Littlewood is a fun twist on the Stardew Valley-like genre of simulation games where you’re a very chill character starting their new life farming, mining and woodcutting your way across town in order to slowly improve yourself, complete small quests and befriend the townspeople. I had a good time with it, but the core loop got a bit too stale after a while so I ultimately didn’t see everything the game had to offer.
UFO50 is a really interesting project; a collection of 50 games, made to feel like you’re playing titles from a long lost line of consoles that released in the 1980s, with a wide spread of titles across various genres, made by different designers and presented as a chronological evolution of a platform. The idea is ambitious and there are some great games in there that alone by themselves justify the price of admission and are worth playing, some other titles were not my cup of tea, and my goal of “completing” each game (getting an achievement) was quickly met with failure, but UFO50 is really cool and I’m sure there’s something for you in it!
Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde is a game akin to Vampire Survivors where you do a bunch of runs with varied characters, weapons and upgrades in order to collect currencies, unlock new content, and progress. I really tried to give it a fair shot and played about twenty five hours of it before ultimately giving up; some of the design decisions made are a bit iffy for a game of that genre, but it’s still pretty neat, with a vibrant artstyle and a lot of game to go through.
Galaxy of Pen & Paper is a neat sequel to Knights of Pen & Paper with a more sci-fi focus, spaceship battles and planets to visit. Following the same meta-narrative of a GM playing a tabletop adventure with their buddies where you can level and upgrade both the characters and the players, I didn’t get too invested in this one, because like te previous game, I’m not the biggest fan of the way these games handle adventure and combat generation. Ultimately a neat little RPG with lots of heart, it just wasn’t for me.
Galactic Mining Corp, at first, reminded me of old “mining” classics such as Motherlode where you would venture into dangerous mines with your ship, collect minerals, avoid dangers, then sell everything in order to upgrade your mining machine in various ways, like taking less damage, drilling faster, etc. in order to rince and repeat. Galactic Mining Corp isn’t exactly that refined, instead betting on width instead of depth - a ton of things to collect, unlock and planets to grind, but ultimately making the game less engaging because of the lack of focus required in order to play it.
Halls of Torment, in my opinion, is close to a perfect videogame; An evolution and a refinement over the Vampire Survivors style of gameplay where you only pick a character, customize it with gear and upgrades, then mow down through hordes of various enemies with diverse weapons, skills and effects in order to complete a large swath of challenges. I just had a blast from start to finish and couldn’t recommend this game hard enough.
2024 wasn’t the best of years for me and for the world in general, and even in the game industry it was pretty rough, but I’ve still managed to play enough new games to fill up a top ten list for your reading pleasure. You might learn about what games make me tick a bit too!
Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred is the game’s big first paid expansion, adding a new class, more story, tweaking mechanics and (in my opinion) attempting to right D4’s wrong in a way like Reaper of Souls did for Diablo 3. The new class is pretty fun, the new bit of story they’ve wrote is alright and the mechanics they’ve added and tweaked are pretty hit or miss. Ultimately this doesn’t change Diablo 4 enough for me to want to go back to it regularly, so I’m not sure if they’ve accomplished their goals. Diablo 4 is still fine, but I’d rather go back to Last Epoch if I had the jonesing for an ARPG at the moment.
Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a neat remake of a tried and true dungeon crawling roguelike where you complete small dungeons by creating a character with a race, class, and gear, then explore a small grid of treasures, monsters and traps. The whole thing is a bit of a puzzle because you only regenerate when discovering new tiles, enemies have set levels and it’s much more inneficient to fight really strong foes, and you have limited resources to use overall. I had an okay time, but it was too simple and didn’t engage me enough to keep playing it.
Earth Defense Force 6 is a love letter to the franchise, mixing a compelling story (something I never would’ve thought writing for an EDF game), a ton of gameplay to go through, creativity with new content and a rethread of some old hits with a twist. The most fun I had with an EDF game for sure and a great game all around. I’m really happy they’ve made this!
Children of the Zodiarcs is a pretty cool tactics game where you use dice and cards to attack, use special abilities and defeat enemies with a group of interesting characters in a neat setting. Card and dice customization is a big part of the game, and most of the time is spent fighting, leaving some small interludes for story between each mission. I had a good time with it, but at some point it felt like I wasn’t engaging with the game mechanics anymore and just cruising through the game and that lost my interest.
Book of Demons is a pretty neat roguelike heavily inspired by Diablo 1 with a paper / card aesthetic that I really enjoyed where you must go to the bowels of a dungeon to defeat a big devil. Choosing from three classes with a bevy of items and skills, you click away to walk on predefined paths, dodge attacks, perform small minigame-like tasks to overcome enemies, come back to town to cash in rewards, and restart that loop until the end.
Automachef is one of these factory-type game where you place structures and mechanisms around to solve puzzles, using conveyor belts, resource generators and combiners in order to fulfill specific requirements and move to the next stage. In this case the theming is around food, having you cook meat and combine it with bread and cheese in order to deliver burgers, for instance. I really didn’t have a good time with it, I found the mechanisms to be a bit too finnicky and the tutorial didn’t prepare me adequately for the rest of the game (or the game just wasn’t clear about what it wanted).
Islands of Insight is a really interesting idea, what if you played a big puzzle game, with a ton of different puzzle types, challenges, exploration and progression, but it also was massively multiplayer, somehow? Moving a character around the environments, looking for puzzles to complete, discovering new puzzle types, acquiring skills and cosmetics and solving more complex and difficult versions of puzzles you’re used to. It’s really interesting, and it kinda works! Not a hundred percent, but I had a really good time with this one.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is an amazing anomaly; something that flew over my radar so hard when it came out that I picked up on a whim (while it was free), but it truely made me wish I would’ve bought it on release. I really had no clue what to expect, a card-based RPG featuring Marvel characters made by the XCOM team? I had the (wrong) idea that there would be dating elements too, but chalk it up to superhero fatigue or a lack of interest specifically for deckbuilders, I had ignored it then. Playing it now - with the DLC and all - was a really fun experience.
Tyrion Cuthbert is an interesting take on Ace Attorney, one definitely more on the Visual Novel side of things with less focus on the puzzle elements. Taking the mantle of a defense lawyer in a world full of magic and mysteries, you investigate crimes, find evidence, then tackle witnesses in court trying to find contradictions by pressing statements, thinking through events, and using some mystical powers of yours as well. I had a really good time with it!
Griftlands is a pretty meat roguelike deck-builder RPG where you adventure across a small part of the world, completing quests, negotiating, fighting, improving your abilities while trying to defeat a powerful boss at the end of a few in-game days while unlocking new cards for your next runs whether you fail or succeed. I had a really good time with it, even tho this kind of game isn’t entirely my cup of tea.
Last Epoch is an amazing action RPG, combining mechanics and systems that satisfyingly come together to create an experience where you just want to keep playing, creating new characters, trying more builds and finding out how things work out. The story is nothing to write home about - especially after the twenieth time through - but I’m just playing it nonstop since it came out of early acccess, and boy is it great.
Lootun has a neat concept, fighting monsters automatically with a leveling up team of heroes while you manage their skills, gear and facilities. In practice, I didn’t have a good time with it at all, everything goes too quickly, you’re bombarded with things to look at and the game doesn’t have time to breathe, ultimately giving you the impression that you’re blazing through mechanics without really interfacing with them.
Playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 after Baldurs Gate 3 gave me a deeper understanding on the trajectory that Larian Studio’s games have taken over the years. This is a fine RPG with a deep, engaging storyline and complex systems, but in my tastes it had too many rough spots that could’ve been sanded out a little to make it truely shine. Perhaps the way I’ve played it - multiplayer co-op - didn’t lend itself perfectly to a first experience as well, but that was the way the cookie crumbled!