Against the Storm describes itself as a Roguelite city-builder, and I’m not really in the market for more Roguelites but I am in the market for more city-builders. Combined with its fantasy setting – not super typical for city builders, which are often medieval but rarely this kind of high fantasy – and the way in which you have to network multiple settlements together in a way that makes previous scenarios relevant while getting away from pushing the limits of the mechanics too hard by making a city larger than what you’ve got the tools to manage effectively, and this one is climbing out of the Roguelike hole to get itself into the backlog.
Tactical RPGs seem to be a whole thing lately. Jagged Alliance 3 is a modern warfare turn-based tactics RPG, about recruiting mercenaries for a conflict in a jungle country called Grand Chien. The vibes I get from the art are Latin American, but that name sounds like maybe southeast Asian is what I should be thinking of? I’m not really looking closely enough to tell, this is a tactical RPG selling itself primarily as being a revival of an old series of DOS RPGs from the early 90s, and while that’s basically the path that got us XCOM: Enemy Unknown, I don’t get the feeling that lightning struck twice here.
There is some kind of strategic map to the game, but the way it’s pitched implies it might just be a fancy mission select screen. That’s a nice touch, and I do think most media about wars would benefit from keeping track of and making it clear to the audience who controls what territory, especially in video games where it’s so easy to just have a map in a menu screen somewhere, but that nice touch is not the same as the kind of strategic gameplay I’m looking for, and I see no trace of mechanics for building fortifications or supply depots, although there is at least a reference to “training the locals” and you do have to control multiple parties, splitting up your available cast of 40 recruitable party members in a way that might require you to actually position them differently on the map. On the other hand, it might just be that you get a list of 3-5 missions at once and have to divvy your mercs up between them, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not enough to justify a 50 hour time investment.
Blasphemous 2 is an easy pickup, I loved the first Blasphemous and while I’m not clear how the adventure could possibly continue after the Penitent One was martyred at the end of the first game, I’m also not really invested in Blasphemous’ plot so much as just its vibe.
Beneath Oresa is a Roguelike deckbuilder. Is there a quota? As is standard for these things, the art style is very nice, and I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and assume the gameplay is pretty well balanced, but it does kind of seem like this is the genre people gravitate towards when they have cool art assets but no vision at all for what kind of gameplay to attach to them. The nature of these posts means I have to bring this up either in context of a specific game or not at all, and that feels kind of unfair to whatever specific game I choose – I have no reason to believe that Beneath Oresta in particular is using Roguelike deckbuilding gameplay as a default because any vehicle for the art style will do. But with the number of games in this genre that have strong art styles and nothing else much that stands out about them, I’m really strongly suspecting that some significant chunk of this genre is using the deckbuilding Roguelike thing as basically [insert gameplay here].
Fort Solis is a story-focused adventure game emphasizing its realistic graphics and which directly compares itself to a Netflix series. So, this is someone’s live action sci-fi TV show that Netflix said no to, so they took it to another medium to get it greenlit. “Not even Netflix would take it” is not as damning an indictment as it was a few years ago, but it’s still not a great look.
Boxes: Lost Fragments is a puzzle game where you are a thief in a mansion full of cool kinda eldritch-looking treasure chests and you have to figure out how to pop the suckers open. This sounds like a perfectly cool idea for a game, but I don’t like puzzle games.
Dordogne looks like a water painted children’s book, evoking that “but it moves!” reaction that modern games can do sometimes, perfectly mimicking an art style that we’re used to seeing only in still images or passively-consumed animation and making it come to life in response to your controller inputs. It describes itself as a “heart-warming narrative experience” and the narrative involves exploring childhood memories, so this is very much an adults-reminiscing-about-childhood game. Adulthood is built on adolescence is built on childhood, so if this kind of thing happens to be foundational to the person you are today, then, great, but it’s not part of my foundations.
The Pegasus Expedition is a story-driven grand strategy game about humans fleeing some kind of cataclysm on Earth in a giant space fleet that arrives at Pegasus Galaxy to discover that it’s in the middle of a galaxy-spanning war (one which the humans inadvertently caused, but the marketing doesn’t say how – not sure if that’s supposed to be a mystery or if it’s just too complex to sum up in a bullet point). We have a lot of 4X space games that have interesting worldbuilding, but this is the first one that’s offered a plot, so I’ll give it a shot based on that. I like this genre, just not enough to sink 40+ hours into one of them on the grounds that they might be 10% better at doing the exact same thing as the last five, but the Pegasus Expedition promises to combine the genre with a focus on telling a properly paced story in a way that intrigues me.
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