From my point of view, this year's advent calendar was interesting. My four best games – Arc Raiders, Shelksong, ChiaroscuroAnd Hades 2 – all had high ratings. And then none of my remaining games made the cut. I think I should have strategically placed these games higher to give myself a better chance of making the list. We played along with the system a little, you know?
But that's exactly what selection fields are for. While I've enjoyed a very small selection of games even more this year, I have the opportunity to briefly highlight a few phenomenal gaming experiences, all of which have surprised me in some delightful way this year.
Ancient Ring: The Kingdom of Night
Night rain is the strange and unexpected creation of Elden Ring, an Omen spawn, replete with horns and scales in unexpected places, mixing all the delightfully crafted content of the base game into a Crucible-style melting pot. Where this metaphor fails is that Nightreign is, in many ways, a much more refined and refined experience than I expected. There are several quality of life improvements designed to speed up the pace of the game, and I find myself lamenting their absence whenever I return to Elden Ring itself.
Nightreign's runs are fast and intense, but they're also filled with the same wonder of exploring the map and meeting end-of-day bosses and Night Lords for the first time. It will never match the handcrafted brilliance of Elden Ring itself, but it's amazing how well FromSoft has managed to retain that sense of wonder and awe after moving to a more randomized roguelike structure. At least for me, Nightreign is an experiment that paid off.
Pun
Wordplay captivated my family for a while this year. It was not uncommon to see both Mum and Dad at their computers in the mornings and evenings, trying to string together as many words as possible, often turning to us and saying, “That's a word, isn't it?”, after which we would all lament the absence of the word “damn” in the English language.
If this sounds like fun, know that the pun is probably the best Balatro-style wordplay to date. Your goal is to hit the target quite simply by sending words from the letter tiles in your grid, but with all the modifiers, multipliers and number boosting capabilities that Balatro launched almost two years ago. Wordplay is an elegant, intuitive, challenging game. This is a great way to make your friends and family laugh with the unusual words you put together.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a gigantic, truly excellent RPG. And I agree with everyone who was shocked that it didn't find its way into this year's advent calendar. The characters are captivating, the world is a joy to explore, and the amount of life simulation in the game is perhaps rivaled only by the early Elder Scrolls games. What I really want to highlight is the special main mission that takes place relatively early in the story (well, it'll probably take you many hours to get to it).
In this wonderful quest, you are a prisoner locked inside Trosky Castle, all your equipment is gone. Your only goal is to try to rescue your friend Hans within the time limit, but you'll have to do some very skillful maneuvering – both physical and diplomatic – to slowly piece together the puzzle of what you need to do. It's a wonderful little mystery quest with great freedom to figure things out at your own pace while the castle's inhabitants go about their normal lives. This has instantly become one of my favorite quests lately.
Demonic Bluff Test
I've always loved social deduction and hidden identity games. But I didn't expect to enjoy Demon Bluff as much as I did this year. How can single player Does the social deduction game even work? How can you retain enough of this delicious connivance and manipulative bullshit 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 people who can lie or tell the truth, and as you uncover them, you can use their special skills to discover important information about who can lie or tell the truth – assuming you can trust that information at all, which of course you can't.
I played a lot more of the playtest than I expected, and Demon Bluff is now one of the most anticipated games on my wishlist. I really like the game where you say “you sly son of a bitch” to a deck of cards.
