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The RPS Selection Box: Brendan’s bonus games of the year 2024See the world anew
See the world anew
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda / Secret Mode / DreadXP
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda / Secret Mode / DreadXP
I’m a sucker for a good first-person runabout. I don’t need to shoot, but it’s sometimes nice to get a sword, or a big whip. As long as I get to be immersed in an adventure. I think that’s the big theme of my selection box: being grounded within my player character. I want to feel what it’s like to hike through canyons with too much sellable loot in my backpack. I want to park my soul in the head of a scared Scotsman way out of his depth, hundreds of miles from shore. The closer I can comfortably fit in my character’s shoes, the more I seem to buy into the world they inhabit. Even if that world is constantly glowing a magnificent crimson.
Dread Delusion
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / DreadXP
Indiana Jones And The Great Circle
Image credit:Microsoft
Indiana Jones And The Great Circlehas done pretty much the same thing, but spread out over many days. It’s an expensive blockbuster done with all the craft and competence (and fascist punching) you’d expect from the Wolfenstein folks. It has huge levels, tons of secret areas, and photographable cats. As much as my heart sides with the scrappy underdogs of the games industry, sometimes I just want to luxuriate in impeccable lighting and munch popcorn to Hollywood-level acting between open-ended quests that’ll let me crack a Nazi in the back of the bonce with an ancient Roman statue. What I love most is how little you’re required to use a gun - every fight is better approached with your own fists, but it can help to use the smashable detritus around you. I fired Indy’s revolver in one specific moment, when a single foe brandishing a sword came racing toward me. What’s more Indiana Jonesthan that?
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Capcom.
The second reason it’s on my list: You can pick up anyone and yeet them over a wall.
Steamworld Heist 2
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Thunderful
Okay, this one is not such a bodily immersive game. It’s bullet snooker on the high seas. But it was still an adventure. If you haven’t played the previous Steamheist, then basically it is a cartoony XCOM as viewed from the side. It’s a moreish little strategy game and, in this sequel, everything has been polished up and made even moreisher. In an overworld map, you sail around grabbing goodies from the flotsam of the tropical (and sometimes frozen) ocean, while also sinking enemy ships. But in close combat, you’ll enter hideouts and warehouses to ricochet bullets off walls and lob bouncy grenades among other gadgets to clear the map or escape the room with a new friendly crew member. Your foes are dieselbots, the suggestion being that they are a filthy pollutant-people, yet whether your steambots run on coal or not is seemingly unaddressed. It’s just one of the quirks of this continuing fictional realm that spans a surprising number of genres. I still holdSteamWorld Dig 2as my favourite in the series - a one-and-done game of great pleasure - but this piratical caper came very, very close.
Still Wakes The Deep
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Secret Mode
Still Wakes The Deephas incredibly good voice acting. Scottish accents in video games are generally foisted upon dwarves or bundled together with Irish accents to make up for a shortfall in Vikingesque islanders. But here we’re treated to a cast of Scottish oil rig workers struggling against a monstrous fleshy horror none of them can understand. As a game, it’s a highly polished, cinematic first-person corridor dasher, with some classic hiding from monsters and environmental puzzles that won’t tax you too greatly. But atmospherically, it’s a work of careful craftsmanship. Rain and other weather effects make every journey out onto the deck an uneasy, wet, gauntlet. Each monster is a fucked-up version of a crew member you have previously spoken to and gotten to know (if briefly). And the hideously glittering substance that seeps throughout the rig will put you in a state of constant, low-burning unease. Mechanically, there is nothing super new about any of it. But it brings you through an unfamiliar environmentwith such attention to detail, and such great voice work, that I really didn’t mind.