Winner: Drop Duchy
Drop Duchy is a superb idea executed brilliantly. Sleepy Mill Studio fused the familiar Soviet classic Tetris with a medieval-themed city-builder, and blended both into a roguelike deckbuilder. Cards in the player’s deck are transformed into tetrominoes which descend in that familiar, inevitable way. How they are placed determines how a miniature fiefdom develops – farms, forests, mountains, castles, rivers, and military emplacements both allied and enemy.
What begins in a simple way gradually evolves into a truly inspired and satisfying puzzle game. Progress unlocks not only new cards – helpful and hostile – but also whole new gameplay mechanics and factions which play very differently. Crucially, Drop Duchy never becomes overcomplex and its climactic boss battles are not as insurmountable as they may first appear. Sleepy Mill have continued to support the game with two DLC add-ons, each of which adds a new faction and additional mechanical quirks.
Like Into the Breach and Inscryption before it, Drop Duchy is an indie game possessing a spark of genuine genius, matched with high-level execution.
Read our review of Drop Duchy.
Runner Up: Blippo+
It might not be strictly speaking a game, rather similar to previous Entertainium Game of the Year winner Immortality, but Blippo+ has essentially the opposite atmosphere to the foreboding overtones of Immortality. Imagining what cheaply made early 1980s cable TV might look like on another planet, on the opposite side of the galaxy, Blippo+ has the tongue planted firmly in cheek as it hosts a variety of 1 minute long faux TV shows, from news to soap operas, from science to teletext. Everything has that authentic low-fi fuzziness, and also monochome versions as a result of the original release being on the miniature Playdate handheld. Blippo+ is thoroughly charming and consistently entertaining.
– Gareth Brading
