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The RPS Selection Box: Ed’s bonus games of the year 2024Double trouble
Double trouble
Image credit:RPS
Image credit:RPS
Unlike a lot of the team I’d imagine, my opinion is this: I thought the year was quite middling for games. Or at least, it was middling for my own personal taste, which is quite unsavoury at the best of times. Most of my best picks made it into the calendar proper, but a couple didn’t. One I hadn’t even played properly until after the vote, and the other? The other is a flawed pick, but one that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Anyway, hope you all have a restful Xmas folks and a cracking new year. I hope Santa bought you some nice warm socks or a chocolate orange so dense, you could tee it off at your local golf club.
Windblown
Image credit:Kepler Ghost
Windblown’s an early accessroguelikethat I thought looked a bit middling when it was first revealed. Then I gave it a whirl and I was proven totally, totally wrong. It feels excellent, is smart, and you can play it alongside two friends for some franticco-opcapers. It’s a shame no-one is really talking about it, so here I am to rectify that.
As a cute animal (axolotl, bat, lizard, hamster, one I’ve forgotten), you are to jump into a big cannon and fire yourself into a huge, swirling tornado. It’s in this tornado that a sequence of increasingly difficult stages is conveniently set up, varying from mushroom kingdoms to rat towns and rusted mechas, all on floating pieces of very large rocks. You’re to battle through them, gradually getting stronger as you go. Die and you’ll return to base with some currency, which you can use to permanently improve your stats or unlock cool things for future runs.
You’ve likely heard all this roguelikeyness before, but I’d say Windblown sets itself apart with a few things. The dash is sublime - very snappy, very fast, very spammable. We likey. Combat feels punchy, encouraging you to swap between your two weapons with generous “slam the swap button” windows that let you pull off some very cool combos that apply bleed or activate special moves. Weapons? Good. Powerups? Solid. It’s all been well thought through, with music that goes a lot harder than it needs to.
Shin chan: Shiro And The Coal Town
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Neos Corporation
Right now I’m listening to “1 hour of relaxing music from Shin chan: Shiro And The Coal Town” on YouTube. It shows Shin chan, a mischievous kid fishing in a quiet stream, as his pet dog Shiro wags his tail and scratches the backs of his ears. The music is wonderful and plinky, with the backdrop all lush and green - just a slice of the beautiful countryside of Akita in north Japan. I find it really takes me back to summers I’ve had as a kid and I get all nostalgic and emotional. In all honesty, it’s not helping me write this up.
We must persevere through the emotion, though, for this is why it’s in my selection box in the first place. The machinations of Coal Town aren’t exactly for me, in that it’s a collectathon where you go about a wonderful town and collect bugs and fish and 99.9% of your quests are to do with gathering yet more materials. You do this every day (it’s not likeAnimal Crossing, in that time pauses when you quit the game) and it can feel like you’re ignoring all the loveliness in favour of blazing a path to fill your backpack as fast as possible.
