Games you missed out on in January 2024

Here are some of the smaller games we played last month

January is usually one of the quieter months of the year, but 2024 is starting off with a bang. There have been some huge triple-A games already this month, with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Tekken 8, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. However, gaming is all about variety, and there have been plenty of incredible indies out this month that will give every type of gamer exactly what they want.

Here are all of the smaller games we played in January 2024 that deserve recognition.

Portal: Revolution – RW

When a Portal fangame gets the official Valve endorsement to go up on Steam you know it’s something worth checking out. The last major one was 2021’s Portal Reloaded, which added fully functional time travel mechanics into its puzzles and was absolutely brilliant.

Portal Revolution doesn’t do much in terms of new puzzle mechanics, but it does push the boat out on the narrative side of things, serving as a prequel story to Portal 2. You awake as a test subject in Aperture long after GLaDOS has been killed and shortly before Portal 2 starts, and a mysterious core of dubious morality guides you along in getting the facility up and running again.

I won’t go any further than that to save you from spoilers, but it’s safe to say that this is a charming new story in Valve’s world. The dialogue doesn’t quite have the iconic snappiness of an official Valve game, but it does as good a job as you’d expect a fangame to do in making a story that fits Portal’s tone.

Puzzle-wise, it’s far trickier than anything in either of the official games – although that isn’t too hard to manage. It assumes you already know the fundamentals of the series and goes straight into challenging you with unique ways to use the existing mechanics. It genuinely stumped me more than once, which is something I can’t say for either of the main Portal games.

My only complaint about the puzzle design is that the larger chambers – while good for complex puzzles – often involved a lot of slowly running from A to B while solving puzzles. Plus, there were a fair few chambers where the solution involved doing the same action over and over with minor tweaks each time, which made it quite repetitive.

Still, if you’re hankering for some Portal puzzles, this is the best new set of levels that have been released in a good few years, and it will probably be a while before we get anything this good again.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)

Rising Lords – MW

Deck13 / WhisperGames

Rising Lords is a turn-based strategy game with a charming art style that has you manage and expand your medieval domain and fight tactical battles to overcome your foes. You gather all the necessary resources by dragging peasants onto farms, quarries, and other production sites, which will allow you to grow your population, construct additional buildings, and recruit troops. Raising armies costs you population, actually reducing your economic output, so you’ll want to think carefully about plans for expansion and only take as many men as you need with you. In addition, you’ll need to manage your peasants’ health and loyalty, being able to shift food between your towns to avoid starvation.

Though this is a fantastic foundation, Rising Lords lacks a lot of strategic depth – once you think you’ve just scratched the surface when it comes to troop types, buildings, and resources, you’ve already reached the bottom. There is little in terms of town specialization, for example, and the diplomacy system is barebones at best. In the end, Rising Lords’ campaigns all feel very samey.

Rising Lords’ tactical battles have a bit more meat to them, as you’ll need to consider terrain and formations in addition to troop types. Your commanders come with different abilities that can be played out during a battle in the form of cards, granting different units special skills or buffs. The key to winning is often to break the enemy’s morale, not completely wipe out all of his forces – a realistic portrayal of historical battles. These skirmishes are generally entertaining and satisfying. There are always stakes as well, as you’ll want to avoid as many losses as possible since you’ll need to use up valuable population and equipment to restore your forces.

You can play various modes in Rising Lords, diving into skirmishes and completely foregoing the strategic layer (both against humans and the AI), or create a sandbox game. There is also a story mode, which, unfortunately, is a bit disappointing. It’s not that the campaign is too challenging, but it feels like the developers want to railroad you into playing a certain way with no amount of any strategic freedom – if you don’t tackle the missions in the way the developers intended, you will have little chance of clearing them. A frustrating auto-save system adds to the campaign’s woes.

Rising Lords squanders its strong foundation and beautiful visuals due to a lack of depth despite a very long time in Early Access, making it too shallow for experienced genre fans. More casual enthusiasts will probably get their money’s worth, though.

Score: 6/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)

House Flipper 2 – RW

Frozen District

I’m not ashamed to say that I put just shy of 100 hours into the first House Flipper game. I didn’t know I enjoyed interior design so much, but I channeled the Property Brothers and found great joy in turning a burnt-out husk of a home into somewhere I’d love to live if the modern housing market wasn’t a hellscape I daren’t look at.

House Flipper 2 takes a step back and rebuilds a lot of the first game’s systems from the ground up to make life easier, and to make doing your job more fun. Painting walls is a prime example. In the first game, you would click and hold on each tiny slither of the wall until it changed color before moving on to the next one. Even when fully upgraded to be much faster and doing multiple segments at once, it was a bit of a chore, but now you simply outline the area of the wall you want to paint – no matter how big – and move our paint roller around it. It makes the task so much more fun and truer to how it is in the real world.

That’s what this sequel is full of, and changes have been made all across the board to cleaning, paneling, and building that improve the quality of life and make a game I already loved even more enjoyable.

The trade-off for this is that it currently has less content than its predecessor – especially if you include the DLCs. There are still a good number of houses to renovate, but there are fewer jobs and a smaller variety of objects and decorations to put in homes. This will change over time though. Based on how the developers have talked pre and post-launch, House Flipper 2 is a bit like a new starting point for them. Updates are already on their way adding new decorations, and this game will be a base that they can build off and add to for a long time to come.

It’s already a greatly improved game than what came before it, and it won’t be long until the amount of content is there to match, so this is an easy upgrade for anyone who liked the original game.

Score: 9/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)

A Highland Song – KM

Inkle

A Highland Song takes the mountaineering of Death Stranding and transports it to the 2D plane while grounding it in a tale about teen rebellion in the Scottish Highlands. Managing stamina and health, you bound across mountains and hills, pushing toward the sea with every stride.

Occasionally, the music kicks in and it transforms into a rhythm action game as you hop to the music and leap between rocks. On the surface, it seems twee, but there’s plenty of depth hidden in those hills.

As with actual hiking, you get more out of it the more experienced you are. Once you’re done, go again. Take a different route, clamber up another hill, and delve into a different cave.

You have your destination, but there are dozens of ways to arrive and plenty of secrets to find along the way. It’s a game that understands the journey is the entire point.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC 

Cobalt Core – KM

Brace Yourself Games

Like FTL? What about Slay the Spire? Mash them together and you get this, a colourful deck builder where you pilot spacecraft across a roguelite galaxy map. As well as using cards to block and attack, you also have to be aware of your ship’s location and where enemy attacks will land. Play well and you can dodge and weave between bullets while firing a volley of your own.

As with any good roguelite, there are new pilots and ships to unlock, as well as card sets and modifiers to change what you’re capable of.

It’s also injected with some of that Hades magic, with your pilots dropping new hints to the story with each successful run. The story and characters aren’t quite as in-depth as Hades, but it makes up for that by being funny and charming in a way few games can manage.

Score: 9/10

Version tested: PC