About the nomination
Most of the video game carries a destructive beginning: forever we are fighting, we shoot someone, and even if we suddenly remember about races or sports, everything is also built there on rivalry. But what to do if you are tired of destruction and instead you dream of creating? It's time to hang in the management simulator! About what projects in this genre stood out in 2018, we will now tell.
Gambling summarizes the results of the year: the best games of 2018!
Third place – Graveyard Keeper
If you have long dreamed of quiet neighbors, a profitable position and contact with mysticism, then Graveyard Keeper – Game for you. According to the plot, you find yourself in the skin of a simple layman, which was shot down by the car. But the adventures are just starting on this: in the afterlife, he had the role of the caretaker of the medieval cemetery. There are enough work: Control of graves, management of incoming corpses, execution of quests from otherworldly employers … True, the main character saw all this in the coffin: he just wants to find out how to return home, but what to do if everyone I meet in exchange for any fragments of information. Be sure to require a service?
From the point of view of gameplay, Graveyard Keeper is a very typical “farm” in the manner Stardew Valley , only adjusted for a specific cynical surroundings. Fresh corpse is not only someone's broken life, but also a valuable source of meat, blood and other resources, which will definitely find use in the economy. And so that they are always in abundance, the inhabitants of the local kingdom are not prohibited, say, poison – the main thing is that you yourself have time to dispose of all the coming “customers”.
The authorities also have to report and maintain a cemetery in an exemplary manner. And you also need to get food, collect building materials, bargaining useful items on the workbench, conduct services in the church to collect donations – in general, take care that the case flourishes. In parallel, there is also the development of the character: he can be improved in six different disciplines, which also open up new opportunities – and so on until the cemetery becomes the most comfortable in the country.
Graveyard Keeper captivates an unexpected approach to the usual genre. This gloomy project is a kind of counterweight to numerous sugary “farms”, where the sun is always shining and grass greens, and the cheekbones are reduced. At the same time, the game is not in a terrible Gothic schedule, but in a quite pretty pixel style that does not allow the developers to suspect of excessive bloodthirstiness.
Or still allows? Here you have to dig deeper ..
Second place – Frostpunk and Surving Mars
In second place, following the voting results, we found two games at once. The first of them is Frostpunk , Project from the creators This War of Mine (which we at https://sister-site.org/magicred/ one time also praised when summing up the results of 2014), equally gloomy and depressed, but at the same time attractive. At that time, we tried to survive in the civil war, and now we moved to the freezing world, where it was necessary to establish the life of a whole settlement.
In the yard there is an end of the 19th -century alternative, Krakatau and Tambobora volcanoes erupt simultaneously, covering the planet with clouds of smoke and ash. Sunny rays can no longer break through the veil, and the temperature drops sharply on the ground-but somehow it is necessary to live! In order to save humanity in a new ice age, you have to obtain coal in huge quantities and carefully store each grain of heat developed.
The project took the prize for the best indie group of the year at the CEEGA ceremony and was nominated for the best strategy according to TGA: the developers managed to correctly convey the atmosphere of the harsh cold-up to the fact that during the game you start to freeze directly at the computer. And Frostpunk takes not only aesthetics: it is in a good way a difficult economic model is constantly kept in suspense, now and then demonstrating that any management error can lead to mass death of people.
The second project is also capable of boasting recordly low temperatures, albeit for another reason: in Surving Mars, as it is easy to guess by name, the player will have to colonize the red planet. At a low level of complexity to Mars, a rich corporation is sent to us, clearly sketched with SpaceX, but on Hard will have to fly as a representative of Russia or India.
The game is highlighted by two main chips. Firstly, every potential colonist is a person with its own advantages and disadvantages: your wards can turn out to be vegan, alcoholics, gamers, womanizer, paniclers and God knows who else. And if at first it is possible to recruit the best of the best, taking “side effects” to a minimum, then over time only all kinds of freaks and marginals will remain in the queue for the development of the new planet. And you will have to take care that they get along with each other and do not steer from longing under the dome, which meteorites will regularly bomb. Survival depends not only on the uninterrupted supply of food, water and electricity, but also on the notorious morality: a character deeply disappointed on the expedition can begin to ask back to the ground, or even finish the life of suicide, giving an example to the neighbors.
The second feature is several plot branches at once, which fill the passage of unpredictable events. For example, at some point, incomprehensible black cubes will begin to appear around your colony. You can use them as building materials, but after some time they suddenly begin to flicker and tick, like an hourly bomb. Go understand what will happen when they are pretending! Either urgently get rid of them, or, on the contrary, to gain more and wait for the intriguing interchange.
You can start passing every time with a new scenario, which significantly increases the reiglable. After all, I would like to look at at least once at each expedition outcomes! Moreover, the texts in Surving Mars are written very talentedly: as if you are reading a good novel in the science fiction genre, while you are busy with outstanding management.
Mention are worthy
Lovers of the good old Theme Hospital This year pleased her with an ideological heiress. Two Point Hospital It is built on very similar principles: you need to build a profitable hospital, where they are treated for all sorts of exotic diseases. Either the light bulb will grow instead of the head, then the acute attack of cubism will happen, then the lycanthropy will develop – and to invent treatment from another unimaginable ailments again.
Jurassic World Evolution Similar to Planet Coaster – Only instead of American hills do you build corrals with dinosaurs. The economic model is largely similar, game principles – also, management is not very complicated here, but opportunities for creativity and self -realization of the car and a small cart. The buzz, of course, is when something goes wrong and some tyrannosaurus breaks out and begins to eat someone. And this game fills the plot hole between the events of the first two films of the series Jurassic World. Jeff Goldbbum was even invited to it: he played the usual role of professor Jan Malcolm.
And finally, one cannot but say about Northgard , which turned out to be a very hardcore project about the Vikings. In this project, despite its external cartoon and frivolity, it is very easy to make mistakes that will lead to the fundamental impossibility of completing the mission. It is important to immediately find a winning strategy and adhere to it impeccably – and for this you will have to start a level again.
First place – Rimworld
With the genre, of course, we rolled. Rimworld – In fact, not so much an economic simulator as a generator of stories, one is more than the other. No, of course, you can play it as a serious manager simulator. Moreover, the game of the secret Sylvester provides many chances to optimize himself and even break himself. A little-old experienced player without any problems protect the settlement with an almost impassable labyrinth with traps in any biomet, sings a valuable beast with beer and learn to feed the colonists with dishes in which no one teaches human.
Just for example: one of the most elegant and budgetary ways to fight off the raids is to build a huge roof at the entrance, which will stay on one specially undermined pillar. Enemies come, colonists shoot a pillar … Bums. This raid cut off his head, almost all the bones broke this, this … Eye scratched. Happens!
However, it is not for nothing that some veterans are not in vain Rimworld practicing a conscious rejection of the utilitarian “death corridors” and, for example, over and over again begin the game with a naked, one -legged, one -legged colonist in the ice of local Antarctic. Because the real pleasure in this game begins at the moment when you refuse rest and security. When you are trying to create utopia in the desert, which opens the door in front of every resident of the planet. When you build a vest in the tuture, where no one has rights and freedoms. When a cult of frozen dead people spontaneously forms in your city, and most of the energy goes to maintain a huge refrigerator. When you send the best fighters of the colony to a suicidal mission, because the life of a friend is at stake.
Some call this game Dwarf Fortress Lite. Some – Dwarf Fortress with a human face. And someone just says: “Randy, your mother, this is the third pack of Kuritz-Ludaists this week!", And then with pleasure watches how frantic chicken finish the last survivors in the depths of a bombed bunker. It is worth a lot.
If we have not mentioned your favorite creative project here, be sure to write about it in the comments. Well, if you still like the destruction and spirit of rivalry, welcome to other nominations: the next one will open on the site tomorrow!
Gambling summarizes the results of the year: the best games of 2018!