Hello and Happy New Year! Did you have a nice break? I hope so.
This is our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing, in this case, over the festive break. This time, we gorged on loot in Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2, we were pleasantly surprised nay delighted by Indiana Jones, and dug into the trifle-like layers of genius that make up Animal Well.
I’ve been ping-ponging between Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 during the Christmas break – I’ve been filling my ARPG cup, you could say. What surprised me, doing this, is how complimentary the games can be. Path of Exile 2 is frugal. It doesn’t give up anything easily. You inch through zones and then try multiple times to beat bosses, and when you do, they don’t give you much, the stingy bastards. Path of Exile 2 certainly doesn’t shower you in rewards like Diablo 4 does.
Never was this more apparent than during Diablo 4’s festive Slay Ride to Hell celebration, which spawned Treasure Goblins around the map seemingly everywhere – those scurrying Santa-like carriers of bottomless bags of loot. The spawns were particularly potent in the new Vessel of Hatred expansion zone, Nahantu, which it turns out I hadn’t been to yet because I hadn’t played the expansion yet. Cue, then, the perfect storm for me: catching up on a year of loot changes and expansion content, while also being drenched in fountains of loot along the way.
It did get old eventually, but not before I’d romped through the standard character levels with the new Spirit Warrior class and redeemed literal bags full of some of the best loot in the game. I even had time to re-equip a few other characters. It’s an embarrassment of riches that couldn’t be further away from the Scrooge-like approach of Path of Exile 2, and I loved Diablo for it – I gorged on it.
Now, though, I’m back to Path of Exile 2, as if to purge the excess of Diablo. It’s fitting for January, I feel.
-Bertie
Animal Well, PC (Steam Deck)
This video features the maker of Animal Well: Billy Basso.Watch on YouTube
I swallowed the Animal Well pill along with my Christmas dinner this holiday season and cor, what an absolute gem of a game. I know it’s been said a million times already, but Developer Billy Basso has cooked up something really very special with this debut, and Metroidvania likers owe it to themselves to get this played if they haven’t already. This is an ingenious interpretation of the genre, not just in the way it changes the rules around traversal and discovery (swapping double jumps for frisbees and bubble wands, for example, and dashes for yo-yos and spinning tops), but also because it’s just so gosh-darned clever. It does that thing that a lot of my favourite games do, in that it plops you into a world and then simply gestures towards the open door, leaving you to discover it for yourself with next to no guidance whatsoever. It’s so, so thrilling, and the kind of game that occupies every waking thought while you’re playing it.
Case in point: I loved discovering all the different ‘layers’ of Animal Well the more I played it. The first one is the six-odd hour jaunt you’ll experience to simply get to the bottom of the well, completing the main thrust of its story quest and conquering its ‘final’ boss. The second layer, however, is where Animal Well really comes alive, which is a 64-strong egg hunt that actually lets you leave the well altogether, leading to what I’d consider its proper ending. This is what I was able to finish over the holidays, expanding my playtime closer to 20 hours. But there’s also a third layer that riffs on all manner of Tunic/Fez/ARG-style ‘deep’ secrets involving hidden bunnies, bar codes, community puzzles that – hands up – are probably beyond me (or rather, beyond the amount of available head space I have for that kind of stuff alongside also having a job).
But man alive, that egg hunt layer was properly great, if only because the tools and gadgets you need to obtain to find them all go way beyond what’s required to beat the first layer of Animal Well. It really fires up your mind about what’s possible in this strange environment, and what other secrets might have been hiding in plain sight all along. And some of those eggs are so well hidden! An absolutely insane achievement for a solo developer, and very deserving of its spot in our Top 50 Games of 2024.
–Katharine
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Xbox Series X
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What a joy it’s been discovering Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Eurogamer’s 2024 Game of the Year. I’ll happily admit to some initial scepticism about it. Indiana Jones is a franchise that has not always been well looked after, and while MachineGames is undoubtedly a talented developer, it is not known for handling licensed action adventure games. How wrong I was! I’m having more fun than I’ve had with pretty much any other game launched last year.
But it goes beyond Indy simply being a fun game to play. MachineGames consistently demonstrates an understanding of the essence of Indy – his half-mumbled deductions, mildly snarky humour, and the subtle movements and facial animation that make me feel like I’m watching a fresh performance mo-capped by Harrison Ford himself.
Then there’s the attention to detail. Surely I wasn’t the only one who teased out the arrival of the game’s first villain even longer by reading up on all the fossil exhibits in the college library? And hopefully I’m not the only one to notice MachineGames finally solving something that irks me in so many games I play: that you explore a cave/dungeon/some catacombs supposedly left undisturbed for hundreds of years, except for the fact that all the candles are still burning.
Indiana Jones, I should have known some day you’d come walking back through my door with a brilliant new chapter. I just didn’t expect it to be this.
Like the frost on the cars and ground this morning – and the inside of my single-glazed windows in my flat! – a new year has arrived. It’s a time to take stock and look ahead and think what might be, and then run back into bed and hide under the duvet covers and refuse to come out. It’s a time to plan and to begin aspirational journals you’ll put down and forget about and never find again. A time to tackle the gaming backlog you keep talking about, fully in the knowledge you’ll probably double it this year. It’s fresh-slate time, promise time, all done in the hope you’ll look back next year and discover you did something you intended to do. So, what do you want to do, from a gaming perspective?
Here, we look back at our gaming resolutions from last year to see how we did, and then we set some anew. Are you brave enough to commit yours to writing?
Jessica
I wanted to pay more attention to indie games last year, and while I certainly played more of them than I did in 2023, I apparently had a secret ambition to start more massive RPGs than ever before. It was hard to squeeze in time for those indie horrors and puzzlers when games like Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, Metaphor: Refantazio, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard were all stealing 100-hour playtimes from me.
13 horror games we’re looking forward to being scared by this year.Watch on YouTube
This year, I want to dial back the inventory management and take a bit of a breather, immersing myself in more peaceful landscapes. Spending so much time exploring Infinity Nikki‘s cutesy, fairytale-esque world has made me realise that whether it’s a four-hour indie, or another 100-hour monstrosity, the time I spend feeling relaxed in one game is far more valuable than trying to work my way through a list – even if I am still looking forward to playing those games eventually.
Is this my way of giving myself a pass to just play Infinity Nikki this year? Maybe. But as long as it keeps its silly, mellow vibes that keep me feeling happy, I don’t really mind if I’m missing out on the latest Game of the Year contender.
Tom
My new year’s resolution is to become less of a completionist. I think it’s becoming a problem. When I play games, I like to finish everything I can before moving on to the next area. I’m playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle right now, for example, and I’m really keen to get out of the Vatican and back to the jungles and deserts that await. But I can’t. Something inside me is making me hunt down photos of cats, and finish side quests and eat all of the biscotti I can get before I go. And that’s great – it’s a sign I’m enjoying a game that I want to be completionist – but the longer I linger, the more frustrating it can get that I’m not somewhere else already.
As I look to February and a likely 100 hours sneaking around feudal Japan in Assassin’s Creed Shadows – a game that will probably be stuffed to the brim with distractions and collectibles, and whatever the feudal Japanese equivalent of biscotti is – it’s a resolution worth making, I think. Ignore your bulging quest log, stop scouring for that last little thing. It’s time to move on and get to more of the good stuff.
Marie
My resolution for last year was to complete the main story of at least three games I’ve not completed yet. Did I reach that goal? Technically no I didn’t, but I’ll give myself credit for coming close with two stories completed.
This year I’ll be less strict, and less ambitious, with my resolution. I’d like to find myself returning to games that have previously brought me joy, specifically time-management or life simulators like The Sims 4. I spend most of my time on consoles with bigger games, mainly live services and RPGs, so it’d be nice to get back to the kind of PC gaming I used to love in games like The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon. There’s something I find infinitely relaxing about managing the smaller details in those games (my parks are usually free with very expensive merchandise…).
Does this count as a resolution if it’s so vague? I’d like to think so.
Chris
This year I’d like to play more games with other people. Specifically with my friends (my partner couldn’t give two hoots about gaming and frankly I love that – it’s nice to have our own hobbies!). But as my old group of friends has got older and busier and more spread out, gaming has been the best way to keep in touch with them. I fell out of the habit a bit in 2024 with all the usual, cloying tendrils of modern life getting in the way. This year, I’m going to reserve a little window of time, even if it’s every other week, to check in with mates and play something together. That something will probably be one of the games we’ve been playing together, over and over, since we were spotty little teenagers, rather than anything new or exciting. But that’s kind of the point.
Victoria
Last year I resolved to play The Sims more honestly, with no cheats greasing my hypothetical wheels to the top. Did I manage it? Well, not exactly. I tried. Hand on heart I really did. But the allure of spamming that money code is just too dang strong. I like being rich in The Sims, with all the hot tubs and space rockets that come with it. I don’t like waiting for my characters to come home from work, for them to then watch shows on a crap TV which is always at risk of breaking. So while things started off well enough, I soon gave into temptation and deployed the motherlode code. I have no regrets.
Nine open world games we’re excited about that are coming in 2025.Watch on YouTube
As for this year, I am actually still a tad undecided. Since starting at Eurogamer, I have broadened my video game horizons tenfold, and in the last couple of years I have played more indies and other games than I ever would have. Last year, my personal Game of the Year was actually I Am Your Beast, and there is no way I would have given it even a glance a few years ago. But I absolutely loved it.
So I guess I’ll do a similar thing again: resolve to keep trying games that may not initially sound like my cup of tea. Perhaps like last year, I will be pleasantly surprised by the results.
Katharine
I made a resolution last year to finally play GTA 5. Did I play GTA 5 last year? Did I heck. There’s probably not much point in trying to do so now ahead of GTA 6 coming out if I’m being honest, but the GTA series as a whole has always been a bit of a blindspot for me, as have Rockstar games more generally. I just never quite have the time to dedicate myself to them properly, you know!? Maybe I’ll resolve to finally play Red Dead Redemption 2 instead this year – the setting and tone of it is much more appealing to me as a concept than GTA, and I’ve always admired the horses in it as well. Honestly, nobody does horses quite like RDR2 does.
Bertie
I did it; I can’t believe I actually stuck to a resolution. Last year I said I’d start streaming and I did. I joined a Dungeons & Dragons group called Chaotic Questers and began streaming roughly once a week on Twitch. We even went to a castle on the Scottish border for a weekend, to record there, which was fun, especially when our car broke down for good on the way back. It’s been quite an adventure getting to know and understand the world of streaming from the inside, and it has increased my respect tenfold for the people who do it. Standing beside the M6 near a gang of cows – they were threatening, actually – while waiting for the RAC to appear was quite an experience too.
Oh, and while I didn’t manage to start my own personal video game stream, my partner did, so that’s probably worth half a point? I also didn’t manage to run a tabletop RPG, though D&D formed a central part of my gaming year. I’m still reading TTRPG books, though, and tinkering away on my own campaign, so I came close. Another half-point?
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This year, I’m being more specific. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it but I’ve never properly played through a From Software game. I’ve dabbled in them – in Demon’s Souls (the original!) and Dark Souls and Bloodborne and Elden Ring – but I’ve never persevered for fear of being too aggravated by a game late at night. But I realise – Path of Exile 2 helped me realise – that I actually relish a combat challenge, so this year I’m seeking to change things. I promise to beat five bosses in Elden Ring, and you can hold me to that. And I’m phrasing it that way so I don’t baulk at the prospect of beating the entire game, though that is my eventual goal, of course. I’m determined to do this – so determined I’m going to start tonight before my determination wanders, which it has an annoying habit of doing.
That’s it. Nice and simple. Beyond that, I’m going to challenge myself to play games in genres I don’t normally, but that’s a much more vague thing to pin down.
Lottie
I’ve been playing RuneScape for more than half my life, which makes it my most successful relationship outside of my family. Considering this, you’d expect I’d have long maxed out my character’s levels. Well this isn’t the case. See, I’ve been sitting at Level 88 Herblore for the last seven years. In fact I don’t think I’ve gained more than 10,000 XP in the skill during this time.
The issue is I just detest training Herblore. Outside of mini-games, the process is so tedious. Get herb, clean herb (yes, you have to clean it first), get second ingredient, buy vials, fill vials with water, put ingredients in, most likely empty vials so you can do the process over and over again. It just takes forever.
Yet, that Level 88 has been burning a hole in my eyes over the past year so, in the grand year of 2025, I shall attempt to reach Level 89 Herblore despite the pain. (And no. I won’t use XP lamps. Don’t bring such nonsense into my house.)
What a year, huh? 2024 has been brutal for video games, a medium which has taken a bludgeoning from seemingly all angles. It’s been one of the quietest years for triple-A games in recent memory and the toughest for studios of just about all sizes too.
But through all that there have been – as there always has been and probably always will be – a surging, irrepressible wave of brilliant, inventive, utterly joyeous video games. This has been a year of survival, but also a year of total, out-of-nowhere hits. New, weird, unsuspected gems bursting onto the scene to fill the void left by the blockbusters, which seem set to almost unanimously duke it out for your attention in 2025 instead.
Well done on making it through this year. Thank you, as always, for reading. And please enjoy this list of wonderful games – the reason we’re all here in the first place. Here are the 50 best games of 2024, ranked.
50. The Plucky Squire
Platforms: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch
Image credit: All Possible Futures/Devolver Digital
At the centre of The Plucky Squire is an idea so brilliant it’s still stunning no one has done it before. The ability for a picture book character to become sentient and jump out (and back into) the book’s pages to impact its story is an idea I can’t believe isn’t already a Pixar movie. In a video game, even after two dozen times, the concept never quite gets old. It’s a superlative idea, and The Plucky Squire oozes charm as your little hero attempts to save the day by exploring back and forth through his picture book’s chapters, and then in the bedroom of the book’s young reader. The game isn’t perfect – at launch its verbose writing risked alienating a similarly young audience, while some of its repeated, handhold-y puzzles should probably have been abridged. Now, a recent update has attempted to smooth over some of that – and the brilliance of that initial key concept remains.
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Image credit: Eurogamer / Sega
“Hope you guys know how to fish,” says Infinite Wealth’s lead character Ichiban Kasuga moments before a giant shark beaches itself on the boat you’re traveling on. A turn-based battle against this beast follows, the ridiculousness of the situation barely registering as you attempt to beat up a monster even the great Jason Statham would be wary of. This is Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, though. It’s a game full of moments like this, the kind of which you’d usually never expect but kind of do here. As with other games in the series, you can try to explain to someone why they should play it, but it’s not until they actually do that the penny drops. There are no other games like this, and they must be treasured. – Tom Orry
The pandemic. Cloning. Gene editing. Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution. The apocalypse. 1000xResist embraces all of these subjects during the course of this intimate 3D visual novel, shining a bright and unflinching light on what kind of society might emerge from this petri dish of disasters. The result is one of spiralling complexity, a slow burning tale of faith, lies and conspiracy that suddenly roars to life as it hits the halfway mark, catapulting the world of heroine Watcher, her clone-like sisters and their All Mother goddess originator into violent disarray. Memories become vital battlegrounds to discern and excavate the truth behind Watcher’s heritage, and as the whys and hows of this strange, enigmatic world begin to take shape through these fickle and dreamlike flashbacks, we get to see the big ugly mess of best intentions gone awry sitting at the heart of it. 1000xResist offers no easy answers to any of its big thematic debates, but that’s precisely why this raw and deeply personal journey is so memorable and important. – Katharine Castle
Self-described ‘totally normal gardening game’ Grunn is anything but normal, and developer Sokpop Collective delight in wrong-footing you at almost every turn in this secretly low-key horror game. Your task seems simple enough – as you arrive at the gates of an overgrown country house on a bright Saturday morning, you’ve got until Monday to get the place spick and span before the owners come home. The gardening itself is pleasingly tactile, and the shoomp shoomp of the grass and hedge shears and the combative swipes of your trowel all feel great under the thumbs. But you’ll soon realise there’s something much darker and weirder going on beneath the surface of Grunn, and that these strange forces are actively out to get you. Through a smattering of enigmatic polaroids, Grunn gradually emerges as a horror-infused adventure game, tasking players with matching disparate items to the right puzzle scenarios to help peel back its layers and get to the heart of this deliciously unnerving experience. You won’t be able to do everything on a single playthrough, but each run arms you with more knowledge and shortcuts to unravel its tantalising mystery. It’s wonderfully creepy, and a real grower. – Katharine Castle
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Image credit: Activision / Eurogamer
I won’t lie, I enjoyed the Black Ops 6 campaign a lot more than plenty of games above it in this list. I’m not sure if that’s going to get me banished from the EG Slack or something, but I need to speak my truth. I don’t care one bit for the various multiplayer modes CoD offered this year, partly because they didn’t grab me but mostly because I simply don’t have time to sink into an online multiplayer shooter. Still, BLOPS 6 has the best campaign in a Call of Duty since 2016’s Infinite Warfare. There, I’ve said it. It’s a banger. I think that’s plenty of info to judge me with, but just know I’m right about this and if you disagree you are wrong. Here’s to terrible campaigns for the next eight years! – Tom Orry
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch
Image credit: Digital Eclipse/Llamasoft
These Digital Eclipse collections are hard to sum up, but here’s the rough gist of it. Imagine a luxurious special edition DVD box set of several classic films, put together with a bit of curation, and introduced with context and explanation and nice bonus features. A collection and a story all at once. The latest, from the people behind the excellent Making of Karateka, focuses on the legendary Jeff Minter, king of psychedelic arcade wonder games. This focuses on all of his earlier stuff, but don’t let that put you off. Many of these older, lesser known games still feel frighteningly new, even as you warp back to the mid 80s. Preservation with love. This is video game heritage. – Chris Tapsell
A demonic love story told through the lens of survival horror, Sorry We’re Closed is one of many excellent PS1-throwback games to appear on our list this year, but it’s almost certainly the most stylish one of the lot. With its searing colour palette and punk rock cast of ordinary folks just trying to survive in downtown London (albeit a downtown London that’s somehow become a hotbed for angels and demons all hanging out together and vying for celestial supremacy), this is raw and emotional tale where opening up your heart is a surprisingly deadly endeavour. Shop worker Michelle knows this more than most, after catching the fancy of arch demon The Duchess and being cursed with a third eye that can pierce through the fabric of reality to reveal the seedy, demonic underbelly within. If she doesn’t submit to The Duchess in three days, she’ll be tortured for the rest of eternity, but as she fights for her life in a brilliant mix of third person puzzling and first-person shooting, Sorry We’re Closed shows there’s still a lot to love about fixed camera angles, grungy lo-fi visuals and punching god/the devil square in the face to earn your freedom. – Katharine Castle
What if Sniper Elite was a low-fi conspiracy-fuelled shooter with multi-kill mechanics reminiscent of pinball or the Crash Mode from Burnout? Well, you’d get something like Children of the Sun, an indie shoot-’em-all-up that’s part shooter and part puzzle game. Crouched from afar, its your job to line up a shot – and its subsequent richochets – that take out all of your targets, as you uncover why your mysterious main character is taking revenge on a deadly cult. The visuals and story – such that there is – are enjoyably pulpy, while the quick-fail-and-retry gameplay allows you have just one… more… go… – Tom Phillips
Ah, the weight of expectation. 25 years after the first genre-defining Homeworld game, nine years after a successful remaster and five years after a crowdfunding campaign for a sequel, Homeworld 3 seemed to have its course set to become another intricate, galaxy-spanning real-time strategy game set in 3D space. What emerged from hyperspace was in some ways the game I dreamed of: a fun evolution of what came before, with new factions and a new setting, yet familiarly iconic ship designs emitting primary-coloured exhaust trails, producing realistic battle chatter amongst beautiful nebulae backdrops as a Middle Eastern inspired ambient electronica plays. A new focus on maps with megalithic structures suitable for cover or flanking was a smart twist, providing a new stage for the game’s excellent art direction and making for more interesting battle scenarios too.
Yet an ultimately disappointing campaign that focused on a handful of poorly realised characters stood in stark contrast to the epic, survival-of-a-people tales that made the first games so well-loved, and depressed review scores to the point that the game’s extensive post-launch development plans were halted just four months later. The game’s campaign and its roguelite War Games mode are still well worth playing, with the final 1.3 patch providing some much-needed balance and gameplay improvements, but I fear it may be the final chapter in this iconic series. – Will Judd
Puzzle games about growing plants have been popping up in abundance in recent years, but Botany Manor is almost certainly one of the best specimens yet of this particular sub-genre. Set inside an enormous and picturesque Somerset manor, amateur botanist Arabella Greene takes it upon herself to study and recreate rare strains of peculiar plants that will only bloom under the most specific and wonderfully whimsical circumstances. Like the flower that needs the exact wind temperatures of its mountain home, or the rust-cleansing river weed that will only bloom at a certain water temperature. Or the one that mimics the wing colours of a moth at a particular time of day, or the sleeping heartbeat of a specific woodland creature. As you root out each plant’s respective seed bag from around the house and try and deduce exactly what will make each one burst into life via the notes and letters and other diegetic clues you’ll find scattered around, Botany Manor reveals itself to be a surprisingly robust and artful kind of puzzle experience. It takes time, care and more than a little attention to solve these conundrums, but this game’s a grower, no doubt about it. – Katharine Castle
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Image credit: Piranha Games
In MechWarrior 5: Clans, you are the monsters suddenly bursting out of the walls, except the walls are the edge of the known universe and the monsters are armed with several-stories-tall BattleMechs. There’s plenty here that’s familiar to players of the hugely addicting sandbox of MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, but that game’s slow-and-steady progression of a mercenary company taking on odd jobs is jettisoned for a more engaging linear campaign through the highlights (and lowlights) of the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere, complete with animated cutscenes replete with in-universe lingo. As agents of a technological superpower hidden away from the centuries of in-fighting and neglect faced by the rest of humanity, your advanced machinery is faster, better-armoured and hits harder than anything you’ll face from your enemies. That lets your five-member squad carve through hordes of opposition in supremely entertaining style, and gives you some latitude to experiment with weapon loadouts and skill upgrades before the game’s difficulty ramps up in the final chapters. Best of all, everything can be played in co-op if you like – and despite upgrades to AI squadmate control, subjugating the surats is always more fun with a sibkin. – Will Judd
Arranger is ingenious, beautiful and deeply, surprisingly accommodating. Its premise suggests a world of genius-tier head-scratching where only puzzling’s greatest minds will succeed, but this game doesn’t just want you to get through its challenges, it wants you to feel clever too, and feel like you took everything at your own pace. These are excellent ambitions. At its most basic, Arranger offers players a tile-based world in which rows and columns move as the player does, and many objects wrap around the screen, reappearing from the left when they disappear off the right, say. Taking this idea, you’re sent off on a beautiful adventure, moving from one town to the next, solving problems, engaging in combat – you move swords and whatnot along with your rows and columns – and even taking on bosses. It’s elegant stuff, but it’s backed up with a lovely hint and skip system which means, should you want it, you can have a marker on-screen that permanently points you in the right direction, and you can hop right over any puzzle that’s annoying you. All this and some stellar writing and world-building. Arranger is a treat. – Christian Donlan
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch
Image credit: Eurogamer/Blumhouse Games
Vibes, the video game. In terms of mechanics there’s not a whole lot of complex stuff going on in Fear the Spotlight, but it absolutely nails that late 90s/early 2000s horror aesthetic. It’s a game split into two parts, parallel stories that follow on from a disastrous seance. The first is mostly set in school grounds as the protagonist attempts to find her friend and avoid the bright orange searchlight emanating from the singular baddy. Part two is more personal, centred on the life of the aforementioned missing friend, this time predominantly set in her old family home. Scarier than part one, this story leans more into Japanese horror like Ringu and Ju-On: The Curse. There’s not much of a challenge here, but the throwback puzzles and brilliant retro visuals felt like a palette cleanser much needed after years of gnarly horror designed to make you wince. – Tom Orry
Look up. This is the slogan DC is using for its new Super Man movie. It’s also something you can do with your actual head while playing Batman: Arkham Shadow on the Meta Quest 3. Looking around isn’t new in a VR game, obviously, but it’s the first part of Camouflaj’s brilliant Batman sim. While Bruce Wayne, famously, can’t go five minutes without saying “I am the Batman,” or similar, in this game you are in fact the Batman. Never before, even in the Rocksteady games, has this feeling been truer. Key to this is the fact that Arkham Shadow doesn’t shy away from the combat we’re now accustomed to in Batman games. Yes, it’s simplified here in order to open the game up to as wide an audience as possible (you don’t have to be trained in martial arts), but it just works. – Tom Orry
Modern games that look like retro games are having a rather elongated moment, aren’t they. One of the best examples this year is PS1-era throwback horror, Crow Country. Rather than simply rely on nostalgia through deliberately-dated, SFB Games created a game that would have slotted in perfectly back when everyone was being scared by the marvels that were Resident Evil and Silent Hill. It’s got smart puzzles, which are essential in a good survival horror, but more importantly the setting is brilliantly realised. There’s a superb sense of place here, which elevates it above the average attempt at aping games of this genre. Oh, and it’s funny, too, which is something games often fail miserably at. – Tom Orry
Often overshadowed by the vast success of its sibling Age of Empires, Age of Mythology is, frankly, an absolute banger of a game, a peak early-00s era RTS from the time where the ostensibly serious strategy genre started to get a bit silly. But I will always maintain that “a bit silly” is exactly what makes for a good RTS, frankly, and Retold is a fantastic glow-up, filing down the jagged, polygonal edges of the original but losing none of its off-beat charm. There are still outlandish god powers to throw around – now with cooldown timers (how modern!) rather than a single use – and still the faintly ridiculous physics to go with it. Seeing colossi and giants boinged up in the air by a meteor will never get old. Nor will a good old-fashioned comp stomp with friends against the improved AI. If you missed the original, or you loved the original, or you never quite got into real-time strategy but want to give it a try, I can’t think of another game I’d recommend first. – Chris Tapsell
34. Pacific Drive
Platforms: PC, PS5
Image credit: Kepler Interactive / Eurogamer
Pacific Drive isn’t the most cooperative of games. Your first dozen or so hours will, if you’re like me, be spent cursing it (or cursing at it). And then the next dozen or so hours will, well, probably also be spent doing that. Weaving your way through the sodden forests of the pacific northwest with nothing but a banged up, possibly-haunted jalopy and a grumpy radio accomplice you will find yourself crashed, mashed, flipped, hurled, shocked, poked and bonked by various obstacles, ranging from slightly horrifying ‘anomalies’ of the Zone to the car’s boot lowering on your head – your own weaponised incompetence manifest. This game is wonderfully, hysterically sadistic, but it’s also laced with clever mitigating design – the garage, where you stop off to recover, rebuild, and make slow RPG-like progress between runs, is really the game’s beating heart – and also a scintillating, Strugatsky brothers-inspired atmosphere. One of this year’s most unique games, but also one that seems to tap right into the zeitgeist: weird physics, gallows humour, masochistism, and a requirement to press on regardless. – Chris Tapsell
I’m torn on Stellar Blade. Having had little to no expectations for it on release, I was surprised by just how great the combat is. I don’t want to sound like a complete idiot, but I wrongly started playing assuming I’d get some fairly by-the-book hack ‘n’ slash gameplay, but in fact Stellar Blade feels less frenzied than that. It’s not souls-like, but it’s not a completely different beast to those games either. It helps that Stellar Blade looks superb, being one of the most impressive games I’ve played on PS5 in 2024 (and all the nicer on PS5 Pro). I won’t sugarcoat it, though: I’m not a fan of the frankly quite ridiculous costumes. I appreciate that there’s a market for that, but I think these designs undermine a top notch action game. – Tom Orry
I’ll be honest, I really thought TCG Pocket was just going to be one of those ‘interactive experiences’ that really centred on pack opening, collecting pretty digital things and extracting as much money out of fans as possible. And, okay, it is sort of that– but wait, come back a sec and just listen. It’s also just a fantastic card battler. This is maybe to be expected – Creatures has been making this card game for a few decades now, after all – but there are some quietly genius tweaks to the formula that make it work so well here. Energy has been shifted from cards in your deck to a generation system, enhanced and modified by the cards you can then build decks around. Matches are faster, and somewhat inconsequential by most competitive standards – but counterintuitively, that also makes it even more fun. If you lose, it’s fine – you lost five minutes, and probably learned something valuable about the deck you built or decisions you made along the way. The interlocking systems, across chance-based elements like packs and wonder picks, to the many quests, AI and online battles, collectibles and more, are astonishingly intricate. And yes, the artwork really is quite lovely. This is one of the best games to come out of The Pokémon Company for some time – don’t write it off before trying your hand. – Chris Tapsell
Games are often so slick, so focus grouped, and so safe these days that it’s amazing when a big game is released and it doesn’t feel like any of those things. Stalker 2 feels like a hugely ambitious indie game from 15 years ago, but with the production values of a modern AAA title. It had plenty of issues at launch (and still does after a bunch of updates), but no other game released this year matches it in terms of scope. It’s an open-world FPS, but unlike any you’ve ever played before unless you’ve played a previous Stalker game. Games don’t have to be sanded down so much they have no sharp edges in order to be worth your time and money. Stalker 2 proves that. It’s got more rough spots than Sony’s entire first-party output this entire generation. – Tom Orry
A game about escaping to the Austrian alps to simply get away from it all, Dungeons of Hinterberg will have added resonance with you if you’ve felt a little burned out recently, or if the pandemic is still faintly lingering in the back of your mind, or if you’ve just had a bit of a year. It’s probably the closest to this year’s A Short Hike, a game about the soothing atmosphere of a physical place, about presentness and mindfulness and nice strangers offering a few words of smalltalk or advice. But also just a very nice, tight, smartly designed game in itself: a mix of Persona and Zelda, mashing together environmental puzzling, playful camera perspective shifts, a bit of light third-person combat and then a soothing retreat to the local mountain village in between. If you play games for escapism, there are few this year that did it better: a dreamy, warm-hearted, timely and deeply welcome retreat. – Chris Tapsell
Another of the very fine, small-team indies of 2024, Arco is a gem of an action adventure game, all rendered in lovely, expressive pixel art (there’s a whiff of 2013 about it, in a good way). Smart combat focuses on short, snappy, intelligent encounters, while the vibe is wonderfully Western-meets-fantasy: a lone wanderer, an authentically South American twist on the cowboy story, a big, mysterious tree. There’s richness and texture here, condensed and refined into something compact yet powerful. – Chris Tapsell
Caves of Qud is a forever game. It’s a blend of Dwarf Fortress and the original Rogue, generating a dense fantasy world and millennia of history, and then using that as a rich backdrop for some brilliant dungeon crawling.
Everywhere you look there’s something special. The art – one or two rungs away from ASCII – is gorgeously evocative of all-night sessions in old University computer labs, while the writing is poised and strange, the storytelling blends the far future and all its horrors with a landscape of ruins and strange mushrooms. Dungeons are procedurally generated but the storyline’s main beats never change, which puts the emphasis firmly on the player themselves. Who do they become? What path do they take? How many limbs and fingers do they want to replace with laser cannons? These are all excellent questions for a game to ask.
Somewhere in amidst all this stuff is a game that tugs at a concealed theme of 2024 in games. Like UFO 50 this is a game with the trappings – and some of the ideas – of the past of gaming, but which treats everything in a way that makes much more graphically lavish titles feel pretty old-fashioned. Even if you don’t think Caves of Qud is for you, give it a try. – Christian Donlan
I honestly believe that Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is one of the best games of the year and on the Nintendo Switch full-stop. It’s that good. I know it’s not perfect, lacking high-score leaderboards for online competition, but it’s an absolutely essential local multiplayer game for all ages. I’ve enjoyed countless hours playing this with my son, essentially showing him that despite the massive advantages his youth offers, he still can’t beat me at video games when compressed into tiny challenges.
The really special thing about NWCNE (sorry, just wanted to write something that looked like a professional wrestling franchise) is more of a side effect, really. By introducing my son to these relics of the video game world, he’s now developed an interest in playing the full games. He’s sunk hours into Super Mario Bros., Excitebike, and Metroid. That’s the power of Nintendo. – Tom Orry
What a breath of fresh air Infinity Nikki is. If you’re tired of the usual open-worlds focused on combat, then may I suggest a trip through Miraland’s lush, fairytale landscapes instead. Where other games may have bosses to challenge, Infinity Nikki’s got high-stakes fashion battles across rooftops and spooky forests, for no other reason than simply being as dramatic as possible. But when Nikki does need to roll up her impeccably-styled sleeves to take on some mischievous creatures, then it’s in service of ‘purifying’ the poor things, not killing them.
When not exploring, or saving the world in one of the most endearingly silly stories I’ve ever heard (where fashion is worshipped in tandem with ancient gods), then just dressing Nikki up to look cute is your only real goal. And if you’re a fan of taking pictures in those cute clothes, be prepared to craft some high-quality snaps, with one of the most in depth Photo Modes in gaming.
Simple concepts, but a joyous execution of them, makes Infinity Nikki the upbeat, batty adventure that it is. – Jessica Orr
Timemelters is the work of some of the people behind Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves. That was a distinct blend of strategy and tower defence that had an enviable sense of its own identity. Timemelters takes the idea further and really pushes up against the limits of how many new ideas a player can handle at any time. That’s a compliment.
You’re playing as a witch in a mythical version of Scotland, but really you’re a flexible attack unit with the ability to cast spells, reverse time and record your own clones to fight against, and move through wormholes that tie the maps in non-Euclidean knots. The stroke of genius that brings it all into focus is this: you only have one hit point. If you fail at any moment in the game you’re dead, and so you really explore each map and its challenges, breaking down objectives, working out how to rethink space, and steadily becoming the kind of ingenious player you always hoped you might be. 2024 had a lot of great games, but few had as much to teach the player about their own potential as this one. And it’s brilliant fun too. – Christian Donlan
One of this year’s most compelling detective games, No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a deep dive into the fickleness and fragility of the human mind. It’s the kind of mystery game you should really just go and play and not read too much about beforehand, as saying anything about its story or finer details will veer dangerously close into spoiler territory. But the simple facts of the case are thus: you play a detective haunted by one particularly harrowing case from your youth that’s long since gone cold, and at last you’re tasked with rooting through your own piecemeal memories of all the different witness testimonies to try and get to the bottom of it. As you start reconstructing a timeline of events and matching fragments of statements to the correct speaker in the right order, you’ll gradually unearth other, hidden details of the case that constantly challenge and expand your understanding of it. But the real masterstroke of this game is how deftly it weaves its narrative, and how closely it guards its deepest and most devastating secrets. It’s masterfully executed, and a must-play for all budding detective heads. – Katharine Castle
Platforms: PC, Ps4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch
Image credit: Ubisoft
This year’s best Metroidvania and a new benchmark for the genre at large. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is an athletic, nimble dream of an action platformer, marrying taut and challenging traversal techniques with a mythic quest of dazzling proportions. As heroic warrior Sargon, you must save the titular prince from the sprawling, labyrinthian prison of Mount Qaf, a foreboding and ominous place that turns friend against foe and time back in on itself. It’s an enthralling adventure, and the kind of hero’s journey that feels steeped in both the series’ tradition and the modern, dynamic flair of anime and graphic novels. It also solved the genre’s ever-present problem of painful backtracking with its game-changing screenshot tool, letting you pin images of locked doors, puzzles or anything else that caught your curiosity directly onto the map. Together with its rigorous and skilful platforming, this is a staggering achievement from the Rayman Legends team, and it’s a travesty that we won’t get to see more of it in the future. – Katharine Castle
There’s something about I Am Your Beast that reminds me of the old Batman TV series’ comic book punch effects – BAM! ZIFF! BOFF! FWIP! – only with less of the camp and much more angst. One of several games to come from Xalavier Nelson’s Strange Scaffold this year, which is arguably less a typical development studio and more a venture, allowing different devs to come in, put their stamp on something, and quickly turn around a tight, snappy, few-hours-long game with an exceptional premise that carries it well beyond what you might expect for the budget. Of those, I Am Your Beast is probably the snappiest and the tightest, a steely revenge flick with deeply cathartic, thunderously hard-hitting action to back it up. KAPOW! – Chris Tapsell
There’s been growing chatter this year about the death of double-A games, which is interesting. For one, I’m pretty sure we had that same conversation some time around 2013. But more than that, I’m also just not entirely sure it’s true. Maybe double-A games haven’t gone away, so much as just become much more expensive, in the same way triple-A budgets have ballooned. Either way, consider Space Marine 2, a game that is double-A in spirit and nature, and just about every sense other than how much it actually cost.
I have to emphasise: that is intended as a very big compliment. Space Marine 2 is a joy in co-op, particularly against AI hordes but also in its meaty, gristly, simple pleasures campaign. It’s very pretty, richly detailed, but also just has a teeny tiny whiff of harmless jank to it around the edges, in those distant hordes and over-the-top explosions. And it’s also thoroughly, utterly committed to the bit. This is an exceptionally 40k game, rich with little details – lore for the lore gods! – and ripe with gothic, dark future atmosphere. Coupled with little Doom (2016) inspired mechanical hooks, like its parry and execute system, and it’s an absolute winner. The second best game about getting together with pals and shooting hundreds of xeno scum to bits this year. – Chris Tapsell
Strange, stylish, and (mostly) successful – Indika is maybe the most A24 video game of this past year. There’s a lot going on here, but it’s hard to get past the presentation – and the impact that utterly striking presentation has, in all its forms, on the game as a whole. Think morphing, switching, surprising camera angles and movements, or sudden snaps to entirely new perspectives or art styles. Think deeply thoughtful character animations – Indika chews her nails and looks around skittishly when left to idle. Think bicycle sprints and thorny takes on religion and oppression. While the actual mechanics themselves – effectively, a bit of platforming and light puzzle-solving – don’t burst with novelty, there’s still a serious lesson here for a medium that has, let’s face it, been astonishingly slow to evolve when it comes to the good old camerawork and direction behind visual storytelling. That lesson is in just how much can be wrought from a game with some proper thought – behind how and where you put your camera and what you can see on screen, but also what you choose to do with it and why. – Chris Tapsell
There are many very clever people working in video games, and one of those especially clever ones is Suspicious Developments’ Tom Francis, developer of Tactical Breach Wizards (and I’m not just saying that because he’s written for Eurogamer). Tactical Breach Wizards is a deft, compact, and deeply witty take on turn-based tactics, setting you up as a bearded, wizened SWAT team that begins each scenario with a wonderful, thunderous boom through the front door. From there you need to clear a tiny, intricately arranged room, Into the Breach-style, using clever systemic devices – into the wall! Out the window! – to shunt and blast enemies around the arena as you go. As Matt Wales put it in his excellent review, “Tactical Breach Wizards is absolutely obsessed with defenestration”. Sold! This is the stuff of tactical dreams. – Chris Tapsell
The first Frostpunk went down as something of a cult favourite amongst the PC strategy hardcore for its grizzled take on settlement survival. The second takes things further: difficult decisions are even more difficult. Politics, split curiously into sets of opposing values: Progress and Adaptation; Merit and Equality; Tradition and Reason. There’s a sense of breathlessness to it – of constant forever-struggle, a civilisation perpetually on the edge of strife – and at the same time one of pensive depth. If grand strategy games have always felt a bit too detached for you, too ‘God’s eye’ and geopolitical, then zoom right in onto this one. This game is right there on the ground, in the dirt and soil and snow, and the bloody choices of how you get by against the odds. It’s one of the best strategy games in some time. – Chris Tapsell
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, Netflix
Image credit: Eurogamer/Playstack
The Case of the Golden Idol was always going to be a tough act to follow, but developer Color Gray Games has truly outdone itself with this ambitious sequel. Catapulting the timeline forwards 300 years to the paranoia-drenched 1970s, this tale of corporate conspiracy and murders most fowl captures your attention at every step. Technically, it’s a little lighter on the blood and gore this time round, with some scenes simply depicting brawling TV contestants, exploding outdoor cinemas, or even poetic dances with secret, hidden meanings to decipher. But the crimes and mysteries themselves are no less compelling for it, and deducing who did what, why and how in each of its freeze-frame tableaux remains as tantalising as ever, especially now its dedicated windows and parcelled out puzzle boards make them more approachable than ever to crack open and read between the lines. It’s smartly done, and one of the most satisfying mystery games of 2024. – Katharine Castle
Capcom has been firing on all cylinders lately, and its mythological romp through the demon-infested torii gates of Kunitsu-Gami is no exception. This action-heavy strategy game is a real feast for the senses, combining its athletic and kaleidoscopic kagura dance combat moves with a challenging tactical core of cerebral tower defence. The goal is to safely escort the priestess Yoshiro through the cursed and corrupted towns and hollows of a mountainside community, defending her from waves of strikingly gnarly demons both as her chief guardian Soh and the gaggles of recruitable villagers that can be assigned different roles and jobs to best hold down the fort. Long range archers and brawny woodcutters are eventually joined by powerful sorcerers and teleporting ninjutsu, but the demons you’ll face also evolve in kind, as do the settings, objectives and obstacles you’ll encounter along the way. There are so many fresh ideas to get to grips with in Kunitsu-Gami that you’re never short of creative challenges to overcome, and the energy and enthusiasm it presents them to you with is always utterly infectious. A truly wild ride from start to finish. – Katharine Castle
You should always make time for a Simogo game. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes takes a sharp turn from the breathless, bubblegum electro-pop of platformer Sayonara Wild Hearts, the studio’s previous, instead opting for quiet, moody, monochromatic puzzle-solving in a strange, vacant mansion in the woods. Some of those puzzles can be a frightful challenge – this one’s a notebook-and-pen joint, and you’ll be much happier if you give yourself over to that fact from the off, rather than resist it out of pride, as I always find myself doing at first. You make time for a Simogo game, but this is one you need to carve out hours for, not only to play but to sit with, puzzle over, examine from all sides. Like a good old puzzle macguffin, but also like the curious objects of art this game builds its web of brilliant clues around. – Chris Tapsell
Following up a game like Spelunky must have been daunting, so in many ways Derek Yu’s response makes total sense. He got a bunch of talented friends together and slowly they all made something weird and unique. UFO 50 isn’t a game so much as it’s the back catalogue of a console that didn’t actually exist, but might have.
Real talk: it’s overwhelming at first. All of UFO 50’s games are complete experiences and they’re all unlocked from the off. That means when you load the game up for the first time you have a daunting decision to make. Where to start? But as you pick a path and move outwards, shifting from RPGs to puzzle games to strategy games – so many strategy games! – you start to realise it’s not necessarily about getting the most out of everything, it’s about finding the games that click with you and exploring them deeply, and then moving on to something new.
Over time I suspect every game will have its moment. Of all the games on this list, this is the one I think you’re meant to live with for a decade or more, really getting the most out of it. 50 games, weird interconnected lore, different art styles and a gorgeous approach to pseudo-history. As follow-ups to one of the greatest games ever made go, it’s hard to fault. – Christian Donlan
Three years ago, it would have been hard to fathom that the natural successor to games like Deus Ex, Dishonored and other renowned immersive sims would have been Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series. But just as Tears of the Kingdom amply proved last year with its anything goes Ultra Hand contraptions, Nintendo’s creative spirit has only grown stronger over time, and the bevy of magical building blocks at your disposal in this year’s Echoes of Wisdom is a brilliant extension and evolution of that particular school of problem solving. Zelda makes for a highly winning heroine in her first proper outing as series lead, and the way she’s able to repurpose everything from beds and children’s trampolines right up to the most fearsome monsters that have terrorised Link across 30-odd years of adventuring to overcome the trials in front of her makes this one of the most daring and innovative Zelda games to date. It confronts what the future of the series might look like without a sword-swinging hero at the helm, and it does so with inventive and elegant ingenuity. Here’s hoping it’s not another 30 years until Zelda gets to reprise her stunning debut role here. – Katharine Castle
Platforms: PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Image credit: Playstack/LocalThunk
It’s the game that’s been on everyone’s lips (and brain, and console, and phone and practically every device going) since it took the world by storm back in February. Balatro has been a force of nature this year, captivating the world with its roguelike poker games that make cheating and gaming your deck the main event. Whether it’s amping up the score of your hands by exploiting all manner of special effects from its deviously conceived Joker cards, or juicing the numbers with arcane twists via booster packs of accompanying celestial buff cards, Balatro is melting pot of cunning creativity – a feeling that’s only enhanced by its wonderfully woozy music and hypnotic, swirling backgrounds. The aim, of course, is to manipulate your limited number of playable hands to beat the high score blind offered by your opponent. But as the ante goes up each round, so too do the number of zeroes on the end of those score targets, requiring all the more tactical manoeuvring to keep your run going. It’s a work of marvellous depth and winning simplicity, and rightly one of the best and most memorable games you’ll play this year. – Katharine Castle
The original Dragon’s Dogma came out at the tail end of a console generation that, frankly, everyone was sick of. It’s not that we didn’t love the PS3 and Xbox 360, but they were knocking on for seven years old at this point which back then, when Moore’s Law was still holding strong, made them the gaming hardware equivalent of a still functioning Roman aqueduct: impressive, and beautiful, but relics. Wholly inadequate for modern challenges. Probably leaking somewhere.
And so Dragon’s Dogma wasn’t quite the game that had been envisioned. Features were cut. Compromises were made. Par for the course at the best of times, but stuffing Capcom’s Elder Scrolls into a measly half gig of RAM would have been gruelling. Still, it managed to impress: justifying a huge DLC expansion, several re-releases, and a Japan-only MMO. The business, alas, remained unfinished. When work started on a sequel, the mission was plain: do it properly this time.A larger and denser map. More settlements. Two capitals. A beast race to rival the world of men. Richly drawn NPCs and better quests. An expanded pawn system including a controversial but frankly brilliant meta-game in the form of a deadly disease that spread between users. Dragon’s Dogma 2 delivered where the original game had to pull back, bringing to fruition a singular vision that had eluded its creators before, finally running on hardware that could do it justice. As long as you had a VRR TV. Look, shut up.
It’s the decade-long chasing of that vision which impresses the most. There isn’t anything quite like it: quests aren’t checklists, they’re arduous journeys into an untamed wilderness, where you can feel civilisation slipping away with every stride. Its landscape is unforgiving, fast travel only barely exists and requires effort to arrange, and night means night: travelling in darkness means danger and no visibility, as opposed to everything being normal but tinted blue, as night time so often manifests in other games. But there is beauty in the inhospitable. Grand vistas, forests as dense as real life. And this game has the most realistic mountains I’ve ever seen outside of literally the Scottish highlands: they are emphatically there. Intimidatingly tall. Impossibly wide. Unconcerned about spoiling your view, infinite draw distance be damned. There are mountains and you will look at them.
In the time between Dragon’s Dogma and its sequel, the RPG landscape has undergone several game-changing revolutions. The cultural dominance of Soulslikes mercifully peaked and waned. The likes of The Witcher 3 and Zelda: Breath of the Wild caused enormous shifts in world design that are still massively evident in new and upcoming games. But for Dragon’s Dogma 2, all that might as well have never happened. It is entirely unmoved by all the strides that have been made in This Sort of Thing, seeking only to be the best version of itself. The genesis of the project may have been Capcom’s desire to have its own competitor to Oblivion and the like, but it achieved something much more worthy than that: it finally became Dragon’s Dogma. – Jim Trinca, Destroyer of Word Limits
In a year of political elections and excellent RPGs, there couldn’t be a more 2024 game than Metaphor: ReFantazio. From Atlus, creators of the Persona series, it shifts setting from high-school drama to epic fantasy and bases its narrative on an election to restore justice to the world and prevent a dictator from brainwashing the population. It’s a celebration of diversity as well as an ode to the RPG genre, with its varied characters and anti-prejudice themes wrapped up in a smart Archetype class system and nods to 90s classics.
Above all, it’s a damn fine RPG in its own right. Building on the premise of the Persona games, its calendar structure expands into a heroic adventure, its menus are exquisitely designed, and its operatic soundtrack includes one of the best battle themes ever. Its turn-based combat, meanwhile, is fast and thrilling, its Archetype system full of depth, and its plot folds in on itself to interrogate the very meaning of what a fantasy story can be. Metaphor: ReFantazio is grand and poetic and enchanting, but it’s also a game full of hope for the future – something we could all use a little of this year. – Ed Nightingale
When I first played Thank Goodness You’re Here! as a brief demo out at GDC, I worried it might just be a game about silly jokes and slapping people. Then I played more of it and realised it is just a game about silly jokes and slapping people, and that’s brilliant. There’s a mix of all sorts here, Beano and Aardman Animations, and that very specific, red-faced, lip-puckered, Matt Berry sense of humour (you know what I mean just from that, I’m sure. And yes he is also in it). Of the many games released this year that lasts just a few hours, and only costs a few bob, this is right up there. Games can be oddly serious business; maybe it’s time to treat yourself to a cheap laugh for a few hours instead. – Chris Tapsell
We certainly haven’t been short of great horror games this year, but few have captured the 0-60mph unravelling of the human mind under pressure in quite the same way as the brilliantly surreal Mouthwashing. You know from the start that your spaceship hauler and the rest of your crew are doomed – you’re the one, after all, who sets their collision course in motion. But as time flips between the before and after of this pivotal moment, we get to see how it all started, how it gradually starts to fall apart, and then the violent and sudden rupture of multiple psyches all at once. Mouthwashing delights in wrong-footing you at almost every breath, but it moves at such a brisk and bracing pace that you can’t help but feel enthralled to it. Nothing is as it seems on this cursed ship, and its tight quarters and corridors morph and bend to brilliant effect to mirror the crew’s deteriorating mental state. It’s also not afraid to have a good laugh at itself either, as reflected by its punchy, witty script and some particularly dark comedic interactions you can have with the near-mummified captain Curly. There’s simply nothing else quite like Mouthwashing out there right now, and it’s downright refreshing. – Katharine Castle
What is the purpose of a remake? How do you balance old and new, while preserving the thrill of the original game? These are questions Square Enix is exploring with its Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, with Rebirth proving a divisive middle entry. While some of its narrative changes have appeared convoluted, they’ve certainly got players talking. Simultaneously, the richly detailed open world, characterful storytelling, and beautiful performances have expanded upon the beloved original, bringing its story to life in ways players in the 90s could only dream of.
And while it only represents one part of a broader trilogy, it’s a brilliant RPG in its own right. Combat is a smart mix of real time and command-driven action, its extensive soundtrack is absolutely killer, and it’s (perhaps overly) stuffed full of things to do: from chocobo racing, to monster hunting, to dancing and piano playing, to the utterly absorbing Queen’s Blood card game. Rebirth presents an entire world for Final Fantasy fans to lose themselves in while preserving the original’s tonal shifts from dark sci-fi conspiracies to bizarre characters, camp cutscenes, and the palpable homoerotic tension between its leads. Square Enix went with a maximalist and flamboyant approach to gaming remakes, which certainly worked in its favour. – Ed Nightingale
When I think of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I think of its journey to release – and the relief I imagine its development team at BioWare felt seeing the project finally launch, to a generally positive reception, after a sometimes-tortuous 10 years. Veilguard is by no means a perfect game, and there are moments where a decade of witness marks are visible. But as much as it is a different proposition to Dragon Age: Origins – unsurprising, coming some 25 years later – and as much as it stands somewhat in the shadow of last year’s genre-defining Baldur’s Gate 3, Veilguard still stands tall, strengthened by its similarities to other BioWare greats.
In Veilguard I can see the character work of Mass Effect 3 and Citadel, particularly in the brilliant Davrin and Emmrich, and the ambition to build towards a thrilling conclusion of a kind we’ve not seen since Mass Effect 2. It is the developer’s most enjoyable adventure, with brilliantly designed environments that expand over time, and certainly BioWare’s most technically stunning and beautiful effort to date. It is a return to form, and makes me excited once again for BioWare’s Mass Effect team to build on these foundations next. – Tom Phillips
Animal Well is the kind of game you dream about. It offers a midnight world filled with nature and strange ruins, but it’s also dense, complex, and filled with unlikely secrets. It’s one of those special pieces of art that lives with you for such a long time that it starts to feel like a companion. It encourages you to work out how it thinks.
And yet on the simplest level it’s pretty straightforward. It’s a Metroidvania in which you explore a large, interconnected series of grottoes using new tools to open up new paths. But the tools are brilliant in their mundanity – a frisbee, a slinkee, a yo-yo – and the ways you use them are constantly changing. Mechanically there is a strong sense that you’re following in the designer’s footsteps, finding the potential in your oddball arsenal in the same way that they did.
The game’s world is constantly unfolding, and offering new opportunities and revelations to those who learn how to look for them. It’s partly about pattern recognition and partly about taking really good lateral punts at things – often your weirdest impulses will lead to something good.
Clever as this stuff is, when it slowly fades from memory, what remains is pure atmosphere. This is a pixel-art world ripped straight from the early days of home computing, with all the idiosyncrasies that suggests. You’re not alone in the depths either, you’re surrounded by beautifully animated, playfully designed animals who share the caves and walkways with you. We loved Animal Well when we first played it – now, more than anything, we wish we could experience it for the first time again. What a beautiful thing this is. – Christian Donlan
How do you even begin to build on something as exactingly crafted as the original Silent Hill 2? Every step, every rhythm, of protagonist James Sunderland’s oppressive journey through the infamously foggy town is so imbued with underlying meaning, so key to understanding the larger picture, that meddling with it too much is liable to bring the whole thing crashing down. But developer Bloober Team’s deft Silent Hill 2 remake is quite extraordinary, not only modernising the beloved survival horror classic with intelligent mechanical finessing and a beautifully forlorn makeover but expanding and enriching it in genuinely additive ways.
It’s a remake of incredible balance, fiercely reverent to the original but unafraid to be bold. It slavishly hits every story beat, every iconic moment, except where there’s room to surprise; dialogue is barely changed, yet stellar performances find new emotional depths; anticlimaxes are reworked into unforgettable crescendos; it brings clarity without ever losing its sense of mystery; and, brilliantly, it even cheekily canonises an age-old fan theory, allowing this new version of Silent Hill 2 to harmoniously coexist with the original along the same timeline. But more than anything, it plays beautifully. Bloober skilfully explores new spaces within the original’s immovable structure, all while keeping masterful control of tone – and its bereft malevolence reaches some genuinely terrifying extremes. That the studio also manages to do all this with a gentle sense of fun, and makes one of gaming’s most wrenching closing acts somehow even more devastating, speaks volumes. – Matt Wales
There’s a case for a lot of games on this list being the game of 2024, but I think Helldivers 2 might be the one that pips it. Helldivers 2 released at the height of the industry’s period of catastrophic layoffs, as publishers scrambled to adapt to a changing, post-pandemic industry and as analysts went in desperate search of answers for what, exactly, makes for success. And Helldivers 2 had the answer: gameplay, above trends and fashions and not-so-sure-things, has always been king – and great gameplay comes from invention first, from giving developers time and space and the means to take a gamble. In this case, developer Arrowhead’s great invention was to mix the comedic brilliance of its more niche twin-stick efforts – the likes of Magicka and the first Helldivers – with an ingeniously novel concept: a “Game Master”, in the now-infamous Joel, who planned and responded in real time to the efforts of the playing public, pulling the strings of the game’s galactic war from afar.
The result is a kind of grand, divine comedy playing out across battlefields, regions, and planets. A sense that this whole thing is a bit of a prank – that “robot Vietnam” is very much an intentional nightmare, that just as one planet is saved as a result of Herculean communal effort, another will be plunged into a far worse conflict of its own. But also that you’re still in on the joke – mashing in Komani code-style combos into my controller to call in an airstrike, complete with frantic, finger-pointing ‘beep boop beep’ animations in-game, never fails to crack me up. Nor does ‘accidentally’ landing my drop pod right on a mouthy teammate’s head. It’s masochistic, darkly funny, creative, playful, strategic, thematically aligned, anti-fascist, mechanically tight as anything and indisputably new. If we must still insist on funding or designing games by formula, fine – give that one a try on for size. – Chris Tapsell
I’ve described Astro Bot as “mid-tier Mario”. You might see that as being negative and unnecessarily harsh on what is a wonderful, joy-filled video game, but that’s not my intention. If I told you that I’d make you wealthy, but only as wealthy as a mid-tier billionaire, well, I doubt you’d be upset (other than the new found stress of needing to work out how to use that money responsibly). Mario has been so far ahead of the competition in the 3D platforming space that being mid in this context is a rather incredible achievement. Sony now has a giant of the genre and as a result I now have more confidence in the industry to care about it once again.
Being popular does matter, but sentiment counts for something too when you’re building a brand. With Astro Bot Sony has made people feel good about the PlayStation. Not just in the current moment, but over their lives with the console. Big budget blockbuster narrative experiences have won PlayStation awards and millions of users, but Astro Bot made me (and many others) connect on a fundamental level. It’s fun to play video games. I didn’t think I needed to be reminded of that, but I guess I did. – Tom Orry
The biggest surprise success story of 2024, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a game that’s snuck into our collective hearts, walloped us over the head with its guitars, fly swatters and dusty brushes, and instantly won us over with its roguish charm and winning smile. This is a game that fully understands what Indy is, both as a character and as a series, placing us firmly in the baggy beige trousers of this whip-cracking adventurer whose globe-trotting treasure hunt takes us from the hushed halls of the Vatican, the sweltering deserts and jungles of Egypt and Thailand, as well as a few more explosive and spine-tingling locations along the way.
Within those environments, developer MachineGames has crafted a series of dense and deeply lived in spaces, giving players the tools to improvise multiple routes into tightly guarded areas, all manner of weapons and daft, everyday objects to clobber Indy’s enemies with, as well as an entire museum’s worth of brilliantly conceived mysteries, puzzles and sidequests to indulge in along the way. Indeed, the latter ‘Field Work’ assignments are frequently so substantial and crucial to filling in more information about the main plot that they’re almost full story missions in their own right. It makes everything feel important and worth your time in The Great Circle, tempting you further into its central mystery so you can prise open every last secret it has to offer.
It’s also just a bloody great action game, meshing approachable, fleet-footed stealth systems with muscular melee combat and some properly good tactile puzzle sequences. It’s all backed up by a wonderful cast, too, whose memorable performances and outstanding voice work bring that extra layer of polish to the whole experience. The Great Circle is everything you’d want and hope an Indy game to be and more, and we only hope MachineGames gets to reprise its role as long-term Indy custodians in the future. It feels like a bold new chapter for this studio, and it will be one hell of a ride to see what it does next. – Katharine Castle
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week it’s all about Christmas presents and video game memories we associate with the festive season – what we’ve unwrapped, gifted, or otherwise been somehow involved with at Christmas time over the years.
NFS: Underground 2 has been modded to look nothing like the original game.Watch on YouTube
I don’t think I have any amazing Christmas memories that are tied to video games I received. Most of my video game gifts as a child were on my birthday, just a couple of months earlier, but I do have a couple of lovely memories of giving the gift of video games.
My son, cursed to be obsessed with video games like his father (me), was surprised with a Switch and a bunch of games five years ago. In classic video game tradition we did the whole “And one more thing” reveal, and he was obviously over the moon. Lucky so and so.
Of more interest to you, reader, though, is likely the time I gave a copy of Need for Speed: Underground 2 on PS2 to a cousin who would go on to be a UK chart-topping pop star in the early 2010s. I say cousin… the family relationship is a little more complicated than that, but I’m going with it.
Happy Christmas, everyone! Let me know if you have given a present to someone famous.
-Tom O
Can you beat the joy of Zelda at Christmas?
I haven’t asked for any games this year – the curse of being a games journalist is that there’s usually precious few gaps in your library by year-end – but I will likely be playing varying degrees of NYT Sudoku this holiday, as well as finally tackling Star Wars Outlaws. For reasons even I’m not wholly sure about, that’s the big blockbuster from this year that’s calling out to me the most at the moment. Not Dragon Age. Not Silent Hill 2. It’s Star Wars, of all things. Though with a lot of travelling between families this week, I will likely load up my Steam Deck with a bunch of great indie games I’ve missed this year as well. Top of the pile? UFO 50.
I haven’t even given many games as presents this year – just Unicorn Overlord for my younger brother, as he’s already decked out with most of this year’s major RPG fare, which is his go-to genre these days. If there was a new Zelda or Xenoblade just out, those might have been good presents for my two older brothers – and yes, Echoes of Wisdom was in contention at one point. Then I discovered my younger brother already has it, so there’s a very good chance they’ll have just borrowed his copy instead due to our ancient family law of never ever double-buying anything (which I willfully ignore all the damn time, mostly because I just live much further away from all of them).
I do love getting a big Nintendo game for Christmas, though, and Zelda games at Christmas has always a bit of a personal treat for me – apart from the time I got Twilight Princess for the Wii for Christmas, but no actual Wii to play it on because I didn’t ask my parents to pre-order one in time and so had to wait three more months before I finally had a Wii to call my own and play the damn thing. The less said about that, the better, really. But I still can’t forget the sheer joy and excitement I felt unwrapping Majora’s Mask in the Christmas of 2000. It wasn’t just that it had a special gold cartridge. It was because it was all mine – a present for me, and not something I had to borrow from my brothers. Most of our other console games up until that point were all shared between us, but Majora’s Mask was finally something I could call my own – something they had to borrow from me this time, if they wanted to play it (which they didn’t really, in the end, as my older brothers were off to university at that point). But cor, I really did love that little gold cartridge. Steam credit just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?
-Katharine
A Christmas Dream(cast)
The first time I saw Sonic in full 3D on a Dreamcast I was astounded. Though I grew up on the original Sonic Mega Drive games, I shifted to Nintendo for the N64 and fell in love with Zelda instead. But once the Dreamcast was released my heart was all a flutter as my beloved blue blur was chased by an orca whale, running around vibrant, rollercoaster-like levels in proper realistic graphics, not just a side-scrolling pixel.
I never actually owned a Dreamcast, though. I had friends who did and I distinctly remember Soul Calibur sessions after school, taking turns on Crazy Taxi, and one particular all-nighter at a house party playing Sonic Adventure from start to finish. Yet once the GameCube was announced – and subsequently swept up a load of previously Dreamcast-exclusive games (Sonic Adventure 2 and Skies of Arcadia specifically) – the dream was cast aside.
That’s why my partner and I have decided to gift ourselves a Dreamcast this year – the one console neither of us have owned. And then we’re going to scour second hand shops for all those iconic titles. I can finally play the likes of Shenmue and Jet Set Radio. I can kick his arse at Power Stone. I’ll have an excuse to play Skies of Arcadia again. And, no doubt, I’ll play Sonic Adventure once more and remember how it’s a bit crap actually but I still love it regardless. Christmas is all about nostalgia, after all. Which games should I catch up on?
-Ed
A flaming hot Christmas (Spyro 2: Season of Flame – Game Boy Advance SP)
Unwrapping the Spyro 2: Season of Flame cartridge for my shiny pink Game Boy Advance SP is a vivid memory I have of a christmas in the early 2000’s. My sibling and I sat on the floor underneath the tree unwrapping presents to christmas music while my very tired mum (that we got up at the crack of dawn) sat on the sofa excitedly watching our reactions to each gift we were fortunate enough to get. Then, it happened, I had Spyro 2: Season of Flame in my little hands – one of my first Game Boy games. I still remember ripping the paper off and seeing the iconic purple dragon adorning the case.
To this day, if I’m in need of a comfort game that’s not Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing, I’ll always hop back to Season of Flame. The gist was to hop across realms through portals to get back the missing Fireflies and having to navigate different themed areas. Candy Lane in Celestial Plains was themed around sweet treats, Moon Fondue in Starry Planes felt like you were on another world with the green sponge-like rocks around you, and (my personal favourite) Tiki Tropics in Sunny Plains where you feel like you’re battling your foes in paradise.
It was a pivotal game in my childhood as it was also one of the first ones I finished. I vividly remember the moment I clocked you could use different breath types to stop enemies: Ice Breath to freeze Rhynocs to make it easier to charge them, Lightning breath to bring machinery to life, and it wouldn’t be Spyro without flames! My little mind was blown that Spyro could now do all these things.
Also, this could have easily been my first experience with playing different characters in a game’s universe. There were levels where you could play as a Kangaroo called Sheila, Captain Bird, and Agent 9 (whose levels were ones that really tested my patience – and still do.) At this time, being able to play as anyone other than the main character blew my little mind and was the coolest thing on the planet.
But, the above are just the minor reasons this game has stuck in my memories since getting it all those Christmases ago.
The reason this Season of Flame is such a fond christmas memory is that, as I was only young, I did find some of the levels tricky and I just remember sitting beside my sibling after christmas dinner while they taught me what to do. From using Spyro’s glide and hover ability to get to platforms far away or how to outsmart the Rhynoc playing ice hockey, these are just a few of multiple moments my older sibling helped me get through. Learning to beat the game was, indeed, awesome but having that time just sitting together and being shown what to do to someone who was, frankly, the coolest person ever, has played a huge part in my video game journey and taste has been one of my favourite gaming christmas memories to date – and I’m playing it again this year!
-Marie
That’s us done of the year, but we’ve got plenty of Game of the Year articles to come. Please do share your video games at Christmas stories in the comments, and we hope you’ve had a great holiday.
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week, we love a nice festive level, tackle some plant-based puzzles, and explore a brilliant open world while wearing some tremendous outfits.
Look, I’ve got so many games on my list that I’m keen to play, but when Astro Bot got a free winter/holiday themed level I had to play that immediately. It’s, as expected, rather lovely. I wrote a completely original song, not at all based on an existing Christmas classic, to celebrate its release.
DualSense rings, are you listening, What a pain, Retro Rampage A beautiful sight, Puzzle Piece tonight, Walking in an Astro wonderland.
Gone away is the Deckster, Here to stay is my blister Damn that time trial, Live in denial, Walking in an Astro wonderland.
Welcome to the last weeks of December, aka: the weeks where we play ‘Let’s mop up all the millions of great games we missed from earlier in the year’. I’ll be honest, readers, despite playing loads of games from January to March this year, and then another truckload in these latter months from September onwards, I’ve got a great big gaping hole of games I’ve missed from the spring and summer months – something I’ve been trying to rectify with some rapid-fire quickplays lately to see what grabs my attention and what doesn’t.
One game I wolfed down in a single evening recently was Botany Manor, a sedate puzzle game about growing all sorts of weird and wonderful plants inside a picturesque Somerset stately home. These aren’t your typical roses and daffodils, though. Rather, these rare and exotic strains will only bloom under very specific circumstances – the right room temperature, say, or having its soil juiced up to a particular pH by crushing certain apple varieties into it. My favourite was the Wolfglove, which only bursts into life when you recreate specific sounds and wind speeds inside an old tower to mimic the environment of its mountainous home.
It’s very artfully done, and the puzzle of working out what conditions you need to induce require a fair bit of brain power to suss out, putting together clues and information from notes, letters and observations you’ll find strewn about the desks, bins and tables of the manor. I was expecting it to be another one of these cosy game pushovers where all the thinking is done for you, but I was pleasantly surprised by the rigour of its cerebral challenges. Plus, it’s just a wonderful space to noodle about in, its bright and vibrant colour palette and seemingly interrupted spate of picnics and discarded deckchairs bringing touches of The Witness to it. It’s a very jolly time, if a little summery for such a wintry, end of year playthrough.
-Katharine
Infinity Nikki, PS5
Despite playing a lot of open-world games (welcome to guides writing), there’s not many that I genuinely enjoy exploring. I may get sucked into ticking-off side quests for a short while, but there’s a reason the last Ubisoft game I completed was Assassin’s Creed 2: open worlds just seem so big, and scary, and boring a lot of the time. But when a game understands what its audience wants, an open-world isn’t a challenge anymore – it’s an invitation.
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Infinity Nikki invites us to find hot air balloons, bubble blowers, magical hopscotch, and giant bird-like Sky Monarchs, which you can ride on the back of to take in the fairytale sights of Miraland. There are also adorable fairy-like Faewish Spirits to help, cute animals to pet, and thousands of pieces of clothes to customise your Nikki with, to fit whatever style you’d like to see her in while exploring.
It’s massive, yes, but Infinity Nikki’s world seems like it’s designed in service to how happy and joyous it can make you feel, not how much it can pack in to keep you distracted. It’s not perfect – there are bugs at launch, and the standard open-world trappings like collectibles are still present, but for the most part, Infinity Nikki is about as upbeat and cheerful as it gets in video games. Not what I was expecting from a series with its roots in the mobile dress-up genre, that’s for sure!
-Jessica
Don’t get too festive in the comments just yet. We’ve got a Christmas special edition of What We’ve Been Playing going live on Christmas Day morning. See you then.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard, PS5
Image credit: Eurogamer / EA BioWare
I’ll admit I’ve never been the biggest Dragon Age fan, though as a lover of fantasy RPGs and Mass Effect, on paper the series is right up my street. I’ve played Origins and Inquisition, but they always felt a step behind their big sci-fi brother and, beyond some fun characterful moments with companions, felt generic compared to others of the genre.
Veilguard has changed my view a little. Its streamlined gameplay is more akin to Mass Effect but better and more focused for it, while the new visual style helps to give the game its own identity. With its rounded characters, flamboyant hair tech, and soft lighting, I feel like I’m playing a Pixar fantasy in a L’Oreal advert, with some truly spectacular environments too. It looks great!
It’s been years, though, since I played Inquisition and without deep lore knowledge the story of Veilguard felt nonsensical and its characters not as immediately likeable. And beyond its dated quest design, it was the repetitive combat that frustrated me above all. I played as a mage and spent most of my time dodging enemies rather than attacking: between constant aggro, enemy animations that seem perfectly timed to interrupt your spell-flinging, and a lock-on that constantly removes itself when interrupted by the environment, I was near catatonic with rage by the game’s end.
And yet (!), somehow I felt compelled to see it through. For the most part I found Dragon Age: The Veilguard to be mindless and monotonous, but I think that’s actually what I needed right now. After a long year of plenty of lengthy, complex and challenging RPGs, I was keen to lounge on the sofa and sink into something a little more relaxing. The check-list missions, button-bashing combat, and follow the marker quests proved surprisingly engrossing. Right now, that’s good enough.
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week, we admire temporary rule-changes in a game, we play a real-life advent calendar somehow, and we push to the end of a long fantasy adventure.
This week I’ve been looking at my Xbox version of Spotify Wrapped – the thing that lets you see how much time you’ve spent playing games this year and which games you played the most – and while my favourites weren’t too much of a surprise (an egregious amount of Fortnite and another 90 hours of Baldur’s Gate 3, standard) I was taken aback by the amount of time I’d already put into Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
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To be clear, I have not yet finished The Veilguard. I fully intend to, and maybe next week when I have some time off I finally will, but right now, going by Eurogamer’s handy list of main missions, I think I’m only probably around half-way. And I’m already at 45 hours. Have I really spent nearly two days playing? I mean I guess so – I’ve put in an hour or so a night for a lot of the past month. But what have I actually been doing? Is everyone else taking this long?
I think I’m playing The Veilguard slowly, not just in the short length of my play sessions squeezed around life’s other bits and bobs, but also physically in how I move around its world. I do fast travel, obviously, because actually going through the Crossroads and finding the right Eluvian portal to each area would be ridiculous. But when I do find myself walking through those areas, I am actually walking, compared to so many other games where I feel compelled to run.
The Veilguard is beautiful, and its large areas are smartly designed to funnel players to specific places while maintaining a sense of freedom. This isn’t open-world, or whatever Inquisition was, where you can run up a hill and find nothing much worth your time when you get there. The Veilguard’s areas feel curated, their limited spaces enhanced by a great view whenever you’re on the way to something specific.
Plus, of course, I’m doing all the sidequests. I have a fairly good idea where the game is heading – I can see the faction reputation bars that need filling and I am something of a completionist, especially when it comes to BioWare games. So, yes, 45 hours in and probably another 45 to go. But that’s fine – I’m enjoying my walking! I don’t really want it to end.
-Tom
Path of Exile 2, PC
In I go. Wish me luck? | Image credit: Eurogamer / Grinding Gear Games
I’m smitten by Path of Exile 2 (as you’ll no doubt have gathered from my Path of Exile 2 early access review). There’s so much good thinking across the game. Something I’m currently alternating between loving and being frustrated by are the Trials of the Sekhemas, which are trials you must complete in order to earn your ascendancy – your class specialisation – because they show so much of what the game is about.
Number one: they have a cool setting. The Trials are housed in a mysterious temple that’s carved into a dark canyon, the braziers of which light up as you walk past, as all furnishings in cool temples are wont to do. There’s little to no explanation of how it works when you get there, which is maybe an early access thing or maybe a Path of Exile 2 thing – it’s hard to tell (I’m totally okay with it being the latter). You just talk to an equally mysterious NPC – who you recently fought in battle – and head in. It’s eerie, it’s dark, it’s foreboding.
Number two: the Trials change the rules, and I adore this. ARPGs can become switch-off games when things get too repetitive, so finding a way to mix things up works really well.
There’s loads of information in this Path of Exile 2 trailer.Watch on YouTube
The Trials flip the game into a kind of Roguelike where you have to complete alternating trial-types across a series of rooms, that you plot your route through on an adjoining map, all of it culminating with a boss fight at the end. But here, instead of losing only health in the normal way, you also lose Honour, which is a resource specific to the Trials. And should your Honour reach zero, you will fail. It doesn’t matter if you have a full health bar – you will fail and have to start again.
Therefore, you have to be much more careful and respectful of enemies. You can’t rely on recharging shields or health potions to get you through; once Honour depletes, it’s very hard to top back up, and you’ll need as much of it as possible to take on the boss at the end.
I still haven’t beaten the first trial – these things scale right up into the endgame by the way. It’s taken me numerous runs to really understand how it works and how best to approach each room and what the boons (buffs) do and what the afflictions (debuffs) do, and something about being a melee character makes the final boss encounter really tricky. But I’m getting closer – it’s slow going but I’m getting there.
But I’m enjoying it – that’s the key thing. I’m learning, and that’s what Path of Exile 2 is about. I’ve been forced to learn more about how enemies work and where I’m taking damage – damage I didn’t even used to notice. In essence, the game has found a way to teach me more, and I love that.
-Bertie
Advent calendar, cardboard
I am a small elf, working hard to get everything ready for Christmas – I can’t let everyone on the Nice List down. But, oh no! In a bid to get things just so, I accidentally locked myself inside a cupboard in Santa’s Workshop, and now I must find my way back out again before Christmas Day.
Image credit: Eurogamer
This is the premise of my advent calendar this year. It is an escape room, and every day I must solve a puzzle which will lead me to the next door (and a rewarding square of chocolate). There are no numbers on the outside of the advent calendar, which adds an extra thrill to the puzzle solving process. The only way to know if I have solved the puzzle correctly is by opening a door and seeing if the number on the inside lines up with the date.
So far, the puzzles have seen me cutting up one door and rearranging the pieces to form a word, which led to the next door. Another puzzle saw me flipping the whole calendar over and using a previously removed door as a compass of sorts, which then pointed to some flags that related to different letters of the alphabet. When I found all of the letters, they spelled out a word which led me back to the front of the calendar, and to the correct door. I definitely felt like I had earned my chocolate that day.
This year’s advent calendar is easily my favourite advent calendar to date. It even trumps last year’s coffee one, which is something I never thought I would say. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a rather curious image of a checkers board that needs my attention. Byeee!
Soulslike thrills combine with sky-high production values to make Path of Exile 2 a hugely impressive package, even in early access.
Path of Exile 2 is hard – there’s no getting around this simple truth. It’s a truth you need to understand before you play the game in order to get the most out of it, and to accept it, if you like. Like the Souls series, this is a game about relishing the challenge and overcoming seemingly impossible odds to move forwards. Through perseverance and trial and error, you will succeed, and you will feel all the more incredible for it.
I say this upfront because it’s clear that some players out there are a bit confused by what Path of Exile 2 is about. On PC, barely an hour goes by in the game’s general chat without somebody upending their proverbial table and declaring they’ve had enough. “That’s it, I quit! This game is s***!” they say, and then storm away from their keyboard, probably to return quietly an hour later. Chat’s favourite response? “Skill issue.” (I think you can tell a lot about a community and a game from its general chat.)
Their apparent surprise at the difficulty surprises me, not least because Path of Exile 1 is already a known quantity on this front, but you also have to pay to get Path of Exile 2’s early access period, so they’ve actively had to buy their way in – it’s not free-to-play yet like it eventually will be when it leaves early access. These players have deliberately made a choice. So where does the confusion come from? Diablo 4, it seems. People are flooding in from Blizzard’s ARPG expecting an experience like it – and it’s a path I myself have followed, too.
This is a great and long look at the systems that will keep you busy long into Path of Exile 2’s life. It also gives a great overview of the game in general.Watch on YouTube
They’re not wrong to do it: Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4 look very similar and generally play the same way. They’re both action role-playing games played from a similar isometric perspective, and they involve smashing your way through hordes of enemies, looting them, levelling up, and doing it all again. Glance quickly at them and they could easily be the same game. But, importantly, their hearts are different.
In recent Diablos, Blizzard has spent time and effort thinking about how to open the game up to newcomers, which is why Diablo 4 has an easy, standard difficulty and then gives you the option of turning it up (and up and up) if you want to. In Path of Exile 2, you don’t get that choice – there’s one strict difficulty and it cannot be budged – so if you come up against a boss you can’t kill or a challenge you can’t overcome, you can’t modify its difficulty down. Somehow, you’ll have to find a way through, and usually this involves dying. I’ve died upwards of 70 times since playing on the public launch servers, something I embarrassedly told chat recently, to which the chat replied “oh that’s nothing”, and death counts of 250 upwards rolled in. Path of Exile maker Grinding Gear Games sensed an opportunity in Blizzard’s change of heart and leant into it.
The other side of that difficulty is tremendous reward – heart-thumping adrenaline as the boss you’ve tussled with for seven or eight attempts finally approaches their demise. It’s the heart-in-the-mouth excitement as I thump my monk’s killing blow ability, hoping it’ll land before I end up face first on the floor. Hard-earned progress and satisfaction: that’s what you get. And with only one difficulty level, it means everyone in the game experiences everything in roughly the same way (the variable being you and your character), so when someone flips their proverbial table in chat, everyone else there knows what they’re talking about. As daunting as the difficulty sounds, then, think of it instead as the sun in a solar system, around which everything revolves. It’s what sparks life in every area of the game, and it’s an incredibly powerful motivating force.
The scaffold scene here is the game’s inspired character select screen, whereby you choose your character. The others hang and you escape. Note the Executioner standing behind the characters – it’s the same Executioner I’m about to face in this other screenshot later on. It’s nice how the game’s story loops back like that. | Image credit: Eurogamer / Grinding Gear Games
To backtrack a tiny bit: Path of Exile 2 is the sequel to Path of Exile 1, the free-to-play ARPG that grew from very humble beginnings and became many people’s pick of the genre for its unparalleled complexity and ability to keep people busy for hundreds and hundreds of hours. That’s all still very much present and correct here – you need only take one look at the 1500 nodes on the Passives skill tree to see what I mean (they do not fit on one screen) – and there’s even more complexity now in support gems that enhance your ability gems, so you can further modify them. There are character classes in the game, but it also gives you near complete freedom to bend them any which way you will, towards spellcasting or melee, and your knowledge of how to build them is constantly expanding.
The celebrated complexity remains then, but with Path of Exile 2 co-existing alongside Path of Exile 1 – a nice idea, especially as they share a cosmetics shop – there’s also a freedom for the sequel to be something different and not be beholden to doing the same thing again. To that degree, it’s a slightly slower experience. There’s a more tentative feel to exploring the world rather than romping around recklessly through it. Here, you edge forwards so as not to aggravate too many hidden enemies nearby. The game is fond of hiding enemies in relatively plain sight: bones that reform into skeletons; rocks that become crab things; statues that come to life; golems that erupt from the ground or walls. Should they surround you, and they will, then their physical presence means you might find it impossible to get away.
It’s a tricky game to do justice in screenshots. Scenes look small and ineffective when they’re not in motion, when you can’t feel the isolation of them, or sense the presence of large foes around you. This Colossus felt 10 times as big in my memory. | Image credit: Eurogamer / Grinding Gear Games
It actually reminds me a lot of the original Diablo games, which were quick to punish overconfidence. Come to think of it, there’s a lot about those earlier Diablo games in Path of Exile 2’s DNA. You have a tiny inventory you have to hand-organise and empty often, and it’s a screen by screen experience rather than a seamless open world. And even though locations are large – large forests, large canyons, large caves – there’s always a sense of claustrophobia to them, of tight confines, of 640×480 resolution hemmed-in-ness, if that makes sense. There are lots of bottlenecks, lots of potential hazards by design.
The mood of the game reminds me of old Diablos, too, not only because it’s morose and dark – it has the best opening: all of the character classes aligned on a hangman’s scaffold, ready to swing – but also in how oppressive the difficulty makes it feel. Diablo 1 feels scarier than Diablo 4 because you’re scared of dying, I think, and it’s the same in Path of Exile 2. Incidentally, there’s no punishment for dying in the game, and checkpoints are placed liberally around maps, and immediately before boss encounters. The biggest inconvenience is having to wade through some trash or in-between enemies again.
It all makes for a nervy experience – a leant-forwards one rather than a sat back one. Not always, I should add – there are moments where you will find the glorious golden sweet-spot in your build and begin your romp through environments and even through bosses – a feeling you will relish and revel in. There are also moments where you’ll farm or grind, returning to areas with a slightly lower level of monster so you can more easily rob them of their rewards. Usually, though, certainly when you’re pushing forwards into uncharted territory, you’ll be on the edge of your seat.
You can find spectacular unique items with fancy effects, but they’re few and far between. Mostly, you will look muted and a bit drab, which I quite like. Although this is juxtaposed against some frankly ludicrous outfits you can by from the game’s store. They jar with the austere tone of the game somewhat (though I was sorely tempted by the crustacean outfit, I have to say.) | Image credit: Eurogamer / Grinding Gear Games
What makes all of this sing, what prevents this from ever feeling unduly unfair or frustrating, is the skill with which it’s been built. You can really feel the decade of experience Grinding Gear Games has built up making Path of Exile 1, not to mention the resources it acquired from the success it’s enjoyed. Superficially, Path of Exile 2 is gorgeous – intricately detailed and elegant, and wonderfully dour and muted to look at, in a kind of Rembrandty-brown way. Think of a ‘Starks in the North’ kind of colour palette from A Game of Thrones (against which the faerie wings bought from the cosmetics shop somewhat clash, but I appreciate they have to be stand-out enough for people to want to get. I bought a rock pet that sprouts spindly legs and arms on a whim, and that rushes around ridiculously behind me).
Some of the game’s spectacles made me “wow” out loud, too. Typically, it’s the bosses, the game’s centrepieces. A towering Colossus looming over me like a titan come to life made me gawp, as did the gruesome sight of a hulking executioner lopping off someone’s head in front of me – that then rolled down onto a huge pile of bloody heads – before the fight began. There’s such drama to these encounters, witnessed in little speeches they give you before they leap into battle, or in the ways they taunt you as you fight. Rarely are they ever just oversized damage sponges you’ll forget the moment you move on; they are enemies with character and encounters with nuance, and your repeat attempts will sear the memory of them into your mind. No one will forget the Count at the end of Act 1 in a hurry.
The only endgame content I’ve had a chance to try is the Trial of the Sekhemas, which presents a kind of Roguelike challenge of a series of rooms, with a boss at the end, that you have to clear in order to get access to your Ascendancy powers – your class specialisation. But like everything in the game, it’s hard, and it requires getting to grips with some unique rules in order to prevail. | Image credit: Eurogamer / Grinding Gear Games
But it’s not all about boss fights: there’s plenty to be said for the menagerie you’ll meet in between, and not only the twisted sense of imagination that’s brought them to life, but also the consideration with which enemy types have been put together. I’ve got a love-hate relationship with a skeletal sorcerer who reanimates colossal skeletons, which literally throw themselves at your feet, doing huge damage if you don’t roll out of the way. Leave the skeletal sorcerer unchecked and they’ll reanimate these bones indefinitely, but getting to them in all the chaos can be hard, which presents you with a very real problem. The game is full of thinking like this – the accrued knowledge of how people play these games and how best to challenge them.
The zones themselves are visually impressive, too. Grim, cloying forests and pestilence-ridden, flaming farmlands give way to an expansive desert with craggy canyons and hidden caverns in Act 2, and a spectacular town-like caravan pulled by a legion of emaciated slaves, which serves as your hub. It’s a large, large game, even in early access. There’s an Act 3 I haven’t quite been able to get to yet, and once the game hits 1.0, there will be Acts 4-6 to wade through as well. Until then, you’ll have the option to rerun Acts 1-3 on Cruel difficulty, before the expansive endgame begins in a whole new zone of its own. The community reckoning is that it takes around 25 hours to clear Acts 1-3, a further 25 to re-run it, if not more, and then another 50 and upwards to get into the endgame – but given the general difficulty of the campaign, this can vary wildly. In other words, there’s a substantial amount here, and it’s an impressive package.
You’ll be getting use out of your enormous passive skill trees if you decide to take on Path of Exile 2’s endgame challenges. | Image credit: Grinding Gear Games/Eurogamer
A more pertinent question might be should you jump in now? It’s already polished and, barring a few server issues during the game’s public early access launch at the end of last week, a solid and stable experience, and there are no glaring issues with how the game works that should give you pause. But there are, naturally, some kinks and tuning issues, and there’s a general lack of final-polish and explanation (the lack of which can be quite endearing) that I’m sure will be added in the six months at least that Grinding Gear Games intends to keep it in early access (with active development obviously continuing for years thereafter, too, just like it’s done for its predecessor).
One particular annoyance for me was controller support, which is present and generally works, but becomes irritating when you need to select specific things during the heat of battle, because of automatic targeting. You can turn some of this off and play around with the settings, but there’s no escaping that it feels suboptimal compared to WASD mouse and keyboard controls. I haven’t tried this on console, but I assume that it’s the same there.
The safe bet, then, would be to wait for it all to be ironed out, and until you can try it for free as a free-to-play game. But there is something to be said for not missing out on the rush to play something for the first time, and the collective sense of community excitement that comes from that, as people figure things out and work out which bosses will become infamous and which builds will be considered overpowered. This is an online experience and I can feel it nudging me towards the other players to trade for loot – it’s stingy with drop rates – and to occasionally ask for help. But it’s nice to have other people around – it’s nice not to do this in isolation. Share your pain here and the community winces with you (or says “skill issue”).
Path of Exile 2 is hard, then, and it’s not Diablo 4 – and you need to know that before you dive in. But it is a bit like Diablo in the ways that matter. Much like Baldur’s Gate 3 did with BioWare’s old RPG series, Path of Exile 2 has found a way to reincarnate Blizzard’s old ARPG series for a new audience – and made something wholly its own in the process. Path of Exile 2 is a juggernaut, and worthy of all the plaudits it will no doubt get in the months and years to come.
A copy of Path of Exile 2 was provided for review by developer Grinding Gear Games.
Microsoft is expanding its suite of cloud gaming features by introducing the ability for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to stream a “select” number of their owned games to Xbox Series X/S or Xbox One consoles, without needing to install them first. It’s available to Xbox Insiders now, and will launch for all users at a later date. Microsoft has been touting the ability to stream owned games since 2019, with the feature initially expected to launch alongside its Xbox Cloud Gaming platform the following year. Unfortunately, it missed that target by quite some margin, and then failed to hit its revised launch of 2022. In the end, it took another two years for the feature to finally arrive, but since November this year, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers have been able to stream their owned games – and not just those available on Game Pass – to a limited number of platforms. Initially, it was only possible to stream games through TVs and via browsers on supported devices such as tablets, smartphones, and Meta Quest headsets. At the time, Microsoft said it would be bringing the feature to Xbox consoles and the Xbox app on Windows, but not until next year. So it’s a pleasant surprise to see that, earlier than expected, the console rollout is now here – albeit only for Xbox Insiders at the moment. Stream Your Own Game trailer.Watch on YouTube Starting today, Xbox Insiders in the Alpha Skip-Ahead and Alpha rings can – provided they also have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription – preview the ability to stream their owned games to Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One consoles. Users that meet both criteria can start exploring the feature by going to My games & apps > Full library > Owned Games on their console, then looking for (or filtering for) the cloud badge on compatible games. After that, it’s simply a case of selecting a game then choosing ‘Play with Cloud Gaming’. Image credit: Xbox The catalogue of supported titles does, however, remain extremely limited, with only around 50 games currently compatible. The good news is it’s a fairly strong line-up, mixing new and old blockbuster titles with acclaimed indie games. Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Warhammer 4K: Space Marine 2, Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Balatro, Hades, Animal Well, Dredge, Phasmophobia, and The Plucky Squire are some of the more notable games on the list – and Microsoft previously promised its “library of cloud-playable titles will continue to grow, as we work with our partners around the world”. If you’re not already part of the Xbox Insider Program, you can join up by downloading the Xbox Insider Hub for Xbox Series X/S & Xbox One or Windows PC. The full list of games currently compatible with Microsoft’s new cloud gaming feature can be found on its website.
Naiad offers real pleasures and real frustrations – but always with a purpose in mind.
There’s a moment when I’m swimming that I can’t get over. I’m about to start the front crawl. Feet up against the side of the pool, arms pointed forward, face in, kick out, and then…
…Then I’m suddenly entirely alone in a world of purest blue. That blue! The matte blue of the pool’s floor, coming to me through a few feet of water. With my head down, I can feel the surface of the water arc up over my scalp and shoulders. I have a breath to let out before I start to think about arms or legs, but for now I feel like I could stay in this place forever.
This is a feeling that Naiad, a new game about wild swimming, absolutely nails. There’s no polite pool wall to kick against, and Naiad themselves does a lot of backstroke and a lot of dolphin kicks rather than much in the way of front crawl, but that sense of being in the water, being in the water with a purpose, a sense of belonging, that sense that your skin and the skin of the water are working together to move you along? Naiad absolutely delivers.
Naiad’s a fascinating game, but it was such a thrill, such a watery delight at first that it took me a while to notice this. For the first few levels, it sets out a simple framework. Viewed from the top down, you move around a selection of lakes and little rivers, encountering wildlife, interacting with the things around you in a variety of toylike ways. You can sing to attract animals, so you do a lot of collecting ducklings and returning them to their parent. You can gather frogs behind you and land them on their lilly pads. You can sing to make the flowers grow, or to move bees back to their hives. You’re a sort of nymph, a spirit of the river itself, and in Naiad, particularly in the opening sections, the river is something that takes things home.
It’s beautiful stuff, with perhaps my favourite video game water since Super Mario Sunshine. You see the glitter on the surface, and the ripples where it meets the shoreline, and you see the way that branches and flowers settle on it and bob around. But you properly feel its invisible forces. You feel the current as something you negotiate as you use the simple controls: one stick to steer, another to pull off a dash, another to take you under the surface to navigate certain obstacles.
Image credit: HiWarp
There’s such a pleasure in textures here. The wildlife on the surface often looks like it’s made of paper: paper bushes, paper grass, paper birds that you’ve helped find their perches in paper trees. More complex animals are made of different parts, so a bear feels like a negotiation between his arms and legs and snouts. And the water itself? Nowhere and everywhere, revealed in a pearly sheen in some sections where you need to know specific currents, hinted at in trails of bubbles elsewhere. At the end of each level the entire screen dissolves in particles like wet sand before scattering. Naiad is a game to immerse yourself in.
Funny talking about sand, because around the two-hour mark, if you asked me what Naiad was, I’d say it was a very gentle sandbox. You get from A to B in the early levels, and you move through different bucolic landscapes, but by and large you can do what you want. Get the frogs on their lilies? There’s a bonus for doing that. Ditto the lost ducklings who need to be reunited. You could call these things puzzles, but they aren’t mandatory. They unlock lovely stuff in the menus, and the whole game is a bit like building a poem with earned pieces of text. But you can also skip as much as you want and just splash around.
Image credit: HiWarp
This changes, however, and it took me a while to spot that it was doing so. The world of humans slowly intrudes, and with it bespoke puzzles which have to be untangled, often to open the route forward and move you onto the next section. Two things here: Naiad is sometimes an awkward puzzle game. It can be hard to work out what you need to do in some sections, while the dreamlike anti-logic that powered the first section – of course I need to chain together a movement through three purple flowers – grinds a bit in the second, when you need to clearly understand causality. So there’s that.
But there’s something else that redeems this a little. Naiad’s second half is not as much fun as the first, and that’s kind of the point. It’s a bit like how wild swimming isn’t as much fun in real life now that we’ve filled the rivers and oceans with sewage. I’m tempted to say that Naiad pollutes itself a little – increasingly grim settings, less freedom, much less sense of wonder – because it knows that you can’t responsibly make a game about how brilliant wild swimming is in 2024 without acknowledging all the ways that humans have made it less wonderful.
Naiad makes a brilliant point, in other words, and does it very effectively. Deep in the later levels I properly yearned for the early game, where the waters were blue and there were ducklings that needed me to show them the way home. Even late on, Naiad’s still interesting and glorious to move through – there’s trash in the water, but those currents still work their magic. But I think I admire it more for being willing to frustrate me a little, just to remind me that there are real things at stake, and the world of swimming, outside my local pool and my weekly lessons, is caught up in all this stuff too.
A copy of Naiad was provided for review by developer HiWarp.
The greatest trick that Planescape Torment pulled is disguising its verbosity – an eye-watering script of 800,000 words – by relying on, and then swiftly subverting conventions. As an immortal known as The Nameless One, you wake up on a mortuary slab with no memory of how you came to be there. Typically this would be an opportunity for exposition, a perfect moment to explain to the player, via a cast of characters, about their circumstances, while allowing them to project their own identities onto a blank slate. But then a talking, floating skull points out that your body is heavily scarred, including one tattoo on your back with instructions on discovering your past lives. And it turns out the tale behind Planescape Torment is a more personal one. It’s about unravelling The Nameless One’s lifetimes of history, resonant with memories, rather than an altruistic, heroic odyssey to right a cosmic wrong.
And this is merely one example. These tricks are artful sleights of hand, with developer Black Isle Studios reforming somewhat established structures in RPGs with Planescape Torment. Take character creation, for instance; you begin by assigning points to your stats, but you won’t get to choose your character class. That’s because by default you’re a fighter, and only by meeting certain characters or completing specific quests can you embody the thief or mage class. According to the game’s design document, this is a deliberate decision by its developers, who wanted the player’s actions to define their character, rather than allowing them to choose a class from a dropdown list.
At the same time, Wisdom and Charisma were among the more important attributes, given how ludicrously janky combat encounters are. Rather than bashing skulls together, negotiating and even manipulating your enemies (and friends) may reward you with more experience points instead. The trappings of what makes a power fantasy has been demolished; banishing lesser beings with a mere flick of your finger isn’t likely to happen. So while you may chance upon a combat buff or a crudely doodled tattoo (Planescape Torment’s equivalent of stats-boosting equipment), the game undermines the importance of hoarding such supplies. Instead, it’s the possibility of unlocking more dialogue options and narrative branches that seems more appealing. Why eviscerate a zombie when you can talk to it instead? Planescape Torment was the anti-Diablo of the 90s.
That said, even among the pantheon of the era’s RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, Chrono Trigger, and the Elder Scrolls series, Planescape Torment remains an oddity: largely described as a “commercial disappointment”, and too offbeat, abrasive and self-indulgent to appeal to RPG enthusiasts when it was released. Unlike the adrenaline and strategising in these games, Planescape Torment eschewed fluid, immersive combat in favour of inscribing every scenario with nearly imposing walls of text and dialogue. The latter would have been tedious to plough through, if not for its writers’ ability to capture the minutiae of every interaction in abundantly gritty detail. One inhabitant of Sigil is portrayed as a presence with an overwhelming sense of eternity, “almost as if this man were a shell surrounding an illimitable expanse”. Another was a strange tale of a githzerai Ach’ali, who was said to have asked so many “useless and unfocused questions” that “her isle of matter dissolved around her, and she drowned”. Fortunately, Planescape Torment never gets any less bizarre.
The pyromaniacal mage, Ignus, who is now the centerpiece of a small bar in Sigil. | Image credit: Interplay Entertainment/Beamdog
And given that the game is set in the obscure Planescape campaign from Dungeons & Dragons, Planescape Torment featured none of the Tolkein races, the likes of elves, dwarves or goblins that were so commonly featured in other high fantasy RPGs. Instead, various humanoids races live in squalor, with zombies, wererats and fiends roaming in the underbelly and outskirts of the city of Sigil, and where beliefs can reshape worlds and bend reality.
Sigil, in particular, is deliberately disorienting and peculiar. Ever-changing streets shift to the whims of its inscrutable ruler, the ominously-named Lady of Pain. It’s where alleys whisper secrets and heave with agony. It’s where myriad interplanar portals that lead to several realities are hidden in plain sight. It’s where anecdotes abound, of unwary denizens from other planes who have been ensnared in Sigil against their will, as they accidentally stumble into the city through unmarked portals.
The streets are a mix of musky detritus and derelict buildings hastily constructed over one another, with towering spikes and jagged architecture lining its boundaries. So while Sigil is a thoroughly unwelcoming city, it’s also wonderfully fascinating. Every landmark carries a personality that’s reminiscent of the wretched lives of its denizens you encounter along the way. Even decades later, there hasn’t been another RPG setting like that of Planescape Torment, where even debauchery is engraved into its very grounds and walls, its spaces infested with a creeping sense of misery.
Planescape Torment’s chunks of text may be long, but they’re a delight to read. | Image credit: Interplay Entertainment/Beamdog
But discussing the game’s grotesque appeal would be remiss without bringing up The Nameless One’s companions. They’re a cast of compelling, yet eternally ill-fated individuals whose biggest folly was the sheer misfortune of running into The Nameless One. Morte, the jabbering floating skull who you first met at the mortuary, yaks so much that his insults (“Flies wouldn’t even rest on your carcass!”) can infuriate enemies into suffering penalties to their damage. But you’ll soon learn that his offer to guide you along your amnesiac journey is not a magnanimous one, but one borne out of guilt.
There’s also Fall-From-Grace, who’s a mixed bag of contradictions: a chaste succubus who likes engaging in intellectual conversations so much that she became a proprietress of a brothel – one that specialises in stimulating, intelligent experiences, rather than physical pleasures. There’s Dak’kon, a fiercely loyal githzerai who’s sworn to protecting The Nameless One for life, but also tormented by his immortality. There’s Ignus, a pyromaniacal mage who’s the centerpiece of a little establishment known as the Smoldering Corpse Bar, and who you can recruit if you can douse his eternal flame. And there’s also a walking suit of armour, Vhailor, who’s dedicated to meting out justice even beyond his death. All of them are tied to The Nameless One’s wretched fate in some way, and their backstories are essentially a chronicle of magnificent catastrophies. More so if you decide to steer the current incarnation of The Nameless One towards committing unspeakable evils.
Awkward conversations will be had when you’ve just woken up from the mortuary. | Image credit: Interplay Entertainment/Beamdog
And then there’s the question of death: the one device that Planescape Torment is perhaps most remembered for. The ability to live forever – to be killed but without being killed – has afflicted The Nameless One with the inability to hold on to any memories, and this has repercussions beyond what was immediately obvious. As a player, your death doesn’t spell the end of the game, with you merely materialising in the mortuary if you had suffered fatal injuries. This can, at times, be one way to help you out of tight spots, such as reentering certain areas of the game (fun fact: the mortuary can only be accessed by the dead). But more than that, this transformed the purpose of death as a mechanic. Your death is referenced and remembered by others, who sometimes discuss the nature of your immortality. Dying is no longer a fail state; it has become another means of interacting with the universe and its infinite perils.
Planescape Torment is genre-defining not only by virtue of its enthralling scenes, but also its horrific revelations, imparted through its text and narrative devices: that the past incarnations of The Nameless One might have been cruel in the name of pragmatism, that your deaths have doomed more than just a village of souls, and that the unforgivable nature of your crimes may have, ironically, doomed you to a lifetime of immortality. Its legacy is reflected in the fervent community discussions that are still going on decades after its release, and the influence it continues to have on modern games, such as the critically acclaimed Disco Elysium, which builds on the Planescape Torment’s love for the written word to also suffuse its world with paragraphs of velvety text.
That said, Planescape Torment hasn’t aged that well; it’s a 25-year-old game after all, beset by resolution issues, unintuitive UI and tedious, repetitive battles. But these feel like largely technical concerns – issues that are bound to show up as technology advances – with these largely polished with the release of an Enhanced Edition in 2017. Despite the years, the game’s tragic tale of torment, violence and mortality has remained as salient and invigorating as ever. I’m guessing that in another 25 years, it’s these traits that would stay unsullied by the passage of time.
