Happy New Year! (’25) – Also, my year ’24 in Review

Happy New Year! I hope y’all have had a wonderful time celebrating New Year’s (and Christmas! I didn’t write about that either. Oops.). I wish you all a great new year full of good health, success and a bunch of good times. May your problems be few and manageable! Cheers.

The year just passed over and I figured it’d be high time to write one of those “year in review” posts for 2024 since I just couldn’t be arsed to do it in December with me preparing to visit my family, and then I was here with my family and we celebrated with half my mother’s side… we were 19 people in total over here for three days straight. Jeez. And well, now I’ve got a bit of downtime, so I decided to just ramble a bit about this year, I guess.

Note: The “My 2024” section includes mentions of some darker mental health related topics, so tread carefully. Feel free to just skip ahead if that’s not your jam.

1. My 2024
2. My 2024 in Content Creation
3. My 2024 in Gaming
4. Resolutions

My 2024

This year was pretty eventful, I wanna say, but I kind of can’t really say much about it. Man, God needs to get with the time and list all your sins at the end of the year. That’d be neat, wouldn’t it?

Jokes aside, I’ve been living at my new place for a whole year and even had internet finally in late January of last year.

It’s been pretty cold over here, I guess. I’ve made an effort to go running weekly (at the least), I went swimming… twice… this whole year… and both times were in Winter. Yay. Besides that, my eyesight got slightly worse on one eye and slightly better on the other, meaning both of my eyes are sitting at -5 diopters now. At least it’s an even number. Makes looking for contacts easier since I was thinking of getting some perhaps.

Aside from that, I’ve been drawing a bunch and improved a fair bit, I think, managed to read a bunch more (though still not enough) and I picked up the habit of playing uke. My repertoire of depressing songs to play on the “happy instrument” is increasing steadily, from “Creep” and “Zombie” to “It’s Ok I wouldn’t remember me either” and “Only Everyone Can Judge Me” to “Free Bird” (yup). Fun stuff.

I didn’t read quite as many books as I wanted to in my free time, mostly because I was preoccupied with reading a lot of books for university… way too many books, I guess. Mostly in part. But still. A lot of text. I did, however, finish reading “1984” by Orwell, made progress through “The Will To Change by Brooks”, and I even acquired a copy of “Animal Farm” – because hey, gotta read the other thing by Orwell even if it’s apparently not that great and far less subtle, lol.

Besides that, though, I’ve managed to visit my family a fair bit more often. It’s quite often pretty draining for me but I’m glad to see my siblings more and I’m always happy to spend time with my parents. It’s pretty important since I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot of my siblings’ lives by moving far away, and I don’t know how long I have with my parents, so I wanna see them or hear their voices a bunch, basically.

That said, 2024 has been pretty lonely for me. I’ve struggled with loneliness before (it’s a societal problem, post on that another time) but I don’t honestly feel great going into 2025. I’ll write another post about this another time (perhaps later or tomorrow) but I went through a breakup this year and I’m still not over it, basically. It sucks. Oh well.

Besides that, though, I made friends and then we stopped being friends and I just don’t quite know how to make new connections with folks offline these days.

In summer, I went through some drama at university, facing discrimination based on unfounded rumours and some supposed allegations (most likely a case of mistaken identity). It was really bad and I came pretty close a few times to just “calling it a day”. I didn’t, evidently, mostly because I’d feel bad about leaving my family behind… but I called a number a fair few times whenever I went to those dark places.

But then eventually that got kinda “cleared up” and I was just depressed before eventually being sick for multiple months and now we’re here.

Look, it’s been a shitty year. I might write a post about the whole allegations thing at some point because I’d imagine there’s some convos to be had over that topic. The way that was handled was atrocious and the way the whole situation made me feel and the dark places I’ve been to because of that… not great.

And I say “cleared up” because nothing really has been resolved. In reality, I think they just toned down the more obvious distrust and dislike after I reported the data security issue and someone got punished.

My 2024 in Content Creation

When it comes to content creation, though, 2024 was pretty great.

I’ve been streaming regularly on a schedule and our community over on Twitch has been growing a lot with many cool people from all over the world hanging out and me being able to showcase various indie games regularly, doing art streams from time to time, and even just chatting for hours upon hours on stream… just yapping, y’know.

Besides that, I’ve been doing some YouTube stuff with playthroughs and showcases of various indie games and roguelikes. It’s been pretty fun to do so. I still have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to intros and outros, for instance, or anything else I could do, but I’m basically just uploading videos that are like the ones that I like to watch if that makes sense.

And that’s been sort of my credo for the past few years. Create content I’d consume myself. My streams are the way I like my streams. My videos are the way I like my videos. Stuff to fall asleep to, stuff to run in the background, stuff to eat my food to… lots of stuff basically.

Aside from that, though, and perhaps more importantly: I’ve had a slump when it comes to blogging.

I mean:

• January – 3 Posts
• February – 4 Posts
• March – 4 Posts
• April – 2 Posts
• May – 3 Posts
• June – 2 Posts
• July – 3 Posts
• August – 18 Posts (more on that later)
• September – 2 Posts
• October – 5 Posts
• November – 5 Posts
• December – 8 Posts

In 2024, I published 62 posts and a total of 110.000 words. In August, the outlier here, I’ve tried to push myself for the sake of Blaugust but between exams, my deteriorating mental health, the drama at university, the breakup, my health issues, and the chronic pain, I just couldn’t write as much as I wanted to. I mean, I still managed to upload videos daily onto YouTube for all of August and then a while afterwards but originally YouTube was just sort of the extension to Twitch and Indiecator, less so its own thing if that makes sense.

The struggle here was mostly just me wanting to do it all. I wanted to write about some topics I really care about, including some political and socio-critical stuff, but in the end, I didn’t get to do either. I wanted to write more reviews but the added pressure of more and more e-mails coming into my inbox with more and more devs and publishers and PR people reaching out, providing keys, inquiring about past coverage, and so on… I just got very overwhelmed.

I put a lot of pressure on myself, basically. “I have to write about this”, “I still have to finish the draft on that post”, etc. etc.

It was suddenly less so about “wanting to write” and more so about “having to write” and I just lost all joy I had for this hobby of mine.

But! Starting in October, I started to write more about these topics and I’ve been enjoying myself a bunch. I wrote some reviews on games I really enjoyed. I’m hoping to write more throughout 2025, not because of some sort of obligation but rather because I want to.

I wanna showcase cool indie gems, I wanna talk about the things that interest me, and I wanna use my platform for something. Does that make sense?

Back in 2013, I hurried home from school each day to spam F5 on this blog called PetesbackWelcome by derLoarp in hopes of a new post coming out, and I had a blast reading his reviews and other articles whenever there was something new published. From anime and indie games to Gundam models to monster hunter related posts, there was always something interesting up there. I believe he deleted his blog at some point after no writing for ages. At another point, there was also this blog by him around and you can still give stuff over there a read but it’s all in German, so uh better start learning, eh?

Anyway, that guy was sort of at fault for me starting to write blog posts back in 2018. I wrote these super long (3-5k word) reviews back then in German before not having the time to do so anymore after an odd month or two. Oh well. And then back in 2019, I started blogging again… on here… And I’ve been doing that ever since.

I think reminiscing about how I got into blogging (and also having to pay for my plan in WordPress as well as the domain) made me think a bit more about why I write and what I initially enjoyed so much, so, I’ll try to write semi-regularly on here in 2025. No pressure or anything, just at least once a week if I can find the time.

My 2024 in Gaming

So, I played a bunch of games again, mostly because I was supposed to stream some or because I started a playthrough on stream or I just replayed the same games I always play. Nothing new there. If you wanna get a deeper look into the psyche of the gamer called Dan Dicere or MagiWasTaken, here’s my Steam Year in Review link.

I wanted to use ManicTime, actually, throughout the year to track my PC habits and like perhaps even reduce how much time I spend in front of screens but I’ve noticed that I not only always forget to look into setting it up (or rather I keep forgetting to set it to start when I start up my PC) but I also did terrible in so many areas of my life and gaming was bliss, so screw having less screentime. I’ve got blue light filters in my glasses and my screen turns orange after a while, so all good there, I’ll do better another year.

That said, Steam only tracks my Steam gaming habits, so let’s talk about the other launchers first: I’ve played a bit of League but not all that much. It’s been fun whenever I got to play some but like… I don’t do it much. I also played a shitload of Legends of Runeterra, grinding the PvE mode (aka the main mode nowadays) which has been good fun.

Besides that, though, I played through Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of Earth and recorded my whole playthrough. That game crashes any time you hit the windows key or tab out, so it was painful, to be fair… but it runs much better on GOG than it does on Steam, so I’ve spent a lot of time on that. I can’t check right now how much time exactly but if my math is correct, it should be around 16 hours.

If you wanna see my playthrough a game I never got too far in as a kid when I first played it on the original xbox, here’s the playlist with all the “longplay” parts.

That said, I also did dabble a bit in emulation. I played through Shadow of the Colossus for my very first time this year but emulating PS2 on my PC (built in 2019) made it sort of slow. Fantastic game, though! Like, damn. So, there’s 19 hours right there, too, that I still wanna edit and then upload somewhere. I also did my first-ever Nuzlocke (well, Artlocke) in Pokémon FireRed this year, and managed to beat all the difficulties up until S-Hard in Pokémon Puzzle League.

So, I played a bit of everything here and there throughout the year, on top of some Pokémon TCG Pocket, Merchant, and other games on mobile.

But I mainly played games on Steam. In 2024, I…

• played 210 games
  • 147 of which were new! I also participated in 7 playtests and played 64 demos but I’m unsure if those are counted separately or not
• unlocked 1847 achievements
• played mostly on mouse and keyboard (79%)

Most of my playtime was spent Helldiving, Monster Hunting and Retiring. Like, I’ve had Rusty’s Retirement open for a good bunch which ended up counting for 9% of my playtime. Helldivers 2 and Monster Hunter Rise provided me with that extra bit of action and fascism that I just needed in my life, I guess.

But honestly, my game of the year was either Webfishing, Cryptmaster or Echoes of the Plum Grove. For Cryptmaster, maybe check out my review over here, since I have not written about the other two just yet.

Webfishing is great. It’s a 5 dollar game on Steam about fishing. You can play it solo/offline, in private or public lobbies, and you carry your progress wherever you go. You fish, unlock upgrades, buy cosmetics and you can /wag in chat to make your tale wag. It’s a great game. I genuinely loved how much I got to just relax with this one and the few interactions I had with others (I mostly play solo, tbh) were incredibly wholesome and adorable.

And Echoes of the Plum Grove is a farming sim that is set in the early 18th century where you start a new life on stolen land (literally the colonies in the United States) after giving a middle finger to the Crown. It’s like Harvest Moon but more hardcore… Hardcore Moon? What I mean to say is that you can die in this game from old age, the Plague, hunger, poison, and more. There’s lots of NPCs that can have kids and grandkids and whatnot. You can marry folks and have your own kids and they can be sent to work in the mines… or your farm… or apprentice somewhere else. When you die, you take over as your kid, btw, so that’s neat. But the game has a lot more than just that to offer and if you’re more of a cozy gamer that wants to enjoy a 2.5D life sim, you can also simply turn off aging, death, hunger and the tool durability stuff. I think taxes were also something you could turn off but I married the mayor so I didn’t need to pay any taxes for ages.

GOTYs aside:

Apparently, the median for achievements collected, games played and long streaks of playing games is pretty low, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that I’m above average. My longest game streak was 32 days. Again, not too sure if that just means that I played one game for 32 days in a row or if that just means that I played a game every day for 32 days… which could check out for Blaugust theoretically? No idea.

49% of the games I played were new releases that came out this year (checks out since I write about games, eh?), whereas 12% were “classic games” aka titles that came out 8 or more years ago… I got back into FTL, you know? And well 39% of the games I played came out in the last 1-7 years. Fair.

As per usual, I mostly spent my year playing roguelikes and roguelike deckbuilders as well as games about inventory management, farming and fishing. No surprises there, to be absolutely honest.

Rusty’s Retirement was sort of the game that I mostly played throughout April, May and June with 72% of my playtime in May being dedicated to this farming game where robots from Haiku the Robot take care of plants to turn them into biofuel. Huzzah!

Helldivers 2 was this big thing this year that I actually enjoyed far more than I thought I would, especially as I had no clue what it was like due to its marketing being both great and shit at the same time. Back in March, it was my birthday gift to myself since I really wanted to play it with friends. As a result, I ended up being hungry for most of March. Shooting bugs made me forget about the hunger though. I played mostly this throughout May and April but then didn’t play Helldivers 2 much afterwards since I just didn’t play many games from May onwards. I guess causing genocide on alien planets doesn’t go well with heartbreaks. That said, I picked it back up again from September onwards and have been enjoying it a fair bit. I just wish I could bring more mortars with me.

And well, Monster Hunter Rise is a cool game that I’ve played way too much of in 2023. In February, March, August and September of this year, I ended up sinking more hours into this one, too, although I’ve stopped playing lately since exams are approaching again, haha.

Risk of Rain 2 ended up taking over most of my summer this year with me diving back onto Petrichor V, mostly because I get that RoR2 itch from time to time but also since there was that whole DLC and some updates, patches and fixes. Look, it’s a great game, alright?

Besides that, though, I’ve also played a fair bit of a cute little roguelike game called Talented (which was released into its 1.0), started a new Stardew Valley playthrough half a year ago that I just never returned to after the first year was over, and played a ton of Palworld when it released. On top of that, though, I’ve played way too much Earth Defense Force 4.1 this year and I don’t regret anything. That game made me stronger. I’ve captured 8 spiders alive this year alone to then carry them outside rather than killing them. Oh, and I played through Bandle Tale, got back into Dome Keeper, enjoyed Nova Drift and Megaloot a bunch, played through Serious Sam 3 finally, got back into Cultist Simulator and Unrailed, played through Sonic Adventure DX on stream, and I made a multi-armed axe-wielding mutant decapitate a lot of people in Caves of Qud.

This year in gaming was pretty great and just like this post, it was pretty chaotic.

Neat.

Resolutions

Not gonna lie, I’m gonna be spending most of the year trying to figure shit out for myself. I wanna make good memories, gain some more weight, start working out again (on top of my usual jogs) but also spend more time with my loved ones, give myself the time to heal, and just take everything one step at a time.

Besides that, I started learning Godot last year and wanted to possibly get into game dev this year and actually making a (simple) game as a side project. In terms of content creation I wanna write more reviews, share my thoughts on more subjects, structure my content on Twitch better, and find time for the simpler pleasures in life.

Since vague goals can be pretty hit or miss, I figured it’d be a good idea to include some more precise goals without adding any pressure or anything.

I wanna:

• make a game
• be around my ideal weight for my height again, so roughly ~95kg
• call my relatives more often
• reach out to folks more often
• start working out again and stick to it
• make strides in my education and finish my internships that I still gotta do
• enjoy the small pleasures in life more

and more.

I think those are pretty feasible.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.