The larger cogs in the games industry are chasing their tails. Remakes. Profit consolidation. Senseless layoffs. Repeat. It feels like dogsitting a hyperactive puppy that constantly wants acknowledgement. Yes, you caught the ball! Good job! Throw it again? Are you sure you don’t want to play with–okay, okay, I’ll throw the ball again. Same activity, same outcome, different year. The 2024 Taylor Awards is my attempt at breaking that cycle.
Last Year’s Taylor Award Winners: The 2023 Taylor Awards
The 2024 Taylor Awards honor media that kept me from complete exhaustion. A bit of the grotesque, a splash of adventuring spirit, and grooves upon grooves held this turbulent year together.
Jordan Mallory Spirit of Excellence Award
If Hieronymous Bosch lived to see mass industrialization, he might have produced something like Slot Waste. It’s a short, sharp journey through factory machinery. There are no button prompts, UI elements, or even settings menus. The player guesses their way through a bizarre assembly line. Each step grows more arcane, more abstracted. This all must serve some purpose, right?
Slot Waste has haunted me for weeks. It’s a fever dream of distorted How It’s Made episodes, the unfeeling efficiency of industrial machinery, and the gnawing sense that something is deeply wrong. Some will regard it as a brief oddity. But I will carry the things I saw and did into the new year and the endless job hunt. All work does something, but not all work is FOR something. How many cycles are wasted on looking busy, on making an imaginary number go up? How much are we willing to do for productivity theater?
Best Single-Player Cooperative Game
Falcom’s long-running Trails series of interconnected RPGs kicks off the latest entry with a full-ass adult protagonist. Van Arkride is a spriggan, a jack-of-all trades willing to take on even the more dubious odd jobs. And he’ll need all the wiggle room he can get. Trails Through Daybreak is orders of magnitude since the series launch in 2006, but the carefully paced storytelling and steadfast moral compass ties things together. Systems and characters change over time, but the continent of Zemuria and its people threads through them all.
Trails Through Daybreak is a huge sea change from past arcs. Van is far from the plucky coming-of-age upstarts (whom I love dearly) from past games. Massive chip on his shoulder notwithstanding, Van takes on the role of team dad, sheperding his misfit part-timers through a fantasy world on the brink of a second technological revolution.
The intricate plotting and turn-based battle system is better than ever before, but Trails games will always be a two player game in my household. It just doesn’t feel complete without passing the controller between my partner and I, splitting narrative and combat duties and speculating on what comes next.
Best Gay Little Album
I cannot listen to any single track from Gavin Turek’s Diva of the People without doing a full album rotation. It’s intrinsically funky and deeply Los Angeles, stacking bangers and sonic quirks from front to back.
The video for “Disco Boots” hooked me first, Gavin strutting through New York streets in–what else?–glittering white high-steppers. But the full album surprised me, dancing through unfulfilling relationships and mixed signals. These aren’t the sad bangers you expect, putting the full workout into working out your problems.
After catching Gavin Turek’s Los Angeles release concert, there’s no denying she’s a true diva through and through. Her genuine enthusiasm, unshakeable work ethic, and relentless choreography made my twenty dollar ticket feel priceless.
That’s all for the 2024 Taylor Awards. As always, capitalism is a curse! Goodnight!
