25-02-02

Favorite Things January 2025

New year, old me wanting to get into new experiences and yet doing that very rarely!

I played so few games last year that I genuinely didn't even feel qualified to pick one for any of Backloggd's 2024 GOTY categories, especially since there was nothing that particularly stuck out to me.

I feel like the biggest difficulty in coming up with games for events like that is that the vast majority of the ones I play in any given year were actually released in the past, yknow? Though tbh I feel most people play like 3 or 4 games and vote anyways but I STICK TO MY PRINCIPLES!!

And this is to not even mention other mediums like movies or books, I wanted to read way more than I ended up doing in 2024, and movies are just a huge challenge so I didn't even bother with setting a goal in my head lol.

Either way, I'll try my best to not only get into new stuff this year, but also appreciate them in a meaningful way.

Starstruck: Hands of Time

Definitely one of the most unique videogames I've played in a long time.

Starstruck is a game I found out by chance through Jacob Geller's Bluesky, and added it to my endless backlog due to it having a very original visual presentation. Said presentation was indeed one of the highlights of the experience, but so was the rest of the package.

I'm not even sure if I can properly convey what this game is like. At a glance it seems just like a fusion of Mother and Katamari Damacy with rhythmic elements, but it ends up being so much more than that. It intertwines its themes, different mediums and meta narrative and gameplay in a brilliant way, all on top of having an amazing soundtrack. I'll admit I didn't grasp all that they were trying to say, but that's probably just on me for my lack of experience with analyzing this sorta stuff.

And despite such a high quality, this game is criminally underplayed!! Judging by steam reviews and its general online presence, almost no one played Starstruck, which is genuinely devastating. If you're reading this and anything I said piques your interest, definitely try this out!

PARAEDOLON

This is a short, free horror experience from KIRA, one of the developers behind Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion's, which is what instigated me to play it in the first place. I played this at night but in a voice chat with someone because I am way too much of a coward to play horror games by myself, and as a consequence I quickly lost my fear and began making jokes at the game's expense (mostly to try and keep myself calm though lol).

What I REALLY didn't expect was that despite thinking the game hadn't scared me much, once I went to sleep that night I had by far the worst nightmares of my life. I can barely explain them now especially since it's been a while, but it involves the sort of cosmic and indescribable horror PARAEDOLON conveys, and it really surprised me that it ended up impacting me in that way even though I hadn't noticed it at first. The only other work of fiction in recent years that made me have nightmares was Stephen King's Salem's Lot, and with that one as well I really didn't expect it.

Naturally, after waking up from such a horrible experience, I went online and tried to search for more games like it, but unfortunately came empty-handed. This whole thing really marked the game in my mind and in a good way, and it's nice to see that I connected with a KIRA production so much yet again

Northernlion

Not sure if it's when I first watched him, but this month is definitely when I've become somewhat (really) addicted to Northernlion's videos, first through Librarian's clips and more recently watching the Cine2nerdle VODs with Twitch chat.

He definitely stands out amongst the crowd: he's clearly smart and well studied, and knows how to banter and convey himself through words, either arguing for whatever point he's trying to make or just destroying a poor chatter, and being funny/generally entertaining on top of that obviously helps.

He's obviously not perfect, and most of what bothers me is his being a white cishet guy coming through in some of his takes and arguments, he sometimes briefly admits he has privilege but that's not enough to stop him from talking on issues he really shouldn't be speaking on. I also wish he'd show support more often, but I guess it already means something that he's an ally to begin with, even if that should just be the bare minimum.