Game of the Month - December 2018

Games
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2019

It isn’t 2019 yet in this thread! Mwhahahahaha! Lets think back to least year, and specifically last month…

What was your primary game this past month? It could have been a recent title, a new discovery, or something from your backlog. Or perhaps an old favorite you returned to years later?

My GOTM:
I ended up spending most of my free time playing and finishing and getting all the achievements for My Brother Rabbit , one of the best HOG’s of 2018. (Hidden Object Game)

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Honorable mentions going out for :
Book of Demons , more time will be spent with this in January, must kill tiny paper demons!
Northgard , won a Wonder victory last week, this is a enjoyable slow paced rts.
Railway Empire , grabbed 2 new dlcs for this (Canada and Mexico), its a fun train logistics sim.
A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build , I’ve ended up building like 20 snowmen so far.

What game defined December 2018 for you? What was your Game of the Month?

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Battlefront 2, courtesy of a month of Origin Access bought to try BFV. This subscription thing might catch on :/

It’s good to have an outright SF pew pew game :)

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I am so glad you enjoyed My Brother Rabbit this much!

My game of the month… This is going to prove very difficult.

I started my EF2000 campaign proper. It’s a mess. Nothing is going right, and I suspect we are going to run out of planes before the second week. The USSR already took over one of our half-dozen airports. Despite the ethereal aspect of the player’s presence (in contrast with Microprose ranks and medals progression system), this is very intense. Flying back to the base feels like such an achievement.

In this flight sim mood, I reinstalled Il-2 1946, which runs absolutely perfectly through Wine. I have started a Normandie-Niémen campaign there, and I didn’t remember the incredible attention to details of that game. Now that I know better how to fly (somewhat), the experience is very enjoyable, although I have only managed to harm a single bomber over my mutiple sorties — but again, reaching home alive each time feels like such an accomplishment.

As I had to stay out of my place a bit, I enjoyed a lot of iPad X-COM, a game which I grabbed in a sale because of the heartly recommendation I read on these forums. It’s plays incredibly well on the run (it even autosaves all the time!) and is very absorbing if you have more time to waste. I have the feeling the game plays better with this touch interface than with the original mouse one.

Around Christmas, I enjoyed Simmiland and Equilinox, two indie games about building a world, but those are actually more akin to light puzzle games (slightly less light in Equilinox’ case).
Speaking of puzzles, I have been enjoying Braingoodgames’ latest, Rolling in the Reef as well. I play a few games every day. It’s perfect, as usual with those guys.
I tried to jump into Warbanners, a tactical RPG with punishing difficulty, but I wasn’t in the mood for such punishment it seems. It also tends to glitch Wine after an hour of play, which is very discouraging. I will get back to it when I have a PC.

Then all hell broke loose a few days ago when a dear friend gifted me a Nintendo Switch. I grabbed a few games for it, and along them is Zelda. Now, I must confess I never quite enjoyed the games of the Zelda series. I was fascinated by their concept as a kid, but have been very disappointed by some of the five games of the series that I played, especially by A Link to the Past (a game where I was having zero sense of discovery because of the massive hand-holding, right from the manual).
This new one is such the opposite. All is open, nothing is much explained. It’s like Shadow of the Colossus, excepting instead of looking for tiny crumbles of anomalies or stuff to do every couple miles, freedom and life are everywhere. The semi-silent atmosphere is amazing. The tiny puzzle approach to map encounters reminds me of what I loved the most about MGS5. What an experience this has been so far. It even managed to turn the moribund setting of the series into something somewhat epic and dark for me.
I also grabbed Yoku’s Island Express, which is one of the most charming pieces of game I’ve seen since Michel Ancel stopped making games. As an insect lover, this is especially delightful.

So I have 4 games of the month and counting. I just can’t decide.

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Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

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In my typical gaming ADD fashion, my December was split between lots of various games. I spent the most time with the following, in no particular order:

Hearthstone
Magic the Gathering: Arena
Subnautica
The Messenger
Dragon Quest XI
CrossCode
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice VR

If I had to pick one single “Game of the Month”, it would go to MtG: Arena to mark my return to MtG after over 20 years away from the game.

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For most of the month it’s been For Honor.

Picked up No Man’s Sky after Christmas and that’s been taking my time to close the month /year.

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I guess for me it’d be Assassin’s Creed: Origins, shockingly. After loving Odyssey via Google Stream, I thought I’d give Origins a try and I am loving it.

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After playing so much RDR2, I was really surprised at how Dead Cells swooped in and stole game of the month in December in the last 3 days.

With RDR2, I was thinking, man, I’d love to spend more time as a cowboy other than just doing this one mission, but my son needs me right so I’ll switch it off.

With Dead Cells, I was thinking, man, I just need to freeze the next enemy ninja and then jump over and destroy the dummy, ugh, my son’s head is in the way, I have to lean around him to see the game. Great now he’s crying and I can’t hear myself play Dead Cells.

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Kenshi.

I also tried Subnautica, free thanks to Epic, but Kenshi drew me back.

And Rebel, Inc for iPad.

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Grim Dawn, with Slay the Spire as a runner up.

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I made it pretty far in Hollow Knight without using a walk through, but finally I said screw it. I just got tired running around the map trying to figure out if I could get past an obstacle yet. So I decided to use a walk through primarily just to tell me where to go. I recommend taking notes when starting to play the game to write down where there was an obstacle and what it was. In any case, Hollow Knight is a very good game with some pretty tough platforming at times and difficult boss fights. Does feel good when I finally get past a trouble spot.

I played through with a faction in Gladius Relics of War. It’s nice to have a 4X game where the war is interesting (other than Age of Wonders 3). The faction I played only allowed 2 city, so it will be interesting to see how it plays with a faction that settles multiple cities.

I’m still trying to get my ascension level up for the ironclad in Slay the Spire. I’ve been stuck at 15 for a while, but can get tantalizingly close to make me think I have a chance. This is the first ascension level where it isn’t unusual for me to die early.

I probably wouldn’t have purchased Book of Demons without the great coupon I got for owning Darkest Dungeon, but it was a fun romp down to kill the archdemon. I like the different ways the game has the player interact with the enemies. It did start to get a bit old, so it’s going back on the shelf for the time being.

I also enjoyed some digital board games vs the AI with Through the Ages, Armello, and Splendor.

Even with the newest update and adding some DLC (Utopia and Armageddon), Stellaris didn’t manage to score higher than “eh, it’s OK”. There were some good moments that I enjoyed but ti still feels so lackluster in general.

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Just Cause 4 for me. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was pretty awesome too.

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Been Skyrimming for a good while.

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Monster Hunter World. Nothing else came even close. Maybe Grim Dawn in a distant second place.

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Road to the North mod for STALKER: Call of Pripyat consumed most of my nights with some Astro Bot and Grim Dawn also thrown in.

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Every 4 months Hearthstone comes out with a new expansion, and that tradition was repeated in December. So all month I’ve been playing Hearthstone. And by “Playing Hearthstyone” I mean playing against this guy:

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And by “playing against this guy” I mean playing against this guy pretty much every single fucking game. And by every single game I mean probably 8 out of 10 games. This is too much. Fuck that guy.

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December also saw me playing a great new game, Book of Demons. It’s a fun game with a few arbitrary limitations (like the semi on-rails controls) that hold it back. But, poor, gimmicky, design decisions like this don’t ruin the game, they only make it less fun. The game is still a big winner overall.

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And lastly, the Spyro Reignited trilogy has been eating up a fair bit of time. The game itself seems to be a kids game through and through, so it’s just about the easiest thing I’ve played in a long while, but it’s super colorful, super relaxing, and just a great game to veg out to. It also has the benefit of being one of the best looking games I’ve ever played. The Spyro trilogy is so gorgeous that Mario Odyssey is just a sad, ugly, pixelated embarrassment by comparison.

I’ve already finished the first game of the trilogy and am 20% of the way through game 2, which introduced some much-needed new mechanics. I look forward to finishing this one.

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I went once more Into the Breach this month, and have been picking off some of the team goals I missed the first time around. Still love the constant stream of interesting tactical nuggets it’s able to serve up on demand.

Possibly the winner in terms of hours is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which I gave the kids for Christmas and wound up getting sucked into as well (I was just going to do a bit and unlock the characters they like, but the single-player mode is actually fun for once!)

Also spent some time with my trusty horse traipsing around the wild west, solving problems for townspeople and battling demonic cows in West of Loathing. It’s one of the funniest games I’ve played in years, though the battle system isn’t up to the same standards as the writing.

And back at the beginning of the month, I wrapped up two excellent platformers on Switch: Celeste and Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon.

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Tales of Maj’eyal, followed by an end-of-month Heroes of Might & Magic II spree. I’d never really played the latter much, and found it surprisingly hard on Normal difficulty. Took me quite a few playthroughs to get a win.

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Pathfinder Kingmaker.

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Fallout 4 (from the backlog), which I’m still playing. Might end up being GoTM for January too.