When all those ‘best of the year’ lists appear, I always find myself trying to remember what I’ve enjoyed and drawing a blank. My memory really struggles to remember when I encountered specific films/games/books/etc. In 2024 I planned ahead, by which I mean: I had a spreadsheet.
Some of you might know me from
, the weekly newsletter I’ve been writing since 2021. It’s where I put my fiction, as well as articles about writing serial fiction. It doesn’t leave much space for anything else. That’s what Infinite Backlog is all about — a place to stick my random thoughts about entertainment and popular culture.So! Here’s a whistlestop tour through things I enjoyed in 2024. Note that a lot of these were released in previous years; hence this being the Infinite Backlog.
In no particular order, then:
Movies
I didn’t see many films this year. Every time I go to the cinema I’m reminded of why seeing films with audiences in the UK is a bad idea. At home the streaming platforms have turned everything into content churn to the point that I choose instead to not watch anything.
If there’s one thing I want to do in 2025, it’s watch more movies and to be more intentional about what I pick. Perhaps I’ll take out a membership to a cinema, as a way of encouraging me to go.
Poor Things
Watched this while I was ill, which made for a suitably surreal and somewhat dazed experience. I didn’t get on with The Favourite at all, finding it to be a weird case of style entirely suppressing all substance, but Lanthimos’ all-in aesthetic matches far better with the general madness of Poor Things.
It’s a tricky film that raises lots of complex issues without being interested in directly commenting on any of them. It is ostensibly about female empowerment, but it is written and directed by a man and spends as much time as possible ogling Emma Stone’s naked body. Bella is presented as a child, as a literal baby’s brain transplanted into an adult body, which bumps into the rather icky question of whether age is determined by the mind or the body itself — pertinent given where the film goes, and Duncan’s (Mark Ruffalo) obsession with her.
Thematic muddiness aside, Stone is amazing, Ruffalo is absolutely hilarious and the film is visually startling and entirely unique.
Transformers One
This is unironically my favourite film I saw this year. For context, I was a child in the 1980s and loved Transformers from the off. Seeing the 1986 animated movie is my first cinema memory. I had the toys. I adored the UK comics by Simon Furman and the gang.
I loathed every single one of the Michael Bay live action films.
The further Bay has got from the director’s chair, the better the films have become. Bumblebee was a lovely 80s throwback that could have been directed by a younger Spielberg. Rise of the Beasts was a big blockbustery mess, but was good fun, had a great soundtrack and an interesting cast of characters.
Transformers One is a significant departure from all that. It’s directed by Josh Cooley of Pixar and tells something of an origin story. Crucially, it’s about characters rather than explosions. It has a good story, expertly told. It’s visually captivating. The cast is excellent. It knows when to be very funny, and it knows when to be very serious.
In other words, it’s a very good film. It’s probably the first time a Transformers movie has been something that a non-Transformers fan can enjoy. The trailers were all pretty bad, so ignore them and just go watch it.
Prey
This had been on my list for years. It was one of the many films that got dumped and lost to streaming menus during the Covid years. This is a film that sets out to do a very specific thing and then 100% nails it. It has a confidence throughout, a clear view of what it wants to be, and it never deviates. Exciting, hugely satisfying, with great audio design.
Honourable mentions: Deadpool & Wolverine for bringing back the ice-skating line, Bohemian Rhapsody for getting my son 110% into Queen.
Games
Games are where I spend most of my entertainment time. I increasingly find them to contain the most innovative and unexpected storytelling experiments — not always as purely successful as novels or movies, but more raw and unpredictable.
Novels have been novels for centuries. We figured out what ‘a movie’ was decades back. There’s tons of space within the forms to try new things, of course, but games are in a slightly different position: creators and designers are still finding the edges of the form. It’s still really difficult to neatly define what ‘a game’ is, because it keeps mutating quite drastically.
Venba
This one is very short, and made me cry. It’s immediately captivating, with a tactile cooking hook around which it hangs a compelling and very ordinary family story. Deeply moving, and hard to describe.
Stories that span multiple generations always get me right in the feels.
Tactical Breach Wizards
Most likely my favourite game of the year, Tom Francis’ turn-based tactics game borrows liberally from X-Com, Invisible Inc. and Into the Breach while very much doing its own thing.
There are two aspects to TBW that make it work. First is the incredibly tight mechanics, which are endlessly fun while remaining simple to understand. You always have full information about what’s about to happen, like a game of chess, and it’s about figuring out a counter-strategy. You can rewind and try different approaches, and the game is determined to not waste your time.
The second big win is the writing. It is far, far better than it needs to be. Hilarious dialogue, exciting world building and genuinely thought-provoking ideas. It’s been a difficult year in the real world, and TBW’s attitude to death has lingered in my mind long after I completed its main campaign.
Balatro
Ugh. I hate poker, and thought I’d hate this, but it’s undeniably very clever. Riffing on poker hands, this actually has very little to do with poker and far more to do with games like Slay the Spire.
I’m not very good at Balatro, but I keep playing it.
The Messenger
My 2023 game of the year was Sea of Stars, also by Sabotage Studios. This year I went back to their first game, which is a very different thing. A side scrolling platformer that revels in nostalgia, this is all sorts of fun and has several fantastic twists in its tale. The second half rather lost me, primarily due to being too hard, but it was a great time nonetheless.
Phantom Liberty
I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 from the off, despite all of its bugs and missteps. Seeing it slowly improve over the years since release was a joy, but I never expected the total overhaul that came with Phantom Liberty. The way the game’s entire design was rethought could have been kept for a full sequel, but CDP went and did it for free.
Phantom Liberty is their storytelling, world building and game design working at peak levels. It’s something special. Plus walking around with a digital Idris Elba is cool.
Baldur’s Gate 3
I’m slowly working my way through BG3. It is clearly very good and an incredible achievement. It’s also very long, with every battle seeming to take hours. I’ve dropped it down to easy mode, to make it less of a slog and a more directly enjoyable story. And what a story!
The recreation of D&D rules is remarkable, but also feels like the game’s biggest restriction. I’m very much looking forward to what Larian do next, without those shackles.
Planet of Lana
This snuck in right at the end, as I was gifted it by a friend only yesterday. But it’s very good, and very me. Riffing on the feel of 90s classics like Another World and Flashback, this is a zero-combat alternative that focuses on simple stealth and puzzles. Its visual design is gorgeous and evocative and the sound is stunning. The way it uses its side-on camera is very clever — so often that’s where these games fall down.
There’s also a cute cat thing. I haven’t been this immediately captivated by a game for a while, and can’t wait to see where it goes.
Honourable mentions: Death Stranding, Helldivers 2, Hades 2, Jedi Survivor, Beyond Good & Evil (remaster), The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.
Books & comics
I don’t read as much as I should. Especially being a writer. I mean, I’m constantly reading, but it’s a big melting pot of fiction, non-fiction, short form, long form, online, offline — the end result being that I don’t get through as many Proper Books as I’d like.
Still, here are the ones I really enjoyed this year:
Shadow of the Wolf
This Is How You Lose the Time War
I think I heard about this book when it went semi-viral a couple of years back. It’s a unique specimen, its story told in epistolary fashion between its enigmatic lead characters. They’re caught in a war that traverses the entirety of existence. The scope of the setting is impossibly vast, but everything is rooted in character and personal stakes.
It’s a concise explosion of the imagination, and absolutely must be read.
On A Sunbeam
The cover of this graphic novel had been staring out at me from bookshelves for a while before I grabbed a copy. I knew nothing about it, other than I adored that cover. I mean, look at it:
It’s a curious fantasy set in a reality that the author stubbornly refuses to define. It operates in a space of magical realism and sublime vagueness. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I found it challenging, primarily in its art. While it’s always beautiful, it’s not easy to parse or follow what’s going on from a narrative point of view.
I’d much rather encounter something difficult and unusual than generic, though. On a Sunbeam tells a lovely story of friendship and young love that is more ordinary than its visual trappings would suggest.
At some point I’ll re-read it, which I expect will be an even better experience.
The Power Fantasy
Kieron Gillen is probably my favourite writer. Probably. I don’t like making declarations like that, as it’s so mood-dependent. But, I mean, everything he does is irritatingly excellent.
The Wicked and the Divine, DIE and Uber are all astonishing. I need to get round to reading Once and Future properly.
Kieron’s also worked on a lot of Marvel stuff, of course. His Avengers/X-Men/Eternals crossover from a couple of years ago was an immense achievement — a big Marvel cross-over event that actually meant something and had something to say and moved me.
The Power Fantasy takes a lot of the themes he’s explored previously and puts them into a new, hard-edged, take-no-prisoners moral puzzlebox. It’s a fairly devastating commentary on geopolitics, wrapped up in gorgeous art from Caspar Wijngaard.
Transformers & Energon Universe
What started as a guilty pleasure has turned into a genuine pleasure. Daniel Warren Johnson’s take on Transformers continues to be clever and enormous fun (giving character and motivation to many Decepticons for the first time!). It’s a great read with the 12 year old, and I tend to then re-read it for myself.
Accompanying it are all the other series in the Energon Universe orbit. Void Rivals is an excellent slice of science fiction space opera that is strong enough to stand on its own. Duke, Cobra Commander and Scarlett were fun. I’m less convinced by Destro and the new G.I. Joe, which feel a bit more old fashioned. I was never a G.I. Joe kid back in the 80s, so don’t have nostalgia to lean on there, and I’m still unsure what the appeal of the series and characters is. No matter how you reshuffle the pack, it’s still a bunch of heavily Americans going around shooting stuff, and that’s not terribly interesting.
Honorable mentions: Black Cloak, Saga, Spectators. All superb, obviously.
TV
Much like movies, I don’t find a huge amount of time for TV. As an aside, I’ve really noticed that the things I’m really enthusiastic about these days — comics and games — are the two which I curate and purchase individually. Where I have subscriptions to streaming services, as with movies and TV, I find myself watching less and less. It’s all just become content.
Anyway, despite all that I did enjoy this lot:
Reacher
Season 2 was great fun, primarily thanks to Alan Ritchson being absolutely perfect in the role. I love that the stylings of the show, from the cinematography to the editing, feel bound up in Reacher’s own abrupt personality.
Strange New Worlds
The one show on TV that remembers how to be episodic and serialised at the same time. Manages to feel old school and brand new at the same time.
Agatha All Along
I’ve been a big fan of the MCU from the very beginning, spinning out of my love of the comics. Up to and including Avengers Endgame I would staunchly defend the movies when people moaned about them being formulaic. I lived through the awful blockbusters of the 90s and 2000s, especially the terrible comic adaptations. Marvel got so good at it, we forgot just how bad this stuff can get.
I loved how they played with genres in each of the series, and kept everything rooted in character even while the big explosions were happening.
The multiverse stuff post-Endgame was always going to be a mess: unlimited multiverse scenarios have a built-in senescence, with each variant reality undermining all the others. When there are infinite possibilities, meaning is lost. They can bleat about the ‘sacred timeline’ all they want, but an infinite number of universes can only ever result in none of them actually mattering, from a story perspective. Unless you do something very clever, or apply strict limits.
Anyway! All of that is a long preamble to say that Agatha All Along was superb, a breath of fresh air, very clever and consistently fun. It told a serial story that was designed for the form, rather than simply being a very long and poorly paced movie. That it was put together by some of the same people who did Wandavision is no coincidence.
Wallace & Gromit
The Christmas special was glorious. How wonderful to have something as silly and fun and purely entertaining as this, which is simultaneously demonstrating artists at the absolute peak of their creative powers.
Arcane
I still don’t understand how this exists, but I’m glad it does. The game has never interested me, but Arcane is far denser and richer than it needs to be. As with Wallace & Gromit, this is a team of artists working on a completely different level to everyone else.
Skeleton Crew
As with Marvel, Star Wars has felt very peripheral for a while. Too lore-obsessed, preoccupied with filling in the gaps between the main stories. Skeleton Crew rejects all that and remembers to make their show about a bunch of compelling characters. It has great comic timing, a fun adventure vibe, excellent action and visual, and every episode takes me to a cool new location full of potential.
In other words, it feels more like Star Wars than anything has for a long while.
Oh, it also has some of the best creature work I’ve ever seen.
Physical 100
I have nothing intelligent to say about this, but I’m entirely obsessed.
Honourable mentions: Naruto Shippuden continues to be great (but we haven’t quite finished it yet), Fallout, The Boys, Only Murders in the Building.
This isn’t going to be a regular newsletter. I’ll ping something out as and when I have something vaguely interesting to say about something I’ve played/watched/read/etc.
Until then, thanks for reading.
Wallace and Grommet: Vengeance Most Fowl was amazing.
I unironically need to see Transformers One.
I'll probably pick up the T.K. Hall books.
You COULD have gotten away with listing B5 as a 2024 show since you're doing a newsletter about it...