January traditionally lacks major video game releases, allowing players to catch up on game-of-the-year contenders and giving smaller games a window to stand out.
Dice rolls are put center stage in Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, about a cyberpunk future where mercenaries, scavengers and outcasts eke out a hardscrabble living. Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist is an inventive Metroidvania where you battle a cigarette-puffing human-rhinoceros hybrid and a purple-robed robotic sorcerer.
And if you are pining for Grand Theft Auto VI, check out the documentary “Grand Theft Hamlet,” about two out-of-work actors staging Shakespeare during a pandemic lockdown.
Here are three other games you may have missed this month:
The Roottrees Are Dead
The joy of playing The Roottrees Are Dead, the remaster of a 2023 browser game about identifying the numerous members of the fictional Roottree family, goes beyond its delicious twists and shocking reveals.
The more I play the game, the more I scour internet articles and newspaper clippings, the more I flip through water-damaged photographs and magazine cover stories, the more I come to realize that The Roottrees Are Dead isn’t invested solely in the salacious.
Its drama is intimate, and it appears in the little leaps of knowledge you make as you carefully examine the corkboard-pinned family tree, identifying wayward aunts and uncles and having your educated guesses satisfyingly confirmed. It’s a game about knowing, about being allowed to know — not just a family’s secrets and shame, but its truth.
It’s no mistake that the game is set in 1998, during the early heyday of the World Wide Web. Part of the compelling fantasy is simply being able to look something up online and get a reliable answer back.
Just as Guitar Hero makes me feel like a rock star, and Forza a champion racer, The Roottrees Are Dead makes me feel like a competent sleuth. It does this by taking the complexity out of its online investigation while leaving enough to justify copious notes and the rechecking of evidence. It successfully crafts a self-contained, graspable universe, one that rewards my close attention with a charming and richly layered narrative.
Skate City: New York
When New York City becomes a video game character, it makes a resident’s experience far more enchanting. So when the Toronto studio Snowman told me Skate City: New York was the result of copious on-the-ground research into the glorious parks and monuments here, I was intrigued.
The mobile game begins with a realistic video of the Statue of Liberty. But when I passed Lorenzo Pace’s “Triumph of the Human Spirit” in Lower Manhattan, it wasn’t identified. Oddly, boroughs are named only after unlocking modes for free skating. There, you can change the camera angle from a flat landscape view to just behind you.
From this perspective, closely passing skaters and tourists is a much more personal way to enjoy the mildly difficult feats of trickery and balance. The controls — quadrants on your iPhone screen — felt startlingly easy to use, so I pulled off kick flips, nollies and pop shove-its, tricks forgotten since I enjoyed the Tony Hawk series.
Chill music played appealingly during a level in Central Park where I tried to evade a security guard. When I failed to jump over a barrier near the lake, both of us fell in, legs and arms akimbo. The security guard grunted. I laughed with punky exuberance.
Other challenges in Skate City: New York include crafty wallrides and shooing away white pigeons. Classic “I NY” and graffiti-style Brooklyn decks completed the Big Apple vibe.
Heroes of Hammerwatch II
Heroes of Hammerwatch II is easy to pick up but impossible to put down, taking the popular rogue-lite structure — every time you die, you must start from the beginning but with upgrades to your character — and injecting it into the model of a classic action role-playing game. For more than 17 hours, I have been crawling through a dungeon, fighting bosses, grabbing loot and trying to save the world.
Because progressing in each class provides a bonus to all your other characters (e.g. the paladin increases armor levels), you’re encouraged to experiment. The seven classes are well-balanced, but, since I prefer offense-is-defense strategies, I like the warrior best.
The gameplay, item and skill systems are uncomplicated, but it seems like something new is revealed after almost every good run. A sparse story is characteristic of many rogue-lites and not necessarily a demerit; the retro art and soundtrack have a lot of that late-’90s panache people get nostalgic for.
Heroes of Hammerwatch II is elevated by a smooth and approachable co-op experience for up to four players. It feels easier to make progress with friends. If someone dies, resurrect the character and forge further into the dungeon.
The post 3 Video Games You May Have Missed in January appeared first on New York Times.
