Everyone on my BlueSky feed was talking about The Game Awards, and not in a positive light. It continues to be an obvious delivery method for ads and de-facto propaganda for AAA companies that don’t always deserve the dollars they make, and there’s been no word on continuing the Future Class program which was really the only big draw for smaller developers to tune in for. But less than that, I think everyone’s just tired of Geoff Keighley and his taking-gaming-incredibly-seriously ass and his dumb face. (At least I thought that was the case, but then everyone watched anyway. Oh well.)
Some people were just planning to not watch TGA, but others want to make their own award show, either to replace TGA with something better or just to have a good time with friends and talk about videogames. The Cublex Awards are somewhere between those two and a secret funnier third thing. I’ve putting this together with not enough info to actually make objective choices but also I’m just a guy who enjoys writing opinions, so here’s a bunch of opinions with some awards to go along with. I’ve nothing else to add, let’s get going.
Let’s start with a couple more objective awards. This award is meant to be a specific measure of the game that is the most game of the year. Not necessarily the best, but it’s got a whole lot of game. A ton of game. Just an absolutely massive amount of game.
UFO 50 wins the Most Game award for having the most game in it of the entire year: a whole 50 of them.
UFO 50 isn’t something that happens twice. You don’t get this level of crack-team indie devs to team up and make a custom NES game compilation, and you definitely don’t get them to make all 50 of the games in the collection to be genuinely good full sized games. I’ve only got 4 gold discs and a single cherry (Camouflage), but I can genuinely confidently say every game in the collection is worth your time to at least give a shot.
I dusted off all 50 carts and not all of them clicked with me, but man was it worth it. The puzzle-type and arcade-type games gelled with me super easily as they usually do, but I also found myself being weirdly interested in the metroidvanias, particularly Vainger and Porgy. Metroidvania isn’t a genre I usually give a look to (they seem so LONG), but this game will probably change that, especially once I go back to actually beat Vainger.
Loses points for not having a Tetris-type in the mix, but I don’t know what they’d even replace to add it.
This is the opposite of the Most Game award: what game had the least amount of game in it? Just an absolutely miniscule amount of game? Insert PlayStation 5 joke here, along with a laugh track.
I didn’t play Concord, but most people who have shit to say about it also didn’t play it, because nobody did. That being said, Concord doesn’t win the Least Game award because I think it’s bad, it wins the award because it existed for two weeks and no longer. I heard it was pretty decent, but it just flopped way too hard to have any other fame besides this. Unfortunate.
All things considered, I think if it released as an F2P game it’d have at least a year of lifespan in it with a small following of ex-Overwatch players, or something like that. $40 was just way too much for a new entry in a subsection of competitive shooters that were already seemingly past their prime and all F2P. And the devs probably didn’t know that that would cause problems at the beginning of the project, because Overwatch WAS in its prime when they began. If the gaming landscape was different, Concord might’ve succeeded enough to not immediately shutter Firewalk Studios. I wish that’s the world we lived in for the developers’ sakes.
The objective awards are now over. This award is for a game that I think deserved a better or wider reception than it got, or maybe it should’ve succeeded financially instead of failing to meet goals.
See above. Would’ve won this award if it was seemingly better than 7/10, and is also disqualified because I didn’t play it and this one actually is based on my opinion instead of the facts I’m aware of.
EX-XDRiVER is a rhythm game made by my friends and their friends. It’s got really good mechanics, godlike charting, a great visual aesthetic, and a fantastic soundtrack. And even in the core rhythm game community, almost nobody talks about it and it makes me so sad. I never see scoreposts outside of the EX-XDRiVER discord, nobody ever hypes up a new update, and it does zero numbers on anything. I do feel guilty putting this here because I could absolutely be the guy who talks about it, but I’m also really bad at it and have generally been floating away from hand-centered rhythm games ever since I hurt my hands, so I’m not the best representative.
That being said, while nobody talks about it outside of the discord, the discord itself is generally pretty active. It’s got its core userbase people posting in the core userbase location talking about core userbase things and making core userbase custom charts using core userbase custom charting utilities. Those last two parts are more than other indie rhythm games get, and that’s a pretty satisfying thing to see. And since the game is free anyway, success doesn’t necessarily need to be measured in player numbers.
I still think more people should play it. Go play EX-XDRiVER if you like rhythm games, or even if you don’t. It is free!
I got 24 hours of gameplay out of this within a week. I do not go all-in on games like that anymore.
Islands of Insight is a strange one. It’s an open-world exploration puzzle game collection with live service elements. You go around a cool fantasy world and learn bits of lore from spheres while solving various types of puzzles scattered around the land. It is very beautiful and very fun. The live service portion was also alluring – the game has singleplayer, but also had a multiplayer server where you could interact with other players in a limited context, show off cosmetics you earned through solving puzzles, and the puzzles available would swap out every so often so you could keep your scores going up. Not necessarily cooperative, not really competitive, more of a shared world experience. The game felt alive, it was nice.
The key word in that paragraph is “had”. The servers are dead. The game is now singleplayer only, and it will never be updated again. You cannot experience the shard world anymore as you can’t share it with anyone. That knowledge makes the game in its current state, an ostensibly finished game, feel incomplete. The dev team should’ve gotten the cash to keep the servers going. It was absolutely deserved, even if it didn’t add all that much.
Lunarch Studios, the dev team of Islands of Insight, seems to be doing fine. They probably cut the cords to save the studio from destruction via server costs, and they’re taking the puzzle elements into future games. I’m just glad I was there for it when it was alive.
Here’s a silly one. This one gets awarded to the game that broke the best within my silly fox paws. A game that crumbles into dust can be just as good of an experience as one that stays steadfast.
As a disclaimer, the full game releases in 2025, but this quick story warrants this award’s existence and this game’s winning of it anyway.
I joined a Discord VC to the knowledge that this demo had gotten released, and because it’s an excuse to fuck around with Turbo Dismount again, I downloaded it. Four or five of us were going for high scores in the game, which involve throwing around a car and the ragdoll(s) within to cause the most bodily damage possible. The method I used was as thus: speed the car into a giant ass landmine.
This should not have worked. The average score using this method amounts to about 300,000 from my memory, which isn’t an amazing score for this game. More complex methods would probably work better. I managed to score 412,192,690, more than doubling the previous global high score on the “The Original Classic” map, by (likely) having the explosion randomly clip a body part inside of the terrain. I could not locate this body part. I could not recreate this. Nobody else in the VC could manage anything similar. I have zero clue what happened, but it happened nonetheless, and I got a world record for it. That’s worth an award.
Here’s another silly one. I have ADHD, which is both a boon and a burden. One of the better/worse parts is hyperfixations, where for a small to medium period of time I’ll care about exactly one Thing that I absolutely fall head over heels in love with in a way that I can’t do anything about. If I’m not actively interacting with The Thing, I’ll certainly be thinking about it. I’ve gotten good at managing these, so they’ve turned into healthy temporary obsessions that make my social media pages seem strange. Here’s the best ones.
See above. I don’t have much to add because it was less an “ohmygodthisthingisawesomeiloveitforeveryhouroftheday” and more of a “playing it in a partial vegetative state after work” sort of situation, which actually feels pretty bad in the moment. If the game weren’t actually damn good, it would be fully disqualified for that.
Fluidity is a WiiWare platformer collect-a-thon where you play as water. I played the demo as an actual child, and I 100%ed the game this year in a fit of “oh fuck this exists”. It is wildly good. I’d go through the work day running the relaxing soundtrack through my head (or actually listening to it), I tried to edit the existing online guides to make them better (it didn’t work out), and I even gave the sequel game another shot after finishing the 100% (it’s still not amazing). It was fully worth my time.
Cyberscore is a high-score website for a variety of video games all over the place. The main conceit is that every leaderboard you submit to contributes to a site-wide leaderboard, and this got me hook line and sinker. I played a lot of different games in a single week, submitting a few hundred scores, and got into a small speedrun battle with another user on the site. It’s great! I plan to continue to climb the ranks and submit things to the site.
I made an article about this. A Nintendo-associated developer, Skip Ltd, made a bunch of experimental-ish games for the GBA, DS, and Wii, and for a while I got absolutely absorbed into these games. They’re great! I haven’t touched them in a bit as of now, but they’re all worth playing. This was caused by a discussion with a friend (hi Mark) and I think I got him into the same situation because he proceeded to begin 100%ing the entire series (sorry Mark). I did not do this; you couldn’t pay me to 100% Orbital or Orbient. But I did enjoy playing them all, and I will forever be enamored by Light Trax’s visuals.
We’re getting very close to the big award – the Game Of The Year. I miss a ton of titles, and it’s clear that some games deserve recognition in a way that I can’t give because I didn’t play them. So here’s me doing that.
This is the game I’ve seen the most acclaim about this year without knowing a single thing about, and that terrifies me to the point where I won’t touch it since all I know is the genre, which is psychological horror. I can’t do horror. I’ve tried. It just doesn’t happen. And since I don’t know anything besides “it’s good and it’s horror” I’ve got nothing else to say. But it deserves the spot here nonetheless.
Holy shit did everyone love this game to pieces for a month or so. This is the only game on this list that I heard anyone mention at my workplace, and that’s because everyone ever was enjoying it. The game’s social media presence was phenomenal at least from my distant perspective, and the game itself matched that in spades with solid cooperative shooter gameplay and blatant political satire. If a game is bringing this many people together and making a statement at the same time, I can get behind that. Especially since I agree with the statement, I think. I didn’t play the game.
I don’t have much to say about this game. You’re a furry and you go fishing. It’s multiplayer in an Animal Crossing kind of way. It’s a good silly chillout game. There’s probably stereotypical e-daters running their own servers 14 hours a day, and I hope they’re enjoying their dates. I’ve not seen any of that, it just seems like that kind of game. Most of the online presence has been the time-tested technique of posting funny chat messages, which I can also get behind.
Curveball! I don’t like shooters and I also hate the military industrial complex, so why would it win an award from me? Because according to the people I know that actually play competitive shooters, it’s great! The singleplayer is apparently one hell of a trip with a ridiculous amount of range in gameplay styles, the competitive multiplayer is heavily movement focused in a way that feels great and fun, and Zombies mode is back which I’ve always respected. It’s enough to cause a Discord server-wide obsession for at least a little bit. This game was good enough that it increased the size of a polycule, and that’s a five star review if I’ve ever seen one.
This is why I miss a bunch of new games. Some could stay I’m stuck in the past. But I was born in 2003, and videogames existed in the 1970s, so I’ve got some catching up to do, and I’m going to take a very roundabout way to get there. Here’s some games.
I already talked about this game. It’s a platformer where you play as water. It uses motion controls that feel good. The artsyle is fantastic. The progression mirrors Metroidvanias if Super Mario 64 was a Metroidvania. You can fulfill the dream of being an ice cube. One of the tasks has you playing pinball. It’s not a very good pinball machine. The soundtrack and audio effects are satisfying. The difficulty curve is insanely tight and balanced, for the most part. It’s worth your time.
The Pedestrian is a pretty simple puzzle platformer. You’re a pictogram guy who moves between street signs and solves puzzles. The game is solid and fun to play, and the puzzles are very well designed. A lot of them have you reorganizing and connecting sets of signs so you can take the right way around the board. But the visuals is what keeps you going. Every scene focuses on your sign-based playfield, but the scenery around the space is meticulously detailed and just plain pretty. It’s a game that allows me to reject the “realistic visuals are bad” belief, because it’s way better for them. It’s amazing.
I played the demo at GDEX 2024 and I think I went farther through the game than the demo is supposed to let you, which is why I’m counting it. The devs gave me a key for free (thank you!) and I redeemed it and it’s not even installed on my computer and I feel bad now.
Conventions are great because they have arcade cabinets you’ll never own. (And you probably shouldn’t own them, but that’s a different story.) I’ll never have an ONGEKI cabinet, and that’s for the best, because if I did I’d break my hands playing them. (Again.) It’s a rhythm game bullet hell hybrid where you have to play a somewhat normal button rhythm game and dodge/collect circles at the same time with a big ass lever. It’s a wild experience that’s kinda hard to describe and also weirdly cohesive and fun. If you get a chance, give it a shot.
There has never been a game with less level design than this that’s as tightly designed as this is. Mosa Lina is a minimal puzzle platformer. Your tools are random. The level is random. You get what you have, and you have what you get. There is no balancing. Sometimes you can’t win, and sometimes you can.
This doesn’t sound fun, but it’s wildly enjoyable. It’s the pure challenge of it. You’ll never get stuck on something for long because once you die you move on to a different level, so you’re willing to take risks. You’ll slowly figure out what your tools can do and you’ll pull off some amazing stunts. Despite your default movement being somewhat limited, it’s a certified schmovement game. It is wonderful. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey, and the absolutely insane bamboo/camera/gungun trick you just pulled off to complete the journey. Go play this game.
We’re here folks! You know what it is. What was my Game Of The Year?
We’ve not seen a game like Balatro in a long time. Once it released on mobile, it was game over. This is it. This is the game. It seems like a strange concept, but the moment you understand it, it seems so blatantly obvious not just in gameplay but in existence. I feel like I don’t even need to talk about what I like about it because everybody likes the same thing about it. Balatro feels like we’ve been playing it for over a decade like other roguelikes. Balatro feels like it was bundled in with Windows 7. Balatro feels like a good Christmas song. It’s always been there. It’s been here the whole time, it will continue to exist long after I die, and it deserves the place.
If you have the game on PC and enjoy the concept of Pokemon, I also recommend the Pokermon mod, it’s a good time.
Weirdly, the card game loses to a wildcard choice.
Balatro has the staying power, and I expect it to never disappear from the general consciousness of gaming. But it really doesn’t beat the pure experience of receiving a box of old games that don’t exist. While Balatro was indeed an instant classic, we get a great card-based roguelike every so often pretty consistently. UFO 50 doesn’t even happen more than once. I got an Atari 5200 and a box of games from my grandparents once, and it felt a lot like how UFO 50 feels, except everything in UFO 50 is actually good.
I don’t have many more cohesive thoughts about UFO 50 as a whole, but the easiest possible excuse I can give is that there are at least three games in the set of 50 that gave me an amazing experience that would’ve been in consideration for Game Of The Year on their own!
Porgy is an insane experience. It’s incredible. I didn’t get very far through it because I can’t handle playing it for a long time, it is aggravating. You have zero power, as soon as the bosses start spawning it is immensely difficult. This allows every single paltry upgrade to feel massive. It’s a wildly emotional experience; it’s the most I’ve felt in a game this year.
Mini & Max is in my top 3 platformers of all time (the others are Mosa Lina and, weirdly, Geometry Dash’s platformer mode) and it’s not number 3 (number 3 is Geometry Dash.) I think it counts as an immersive sim. The tools you get over time are quite fun to mess with. It’s the best execution of an open world game I’ve seen in a 2D situation. It oozes charm; every small place builds the world around you immensely. I’d give examples, and I definitely have a few, but I’d rather you go find them on your own.
Camouflage was an immediate go-to and my first gold cart. It’s a very well designed puzzle game with wonderful theming and the best level select music I’ve heard in a while. The baby collectable is a fantastic addition, and the level design is build exactly around it in such a way where it feels weirdly natural. It’s just plain good!
If I went to go 100% the game instead of doing less important things I can almost guarantee I could write like this about four more games in the pack. If your game has seven GOTY contenders within itself, I think it just wins. It wins. UFO 50 wins. UFO 50 is the game of the year.
Here’s to a new year that will almost certainly also have a lot of good video games that will probably be good for different reasons than the ones from 2024.