MSD's GOTY Indecision Blowout: Birds at War
I don't think I can truly commit to a 'Game of the Year' so instead I'm just highlighting stuff I really enjoyed that I haven't really seen praised elsewhere.
๐ฎ check out the whole series here ๐ฎ
Avianos (UFO 50)
Despite how involved with video games I am in my adulthood, I had limited access to them as a kid. I grew up in the 80's the youngest of 5, both parents working menial jobs because the economy was so bad, and things like 'food' took precedent over things like 'dental care' or god forbid 'video games'. That is until a neighbor who worked at Atari gave my older brother / eldest sister a (then-new) 800 system with a floppy disk container that had (most likely illicit I later realized) copies of every game released on the platform between 1979 and 1985 - so while friends my age were playing Mario, Final Fantasy, Dragon 'Warrior' and Zelda in the early 90's, I was sifting through my sibling's collection - disk after disk looking at inscrutable titles and hoping there was some fun to be had in there.
UFO 50 is the closest and most purely distilled thing I've ever experienced to recreate that feeling - dare I say, it's nearly identical (with less load times). For those who slept on UFO 50 - this is a 'game' you buy that is the entire library (50 games) of a fictional 1980's video game console. I was originally going to make UFO 50 as a whole an entry here in my indecision blowout, but keeping true to the "things I played a lot of that I'm not seeing a lot of other people talk about" I thought it more important to highlight a specific hidden gem from the collection: Avianos.
Avianos is effectively a board game in digital form (complimentary). Players play as one of two factions of birds, each determined to conquer the other, and take turns praying to dinosaur ancestors that grant them abilities for said turns. The system works that there are several resources (seeds, bones, workers) that you can gather both by moving around the board as well as through ancestor abilities, and you can use those resources to purchase more troops. Your actions per turn are limited by the ancestor you pray to (which is on a rotation scale of 'select 1 of 3 that neither you nor your opponent prayed to them last turn'), and potentially boosted by how many times you've prayed to them previously.
The game world (or board) features multiple 'castles' with the main goal of: capture and hold 4 of them for 2 turns and you win. There are all sorts of strategies to brute force your way through with Stegnar and Rexodon's movement and troop massing capabilities, to more high level strategies involving Trilock's use of the bone resource to cast spells and teleport your troops. And speaking of troops - if you move your soldiers to a board piece that contains enemy soldiers you enter a real time battle arena where higher numbers do not always equal victory. A lucky shot with a hummingbird bomber could eliminate entire swaths of dodo soldiers. A few hawk knights can hold out against seemingly infinite duck archers. If your side is losing you can flee or (if you have structures on the board tile) you can burn the buildings down to prevent your opponent from capturing them. Birds are brutal.
By itself, it's a fun, challenging experience. The single player has 3 difficulties (with additional challenges after you complete them) and the map is randomized every time. As a multiplayer game though? Jesus CHRIST this game has been on constant rotation in our house since release. Checking the play time on the profile we used for multiplayer, we have 80 hours so far. "Trilock Gang Rise up" is a constant refrain in the house. One session pioneered the use of 'Mountain Jail' where the Brontor spell to move mountains was used to lock a player off from the rest of the map until they could get enough blessings to fly with Quetzal. There's...a LOT to this game.
And if none of the above was reason for inclusion on this list, I found myself loading up UFO 50 in my Steam Link app to play Avianos on my phone - which is bonkers to me. The last game I committed to doing that for on a regular basis was Cobalt Core (and briefly Into the Breach when I wanted to cancel my Netflix subscription). Cobalt Core was one of my 2023 'Not but yea actually' Game of the Year contenders and it felt disingenuous to have something else scratch that same itch and not get a mention here.