November is… merry! As the great grim centipede of people and property that is Videogaming continues its progress of the midnight wood, a dozen auteur designers from theatre backgrounds don coxcomb hats and sequined codpieces. They climb onto carts and stage a chariot race, beating each other with bladders decorated to look like Roger Ebert. There is laughter up and down the train. Meanwhile, the industry seers and marketing-mancers have received hopeful tidings from their friends among the owls and bats. The trees are thinning out ahead. The stars can sometimes be seen. There is wild talk that third-person cover shooters are about to come back into fashion.
That isn’t all the owls and bats have seen, however. As the path curves, we find ourselves in the courtyard of a squat and forbidding tower. Five levels of blood-flecked obsidian and pixelated braziers, each named for a day of the week, each infested by perfectly terrifying new PC games. Never mind that the edifice has clearly been slapped together using assets lifted from a webinar. Never mind that you can see fuchsia checkerboards everywhere. The tower’s frightful denizens must be defeated – or possibly even bought – if the convoy is to proceed.
Monday 24th November
- Nientum – Op.ZERO (early access) is a mix of 2D platforming and rhythm-action in which amnesiac anime girls restore a creepy theatre and perform twisted versions of familiar musicals.
- On a similar theme, here’s Constance, a 2D metroidvania about a somersaulting painter who is navigating worlds derived form her mental health difficulties. Your paintbrush is at least as mighty as a sword, but watch out, using its magical abilities will corrupt you.
- Primal Fray is a turn-based, creature-collecting strategy roguelike set on floating hexagonal islands. Try to make your enemies fall off first.
Tuesday 25th November
- In A.I.L.A you are a games tester contending with a villainous AI level designer (think Portal, not ChatGPT), rather than the more familiar problems of precarity and crunch.
- In Newgroundsy cartoon FPS Captain Wayne – Vacation Desperation (pictured), you are a sailor with a shotgun fist on a mission “to rob the rich to feed the badass”. I hear and salute the praxis of the implication that one cannot be both rich and badass.
- In Red Rogue Sea you are playing FTL, but with pirate galleons and turn-based combat and deck-building. Not that much like FTL, perhaps.
Wednesday 26th November
- A dragon has turned the world to night and it’s your job to settle his hash in Holder Of Place, an autobattling roguelite deckbuilder.
Thursday 27th November
- Kings Of Hell (early access) is a palpably Power-Stoned 2000s-style beat ’em up starring upwardly mobile demons.
- Veterum is a turn-based fantasy strategy-me-do with an emphasis on shaping battlefields in your favour.
Friday 28th November
- Death In Abyss is a 3D underwater “flight” combat game in which you play a nimble submersible with fins fighting off huge, fleshy leviathans. Chorus meets Devil Daggers, maybe?
- Ayasa: Shadows Of Silence is a Little Nightmarish jaunt through six platforming worlds dedicated to Faith, Hope, Love, Greed, Indifference, and Betrayal. I get the sense that even the nice-sounding worlds will be dreadful.
The tower is soon afire, for in these strange and glitchy times even obsidian may burn. Our gimlet-eyed QA staff chase the surviving games into the woods; they will haunt us for months to come, stealthily adding themselves to our wishlists while we huddle in our wagons, blowing into frosty fingers and dreaming of the brighter tomorrow promised by the soothsayers. Perhaps the Second Coming is at hand! Perhaps another 2.0 update is at hand!