It was an interesting Advent Calendar this year, from my perspective. My top four games – Arc Raiders, Silksong, Clair Obscur, and Hades 2 – were all highly ranked. And then none of my remaining games made the cut. I guess I should have strategically placed these games higher up for a better chance of making the cut. Bit of gaming the system, you know?
But then that’s what Selection Boxes are for. Despite the fact that I enjoyed a very small selection of games even more this year, I get the chance to briefly wax lyrical on a handful of phenomenal gaming experiences – each of which surprised me in some delightful way this year.
Elden Ring: Nightreign
Nightreign is a strange and unexpected child of Elden Ring, an Omen spawn replete with horns and scales in unexpected areas, mixing together all the delightfully crafted content of the base game in a Crucible-esque melting pot. Where this metaphor falls apart is that Nightreign is in many ways a much more polished and refined experience than I expected. There are several quality-of-life improvements designed to speed up the tempo of the game, and I’ve come to lament their absence whenever I go back to Elden Ring itself.
Runs are fast and tense in Nightreign, but they’re also filled with a similar wonder at exploring the map and facing the end-of-day bosses and Nightlords for the first time. It’s never going to match the hand-crafted splendour of Elden Ring itself, but it’s quite amazing how well FromSoft managed to keep that sense of wonder and awe after switching to a more randomised roguelite structure. For me at least, Nightreign is an experiment that paid off.
Word Play
Word Play took my family by storm for a time this year. It wasn’t uncommon to see both my mum and my dad at their PCs in the mornings and evenings, trying to piece the longest possible words together, and frequently turning to us and saying “this is a word, right?”, after which we’d all lament at the lack of the word “fuckfully” in the English language.
If this sounds fun, know that Word Play is likely the best Balatro-esque word game around right now. Your aim is quite simply to meet the score targets by submitting words from letter tiles in your grid, but with all the modifiers and multipliers and number-go-up goodness that Balatro kickstarted nearly two years ago. Word Play is slick, intuitive, challenging, and a great way to make your friends and family laugh with all the unlikely words you put together.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a mammoth, a truly excellent RPG. And I agree with everyone who was shocked that it didn’t find its spot in this year’s advent calendar. The characters are engrossing, the world is a joy to explore, and the number of opportunities to life-sim your way through the game is perhaps only matched by the early Elder Scrolls games. What I really want to highlight though is a particular main mission which occurs relatively early on in the story (well, it’ll likely take you many hours to reach).
In this particular wonderful quest, you’re a prisoner confined to the inside of Trosky Castle, all your equipment gone. Your one aim is to try and save your friend Hans within the time limit, but you have to do some very skillful manoeuvring – both physically and diplomatically – in order to slowly piece together the puzzle of what you have to do. It’s a wonderful little mystery quest with a huge amount of freedom to figure things out at your own pace, while the inhabitants of the castle are living their lives as usual. It instantly became one of my favourite quests in recent memory.
Demon Bluff Playtest
I’ve always adored social deduction and hidden identity games. But I was not expecting to enjoy Demon Bluff nearly as much as I did this year. How can a singleplayer social deduction game even work? How can you keep enough of that delicious connivance and manipulative bullshittery when you’re just alone in a room staring at a screen of cards? I’m as amazed as you that it works so well. In Demon Bluff, the cards are the people who may be lying or telling the truth, and as you reveal them you may use their special skills to discover important information about who may be lying or telling the truth – assuming you can trust the information in the first place, which of course you can’t.
I played far more of the playtest than I expected, and Demon Bluff is now one of my most eagerly anticipated games on my wishlist. I do love a game that makes you say “oh, you sly son of a bitch” to a deck of cards.