At a glance, At The Gates resembles one of the Civilization titles, and with good reason. The man whose name is in the title was a designer of Civilization 5. But don’t be fooled, At The Gates is no copy cat game. Jon’s title is its own breed of 4X with a pretty unique formula and interesting systems.
Slay The Spire is a challenging and highly replayable rogue-like. You play as one of three characters attempting to scale a 51 level spire. Each floor has an encounter for you to interact with, whether that’s battling a creature, dealing with a random event or visiting a merchant. Each stage of the spire has a challenging boss battle. If you die, you start over from the beginning. But Its rare for any two playthroughs to feel alike.
Meeple Station shares some similarities with RimWorld, which got my attention straight away. But Meeple Station is not a clone by any stretch of the imagination. You manage a station of Meeples, attempting to rein in as much profit as possible while keeping the crew happy and alive. Neither of which is easy to do.
Often times when I see someone describe a game as difficult, I tend to roll my eyes. One of my biggest gripes with gaming today is how easy and dumbed down many titles tend to be. Many of those games don’t even give me an option to change the difficulty. So when I saw people describe Chrono Ghost as very difficult, I was skeptical. Well, two hours into the game I had died 507 times (The game keeps track) consider me thoroughly humbled.