Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: Skis, cards, and impossible missions.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What we’ve been playing, here’s our archive.
Steep is one of those beautiful games that lives so luxuriously in the mind. Long runs, the swish of passing trees, the crunch of compacted snow. Ubisoft approached winter sports in a very Ubisoft way: what if you could have all of them at once? What if everything you did showered you with points? What if the map was almost implausibly vast? Going back into a game like this – a game I have such lovely memories of – feels a bit dangerous. What if I don’t love it any more?
Gosh, though, I still love it. Everything in Steep is an event or a challenge. Everywhere is a point of interest or a fast-travel opportunity or a chance to go PvP and level something up. But where the game really comes alive, predictably, is when you turn your back on all that. Pick a starting point and just ski and ski and ski, downwards and downwards, chaining ice and snow and weaving around trees and ending up somewhere lonely and beautiful, somewhere that you know you’ll never find again if you go looking for it. That’s Steep. And it still lives luxuriously in the mind.
Someone recommended this to me by saying, “I’d even go so far to call it the Hades of the Roguelike deck-builders,” which is quite some claim! But I can see what they mean. Griftlands has swagger. A lot of this you can see at a glance. The illustrative artwork is bursting with style, and it’s brought to life with great verve and charm. I love how you gabble to other characters in an alien language. It might seem like a little thing but it’s one of many things that makes the world seem so believable. Griftlands is crisp, it’s zippy, it’s wonderfully put together.