What we've been playing - Loot fountains, Indy delights, and layers of game trifle
A few of the things that had us hooked this festive season.
4th January
Hello and Happy New Year! Did you have a nice break? I hope so.
This is our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing, in this case, over the festive break. This time, we gorged on loot in Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2, we were pleasantly surprised nay delighted by Indiana Jones, and dug into the trifle-like layers of genius that make up Animal Well.
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred, PS5
I've been ping-ponging between Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 during the Christmas break - I've been filling my ARPG cup, you could say. What surprised me, doing this, is how complimentary the games can be. Path of Exile 2 is frugal. It doesn't give up anything easily. You inch through zones and then try multiple times to beat bosses, and when you do, they don't give you much, the stingy bastards. Path of Exile 2 certainly doesn't shower you in rewards like Diablo 4 does.
Never was this more apparent than during Diablo 4's festive Slay Ride to Hell celebration, which spawned Treasure Goblins around the map seemingly everywhere - those scurrying Santa-like carriers of bottomless bags of loot. The spawns were particularly potent in the new Vessel of Hatred expansion zone, Nahantu, which it turns out I hadn't been to yet because I hadn't played the expansion yet. Cue, then, the perfect storm for me: catching up on a year of loot changes and expansion content, while also being drenched in fountains of loot along the way.
It did get old eventually, but not before I'd romped through the standard character levels with the new Spirit Warrior class and redeemed literal bags full of some of the best loot in the game. I even had time to re-equip a few other characters. It's an embarrassment of riches that couldn't be further away from the Scrooge-like approach of Path of Exile 2, and I loved Diablo for it - I gorged on it.
Now, though, I'm back to Path of Exile 2, as if to purge the excess of Diablo. It's fitting for January, I feel.
-Bertie
Animal Well, PC (Steam Deck)
I swallowed the Animal Well pill along with my Christmas dinner this holiday season and cor, what an absolute gem of a game. I know it's been said a million times already, but Developer Billy Basso has cooked up something really very special with this debut, and Metroidvania likers owe it to themselves to get this played if they haven't already. This is an ingenious interpretation of the genre, not just in the way it changes the rules around traversal and discovery (swapping double jumps for frisbees and bubble wands, for example, and dashes for yo-yos and spinning tops), but also because it's just so gosh-darned clever. It does that thing that a lot of my favourite games do, in that it plops you into a world and then simply gestures towards the open door, leaving you to discover it for yourself with next to no guidance whatsoever. It's so, so thrilling, and the kind of game that occupies every waking thought while you're playing it.
Case in point: I loved discovering all the different 'layers' of Animal Well the more I played it. The first one is the six-odd hour jaunt you'll experience to simply get to the bottom of the well, completing the main thrust of its story quest and conquering its 'final' boss. The second layer, however, is where Animal Well really comes alive, which is a 64-strong egg hunt that actually lets you leave the well altogether, leading to what I'd consider its proper ending. This is what I was able to finish over the holidays, expanding my playtime closer to 20 hours. But there's also a third layer that riffs on all manner of Tunic/Fez/ARG-style 'deep' secrets involving hidden bunnies, bar codes, community puzzles that - hands up - are probably beyond me (or rather, beyond the amount of available head space I have for that kind of stuff alongside also having a job).
But man alive, that egg hunt layer was properly great, if only because the tools and gadgets you need to obtain to find them all go way beyond what's required to beat the first layer of Animal Well. It really fires up your mind about what's possible in this strange environment, and what other secrets might have been hiding in plain sight all along. And some of those eggs are so well hidden! An absolutely insane achievement for a solo developer, and very deserving of its spot in our Top 50 Games of 2024.
-Katharine
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Xbox Series X
What a joy it's been discovering Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Eurogamer's 2024 Game of the Year. I'll happily admit to some initial scepticism about it. Indiana Jones is a franchise that has not always been well looked after, and while MachineGames is undoubtedly a talented developer, it is not known for handling licensed action adventure games. How wrong I was! I'm having more fun than I've had with pretty much any other game launched last year.
But it goes beyond Indy simply being a fun game to play. MachineGames consistently demonstrates an understanding of the essence of Indy - his half-mumbled deductions, mildly snarky humour, and the subtle movements and facial animation that make me feel like I'm watching a fresh performance mo-capped by Harrison Ford himself.
Then there's the attention to detail. Surely I wasn't the only one who teased out the arrival of the game's first villain even longer by reading up on all the fossil exhibits in the college library? And hopefully I'm not the only one to notice MachineGames finally solving something that irks me in so many games I play: that you explore a cave/dungeon/some catacombs supposedly left undisturbed for hundreds of years, except for the fact that all the candles are still burning.
Indiana Jones, I should have known some day you'd come walking back through my door with a brilliant new chapter. I just didn't expect it to be this.
-Tom