All through December and January, the CAPC workforce has compiled a listing of our favourite popular culture artifacts from the earlier yr. In contrast to most year-end lists, we don’t declare that these are the “finest.” Reasonably, these are the issues that introduced us essentially the most pleasure and satisfaction within the final 12 months.
For 2024, our favourite video games, memes, and cultural moments included trend criticism, hyper-capitalist terraforming, JRPGs, and extra.
Derek Man
A social media account devoted to males’s trend would possibly look like an odd factor to rejoice, however Derek Man—aka “the menswear man”—isn’t any mere trend blogger or social media influencer. True, he spends quite a lot of time critiquing males’s fashions, such because the decline of males’s fits, and highlighting elegant fashions from the previous. Nonetheless, his posts are greater than entertaining; they’re deeply informative and academic, highlighting the methods during which trend has developed, and the forces liable for that evolution. And never simply trend, but additionally how our tradition’s notions and definitions of masculinity have modified over time.
As a part of that, he’s unafraid to name out emperors who don’t have any garments, providing pointed, hilarious—and sure, often savage—takedowns of politicians and public figures, and never only for their poor style in ties and go well with jackets. His trend commentary exposes hypocrisy as a lot because it does poor high fashion.
—Jason Morehead
Planet Crafter
Planet Crafter is the debut sport from an indie studio with a remarkably easy premise: you’ve crashed on a barren planet with a gun that mines every little thing and fabricates something. Your mission? Make the planet livable. It’s a wonderful sport that basically captures the surprise of creation whereas additionally indicating the hazards of materialism.
You’re on the mercy of an organization, a heartless terraforming corp that takes convicts like your character and primarily launches them at planets with little greater than an oxygen tank and stated omni-gun. They’ve little care or concern for his or her “staff” and solely contact you as soon as the damaging work is finished and so they can harvest the planet’s bounty. Whereas it’s attainable so that you can arrange a sustainable, automated system that produces and ships items off-planet, numerous data left across the planet point out this received’t work long-term. The unique inhabitants left an enormous gravity sink trapping anybody on the planet particularly as a result of they noticed the rampant destruction that people have been making on the galaxy at massive.
Regardless of this grim message, Planet Crafter is an undeniably stunning sport. Even the barren model of the planet is beautiful in its sterility, with large mud storms and clear, glimmering planets on the horizon. The participant can uncover intricate rock formations and abandoned ruins haunting of their majesty. And, as the sport progresses and the participant introduces an environment, water, vegetation, and animals into the world, it’s genuinely awe-inspiring to see the best way acquainted locales change and grow to be wonderful photos of life.
It’s price noting, after all, that as a lot as Planet Crafter critiques materialism, the identical stunning transformation of the planet is a course of rendered attainable solely by means of the expertise of the materialistic society the sport scorns. On this means, it’s attainable to view Planet Crafter as a wonderful expression of the type of Earth stewardship that God instructions in his phrase, one which appreciates the pure great thing about creation whereas additionally looking for to amplify it much more.
—John Kloosterman
The Rise of Bluesky
When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, and subsequently remade it in his picture as X, some of us would possibly’ve been excited given Musk’s claims to be a “free speech absolutist.” Twitter has grown more and more chaotic, overrun by bots and accusations of censorship. Musk promised to vary all of that, which he did by—checks notes—sharing conspiracy theories and making the place friendlier to Nazis and different extremists.
Not surprisingly, lots of people started in search of an alternate as X started to flounder and grew more and more hostile, not simply to advertisers however to regular customers in search of data and group. Meta rolled out Threads as an offshoot of Instagram, and although it has the bigger consumer base, it’s arguably the upstart Bluesky that’s the true X/Twitter various.
After an extended invite-only interval, Bluesky opened to public registrations in February 2024. So far, it has round 30 million customers, which is a fraction of Threads and X/Twitter’s userbases. Nonetheless, Bluesky’s give attention to consumer management arguably makes it the safer platform; it’s a lot simpler to regulate the content material that seems in your newsfeed and who you work together with. What’s extra, it’s constructed on high of a “decentralized” protocol, with the purpose of permitting individuals to create and run their very own Bluesky variations, that means that customers’ content material shouldn’t be below the management of a single firm or its billionaire proprietor.
—Jason Morehead
Passable
After years of with the ability to mess around with Passable in early entry, Espresso Stain lastly launched the entire sport in Autumn 2024, prompting me to start once more from the start. And what a pleasure!
Considered one of my favourite issues in video games is constructing persistent constructions. The thought of adjusting the panorama in a world I can traverse is quietly thrilling to me. Inserting a constructing or home or small settlement in a spot that lasts for the rest of the sport is simply sort of cool. It’s all ephemeral (clearly!), however inside the area of the sport, I’ve created one thing with permanence.
Minecraft cornered the early market on the concept (even when we noticed this in rudimentary, nascent type in earlier sim-type video games like Sim Metropolis and Populus), however whereas Minecraft is great at creating issues which are functionally monuments and buildings that serve no function apart from (A) being aesthetically attention-grabbing and (B) possibly being a spot you could be inside with out having a spider eat your face, Passable sacrifices a few of that character for strutures that do one thing—particularly eradicating all of the boring components of Minecraft.
Past being a sport the place the participant works to automate away all of the mining/artful grind of Minecraft, Passable boasts a wealthy world for exploration. The world design is gorgeous and assorted and enormous (a bit bigger than Skyrim, GTA: San Andreas, and Oblivion) with 21 completely different biomes and quite a lot of verticality to your exploration. Typically, when you’re ready in your factories to complete producing no matter it’s you want, you would possibly simply wish to go wandering for some time in search of new assets, different crashed vessels, or simply plain stunning vistas. None of this sport was procedurally generated. It was all lovingly crafted by people who deliberately designed the place timber and rocks and geothermal vents would possibly go.
And all that magnificence makes it all of the extra fascinating after I finally pave over all of it with business. A pristine world, untouched by human colonization is out of the blue made into a large manufacturing facility by my very own lone hand, all to the top of manufacturing the wanted quantum supplies required for Earth’s Save The Day program—as a result of we apparently blew it with our personal planet and are transferring world to world like interstellar locusts. So, uhm, I assume there’s that. However man, take a look at these twin suns, what a wonderful sight!
—Seth T. Hahne
Unicorn Overlord
Considered one of 2024’s shock hits, Unicorn Overlord is a JRPG whose major character shouldn’t be, disappointingly, a unicorn, however may be very a lot an overlord. The blue-haired protagonist Alain should type a military of scrappy and gifted misfits to overthrow the traitor who killed his mom years in the past and went on to take over the world. Although ostensibly a tactics-based sport, in actuality, the important thing gameplay in Unicorn Overlord is in getting nearer to your pals and studying to work collectively to beat obstacles.
Unicorn Overlord, in contrast to different tactical turn-based video games, has your characters mechanically progress by means of their assaults with none in-battle enter from you. This streamlines a lot of the fight, however it does primarily make the sport a matter of pitting one set of AI attackers in opposition to one other.
Due to this, your chief edge in battle comes from discovering what characters work finest collectively and maximizing their effectiveness when teamed up by creating their relationships with one another by means of hosted “workforce dinners.” When you as commander make selections about what squads are finest capable of deal with what threats, you largely must belief in your underlings’ talents to acquit themselves properly. It feels much less a sport about you being a tactical genius, and extra a sport about relying upon gifted people who find themselves passionate for a similar purpose that you’ve got.
This reality is particularly underlined by the truth that the chief villain is a mad dictator who vests all energy solely in himself and brainwashes individuals into following his precise instructions. There’s no teamwork on the opposing facet, merely a single hive thoughts (fashioned, as is later revealed, by a mob of undead souls from a long-dead kingdom). Such people as there are insult and berate one another, and even backstab when attainable. Others, when free of the demonic chief’s management, gladly be a part of your banner—assuming you forgive them, which the sport encourages.
Unicorn Overlord, then, pits a “sturdy man”-style dictator in opposition to a frontrunner who eschews glory and grandeur to serve his followers. It’s an atypical story the place the hero shouldn’t be, truly, supremely sturdy or supremely clever—no less than, no extra so than his opponent. As an alternative, Alain’s major high quality is his grace and talent to work with others. He shares the hope of a brand new kingdom and evokes a group of damaged, flawed, biased, once-sinful warriors to struggle collectively in opposition to evil. It’s a wonderful picture of how the church itself must perform.
—John Kloosterman
