I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty details of my Steam Year in Review report, but it did include this little graph that I thought would be fun to share:
So, according to Steam, these are the tags that come up most often in the games I play. At least, the PC games that I play. And I have to say, it’s pretty spot-on as far as my overall tastes go. Horror is kind of my jam when it comes to PC games, because that’s kind of where the indie horror scene lives. A decent amount trickles over to console, but not nearly the wealth that you’ll find on Steam or Itch.io or etc.
Metroidvanias are definitely what I was into in 2024, but mostly due to circumstance. See, I bought a metroidvania Humble Bundle in either late 2023 or early 2024, and well, time makes fools of us all. The action-adventure tag is usually-but not always-paired with metroidvanias, which explains why that one’s there too. Though I certainly can enjoy a good action-adventure that is not a metroidvania.
Now, the “female protagonist” tag is the most happenchance one of the bunch. I personally will never play or avoid a game solely based on the protagonist’s sex; it doesn’t matter to me in the least. But also, there’s no “male protagonist” tag on Steam, which is pretty darn sexist.
“Relaxing” kind of befuddled me, because the only game of the sort that I could remember playing in 2024 was Unpacking, and that was a three-hour game, so it couldn’t have been the only contributor. So I looked into it, and the answer is that I have a lot of PowerWash Simulator hours logged in 2024. Firewatch might count too; I’m not sure and I’m not going to look it up.
I don’t know how 3D platformer made it onto the graph. The only one I played on Steam in 2024 was Lunistice, and that’s another one that I wrapped in a single three-hour session. Realistically, this point should be higher on the graph, but a) 3D platformers are kind of rare these days and b) 3D platformers are definitely better played on console.
And that’s all I really have to say about that. I set my Year in Review page to be visible to the public, so if you’d like to take a gander at it for yourself, you should be able to find it here. If not… I don’t really know what to tell you.