Or it’s possible no one on their staff played it. There’s so many good indie games now, it’s possible to miss them completely. I bet none of these outlets have played Northern Journey, for instance, rather than them having played it and decided it doesn’t deserve recognition, as one example from Krok.
What is Trials of Fire btw? I’ve never heard of it. Is it a card game? It’s tearing me up inside that so many of these indie games getting awards this year are card games. Do I break my rule and play them anyway, even though I don’t like card games? Maybe they’re the type of games that appeal to everyone, not just people who like card games.
Did it turn out well? I bought it, but after I couldn’t figure things out, I tried to learn it via reading the various Old World threads and then a day later gave up and decided “I’m too old for this shit”. Meaning, to be trying to learn how to play games via reading stuff outside of the game.
I never read a thing about Old World, not even most of the in-game info that’s everywhere, and never found it to be remotely hard to learn.
I used a bog standard 4x strategy:
Scout from the jump, find your enemies and places to build cities.
Take over territory as fast as possible with cities because if you don’t the AIs will.
Build military large enough to scare others from attacking but not so large it dings the economy.
Take on each target of opportunity as it becomes available. Slowly grind out the win.
Sure there’s a bunch of substiles buried in it I missed that provide more nuance and probably even more enjoyment for those who dig in, but it’s not like I had to know them to beat the game.
Yeah, I just realized Slipways was this year and have been surprised it hasn’t been on a single major list I’ve seen. Maybe because it came out so early in the year?
I understand titles in smaller-sales genres won’t make top-5 or top-10 general lists. My confusion stems from the fact Polygon has a top 50, Kotaku a top 28, and IGN a strategy-specific set of nominees, and none of those sites had any of the mentioned strategy games.
Maybe it’s all explained by revenue per genre? I find these games because I like the genre, and I don’t know what their market share is. Such as, if a genre’s not at least 5% of the total, there won’t be any emphasis on finding writers who have an interest in it.
The Gamespot article doesn’t do a good job selling it. A game about pushing boxes around with constantly introduced new rules about how you can push boxes?
They have a demo on Steam though, so I’ll check it out. Thanks for the heads up!
@Rock8man Yes, Trials of Fire is a card game, but it’s also a turn-based tactics game. It’s pretty cool, I need to go back to it (like so many other games).
