Holiday Gaming Marathon: Must-Have Games for Your Christmas Break

Fun with Numbers: Balatro

Balatro is a game which doesn’t sounds as engaging as it actually is. In a way it’s in a similar realm as Vampire Survivors, you don’t understand the fun until you play yourself.

LocalThunk’s game might look like a slightly tweaked digital poker, but it’s actually a deck-building rogue-like. Instead of bosses it has increasingly demanding point requirements, and your only hope are card synergies.

Image credit: LocalThunk

See, in addition to the traditional poker hands, you also get a bunch of stuff which affects how many points you’re going to get. Normal cards might have some special effect or enhanced value, while Jokers alter the rules themselves, all opening some pathway towards higher multipliers and bigger scores. The better you do, the more resources for deck upgrades you have, creating a rewarding gameplay loop.

Balatro

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Challenging Exploration: Animal Well

Animal Well is an exploration- and experimentation-oriented Metroidvania.

While you can’t fight, unlike other games in the genre, you do collect items which enable you to access more locations. Many of these items will also have additional, less obvious uses you’ll probably discover on your own, since AW’s dense level design and interconnectedness are quite fascinating and engaging.

Image credit: Shared Memory

The game has a low-res, pixellated aesthetic, but it’s lovingly animated and the environments are vivid thanks to great lighting and particle effects. There are several “layers” to the game, each of increased complexity, with the first being the very basic, “from title to credits” kind of run. Well, “basic” might be misleading, even if you aren’t one to 100% a game, there’s a lot to figure out.

Animal Well

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Chaotic Co-Op Fun: Helldivers 2

Helldivers 2 was 2024’s big multiplayer surprise, a PvE third-person shooter for up to four players in co-op.

As brave defender of Super-Earth and its ingenious managed democracy, you and your teammates will face hordes of vicious enemies of mankind: ravenous bugs and rebellious robots, waging a large-scale, interplanetary war which evolves in real-time based on the community’s performance.

Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios

In case it’s not clear: Helldivers 2 isn’t an entirely serious game. The tone and the premise are zig-zagging between being purposefully silly and satirical, with clear inspiration taken from the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers. Despite that, it takes gameplay seriously, with plenty of gear and cosmetics to kit out your soldier, well-designed enemies, and missions which are always about more than just killing.

Helldivers 2

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Relaxing Platforming: Astro Bot

Looking for a game which could bring the charm of Mario 64 or Odyssey to a different platform? Something to play while younger family members are watching?

If you’ve got a PlayStation 5, give Astro Bot a chance. It’s a lovely, creative game about a cute robot trying to find his friends, many of them dressed up as characters from a metric tons of games which launched on PlayStation at some point.

Image credit: Team Asobi

There are several hundred bots to rescue across nearly a hundred levels scattered across many different planets. It sounds like a lot, but Astro Bot isn’t a hundred-hour collect-a-thon. The game keeps things fresh and can be completed under 30 hours, which is a reasonable time for a game like that. A cute mascot game, a tech showcase for PS5 and a great game in one? Sounds like a jackpot.

Legendary Action: Black Myth: Wukong

One of 2024’s greatest hits, certainly in terms of concurrent players, was Black Myth: Wukong, a game which acts as a kind of sequel to the centuries old, classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.

It takes place long after the unfair downfall of Sun Wukong, and follow the Destined One, another clever monkey, sent on a quest to retrieve the Monkey King’s scattered senses.

Image credit: Game Science

Although BMW has some resemblance to Souls-likes, it’s largely a much more straightforward action game, with dynamic combat, relatively simple progression, and pretty much non-existent penalties for dying. The Destined One’s own journey is separated into story-driven chapters, often shpowing the aftermath (or fallout) of Wukong’s old adventures, a treat for the novel’s fans.

Black Myth: Wukong

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Survival Strategy: Frostpunk & Frostpunk 2

If you’re not into heroism nor friendly vibes, there’s Frostpunk, a game which couldn’t be less cozy if it tried.

Set in an alternate history 19th century, the campaign focuses on a community trying to survive an apocalyptic volcanic winter by a coal-powered heat generator. As the Captain, the de facto ruler of the community, you must implement policies which lead to its survival in these harsh conditions.

Frostpunk 2, Image credit: 11 bit studios

Finding a balance between having enough resources to power the generator and maintaining the people’s hope is a tough one, and there are many narrative moments in this strategy game, where you’ll have to make the hard choice of doing what will help the city survive, or doing something that will make the people want to still care about survival. It’s hard, it’s morally challenging, it’s excellent.

In 2024, FP received a sequel, very reasonably titled Frostpunk 2. Unlike its predecessor, it wasn’t exactly a survival city-builder, as much as a strategy about managing conflicting political factions and expanding your city’s influence over a large region. It’s a noteworthy change of scale, and in interesting one, even if some that nitty-gritty of the original game might have been sacrificed to achieve it.

Frostpunk

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Frostpunk 2

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Innovative Puzzles: Baba Is You

Do you like puzzles being… weird? If so, you might have a ball with Baba Is You, a game about changing how it works.

It’s a series of contained challenges, and each level has a few simple rules designing how it work. They are built out of blocks you can interact with, so you might, for example, push “stop” out of “wall is stop” rule to gain the ability to move through walls.

Image credit: hempuli

The basics seem simple and straightforward, but don’t let that fool you: after teaching you these basics the levels quickly get complex and convoluted.

Completing the game requires a lot of out-of-the-box thinking, as there are more rules active at once, they might need to be activated in a specific sequence, and map layouts get more ambitious. It’s a real brain teaser.

Baba is You

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Hilarious Multiplayer: Gang Beasts

Gang Beasts is a PvP game that is hard to take seriously.

Not in the sense that it’s not a real game, it very much is, but its nature is inherently comedic and it’s hard to be upset even when you lose. How does the game accomplish this? The key is making the “fighters” incredibly clumsy, in the “adorable bag of uncoordinated jelly” kind of way. It makes even gruesome violence funny.

Image credit: Boneloaf

And make no mistake: in a game like Mortal Kombat some arena elements would lead to gore nightmares. Here, a jellybean person getting thrown into an incinerator or bone grinder looks like cruel experiments conducted on a gummy bear. There are no health bars involved, the only way to win is to (clumsily!) grapple your opponents and try to throw them over the arena’s edge.

Gang Beasts

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