I was partial to a scrappy little strategy game even before idiot billionaires doomed the planet, and the UK to brain-steaming heat just when you thought we'd escape it this year. Khaligrad is plenty scrappy. Its edges are rough and you have to figure it out yourself, but it's more intuitive than it appears, and easy to operate once you discern some basics. It's scrappy too in that it's, well. It's Stalingrad. Not really: its world is so fictional it's their 15th century. But the invaders are explicitly fascists and the defenders communists embroiled in a long and brutal semi-guerrilla city war with World War 2 technology. Thankfully, it's stripped of any actual fashy or genocidal play-acting beyond each side doing "hail the empire/union" bits as a sign off.

I think that's why, despite its brutal and difficult setting, it's this year's entry in the long tradition of Low-Intensity Strategy Games For When Hot Why Hot Please Stop You Cannot See My Begging Tears For They Evaporate.

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I was partial to a scrappy little strategy game even before idiot billionaires doomed the planet, and the UK to brain-steaming heat just when you thought we'd escape it this year. Khaligrad is plenty scrappy. Its edges are rough and you have to figure it out yourself, but it's more intuitive than it appears, and easy to operate once you discern some basics. It's scrappy too in that it's, well. It's Stalingrad. Not really: its world is so fictional it's their 15th century. But the invaders are explicitly fascists and the defenders communists embroiled in a long and brutal semi-guerrilla city war with World War 2 technology. Thankfully, it's stripped of any actual fashy or genocidal play-acting beyond each side doing "hail the empire/union" bits as a sign off.

I think that's why, despite its brutal and difficult setting, it's this year's entry in the long tradition of Low-Intensity Strategy Games For When Hot Why Hot Please Stop You Cannot See My Begging Tears For They Evaporate.

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If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.

Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn't realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It's about co-ordinating all your pieces so they'll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don't organise its parts. It is… a lot. It's too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.

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If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.

Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn't realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It's about co-ordinating all your pieces so they'll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don't organise its parts. It is… a lot. It's too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.

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Sonar Shock is a reminder that some of the best game concepts or settings seem so obvious as soon as you play them.

System Shock on an unreasonably huge submarine on an equally ludicrous trip around the Northeast Passage via Cape Agulhas? With a satirical Soviet setting that isn't just "lol russia" or "I think Stalker was about machismo and gun attachments"? And a third thing that I'll get to in a minute because this intro is getting out of control? God yes.

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I regret not covering Skald Colon Against The Black Priory when its developer told us about it 2019. I'd get to be so smug now.

Skald is terrific. I've tried to come up with a clever angle on its journey, but they all wind up saying the same thing: For all its retro stylings (right down to party portraits taking up an unnecessary quarter of the screen at all times), it's an accessible, charming treat, and the best modernisation of 80s RPGs that I've ever played.

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I should be further in than this. My supposed rebellion has thus far eked out a territory that could be described as "where?". My personal reputation is great only among people who love mushrooms and hate deer. It's been long enough that I should probably be a fierce warlord running a large chunk of the kingdom in opposition by now, but instead, I have the skillset of fifty peasants, and the outstanding work of fifty three. And I know why. Bellwright has taught me what I already knew in theory, but had not truly appreciated:

Good managers are rare and precious. And I'm not one of them.

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We have been cursed with a terrible devouring monster. Each harvest, one villager must don the ceremonial, mildly magical mask, and enter the fields alone, to gather the precious life-giving ambrosia before the beast can befoul it. For five nights you must do battle, or evade its ravenous clutches.

Those of you who have known your own Devourer are surely thinking: Only five nights per year? Luxury. Harvest Hunt is good, though.

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Two years of early access have been kind Songs of Conquest. Its strategy fundamentals were already strong enough to impress me in 2022 that it's been quite tricky to even remember what's changed. But there's more of it, and although after much reflection I think it's not quite, quite for me, more of a good and unusual thing is definitely enough to push me into a very nearly wholehearted endorsement.

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I love building games, but it's not that often that put one down and feel particularly tempted to get straight back into it again. Of Life And Land is one of those, but thankfully not so much so that it threatens to consume my every waking moment.

It quietly does several things in a modest little way, that are all the more impressive for its lack of fanfare. The core one though, is that it takes the kind of simulationist foundation normally reserved for the punishing Dwarf Fortress derivatives or gnarly logistics games, and builds on them an approachable, gentle, even philosophical game instead. In a word: it's lovely.

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There are exactly one million metroidy rogueishy action platform games and that is okay. There's no such thing as too many of an entertaining thing in a world with, god I dunno, at least thousand humans in? Maybe more? Who knows.

They are rarely my thing, though. I try more than I really want to, for you, and games like Biomorph give me the energy to keep going through the many that leave me indifferent. This isn't one of my grudging admissions that a subgenre isn't all bad; it's a game that I can't even think of a way to complain about.

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It's not, strictly speaking, a goo. From Glory To Goo's enemy isn't a sinister gunge, but that minor disappointment didn't last long.

Its monsters are individual, blobby little (mostly) purple nasties, but they act as a flood anyway, taking great exception to your base and the resources it pipes back and forth (much like in Creeper World), but coming mostly in waves like They Are Billions. But the thing with FGTG is that there's always a little bit more to deal with than you think.

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Despite my desire for a real life herb garden, I don't really like farming or gardening games. Distant Bloom could be an exception, except I'm not sure it even qualifies as either, really. It is a little bit about exploration, a little about very light puzzles, and mostly in its heart, about cleaning up and making everything pretty.

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It's been a while since I snuck my diary into a column, huh?

Long-term readers might have discerned that I haven't been well for a very long time. I have various ailments, of which we all suffer, and it turns out that a mere five years of clinging on by your fingernails sometimes leads to some actual treatment for... all of them. Wild.

So while there've been a lot of interesting looking games in the shortlist lately, these last few weeks have been entirely too interesting for me personally. Piecing It Together is nothing more or less than 3D jigsaw puzzles. I've never even liked jigsaws, but it turns out that was exactly the kind of game I needed.

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"Very little Bela Lugosi" is not a criticism I ever expected to level at a game. It's not entirely unexpected considering he's dead, but I'm still grumbling at you, Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi.

It is, as it appears, an unabashed homage to Castlevania, but with none of the -vania, making it much more like the original (or the game boy ones, and possibly a few others in the series I don't know about): a straightforward, linear platform game about whipping monsters and not stepping on spikes. Ten a penny, right? But CNSBL captures it so well that it had me looking up old game boy tunes it vaguely reminded me of.

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I like a good management game, but my definition of "good" often includes words like "detailed", "complex", or "dangerously all-consuming". That doesn't mean, though, that I don't appreciate something light and simple now and then. In fact, Minami Lane might barely qualify as a management game by some standards.

There's no real pressure, no chance of failure, and its limit of a handful of levels lasting perhaps three or four hours just about taps it out. But sometimes such limitations are intentional, and exactly what you want from a game.

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I've had to look up.... goddamn it, hang on. I've had to look up Wrath Colon Aeon Of Ruin every day to remember its utter nothing of a name. Such a weak title deserves a much worse game, but this captures the feeling of its late 90s FPS influences as they actually were, and ends up just familiar enough to work, and just original enough to refresh the formula. At times, it's a little too accurate, but even with its annoyances dialled up by the pressure of playing it too hard for the sake of review, I'm impressed with the balancing act it's struck.

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I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting from Graven, but it still feels like it wasn't quite what I expected. That's both good and bad. It has the look of a 90s throwback FPS, the cool atmosphere and action RPG (barely RPG, really, restricted to which weapons you upgrade) combat of something from the 2000s like Rune or Dark Messiah, with a hint of a modern immersive sim. There is, I think, a better game to be made with those parts in a different arrangement. This one is only kinda good.

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I have never enjoyed those grid-based dungeon-crawling games. I dislike the very notion of dungeon-crawling in general, frankly, but the awkward juddery squareskipping rat-toucher games have always left me absolutely cold.

You will be shocked and aroused to learn that I preface with all this just so I can make an exception of Islands Of The Caliph. Does this mean she's becoming more open minded, or just that she's found a way to gripe and complain even within a recommendation? Who can say, readers.

What I can say is that I don't merely hate it less than its genremates. I think it's a bloody great little RPG, full of charm and detail that never drags it down.

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