I’m quite proud of the delights that we packed behind each door of the Advent Calendar this year, to be honest. All my major choices are in there, plus a few more that I haven’t played but I’d watched other people play, and had a swell time doing so. Still, there are always a handful that don’t quite make the cut, but still deserve a heaped Christmas plateful of praise at year’s end. So here’s my selection box, my bonus games of the year for 2024. It’s an unusually diverse triad this time.
Enshrouded
When I first played Enshrouded at the beginning of the year, its main point of difference from other survival crafting games – the monster-spawning Shroud covering the landscape – didn’t really stick the landing with me. It’s a pretty game with an interesting looking world to explore, and when I duck my head into the Shroud, I’m substituting that wonder for time pressure, good-but-not-great combat, and a whole load of murky fog. Still, Keen Games deserves acclaim for creating by far the best building system I’ve encountered in the genre.
Seriously, I found it hard to go off and do other things to round off my early access review, because all I wanted to do was keep building. Powerful tools allow you to erect gorgeous-looking builds much quicker, and with much more freedom, than comparable games like Valheim. Voxels contextually alter their appearance to blend satisfyingly with their neighbours. There’s a wealth of rustic building materials, and being able to quickly switch not only between materials but shapes with the mouse wheel makes building about as painless an experience as I’ve ever had in these games.
Since I last played, the world of Enshrouded has grown larger, and the options for building, discovering, and stabbing things in the Shroud have grown with it. I must find time to dive back in soon.
Solium Infernum
It’s one of my great regrets this year that our planned diary series for political hellspawn strategy game Solium Infernum didn’t pan out (for various reasons). Even in the sulphurous pits of hell, I could feel things heating up very quickly in our game. Only five or six turns in, I was already engaged in a concerning war with Katharine, one where the implications of each move were so vast that even my brother, who never plays these sorts of games, was staying up til late at night with me discussing tactics and contingency plans.
The endless political machinations and mindgames of Solium Infernum remain a high point of 2024 for me, even if we never ended up finishing a game. The original game passed me by long ago, and looking back at it, I see why it was a strong point of focus for League Of Geeks to streamline certain areas and make the reimagined game a little easier for new players to approach. After the (very competent) tutorial, I felt confident enough in my skills of twattery to hurl an insult at Katharine on turn 1 (which led to the aforementioned war). I love games like these, where the world is small but each decision is punchy and powerful. Later this year I found something similar in the political machinations of Dune: Imperium, but that still lacks the delicious Dobos Torte of strategies and implications and second-guessing rivals that I found with Solium Infernum. Readers, I’m going to try very, very hard next year to cajole my fellow treehouse-dwellers into joining me for a proper sequel to 2010’s Gameboys From Hell series.
Delta Force
Delta Force was a real surprise for me, and not just because it arrived so late in the year that we’d already finished up the Advent Calendar before it stole my heart. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m crazy about extraction shooters. I’m still not over the undeserved death of The Cycle: Frontier last year, and since then I’ve been on the lookout for a game to fill the void left behind. So far, Delta Force is doing a swell job – something I really didn’t expect, considering its extraction mode is just one part of the larger Battlefield-like game.
I haven’t even played the main Warfare mode yet, I’m having far too much fun in Operations. It’s a lot more streamlined and simple than Tarkov, but keeps several cool things like the jigsaw-ing inventory, and helmets that visually obscure your view when they get shot up. The economy is more forgiving than Tarkov, but things are expensive enough that it’s still painful when you lose your favourite sniper rifle. The gunplay feels great, the game looks beautiful, and the maps are phenomenal. Friends, I adore Hunt: Showdown, but there’s no denying its maps aren’t particularly natural-feeling. Just a flat array of equidistant, equally sized points of interest on a square of land. The maps in Delta Force feel like real places. Everything fits well together, movement across the map feels great, and you’re never far away from some sort of tense encounter, whether with dangerous minibosses or with other players looking to steal your gear. It’s a very, very formidable new entry to the genre, and if I weren’t heading home to visit my family over Christmas, I’d be spending most of the holiday dying repeatedly in Delta Force, and loving every moment of it.