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The RPS Selection Box: Edwin’s bonus games of the year 2023The final insult
The final insult
Image credit:Fluttermind/ub4q/Red Hook Studios
Image credit:Fluttermind/ub4q/Red Hook Studios
Happy Wintermas, dear reader. And happy new year, I guess. Are you enjoying yours? I’m writing this in the distant past of mid-December, a period of total spiritual desolation. If all has gone to plan, I am currently waving a goblet over my head like some kind of hipster barbarian, and trying to finish all the dodgy vegan Xmas food I’ve cooked which the rest of my family won’t eat, the savages.
Amarantus
Image credit:ub4q
If you are both a lover and a (resistance) fighter,Amarantusis the game for you. It’s a robust and handsome visual novel that blends the thrill of organising a revolution with the thrill of promising your best friend you’ll help him get laid, only to sleep with the object of his affections, or possibly with both of them. It’s the story of Arik, an adorable youth with great hair who is leading a small group of adorable young people with great hair on a not-very-calculated mission to depose an emperor.
Blending the mechanics of a dating sim with a slowburn storming of the Bastille does wonderful things forAmarantus. This is a story of insurrection that embraces false starts and reversals, with at least two playthroughs required to really get to the bottom of things, and an emphasis on personal intimacy rather than some abstract process of building a following. The character writing is vivid and precise, but the silver bullet here is how painstakingly those characters are ‘animated’, with a range of mannerisms and subtleties of framing and context that make the cast feel vastly more alive than that of any photoreal triple-A game I’ve played.
Moonring
Image credit:Fluttermind, LLC
Moonringhas a lot of moving parts, with a full third of the screen given over to a combat log and inventory features. There’s a magic system which is ingeniously hidden away in the mythology, rather than being a set of fireball and healing spells for purchase. Dialogue has a touch of the parser-based adventure format, with you typing in keywords to broach or expand a topic based on the previous response, rather than picking options from a list. For all that, however, the basics of play are straightforward: bump into things to do stuff to them, which often makes them do stuff back. The aesthetic is lush despite the text-heavy interface: Ultima aside, it puts me in mind of certain Spectrum dungeon-crawlers like Wizard’s Lair.
Darkest Dungeon 2
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Red Hook’soriginal Lovecraftian RPGwas one of my weekday chillout experiences, for a while, which is an odd thing to say about a game in which your proud Crusader knight can have a heart attack while fighting a giant pig, and subsequently go missing during a cathartic post-dungeon pub crawl. I guess that’s mostly down to session length: Darkest Dungeon’s monster mazes can be polished off over a lunchbreak or even faster if you, say, open the wrong iron maiden early on. It gives you condensed shots of cosmic horror with a familiar rhythm of dire prospects feeding into outright madness, and beautifully notched and fissured Hellboy-esque art to boot.
While the roguelike format makes the game’s campaign less attrition-driven, I find Darkest Dungeon 2 less digestible somehow. It takes me longer to reach the next inn than to polish off a dungeon in the original, and I never quite warmed to the act of steering the wagon itself. Still, the refined combat is clever, the papery landscapes are bewitching and above all else, it still has the sepulchral Wayne June as narrator.
