What has been 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? Honorable mentions are also welcome, these would be other games that you enjoyed this past month, but not the one you spent the most time enjoying.
For January 2024 my game of the month is:
SW: Jedi Fallen Order - Late to the party on this one, glad I decided to start playing it. The blend of dark souls, tomb raider and star wars is perfect. Just wish the loot chests were more meaningful. I really like the map design, has great metroidvania feel to the locations.
Honorable mentions:
Antihero - always on the list, had a few lopsided games with @geggis
Cyberpunk 2077 - Haven’t play much recently, but any time spent with it has been time well spent.
What game defined January 2024 for you? What was your Game of the Month?
My game of the month is Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, without a doubt. Super fun gamey.
My runner-ups would be Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag (I’m replaying this one - maybe I’ll finish it this time!), The Talos Principle (ditto), Lies of P, and (as usual) Final Fantasy XIV Online. And I guess Dominions 6 would be there if I had played it. But I will. Eventually. ;)
Alongside more Against the Storm, I played two episodes of Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. I had finished the first couple episodes a year or so ago and then took a break.
Great Ace Attorney is delightful! I really saw the original Phoenix Wright games as fun but flawed. Great Ace Attorney is just as silly (and still a travesty of a legal system) but has a deeper story and more robust mysteries with fewer stupid leaps of logic. When you’re on the game’s wavelength, there is some stirring melodrama and a lot of laugh-out-loud character moments. I might be taking another break for awhile before finishing the last couple eps, but I will definitely come back to finish it up.
I started a game of Stardew Valley together with my kids. I’ve already put countless hours into the game but it’s the first time I’ve played it with them. It’s probably the perfect family game and its local coop works great.
However the game I played most this month is the same one that has taken up most of my gaming time the last few months — EA Sports WRC. It’s become almost like a ritual for me to drive at least one or two stages each night when the kids are in bed. This game (and other rally games) have a tricky learning curve but once you have learned to drive decently well it is more rewarding than almost anything I have played in the past year.
I also loaded F1 2023 on game pass and have been playing through its single player narrative campaign. I read somewhere that it is the best story mode in a sports game and I have to agree. Makes me wish that their WRC game could get the same kind of mode.
After spending pretty much all of December on PTO, and not doing nearly enough gaming I made up for it in January. I went on a 4x kick and put a number of hours into Distant Worlds 2, Galactic Civilizations 4, Shadow Empire, Dominions 6, Master of Magic, Stellaris Nexus, and Stellaris. I even did a playthrough of the Gladius tutorial yesterday. In the end if I have to rate them for the month:
🥇 Shadow Empire
🥈 Dominions 6
🥉 Distant Worlds 2
I enjoyed my time with Gal Civ, and the new Master of Magic as well, finally playing through a whole game of MoM and remembering that ICS was a thing back then. I played a couple games of Gal Civ, and enjoyed it more than I did the last edition. I like the colony/core world mechanic and hope that migrates to some other games. I finally broke the seal on the Dominions series and put in some hours on 6. The only thing that really stopped it from taking it up most of the month was that I got on a Shadow Empires kick at the same time. Previously having undiagnosed adhd, plus with the family and work means a large backlog and a lot of games with not many hours in them. This month was enough to put Shadow Empire at #14 on my Steam playing time list, with Gal Civ also grabbing #20 with its ~50 hours. I find myself deep into the 400+ manual of Shadow Empire, and the Domions 6 manual, which is probably more game manual I have read than in the past 15 years.
So a good month of gaming, and hopefully the start of a great year of gaming.
Void Bastards - heaps of mindless shooty fun. Did a normal difficulty run, and the hardest difficulty run. Gave me some Bioshock vibes (of course). Looking forward to their new release soon Wild Bastards.
Two Point Campus - game still doesn’t completely grab me. I like it, but don’t love it. It feels easier compared to Two Point Hospital but something about it doesn’t feel as engaging.
Grim Dawn - my first exploration into the new patch that dropped last year. Nothing but positive changes. Diablo 4 can fuck right off, this is THE ARPG to play.
Jagged Alliance 3 started at the end of the month but so far positive vibes with it. A good JA2 successor I think.
Baldurs Gate 3 - Finally finished this. A bit disappointed by the ending. But overall this game is a piece of art. Palworld - I just jumped on the hype bandwagon, to see what the fuzz was about. And while it’s not really a good game per se, it’s not a bad one either. And I get a strong vibe of “just one more task before I sign off…”.
Limited play time but what I did manage would be a mix of Rogue Trader and Old World.
Rogue Trader is not Pathfinder-quality, but it certainly has its own style and draw in a setting that was unfamiliar to me.
And Old World’s newest DLC is keeping the brilliance of that game chugging along. I’m wary of letting it eat up my time because I want to get through some others (like Rogue Trader) but……
A lot of games vying for very little gaming time but the clear winner this month is Grounded, which I’m playing for the first time. I wish I had hooked some people along to play co-op. Playing on PC but surprisingly it runs great on Deck. Great for a couple late night resource gathering or recon runs.
Well, it hasn’t been a great month for me, mentally, so my desire to play was pretty limited.
Game of the Month for me was definitely Palworld.
I’m all about defying expectations, and I expected little when I started it.
Well. Turns out it’s far more polished than expected (though there’s still plenty of jank), and it’s a weird and wondrous mix that somehow just works out, and works out well enough.
I now long for some AA quality monster hunter game with base building and survival elements, which will likely never manifest. In the meantime…well, might as well breed some more Pals.
A shout out to the tireless R34 artists that embraced the game, though. Over 1000 lewds in less than 2 weeks is an impressive output.
No honourable mentions, as I bounced off pretty much everything else this month. Wall World turned out to have an utterly atrocious ticking clock, Enshrouded felt like Gothic with survival elements (and, sadly, not in a good way for me), and En Garde…well. It was fun, and then it was over.
I picked up a bunch of game the last few months, both recent releases and games I missed out on in 2022, and yet I’m back to Grim Dawn. It’s just so much fun to play, with the minute-to-minute gameplay always fast paced & challenging.
I also went back to Valhalla and Soul Hackers 2 on and off.
Soul Hackers 2 was underappreciated. People need to get over it not being Persona. It’s not groundbreaking, is clearly not a big budget AAA title, and is pretty much more of the same at its core, but that was good enough for me.
The title has to go to Against the Storm. I didn’t play in early access, except for maybe 1 city a long time ago so it was mostly all new. The game is really good, I put over 100 hours into it. I just got into the first prestige level before I moved on so I have lots more I can go when I circle back to it at some point.
I’ll give the runner up to Dune:Imperium based on how much I liked it even though I played it less hours than some others. A really fun take on worker placement games. I never played the physical game so this was totally new to me.
The hits keep on coming because DotAGE is also pretty good. I didn’t make it all the way through the prophacy phases yet. As I mentioned in the game thread things can go bad really fast in that game. I small oversight and my poor people are getting sick and I’ve got a pile of 30 bodies freaking the survivors out.
Another good one is Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles. The different characters play pretty differently. It’s a deck builder with dice. My only real complaint is all the different iconography. I find it hard to differentiate between similar ones and just tell at a glace what things do.
Slay the Princess was OK. I enjoyed it for a couple hours, but didn’t want to keep spending more time with it.
I also dabbled with Station To Station, Railroad Ink Challenge, Blasphemous and PocketCiv. They were all pretty good, except I don’t really enjoy PocketCiv.
