trend of dudes posting about their love of Nikki.
Personal Reflections and Play Logs
For our last themed section, we’ve collated a group of essays that attempt to grapple with difficult, intimate and fundamental questions through games. Ruth Cassidy reflects on the mountain as an experience rather than just an obstacle in A Highland Song. Kate Sánchez observes the vibrancy with which Tales of Kenzera: ZAU captures the full emotional spectrum of grief. Steve Dixon charts a path forward to living life with Persona 3: Reload. Cind at BloomedWings plays a pair of ludic meditations on cycles of divine retribution. Boen Wang meditates on the spectre of Night/New York City. Alana Hagues thinks about space and stuff as she crosses the pond with Pikmin 4, and Flora Merigold muses on Venba, cooking-as-culture, and the severing and repairing of intergenerational bonds.
Elsewhere, Kimimi embarks upon an expansive overview of the Saturn’s flagship dungeon-crawler, Shining the Holy Ark, taking time to write about style, interface, encounter design, balancing, narrative, and more. Alex Russo chases craft in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Edwin Evans-Thirlwell comes to grips with Lorn’s Lure‘s harsh, evocative first person platforming, and Dia Lacina finds the most uninteresting possible power fantasy in a game that seems to underutilize its own setting.
Videogame Grab Bag
Renata Price likes Balatro and wants you to know it’s not what you may have read it is.
“Balatro, like many deck-builders, isn’t about the joy of being a poker player, it’s about the joy of being the house. It is a game about stacking the deck in your favor until you build a system that manipulates probability so effectively you cannot conceivably lose.”
Nathan Schmidt sums up Balatro as a game that both has The Juice while also provoking good questions about genre, and Chuck Sebian-Lander identifies Balatro as a deckbuilder you can absolutely just vibe through.
Cat Bussell explores the dissolution of meaning in the rhetoric employed by Helldivers‘ “Managed Democracy”. Cass Marshall revels in Super Earth’s self-defeating absurdity. Alyssa Mercante attributes some of the success of Helldivers 2 to its ability to evoke a sense of seventh-gen nostalgia.
“Helldivers 2 isn’t a $70 AAA shooter with advanced water physics and a litany of customizable weapons; it’s a goofy, scrappy, somewhat clunky $40 good time, like a college party with shitty beer from a stolen keg. Eventually, someone’s gonna go through a table (or dive-to-prone off a cliff), and it’s gonna be awesome. We need more games like that in 2024 and beyond.”
Emily Price talks with some of the team from 1000xRESIST about cyclical time, memory, and pop media’s presence/absence in the unpacking of collective trauma. Flora Merigold puts her feelings about 1000xRESIST in conversation with the six months of writers who have come before. Alexis Ong writes about 1000xRESIST, the messy, fragmentary nature of diaspora politics, and Hong Kong.
The invisible effects of immigration and eventual assimilation (always an intended outcome, whether you like it or not) are ugly and gruelling. It requires extraordinary long-term endurance from both body and mind. There is a constant interior tension about performance and normalcy and acceptance, because failure risks a physical expulsion from the corpus.
Dylan Atkinson concludes that for all its issues with balance, depth, and pacing, MiHoYo’s latest gacha’s got style, while Willa Rowe finds HoYoVerse’s latest to be an exercise in style over substance. James Troughton laments that even when they’re offering something fresh and new, in some ways Sony is still just playing the hits in Astro Bot. Robin Bea sees moments of wonder in a larger noncommittal structure via Neva. Grace Benfell muses on what Silent Hill 2 loses when its restless dreams are dragged into the HDR glare of the AAA limelight. Ed Smith sizes up this sleeker, more sanded-down Silent Hill 2 by unpacking its more pliable, player-oriented protagonist.
“James Sunderland is not a silent protagonist, either in the Silent Hill 2 remake or in the original game. But in the remake, he is more you, more us, more the players. He responds more to our inputs. He reacts more correlatively to our own movements, and to our ideas of what he ought to be able to do, as a person with a body. He becomes a silent protagonist not in the verbal but in the mechanical sense.”
Renata Price walks the path of a storyteller in Dragon’s Dogma II. Dia Lacina chronicles her first foray into what might be 2024’s paradigmatic sickos’ banquet. Kimimi identifies a distinct lack of consent to relationships in the otherwise agency-minded Dragon’s Dogma II. And Austin Walker presents four short essays on Dragon’s Dogma (II).
“This is the rhythm of Dragon’s Dogma II: Movement and stillness, sometimes in succession, as in the exhale-depletion of resources—like your ever-decreasing maximum health cap—and their inhale-restoration, whether through crafting or camping or simple discovery. Movement and stillness, sometimes all at once, like when you are atop a griffin, holding perfectly still—while the being you cling to cuts through the air across regions you haven’t even seen yet. Movement and stillness, like breathing, like storm wind in trees, in succession, all at once, from hub to loop, from loop to spoke, from spoke to cave, and back.”
Final Thoughts and a Look Towards the Future
It once again goes without saying that this roundup, as big as it ended up being, can only serve to be a small sliver of the total body of work that incredible critics and writers put forward every single day. Writers are what makes this whole thing work; without them, without the labor they perform, there would be no “good writing about games.” Unfortunately, this industry has continued on a downward trend in terms of outlet closures, staff layoffs and the slow, silent whittling-down of viable freelancing opportunities. It’s harder to write about games for a decent pay rate now than it was at the beginning of 2023. This only affirms our mission: it’s never been more important to highlight true independent voices talking about games.
Thank you for joining us for another year in 2024. If you want to see what we’re up to in 2025, including regarding some special projects related to our long-term archival mission, come join us on Discord! It’s the best place to interface directly with the Critical Distance team as well as submit your own recommendations for our weekly roundups. We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky! Come say hi there as well.
From all of us here at Critical Distance, we hope you have a happy new year!