XCOM 2 is the fantastic follow-up to the reboot of the franchise of the same name where you play a covert militaristic group trying to save the world from aliens by sending soldiers on missions, managing your resources and attempting to accomplish certain objectives under a time pressure in order to avoid a wide range of dire consequences. I had a great time playing it on the easiest difficulty with a large dose of save scumming, but regardless of if that’s the way XCOM should be played, it’s just a good time.
Forager is a pretty neat game where you collect resources, build things, fight monsters, level up and go through an upgrade tree for your various tools, buy more land to explore, complete quests, unlock plenty of skills and complete challenges. My experience with it was a rollercoaster of mixed feelings - at first it was pretty slow and the upgrades were incomprehensible, but then progression became too fast and the upgrades didn’t come quick enough. I had a good time with it, but it lost focus too rapidly for me.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a really unique adventure game where you navigate a fake internet-alike as a moderator of sorts, trying to ban offenders and helping people with their problems by solving puzzles, installing apps and navigating through a lot of early geocities/90s-inspired nostalgia. With great humor and pointed design, it was an interesting experience, but I couldn’t really get into it and kinda checked out of figuring out everything by myself at some point.
From the outside looking in, Big Pharma seemed like one of these “factory games” to me, where you would manage a pharmaceutical company, trying to build machines and combine products into more and more efficient medicines while discovering new technologies and improving your setup at your pace. I was a bit disappointed with the scenario-based approach of the game and the more puzzle-based systems. Big Pharma is probably really neat for some people, but it didn’t scratch the itch I wanted personally!
Grounded is a neat little twist on the survival genre where your characters are shrunk down and must content with hunger, thirst and the dangers of insects roaming around a backyard while exploring every nook and cranny for resources, power ups and secrets. I had a good time going through the story, even the next thing I needed to do wasn’t clear at times and there were some slight hurdles in the progression that felt more frustrating than challenging. Overall, a cool game!
Owlboy is a beautiful, inventive and unique 2D platformer full of heart where you play an owl against incredible odds and danger, flying around, carrying other characters and using their weapons while dodging dangers, fighting bosses, collecting coins and participating into different gameplay sequences that keep you on your toes. For all its beauty and care, I didn’t have that great of a time with Owlboy. I felt like the controls were a bit confusing and made combat something that could go downhill very fast.
Antimatter Dimensions is a recent idle game released on Steam where you buy dimensions to create antimatter. You buy dimensions that create dimensions that create antimatter until the point where you can reset the world, buy upgrades and start again. There are a lot of challenges to complete, achievements to unlock and the numbers get really big. That’s kinda what turned me off from the game; it seems like forward progress only meant that the number got bigger through some extra layers above the basic gameplay and at no point I got curious about what I could be unlocking next.
Clicker Heroes 2 is the ill-fated follow up to the web idle game of the same name, attempting something quite daring - being a non free-to-play idle game on steam - so that got my interest when it was announced. Because of many factors, the development of the game didn’t go so well and the early access phase was as far as it went. I had still bought it, so I wanted to give it a look and see what was there. It was a bit of a mess for sure, some mechanics felt underbaked, others were quite interesting but underutilized, and overall there was nothing that grabbed me in the game.
Dicey Dungeons is an amazing roguelike where you play a Dice adventurer going through a few floors of a dungeon, fighting enemies by throwing dice and using equipment via the numbers you’ve thrown, getting new stuff, improving it, using special character powers and limit breaks in order to overcome a wide array of colorful and sometimes tricky foes. A great game with really good music and mechanics, I had an absolute blast with it, even if I regretfully couldn’t stomach taking the time to do everything in the game.
Wizard and Minion Idle (WAMI) is an idle game inspired by NGU Idle, which I reviewed about six months ago. The basic concept is fairly simple, you cast spells to accumulate “Attack” and “Defense” which you use to go through “stages”, unlocking gameplay mechanics and features that all synergize together to ultimately improve your attack and defense some more. These features were a bit more engaging for me than they were in NGU and I had a good time with WAMI! I wish I could’ve stayed with it until the ‘end’ but at some point progression felt like it was dragging on forever and I didn’t know how to improve it, so I stopped.
Vampire Survivors, on paper, is an incredibly simple game; You have a character that you move around and it automatically attacks enemies on-screen, of which there are a whole lot. You get new weapons and abilities as you kill enemies and collect experience, and at some point you either get overrun or survive for 30 minutes, after which the level ends. There are a lot of things to unlock - new characters, items - and mechanics that get introduced as well, so playing it almost always feels like getting progress towards something new, which is incredibly addicting.
McPixel 3 is the sequel to a puzzle game I really enjoyed back in the day; McPixel 1. Filled with humor and surprising nonsense, you had to solve a bunch of levels where there was some danger or situation that needed to be defused, oftentimes in strange ways. There was a great element of replaying levels in order to find all the gags hidden away. The sequel fares really well, but adds a few systems that I didn’t particularly enjoy and fumbles on a few minor things, which luckily doesn’t make a big hit on my overall appreciation. I did everything there was to do in McPixel 3 and I strongly recommend it!
I had a jolly good time with the previous DOOM game and I went into Eternal expecting pretty much the same thing, a classic FPS experience with some modern sensibilities strewn over the whole thing, with a challenging but tight core loop that wouldn’t be too punishing or frustrating. Eternal goes into a few different directions that distracted me from the core experience and I also found that some of the new challenges and systems weren’t my cup of tea. Overall I enjoyed the game, but it didn’t hit as much as the previous one did in my case.
Much like 2021, 2022 was a hell year, but at least we had videogames! I didn’t play that many new games this year - my most played game is Personal 5 Royal, according to Sony - but I at least played ten of them, and I can surely put them in some kind of order and decide which one was my favorite! I wish you happy holidays and that 2023 is a bit less terrible than the year we’ve just went through!
I’ve always looked at the La Mulana franchise from the exterior; A love letter to older games, it was always a bit too opaque and too rough for me, so I never really played the first one. The second one looked really promising and interesting, so I gave that a shot. It was indeed, full of possibilities and mysteries to solve, but still too opaque and difficult for me. The lack of direction, the ease at which the ruins will just kill you and the old-school style of saving your progress and losing everything else you do if you die made me stop playing. It’s too bad, because otherwise I really would’ve loved trying to go through La Mulana 2!
Headlander is a funny little metroidvania from Double Fine where you play a disembodied head, flying around on a space station, trying to stop an evil computer from controlling humanity. When I first started playing the game, I somehow thought erroneously that it was going to have more of a puzzle slant to it than it ultimately did, but I really enjoyed my time with the game! With a good mix of exploration and combat and only some small gripes related to the controls, I’d recommend Headlander if you’re looking for a chill and very stylish adventure.
I couldn’t get very far in Diablo Immortal because I don’t have any mobile devices with sufficient storage space to download all the required stuff, and that’s all right. While a mobile version of a popular action RPG franchise is certainly something that could be fine and not something I would be opposed to in principle, I still am staunchly opposed to free to play games that blur the design line between playing for fun, playing as a replacement to paying money and playing as a vehicle to extract money from players. You’ll understand that Diablo Immortal is one of these games.
Tyranny is an amazing RPG in the vein of Baldur’s Gate and other Infinity Engine classics where you play the unusual role of herald for the evil overlord trying to take control of the world. In a world where I would have infinite time and no other obligations, I would’ve burned through this game in its entirety, but sadly I only managed to play through the first chapter. I really enjoyed what I saw, still! With a very interesting world, mechanics and characters, I’d feel really comfortable suggestion Tyranny to RPG fans.
Square Valley is a solid puzzler for iOS where you place tiles around a map, draw roads and rivers and try to maximize your score to hit a certain target with the constraints of the level you are in. I had a lot of fun with it, even tho I feel like the game could’ve worded some stuff a bit better and surfaced more data overall. It was still a pretty inventive and interesting game!
I had looked at Melvor Idle on mobile a while back, and while finding the core ideas of the game interesting, I had been left disappointed by the mechanics locked behind in-app purchases and mostly by the game’s too open pacing, where the player was bombarded with things they could do with very little logical progression or path they could logically take to get stronger. The PC version, being a premium title, does away with the in-app purchases, but does not change the core of the game much, so it left me with the same overwhelming feeling than the mobile version. Needless to say, I dropped it quickly.