2024 GotY: Bonus lists

I wanted to make the top 10 post more of its own Thing, so I'm breaking out the pre-2024 list into its own post. So here's the list of pre-2024 games I played for the first time this year and enjoyed enough to recommend:

• Tyrion Cuthbert, Attorney of the Arcane and Staffer Case, both takes on the "Ace Attorney but in a magical world where magic operates under rules that let you reason about it" formula. They're both cool, in slightly different directions: Cuthbert is more visual novel-inspired than the original AA games (they expected me to know what "chuuni" means), and Staffer Case pulls a little bit from the "digging through documents" detective games.
• A Highland Song is Inkle's latest release, a game about traveling through the Scottish highlands with a combination of story, platform-ish mountain climbing, and rhythm running through the valleys. Like a lot of Inkle games, there's a lot more content than you'll see in one playthrough, but this is one of the first ones that got me into replaying it enough times to see most of it.
• Rhythm Doctor is a one-button rhythm game, still in Early Access but has a decent amount of story content out already. The primary interaction is "press button on beat 7," but there are a fair amount of twists and distractions on that core that make things interesting. It's by the same devs as the other one-button rhythm game A Dance of Fire and Ice but far less brutal- I was actually able to finish all the "main story" songs and most of the "bonus" songs.
• IMMORTALITY is the latest Sam Barlow "explore a bunch of out of order FMV clips to try to understand the story behind them" game. The twist is this time the clips come from the shooting of three movies, so the story you're piecing together is both the stories of what's happening in the movies and the story of what's happening behind the scenes. It's cool, although I felt like I was less in control of my experience than I was with Her Story or Telling Lies.
• 428 Shibuya Scramble is kind of an FMV visual novel, where everything that would be drawing or sprites is photos and videos instead. (I guess the marketing term is "sound novel") It's less adventure game-y than other VNs I've enjoyed, but trying to find the right combination of choices to get through was enough of a puzzle to be interesting.
• Eigengrau is a shmup where the gimmick is every stage has its own gimmick, and it almost becomes a puzzle to figure out how to handle all of them. (unlike most games in this genre, you need to defeat the enemies to proceed) I played through it once on the default easy difficulty, but there are hidden/bonus objectives and presumably some sort of true ending boss too.
• Bean and Nothingness is the only pure puzzler on this list- it's an odd one about using combinations of beans to summon different creatures and using their abilities to help get past obstacles. There's a good amount of both rule discovery and setting things up properly once you know the rules, so it gets pretty tough by the end. But it's still fun and very interesting.

2024 games I might've liked, but didn't actually get around to playing (AKA the "How could you snub UFO 50?" list):

• The Descent of King Hesper (I started this today, there's no way I'm giving it a fair shake)
• Dungeons of Hinterberg
• Lok Digital
• Metaphor: ReFantazio
• Nine Sols
• Prince of Persia: Lost Crown
• Riven remake
• Tactical Breach Wizards
• UFO 50

There were too many games this year, so there's probably more stuff that belongs on this list that I just forgot.