I've had some thoughts in my head for a while about drawing a line between puzzlehunt metapuzzles and puzzle game metapuzzles as a blog series or a ThinkyCon talk or something. Then a bunch of conversations about the topic happened on Discords I'm on at the same time, so that prompted me to start getting this written down sooner rather than later.

It's a hard thing to talk about because many of these things are late game or otherwise culminating, so there's a lot of spoilers. (and I haven't figured out how to do spoiler tags with Publii yet) So for now, I'll list spoilers before the break as appropriate.

This time around, vague and out-of-context spoilers for Fez, Noita, and Animal Well...

Not a lot to talk about on the dev front. Made a tiny amount of progress on the Meticulous Microbes update, including implementing a fourth mechanic that I think works nicely with the other three, but I haven't had a chance to do much more with it. This time of year is when some other projects with people offline that I don't/can't really talk about here spin up, so that's going to be taking up more of my creative energy in the next few months. Plus there's *gestures at state of the US*.

Not related to something I did this month but still cool, puzzle YouTuber Icely did a bit on Boarding Zone in a recent video. It's nice to see some more people finding it that way!

On a playing side, the behemoth taking up my time has been the new DROD fan levelset, The Descent of King Hesper. It's conceived as something that could be an introduction to the series, with a level introducing every mechanic the system supports. The catch is DROD has so many mechanics that the overall project took over a decade and is bigger than the five commercial releases put together. I'm making decent progress, I think- chapter six out of seven or eight, but only around half of the total number of puzzle rooms. That scares me a bit for just how much secret/optional content is in this. (And I haven't been ignoring that stuff either, just not prioritizing it)

I didn't make too much gamedev progress in December between holidays, playing Confounding Calendar games, and the year-end wrapup posts. So I'll do an overall year in review instead.

So now that I've posted the 2022 and 2023 top 10 lists, and my previous years' games I played this year, here's the new one! I'm changing my rule about free games because there were a lot of memorable ones this year.

From this list it looks like I just played puzzle games, but the last list is mostly not. It's more that this was a really strong year overall, and I've been especially keeping up with current puzzle releases so I could follow streams/discussion.

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: