Stuff I liked in 2024

In recent years I've made a habit of posting a list of my favorite heavy metal releases of the year on Mastodon. This year I decided to list more than just music and do it in a more permanent place here on my website. So here are some metal albums, books, and games I enjoyed in 2024.

Heavy metal§

My top 5 releases of the year in ranked order:

1. Disembodied Tyrant / Synestia — The Poetic Edda
Impeccably produced high-intensity symphonic deathcore; technical, melodic, and inventive. Features possibly first breakdown I've ever liked.

2. IOTUNN — Kinship
An entire hour of beautiful progressive metal with a massive, ostentatious sound and a grand sense of adventure.

3. Seven Spires — A Fortress Called Home
Every member of this band is a master of their craft, and the variety of influences they blend with their symphonic metal core is equal parts fun and impressive.

4. Ankor — Shoganai
Well-crafted metalcore with plenty of catchy melodies and emotional intensity, plus some clever bits of electronic dance music weaved throughout.

5. Enterprise Earth — Death: An Anthology
A novel blend of deathcore, thrash, and various other influences, including the best pop chorus of the year in Blood and Teeth.

And then a whole bunch more that I liked in no particular order. There are too many to describe all of them, but I'll include subgenres to give an idea of what to expect.

• Wintersun — Time II (symphonic prog/melodeath)
• Andy Gillion — Exilium (melodeath)
• A Wake In Providence — I Write To You, My Darling Decay (symphonic blackened deathcore)
• Fleshgod Apocalypse — Opera (symphonic death)
• Assemble the Chariots — Unyielding Night (symphonic prog/death)
• Scarlet Meridian — A Modern Noir (prog/metalcore)
• Allt — From The New World (prog/metalcore)
• Orden Ogan — The Order Of Fear (power)
• HIZAKI — The Zodiac Sign (neoclassical)
• Cyborg Octopus — Bottom Feeder (prog)
• Nightwish — Yesterwynde (symphonic)
• Evergrey — Theories of Emptiness (prog/power)
• Dååth — The Deceivers (prog/death)
• Ad Infinitum — Abyss (symphonic)
• Entheos — An End To Everything (prog/death)
• Fit For An Autopsy — The Nothing That Is (death)
• Blood Incantation — Absolute Elsewhere (prog/death)
• Opeth — The Last Will And Testament (prog/death)
• Brothers of Metal — Fimbulvinter (power/folk)
• SETYØURSAILS — Bad Blood (metalcore)

Books§

In 2023 I got back into reading for fun after a lengthy period of only reading to study. This year I started reading fiction again too. Here are some books I read and enjoyed in 2024.

Nonfiction§

David Graeber & David Wengrow — The Dawn of Everything
A semi-speculative history of how past humans have organized their societies based on anthropological and archaeological evidence. Eye-opening and politically inspiring.

Jason Schreier — Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry
A collection of stories about failure and adaptation in video game projects. Follows after Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which is also a fun read although with a less coherent message.

Robert Sapolsky — Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
A comprehensive look into the various processes governing human behavior, and a strong argument against the existence of free will.

Derek Yu — Spelunky
A short story about the design and development of Spelunky, one of my favorite video games of all time.

Fiction§

Ursula K. Le Guin — Annals of the Western Shore
Three stories about small people in a large, richly detailed low-fantasy world. Full of interesting politics and grounded, complex characters. My favorite of a few different Le Guin books I read this year.

Seth Dickinson — The Traitor Baru Cormorant
Another low-fantasy tale full of political intrigue and complex worldbuilding, but with a more modern tone than Le Guin's work. A girl sets out to climb the ranks of the imperialist nation that assimilated her home in an attempt to destroy it from within.

Adrian Tchaikovsky — City of Last Chances
I'm a sucker for fantasy worlds with complicated politics and explainable magic systems. Here's the third one of those in this list. Various strange gods and magical traditions meet a power-hungry empire with world war 1 -era weaponry.

Becky Chambers — A Psalm for the Wild-Built
A beautiful, comforting solarpunk world where humanity's problems are smaller and stakes lower. Nothing particularly deep, but sometimes a pleasant utopia to relax in is just what you need.

Mary Robinette Kowal — The Calculating Stars
An alternative history of the space race told from the perspective of a woman whose participation faces all the gender-based obstacles one might expect from the time period. Interesting character drama and a well-considered plot taking lots of inspiration from real-life events, culminating (in later books in the series) in some fascinating space-travel stories.

Adrian Tchaikovsky — The Tiger and the Wolf
Back to fantasy - this one takes place in an ancient Nordic-inspired land, lonely and desolate in a way that feels a little like home to me as a Finn. People have animal spirits which dictate their ways of life, but a girl is born with more than one of them, which puts her at odds with her tribe and forces her to forge her own path through the world.

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone — This is How You Lose the Time War
A convoluted time-travel story taking place over unimaginable lengths of time on the one hand, an impressively written piece of love poetry on the other. I've never read anything else like it.

Games§

I don't play a lot of new games these days, but I did play a few this year that I really enjoyed. Perhaps making a list like this will motivate me to work through my backlog and next year I'll have a longer list. Since this is a new thing for me, though, let me pad this list a little by adding the old favorites that I continued to play throughout the year.

2024 releases§

UFO 50
A collection of 50 games designed for a fictional NES-style console, each with something interesting to say and enough substance to feel like a real game. An absolute box of delights for anyone who likes learning to play a game and engaging with its design.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
An excellent distillation of the already amazing world of Elden Ring into a more compact, intense, and satisfying package.

Mouthwashing
A short surreal horror story about the crew of a crashed spaceship. Disturbing in a thought-provoking kind of way, dealing with themes of disability, dependency and betrayal.

older§

Beat Saber
I've been playing this game nonstop since it came out in 2018 and I'm still not even a little bit bored of it. A simple idea simply executed, but so expressive and fun, and made infinitely replayable by the creative and competitive modding community. Plus, it's good physical exercise too.

Spelunky 2
I consider Spelunky the most beautifully designed game of all time. The sequel is not quite as elegant, but I find it even more fun to replay thanks to its branching paths and the endurance challenge of the Cosmic Ocean. I spent a lot of time playing the daily challenge this year, and to brag a little, beat 7-99 quite a few times, ending up in first place on the challenge leaderboard twice.

N++: Community Tab Project
A massive mod that replaces the entire original collection of levels in N++ (the best platformer of all time) with community-made ones. Very polished with tons of variety, including obscure mechanics and glitches that the base game understandably never foregrounds. It has made N++ feel fresh and new again.

Personal achievements§

Now that I've highlighted a bunch of other people's work, let me also indulge in a little retrospection on my own year. 2024 has been great for me overall, not without its struggles but with many successes, including

• completed my master's degree and got a new job as a doctoral researcher, which I've loved so far
• made 50 ink drawings, gaining tons of confidence with the medium, and many digital paintings I'm proud of
• did some cool graphics programming (blog post about that coming later, hopefully) and published my first game on itch.io
• learned to sew and made some actually wearable and good-looking clothes
• came out of my shell a little bit and participated in some social events

Good times. I'll refrain from making any promises for 2025, but I look forward to continuing to improve myself and do creative work.

Thanks for reading; I hope you found something to like in the lists. May the upcoming year treat you well.