Ara: History Untold

2024: my gaming year in review

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This entry is part 12 of 12 in the series Gaming year in review / Game of the Year Awards

Better late than never!

Every year I publish a recap of that year in gaming. 2024 was a good year in terms of new releases, spread across several different genres.

Overall, including titles from previous years (mostly old favourites that I replayed) skewed my gaming heavily towards strategy.

What new releases did I play in 2024?

Indy enjoys a quiet moment.

The new releases I played were a mix of genres — these included:

Which new releases were my favourites?

My picks for Game of the Year are WARNO and Metaphor: Refantazio, both of which I wrote about.

  • WARNO successfully iterated on Eugen’s real-time tactics formula, and gave me many hours of fun during an often-challenging period.
  • I picked up Metaphor: Refantazio late in the year, and it wowed me with its style, dungeon-crawling, and character interactions.

The runners-up

I would place Indiana Jones and the Great Circle just a notch below. This is not so much the game’s fault as a matter of personal taste — later areas moved away from the verticality, focus on freeform exploration, and gorgeous architecture that enchanted me so much in the first area, the Vatican.

Unicorn Overlord is mechanically excellent and in terms of sheer hours, was one of the games I played most in 2024. Had the writing been better, it would be higher up my list.

What titles from previous years did I discover or revisit?

After 13 years!

There were a lot of beefy, evergreen strategy games:

  • I revisited Old World and Crusader Kings III in response to the release of new DLCs. Old World, in particular, is a perennial on my end-of-year lists.
  • Anno 1800 is another perennial. I even put together a to-do list on pen and paper, as I continued working through the tremendous amount of content in the game. 
  • Inspired by the excellent new Shogun TV series, I revisited Total War: Shogun 2 — and finally won as the Oda clan, the first clan I ever tried!
  • I revisited Terra Invicta and found it coming along well, two years after it launched into Early Access.
  • I revisited Emperor of the Fading Suns (link to my original write-up from back in 2011), a classic 1990s 4X game that has been updated and re-released on GOG.
  • I kept playing Rule the Waves 3, a 2023 release.
  • I also tried Fantasy General 2, Field of Glory 2: Medieval, and 40K: Gladius for the first time (and dusted off FOG2‘s predecessor, Sengoku Jidai). While its production values are limited, Fantasy General 2 made a good impression on me.
Fighting a field boss in Elden Ring.

Non-strategy games included:

  • Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was my favourite game of 2023, and I finished in 2024.
  • I revisited Elden Ring and made it most of the way through the base game — up to the Fire Giant — as well as starting on the DLC.
  • A Legionary’s Life was the standout “short-form” game I discovered in 2024.
  • Revisiting Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord took much of the shine off (my original write-up from 2020), as this time the core gameplay loop felt much more repetitive. But what it does (spectacular battles), it does well.
  • I discovered and enjoyed Suzerain’s base game, leading me to pick up the “Kingdom of Rizia” DLC.
  • Potionomics is charming, although its central loop (brew potions, sell potions, buy ingredients to make more potions, repeat) hasn’t kept me engaged as long as some of the other games on this list.
  • I continued my snail’s-pace progress through Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
  • We Love Katamari Reroll was as charming as ever.
  • No list of ongoing perennials would be complete without Mario Kart 8: Deluxe.

Site news

2024 was a productive year for the site!

I resurrected Musical Monday, with a mix of game, anime, movie, and even classical music.

Besides games, I also wrote about books (Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series), and movies (Dune: Part 2).

On a technical note, I switched to a new theme, GeneratePress.

Upcoming releases

There’s only one game release on my radar, the imminent Civilization VII.

In terms of hardware, I am very interested in the upcoming Switch 2. If Nintendo releases it at a reasonable price and with a decent launch library (a new Mario Kart is already visible in the trailer video), then I’ll look to buy it as soon as I can after launch.

I look forward to seeing you around for the rest of the year.

Ara: History Untold first impressions

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Ara: History Untold

Ara: History Untold is a turn-based strategy game that I recently described as a “[production] chain management game first and a 4X second.” After finishing a practice game last week, my impressions are:

  • At a design level, Ara has potential: I enjoy what it tries to do and it introduces some interesting ideas.
  • Its execution needs more work. The game feels several user interface/quality of life and balance patches away from achieving its potential.

As a result, I have slightly mixed feelings:

  • On the one hand, I enjoyed myself.
  • At the same time, I would wait for a few updates (and probably, a few months) before I play more.

What do you do in the game?

While Ara has the trappings of a 4X game, turn-to-turn the focus is on managing cities & resources, and crafting an ever-wider range of increasingly intricate goods. If, like me, you enjoy playing quartermaster (or royal steward), then you are probably the target audience.

For example, consider food, a staple resource in 4X games:

  • A farm on any terrain can produce a small amount of generic food.
  • Alternately, a farm on a rice resource will grow rice. Combining the rice with pots from a ceramics workshop will produce a new good, “grain store”, which gives a large amount of food.
  • As the player gains access to resources, more goods become available. For instance, salt + fish = salted fish and salt + meat = cured meat.
  • Technology unlocks new and better goods. Refrigerators, available in the modern era, provide a large bonus to a city’s available food.
Refrigerators provide hefty bonuses when provided to cities as an amenity, or slotted into homes. The “amenities” panel, top left, was full of goodies by the end of the game.

Cities have many needs besides food:

  • Supplying cities with drinks, perfume, and festivals increases happiness (and hence production).
  • Supplying candles and books increases knowledge (and hence scientific research).
  • Supplying medicine increases health (and hence city growth).
  • Increasing prosperity provides a bonus to tax income.
  • Increasing security provides a bonus to unit strength.

And to round it off, goods and buildings can produce multiple effects, and goods can often be slotted into different buildings.

At Ara’s best, it is satisfying to pull these levers to develop happy, bustling cities.

The interface doesn’t scale as the game progresses

The most common complaint about Ara is its interface, particularly for managing resources and production. Its current city-based UI is adequate in the early game. But as the game progresses, the empire grows, and more goods become important, managing them becomes a hassle.

For example, suppose I want to produce a certain item — be it steel, gourmet meals, refrigerators, or newspapers:

  • Where are all the buildings that produce it?
  • Where are all the buildings that consume the inputs? I might want to change production in other buildings to free up raw materials.
  • Similarly, where are all the buildings that produce the inputs? Again, I might want to increase production upstream so I can throw more resources at the problem.
  • Where can I slot items that boost production?

Now multiply this across different cities and goods, and each turn can become time-consuming and fiddly. By the end of my 607-turn game, instead of optimising each city, I was hitting “end turn” so I could reach the victory screen.

Needs a balance pass

Separate to the UI, I would like to see the developers tweak aspects of Ara’s gameplay, such as game rules & variables, that don’t add up to a cohesive, satisfying whole.

To pick one example, the city cap is fine for the early game but too low as the game progresses:

  • The default map size is too big for the default number of players.
  • New government types increase the city cap, but max out early on.
  • Over time, the game will eliminate players at the bottom of the score chart. This frees up land for the survivors to expand… except they can’t, because their city caps are too low.
  • And there is no option to expand without falling foul of the cap, such as vassalising cities or other players.
  • The net result is that swathes of the map end up uninhabited.
Ara takes place over three acts. At the end of Act 1 and Act 2, the game culls the bottom-ranked players (in this example, Songhai and Assyria – the ones marked as “forgotten”.)

Will I play more?

Maybe, in time. Ara’s core design is interesting and its issues are fixable with patches. I hope the game will receive the attention it deserves.