Throughout December and January, the CAPC team has compiled a list of our favorite pop culture artifacts from the previous year. Unlike most year-end lists, we don’t claim that these are the “best.” Rather, these are the things that brought us the most joy and satisfaction in the last 12 months.
For 2024, our favorite games, memes, and cultural moments included fashion criticism, hyper-capitalist terraforming, JRPGs, and more.
Derek Guy
A social media account dedicated to men’s fashion might seem like an odd thing to celebrate, but Derek Guy—aka “the menswear guy”—is no mere fashion blogger or social media influencer. True, he spends a lot of time critiquing men’s fashions, such as the decline of men’s suits, and highlighting elegant fashions from the past. However, his posts are more than entertaining; they’re deeply informative and educational, highlighting the ways in which fashion has evolved, and the forces responsible for that evolution. And not just fashion, but also how our culture’s notions and definitions of masculinity have changed over time.
As part of that, he’s unafraid to call out emperors who have no clothes, offering pointed, hilarious—and yes, occasionally savage—takedowns of politicians and public figures, and not just for their poor taste in ties and suit jackets. His fashion commentary exposes hypocrisy as much as it does poor haute couture.
—Jason Morehead
Planet Crafter
Planet Crafter is the debut game from an indie studio with a remarkably simple premise: you’ve crashed on a barren planet with a gun that mines everything and fabricates anything. Your mission? Make the planet livable. It’s a beautiful game that really captures the wonder of creation while also indicating the dangers of materialism.
You’re at the mercy of a corporation, a heartless terraforming corp that takes convicts like your character and essentially launches them at planets with little more than an oxygen tank and said omni-gun. They have little care or concern for their “employees” and only contact you once the dangerous work is done and they can harvest the planet’s bounty. While it is possible for you to set up a sustainable, automated system that produces and ships goods off-planet, various records left around the planet indicate this won’t work long-term. The original inhabitants left a massive gravity sink trapping anyone on the planet specifically because they saw the rampant destruction that humans were making on the galaxy at large.
Despite this grim message, Planet Crafter is an undeniably beautiful game. Even the barren version of the planet is gorgeous in its sterility, with massive dust storms and clear, glimmering planets on the horizon. The player can discover intricate rock formations and deserted ruins haunting in their majesty. And, as the game progresses and the player introduces an atmosphere, water, plants, and animals into the world, it’s genuinely awe-inspiring to see the way familiar locales change and become glorious images of life.
It’s worth noting, of course, that as much as Planet Crafter critiques materialism, the same beautiful transformation of the planet is a process rendered possible only through the technology of the materialistic society the game scorns. In this way, it’s possible to view Planet Crafter as an excellent expression of the sort of Earth stewardship that God commands in his word, one that appreciates the natural beauty of creation while also seeking to amplify it even more.
—John Kloosterman
The Rise of Bluesky
When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, and subsequently remade it in his image as X, some folks might’ve been excited given Musk’s claims to be a “free speech absolutist.” Twitter has grown increasingly chaotic, overrun by bots and accusations of censorship. Musk promised to change all of that, which he did by—checks notes—sharing conspiracy theories and making the place friendlier to Nazis and other extremists.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people began looking for an alternative as X began to flounder and grew increasingly hostile, not just to advertisers but to normal users looking for information and community. Meta rolled out Threads as an offshoot of Instagram, and though it has the larger user base, it’s arguably the upstart Bluesky that is the true X/Twitter alternative.
After a long invite-only period, Bluesky opened to public registrations in February 2024. To date, it has around 30 million users, which is a fraction of Threads and X/Twitter’s userbases. However, Bluesky’s focus on user control arguably makes it the safer platform; it’s much easier to control the content that appears in your newsfeed and who you interact with. What’s more, it’s built on top of a “decentralized” protocol, with the goal of allowing people to create and run their own Bluesky versions, meaning that users’ content is not under the control of a single company or its billionaire owner.
—Jason Morehead
Satisfactory
After years of being able to play around with Satisfactory in early access, Coffee Stain finally released the complete game in Autumn 2024, prompting me to begin again from the beginning. And what a joy!
One of my favorite things in games is building persistent structures. The idea of changing the landscape in a world I can traverse is quietly thrilling to me. Placing a building or house or small settlement in a place that lasts for the remainder of the game is just kind of cool. It’s all ephemeral (obviously!), but within the space of the game, I’ve created something with permanence.
Minecraft cornered the early market on the idea (even if we saw this in rudimentary, nascent form in earlier sim-type games like Sim City and Populus), but while Minecraft is excellent at creating things that are functionally monuments and buildings that serve no purpose other than (A) being aesthetically interesting and (B) maybe being a place you can be inside without having a spider eat your face, Satisfactory sacrifices some of that personality for strutures that do something—namely removing all the boring parts of Minecraft.
Beyond being a game where the player works to automate away all the mining/crafty grind of Minecraft, Satisfactory boasts a rich world for exploration. The world design is beautiful and varied and large (a bit larger than Skyrim, GTA: San Andreas, and Oblivion) with 21 different biomes and a lot of verticality to your exploration. Sometimes, while you’re waiting for your factories to finish producing whatever it is you need, you might just want to go wandering for a while looking for new resources, other crashed vessels, or just plain beautiful vistas. None of this game was procedurally generated. It was all lovingly crafted by humans who intentionally designed where trees and rocks and geothermal vents might go.
And all that beauty makes it all the more fascinating when I eventually pave over it all with industry. A pristine world, untouched by human colonization is suddenly made into a giant production facility by my own lone hand, all to the end of producing the needed quantum materials required for Earth’s Save The Day program—because we apparently blew it with our own planet and are moving world to world like interstellar locusts. So, uhm, I guess there’s that. But man, look at those twin suns, what a beautiful sight!
—Seth T. Hahne
Unicorn Overlord
One of 2024’s surprise hits, Unicorn Overlord is a JRPG whose main character is not, disappointingly, a unicorn, but is very much an overlord. The blue-haired protagonist Alain must form an army of scrappy and talented misfits to overthrow the traitor who killed his mother years ago and went on to take over the world. Though ostensibly a tactics-based game, in reality, the key gameplay in Unicorn Overlord is in getting closer to your friends and learning to work together to overcome obstacles.
Unicorn Overlord, unlike other tactical turn-based games, has your characters automatically progress through their attacks without any in-battle input from you. This streamlines much of the combat, but it does essentially make the game a matter of pitting one set of AI attackers against another.
Because of this, your chief edge in battle comes from finding what characters work best together and maximizing their effectiveness when teamed up by developing their relationships with each other through hosted “team dinners.” While you as commander make decisions about what squads are best able to handle what threats, you largely need to trust in your underlings’ abilities to acquit themselves well. It feels less a game about you being a tactical genius, and more a game about relying upon talented people who are passionate for the same goal that you have.
This fact is especially underlined by the fact that the chief villain is a mad dictator who vests all power solely in himself and brainwashes people into following his exact commands. There’s no teamwork on the opposing side, merely a single hive mind (formed, as is later revealed, by a mob of undead souls from a long-dead kingdom). Such individuals as there are insult and berate each other, or even backstab when possible. Others, when freed from the demonic leader’s control, gladly join your banner—assuming you forgive them, which the game encourages.
Unicorn Overlord, then, pits a “strong man”-style dictator against a leader who eschews glory and grandeur to serve his followers. It’s an atypical story where the hero is not, actually, supremely strong or supremely intelligent—at least, no more so than his opponent. Instead, Alain’s main quality is his grace and ability to work with others. He shares the hope of a new kingdom and inspires a community of broken, flawed, biased, once-sinful warriors to fight together against evil. It’s an excellent image of how the church itself ought to function.
—John Kloosterman
