2024's Best Games Let Me Figure It Out

This year, I decided I'd finally play 2022's Case of the Golden Idol, a mystery game that thrusts you onto the scene of a murder moments after it's happened. You pan through several screens, absorb every detail you possibly can, gather clues in the form of nouns and verbs, and make logic-based deductions by filling in the missing details in passages that tell the story of what occurred there. There are systems in place to guide you in the right direction, and the game begins quite simply, but by its end, I was being pushed to my absolute limit. The first few cases took all of about 10-25 minutes, but the final one in the game seemed to stretch across the span of an entire night. My head was positively bursting with possible motives and culprits, and kudos to Case of the Golden Idol for allowing me the room to be wrong about these cases until I eventually divined the right permutation of terms and cracked the case. It was one of the most frustrating ends of a game ever, and I was enamored of the whole experience.

I bring up Case of the Golden Idol and this frustration because, overwhelmingly, many of 2024's best games provided me with that very same feeling. These stellar titles, like Animal Well, Rise of the Golden Idol, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, are composed of what seems like countless of the most nefarious and confounding puzzles I've come across, some of which still vex and evade me to this day. And yet, despite that recurring headache--brought on by slamming my head into a proverbial wall over and over again--I wouldn't trade the experiences I had with them for anything.

I was wrong a lot in Rise of the Golden Idol, 2024's sequel to the aforementioned Case. I frequently confused names and aliases, and as the levels grew in scale (and the scenarios grew in complexity), I missed a lot of smaller details in the immaculately rendered environs that had been planted to provide insight and direction. I misunderstood the events of the game on numerous occasions, and was more surprised than usual at the revelations that were revealed by a level's end. Rise of the Golden Idol was thoroughly frustrating, and yet it's clearly one of the best games I've played all year because when I pushed it, it pushed back.

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