The Games of 2024: Tekken 8, Thank Goodness You're Here!, and... Xenotilt? (Patreon)

Tekken 8

Sometimes you just need to throw a motherfucker into a volcano. And sometimes—most of the time, I find—said motherfucker is family. And so it goes. Tekken 8 is not a full-on reinvention of the Tekken franchise. Fighting games don’t really do reinvention anymore, the risk of alienating your existing players is just too high. Instead Tekken 8 does the standard fighting game sequel: it continues to hone an already-great fighting game while changing up the properties on some moves, tucking a new system or two in around the edges, and giving you some new tools to add to your repertoire. In other words, Tekken is great because it’s been great and hey, it continues to be great. How hard that hits for you probably depends on how ready you were for More Tekken.

Lemme tell ya: I was ready for more Tekken. Over the course of the year, though, I found myself falling away from it in favor of Street Fighter 6. I think part of that is that the post-release stuff for Tekken 8 hasn’t been great. Marketing you game as HEIHACHI IS DEAD only to note that OH BY THE WAY HEIHACHI IS PART OF THE SEASON PASS BECAUSE HE ISN’T DEAD is both a very Tekken thing to do and a bit underwhelming. Could’ve also used a better ghost mode, I think the things they did to integrate that content into the weird avatar-based mode made it a little less appealing.

When all is said and done, though… it’s Tekken. Turns out I like Tekken!

Thank Goodness You’re Here!

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is great and extremely British comedy. It traffics in a particular style of mundane situations that quickly spiral out of control into absurd situations. You then solve these problems and move along to the next one. Things keep escalating and escalating until it wraps back around to where you started. A perfect conclusion. I don’t know that it’s particularly valuable for me to describe these situations—in fact the game benefits from you not really knowing quite what to expect from one section to the next—but I’d also say that this is at least as good and at least as British as Frobisher Says.

It’s a low bar, but it’s also better than the games based on The Young Ones and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But the quality of its comedy and the strength of its silly little puzzles put it up there with some of the greatest point-and-click comedy adventure games around.

Xenotilt

After a good, long time in Early Access, Xenotilt hit 1.0 in late 2024. I mostly just want to remind people of this fact because Xenotilt absolutely rips. I think digital pinball needs to be one of two things: it either needs to serve as a proper, faithful re-creation of the actual experience of playing pinball or it needs to go off the deep end and make things that a real table could never, ever do. While the science of rebuilding real tables in packages like Visual Pinball has done some amazing work, a lot of the commercial work in this space falls into the most boring valley possible—a passable rebuild of a real table with some dumb effects and junk layered on top.

Xenotilt, like Demon’s Tilt before it, goes for it. It’s also just a more engaging and more readable experience than its predecessor, making for a better experience overall. It’s got a great soundtrack, an awesome look, and it carries the torch for Alien Crush in expert fashion. I played it a fair amount in 2025 and hey, here we are! Check it out if you missed it last year.