My time has been taken up by two games recently:
The first is Snowrunner; it was recently added to Game Pass so my friend and I have been playing through it.
Snowrunner is an near endless list of logistical tasks that are accomplished via work trucks. The trucks are all slow and hard to maneuver and all the game’s roads are busted and half paved at best. You’re constantly navigating mountains and ditches and rivers and impressively simulated mud and snow. Very few routes are straightforward, no waypoints are given, and it’s up to you to both explore the maps and plan the excursions yourself.
The game gleefully punishes you for every corner you try to cut. Your biggest setbacks are nearly always self-inflicted, but the game is the most fun when you’re trying to dig yourself out of a mess you created for yourself. The pacing is deliberate and there is a lot of mechanical skill to controlling the trucks, so there’s a natural urge to bite off a little more than you can chew.
The game is sometimes tense, sometimes meditative, and I’m still pretty engaged 30 hours in! If you liked Death Stranding for the uh “mechanics”, then you’d probably enjoy Snowrunner too.
The second is Griftlands.
Griftlands is a deck builder (obviously heavily inspired by Slay the Spire), but with a layer of board-game-esque mechanics that map to CRPG tropes. The game has 3 playable characters and each has it’s own storylines, map, cards, and NPCs to interact with.
The game is played over a series of 5 days. The hero will complete a variety of quests and random events throughout the day, which normally culminate in a larger confrontation at night. The quests often require fighting, negotiation, money/resources, or some combination therein. The quests can have multiple paths through them, places you can cross or double-cross the people you’re working for. You may be able convince someone to give you the maguffin, pay them off, or just beat them up for it. Or you might call on some NPCs you’ve befriended to do the dirty work for you.
Fighting and negotiation are handled via a card game, and there are separate decks and bespoke mechanics for each. Fighting is similar to Slay the Spire combat, but often you have computer controlled allies or pets to help you in battle. Enemies also have a “panic” meter where they’ll surrender after taking a certain amount of damage, and the game gives you the choice to execute them or not (which can have interpersonal or political consequences).
Negotiation operates under some of the same rules (you still play cards from a deck that cost actions), but instead of “fighting” you’re “deploying arguments” and reducing the resolve of your opponents core argument. Losing an argument does not end your game like a fight would, but you must find a way to restore your resolve if you want to negotiate again that day.
The game keeps track of your relationship status with each NPC you meet, and these relationships have mechanical consequences in addition to story consequences. If a fight breaks out in a bar and a person that likes you is present, they’ll hop in to help you as an ally in the fight. If you’re trying to haggle for a better price and someone is present that hates you, they might try to belittle you during the negotiation.
Additionally, if someone loves you, you get a permanent buff regardless of where that person is in the world. These can range from discounts in shops, automatically deployed arguments in negotiations, buffs during combat, etc. If someone hates you, you receive a permanent debuff in the same vein. One fun wrinkle in this system: if you kill someone that hates you, you can get rid of that debuff and gain a unqiue item that was on their person, but killing can have other interpersonal consequences.
Finally, the way the game handles character/stat progression feels pretty natural. Cards each have their own XP meter, and playing a card increases that meter by one. Once that meter fills, you get to pick one of two upgrades for that card. Additionally, winning battles gets you more battle cards, and winning negotiations gets you more negotiation cards. The game effectively improves the actions that you perform the most, and so you can try to either min-max and try to solve everything with one deck, or try to spread out your XP to give you a larger number of viable options in quests.
It’s a very well designed game and I’m impressed with how tight the mechanics are and how naturally they blend into the RPG side. I’m not sure how replayable it will end up being since there must be a finite amount of story, but it’s very compelling for your first few plays and those will likely end up taking a good chunk of time anyway (I’ve played 20 hours over a few runs).
