To be honest, I'm pretty proud of the treats we kept behind each Advent Calendar door this year. All of my top picks are there, plus a few more that I haven't played but have seen other people play and had a great time doing. Still, there are always a handful who don't make the cut, but still deserve a plate full of Christmas praise at the end of the year. So here's my selection chart, my bonus games of the year for 2024. This time it's an unusually diverse triad.
wrapped
When I first played Enshrouded earlier this year, I wasn't impressed with its main point of difference from other survival and crafting games (the monster-spawning, landscape-covering Shroud). It's a pretty game with an interesting world to explore, and when I stick my head into the Shroud, I replace that wonder with time pressure, good-but-not-great combat, and a lot of murky fog. Still, Keen Games deserves praise for creating by far the best building system I've encountered in the genre.
Seriously, I found it hard to go out and do other things to complete my early access review, because all I wanted to do was keep building. Powerful tools let you create gorgeous-looking builds much faster and with much more freedom than comparable games like Valheim. Voxels contextually alter their appearance to successfully blend with their neighbors. There are a lot of rustic building materials, and being able to quickly switch not only between materials but also shapes with the mouse wheel makes building as easy an experience as I've had in these games.
Since I last played, the world of Enshrouded has gotten bigger, and the options for building, discovering, and stabbing things in Shroud have grown with it. I must find time to dive back in soon.
Solium hell
One of my big regrets this year is that our planned diary series for the political strategy game Hellspawn Solium Infernum didn't work out (for various reasons). Even in the sulfurous pits of hell, I could feel things heating up very quickly in our game. Just five or six turns in, I was already involved in a worrying war with Katharine, a war where the implications of every move were so vast that even my brother, who never plays these kinds of games, stayed up late into the night with me. . discuss tactics and contingency plans.
The endless political machinations and mind games of Solium Infernum remain a highlight of 2024 for me, even if we never end up finishing a game. The original game was long overlooked, and looking back on it, I see why it was a strong point of focus for League Of Geeks to optimize certain areas and make the reimagined game a little easier to approach for new players. After the (very competent) tutorial, I felt confident enough in my silliness skills to insult Katharine on turn 1 (leading to the aforementioned war). I love games like these, where the world is small but every decision is forceful and powerful. Late this year I found something similar in the political machinations of Dune: Imperium, but it still lacks the delicious Dobos Torte of strategies and implications and questionable rivals that I found with Solium Infernum. Readers, next year I'll be trying really hard to convince my fellow treehouse dwellers to join me in a proper sequel to the 2010 Gameboys From Hell series.
Delta Force
Delta Force was a real surprise to me, and not just because it came so late in the year that we had already finished the Advent Calendar before it stole my heart. Anyone who knows me knows that I love pull-out handles. I still haven't gotten over the undeserved death of The Cycle: Frontier last year, and since then I've been looking for a game to fill the void left. So far, Delta Force is doing a great job, something I really didn't expect, considering its extraction mode is just one part of the larger Battlefield-type game.
I haven't even played the main War mode yet, I'm having too much fun in Ops. It's much more streamlined and simpler than Tarkov, but maintains several interesting things like the puzzle inventory and helmets that visually obscure your view when shot. The economy is more forgiving than Tarkov, but things are expensive enough that it's still painful to lose your favorite sniper rifle. The gunplay feels great, the game looks beautiful, and the maps They are phenomenal. Friends, I love Hunt: Showdown, but there's no denying that its maps don't have a particularly natural feel. Simply a flat set of equidistant and equal-sized points of interest on a square of land. Delta Force maps look like real places. Everything fits together well, movement around the map feels great, and you're never far from some sort of tense encounter, whether it's dangerous mini-bosses or other players looking to steal your gear. It's a very, very formidable new entry to the genre, and if I wasn't returning home to visit my family for Christmas, I'd spend most of the holidays dying repeatedly in Delta Force and loving every moment of it.