November is coming into its own. The conveyor belt of crowns, clowns and clones that is Videogaming is roaring forward through the night forest. It rained over the weekend and now the mud is waist-deep, disturbing and reeking of the stench of abandoned deck builders. Several palanquins containing former BioWare creative executives were swept under a wave of slop, becoming a chaotic barricade of people calling for Femshep to save them from GAAS. Tencent executives rush in with fistfuls of rope, but it's unclear whether they plan to pull the victims free or bind their limbs.
Answering the call of nature, you get away from the noise of shovels and torches. As you walk behind the trunk, you fall under the spell of metsenpeito and suddenly find yourself alone. Not a sound, not a squeal of bogged horses, not a clink of coins in the general director's carriages. The trunks bend towards the light of your lantern. Then you hear a crash. A twitching glow will lead you through the gap into a clearing where five hooded arcanists surround a ritual fire. Each of them is named after a day of the week, and each of them has a bag of new computer games that they now force on you. What will you choose? Do not deny them everything: the flame can always take another body.
Monday, November 17
- Berlin apartment is a first-person relic hunt where each artifact takes you back to a different time in Berlin's history.
- Shepherds! is a cooperative game where we all play Very Good Boys and Smart Girls (no, not velociraptors) driving herds of sheep into pens. You can also play dog football with sheep as your audience.
- Forestrike is a 2D martial arts brawler, with the difference that you can visualize, plan and repeat your beatings using the art of prophecy. I'm still not entirely sure it's any different from the checkpoint restart, but I enjoyed the martial arts when I played the preview.
- Anivars: Call of the Void is Fire Emblem, but your squads are all evil anime girls.
Tuesday, November 18
- pieces is a top-down, creature-collecting roguelike about a mangy little mouse making his way through a metaphysical sewer.
- Diner at Galaxy's Edge it's essentially a Milliways sim
- Birdcage is an arcade joke with an uncharacteristically intense plot component in which you, a “newly hatched” gunship pilot, must “destroy the World Egg.”
Wednesday, November 19
- Moonlight 2: Infinite Vault This is another part of the management sim RPG where you manage a store during the day and replenish your shelves by raiding dungeons at night.
- Brush Burial: World of the Gutter is a crunchy, static immersive simulator where you, a swamp devil in a corset, break a lot of bones
- Don't like swamp devils? Why not play School of Demons (pictured), then is a Persona-style tactical RPG in which a squad of students destroy hell-fiends on a mysterious island.
Thursday, November 20
- Scoundrel: Divine Ascension is an automatic 1v1 combat similar to Backpack Battles, but with a high-quality Unreal Engine look and feel.
- Live hard, die hard is also a bit of an auto-combat game, although it positions itself as a real-time strategy. It's a two-level, side-scrolling, base-management game where you create cyborg humans to fight aliens.
- Prologue: Forward! is a single-player open-world survival game from Plunkbat whose maps are created on your computer using “our proprietary machine learning model that is trained on public, open-source data and verified to prevent the use of any copyrighted material.” Are revelations enough for you?
- Sliding Hero is a top-down combat Metroidvania set in a 1700s Venetian villa with a carnival theme.
Friday, November 21
- “You are the only daughter of the Evil Emperor, but can you claim the throne?” The answer lies in the visual novel Life Sim. Galaxy Princess Zorana. Unless you are actually the daughter of an evil emperor, in which case you are.
The choice has been made. Your vision suddenly blurs and the fire subsides. The hooded figures swell and become covered with pustules, and you realize that you are looking at a circle of mushrooms while lying flat on a boulder of moss.
You rise unsteadily to your feet. Behind you, the great procession of video games continues. Someone solved the sedan chair situation by turning former BioWare employees into a huge, squelching katamari. A few bats fly by as you take your place in the column. Keep going forward. Surely this forest has an outside side. Someday December will come.
