It’s a delightfully slick and complete feeling game, making the genre’s once intimidating time commitments a thing of the past. Part board game, part streamlined strategy, you use cards to advance your civilization with each new turn, allowing you to progress from age to age in record time. If the very notion of losing days of your life to a 4X strategy game has you trembling in fear, Hexarchy may just be the bitesize alternative of your dreams.Ĭombining the best of Civ with the fast-paced deckbuilding of Hearthstone, this mercifully snappy strategy lets you clear an entire game in just one hour. You open up Civilization for a quick go after a long day and suddenly it’s pitch black and six hours have passed. While my WASD demo left me far from fluent, it’s clever deconstruction of kanji left me feeling like I’d actually achieved something when I headed to the deguchi ( that’s Japanese for exit, mic drop suckaaass). It’s a surprisingly effective way to learn, beating the painful experience of slowly repeating words ad nauseum. When creator Erik Anderson went to Japan he struggled to decipher street signs, finding himself carefully deconstructing each alien Kanji symbol until he began to figure out his unfamiliar surroundings. Using a clever mix of visual clues and drag-and-drop head-scratchers, this pixel art puzzler turns that IRL puzzle-solving element into its core mechanic. What if you could harness that virtual motivation to help you learn a language? That’s the concept behind the Japanese language learning game, So to Speak. From epic open world adventures to more tedious tasks, no matter how much I grumble I always find myself motivated to complete quest after quest.
Video games are a masterclass in making players feel productive. Will Nivalis’ noodley systems have the umami spice necessary to pull off its lofty ambitions? That remains to be seen, but even if it only delivers half of its promises, Nivalis is still an appetising proposition. It’s clever mix of life sim and story-led adventure has more than a whiff of Dave the Diver to it, and apparently you can even fall in love with your customers if you’re into that.
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