PLAY 100 GAMES IN 2018

Clear your backlog and expand your horizons. Here’s what the team played this month

Phil Savage

Editor

We’ve entered the second month of this challenge, and I’m even further behind. I blame Diablo III. I wrote a bit about it in this month’s Now Playing, and, since then, I’ve rolled a new character: a Necromancer.

She’s a great character, with lots of big, squelchy spells that are fun to manipulate. I love the one that explodes the corpses you’ve created—it adds a new, combustible element to combat.

Does watching games count? If so, I spent a weekend watching the Gwent Open Challenge. While the beta is now more complex than the Witcher minigame that spawned it, that has made for a competitive pro scene. I like the tournament format, which requires players to win with each of the factions over a best-of-five series. But no, watching games definitely does not count.

Philippa Warr

Deputy Editor

I’m excelling at this challenge due to my habit of binge-downloading small games on Itch.io. Storyseeker is a good ’un. Tom Sykes goes into more detail in our free game section but it lets you wander a landscape filled with oddities.

I also stumbled through several rounds of the Paladins: Battlegrounds mode which was being debuted at this year’s Hi-Rez Expo. I rather like it, not least because my favorite champion, the tanky healer tree, Grover, is pretty powerful.

Studio Oleomingus continues to drip-feed fascinating satellites to its in-progress game Somewhere. The latest is A Museum of Dubious Splendors and lets you explore odd rooms and writings from a Gujarati poet. They’re gorgeous; suffused with the studio’s thoughtful surrealism, and the edifice of Somewhere makes me think of Italo Calvino’s work.

Andy Kelly

Section Editor

Alpha Protocol is one of those cult games I always assumed people just pretended to like. But six hours into Obsidian’s flawed, ambitious tactical espionage RPG, I see what all the fuss is about, particularly the surprisingly deep dialogue/reputation system.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover was basically abandoned by developer 1C, but the game has been revived by a team of modders hired by the studio to fix it. And this new so-called Blitz Edition is the best way to recreate that Spitfire battle from Dunkirk on PC.

I’ve been devouring a lot of Batman comics lately, so I thought I’d give Batman: The Telltale Series a go. The clunky animation is a little off-putting, but it’s a decent enough Batman story with some really tense moments. I hear the second season is a lot better though.