The official Balatro Timeline documents the history of 2024's biggest game as its developer went from 'obsessed' with making it to 'shocked' at the reception - Related to documents, are, biggest, history, best

Look, 4 new games that are NOT Monster Hunter Wilds

The dust on the yesterday's horizon has become today's stampede. Monster Hunter Wilds has launched and we are all choking on up-kicked sand. So far the action game has hit a peak of 987,000 players on Steam and all my news feeds are nothing but Rathalos screams. This is what we call a "big 'un".

But what trembling critters are eking out an existence in the disturbed ground beneath Capcom's feet? Other games still exist, and some are just unlucky enough to step out of their bolthole the same moment a much scarier freak is on the prowl. Here are 4 games that just released which may be worth a look if you have no time for big beasties.

It's golf. And probably the most expensive game on the list, with the biggest publisher name attached. PGA Tour 2K25 came out today, which implies 2K are comfortable launching their sports game alongside Capcom's gargantuan freak, perhaps concluding that the venn diagram of golf likers and lizard enthusiasts leaves only a slim overlap. But Steam itself strangely seems to disagree. In the box titled "Is this game relevant to you?" the store indicates this putt 'em up is similar to at least one other game I have played: Monster Hunter Wilds. Okay.

Not a full game, but a significant enhancement to the long-running space sim. Trailblazers makes it possible for space pilots to stake a claim on whole star systems, and start building the orbital stations, refineries, and planetary outposts that commanders usually frequent, but in currently unpopulated systems. There's a big rundown here from the developers, which explains in brief the many steps it will take to build your frontier spaceport. As a lapsed space trucker it is an appealing fantasy.

"Turn your system into a gateway to the unknown - a perfect home base for your expeditions into the black," they say. "Become a destination for Commanders looking to make a name for themselves in a bustling hub for missions." In reality, this is sure to involve enough grindy shipping to complete whole seasons of true crime podcasts while flying back and forth between a rubber factory and a glue store. It's also technically in beta. And if you want to give your colony its own name, you'll have to pay extra real money for Elite's special spacebucks. But as an extra bit of grindy endgame, it does seem to open up the Milky Way quite a bit.

Forget what I presented about the golf game being the expensive one. Is £55/$50 a good deal for 14 old Yu-Gi-Oh games stretching back to the original GameBoy titles? Longtime fans and retro game dweebs might be pleased - some of these old card battlers were only released in Japan but have finally been localised for this collection. At least some of the games will feature online multiplayer battles, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters 4: Battle of Great Duelists. And the games boast a "rewind time" function, that's like the much-appreciated fast-forwarding of Squeenix's Final Fantasy re-releases. But, uh, in reverse.

Anyway, there you go. A small menu of other games if you're not into making pants out of majestic symbols of raw nature. There are, as ever, a bunch of other small games released today in Steam's ever-expanding soup of personal projects, sex games, and cynical AI trash. But these are the four that made it through the RPS bullshit filter, a frightening machine that no single worker here knows how to operate in its entirety. You want more good curation like this? It's easy, just keep coming back. We like it when your eyes touch our words.

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The official Balatro Timeline documents the history of 2024's biggest game as its developer went from 'obsessed' with making it to 'shocked' at the reception

By any measure, Balatro is a phenomenon. A weird little indie card game that came out of nowhere in 2023, it earned rave reviews when it launched in early 2024, claimed our Game of the Year crown, and has some of the biggest developers and publishers in the world lining up to get in on the action.

Today, a little over a year after its release, developer LocalThunk has shared the official "Balatro Timeline," a detailed and surprisingly dramatic rundown of how it all came to be (including, in case you were curious, the origins of his name) that's also just a straight ton of fun to read.

The timeline begins in December 2021, when LocalThunk decided to burn three weeks of holiday time "to work on some kind of project." CardGame, the "production working folder for all Balatro source code," was created on December 20, 2021, and has never been renamed.

A month later, "My vacation is over, but I am now fully immersed and obsessed," LocalThunk wrote. "This is my favourite feeling in the world. When I was back in university I would routinely stay up until the wee hours of the morning working on my weird game projects and greet my parents while they made their morning coffee. I got back into this groove and starting in January I was hooked."

From there, the timeline follows the creation of Balatro, and LocalThunk's life around it, through a series of highs and lows: The search for a publisher, slow but growing interest in the game among YouTubers and streamers, the impact on LocalThunk's physical and mental health, the near-certainty that something would go catastrophically wrong at the last second, and the shock when it didn't: I am admittedly biased, but his retelling of the reaction to Balatro reviews is one of my favorite segments.

"February 19th rolls around," LocalThunk wrote. "The 19th is the review embargo day, and Playstack did a truly exceptional job getting this game in the hands of traditional media to write their reviews before launch. I didn’t know what to expect, this was a pretty weird game after all. Average ratings of 6 or 7?

"The first big review is from PC Gamer: 91. Playstack and I are on a call when they break the news to me, and I can tell they are pretty shocked. I am shocked. That rating doesn’t make any sense."

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The Balatro Timeline serves up some interesting insights into indie game development, but it's also just an incredibly entertaining read. Even though we know the outcome, there's a tangible sensation of rising excitement and pressure as the story progresses, and when LocalThunk writes that Balatro's sales numbers on launch day "made no sense," it comes across not as false modesty but genuine surprise: "This was meant for just a few of my friends and yet somehow all these strangers chose to buy it."

"All these strangers," indeed: Balatro surpassed five million copies sold in January.

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One of the best city builders of the last decade is currently 90% off on Steam

Ubisoft is currently running a publisher-wide sale on Steam, offering some pretty nifty discounts like half-price on Star Wars: Outlaws and 75% off The Division 2. But the best deal is a whopping 90% off one of the best modern city builders you can play, Blue Byte's Anno 1800.

Anno 1800 whisks players back to the dawn of the industrial revolution, starting you off founding a little farming village. But it isn't long before you're building smog-billowing steelworks, laying down the tracks of your first railway, and dispatching expeditions to establish colonies in the new world.

It combines the infrastructural management of Cities: Skylines with the production chains of Blue Byte's other notable series, The Settlers. And that combination is utterly absorbing, one you can easily lose hours to without noticing.

When I originally reviewed Anno 1800 back in 2019, I described it as "the most engrossing city builder I've played since Cities: Skylines". While that still sounds right to me, it's a claim that requires revisiting now, simply because the competition has heated up so much in the last few years.

Games like city building roguelike Against the Storm, the bustling beaver sim Timberborn, and the unfinished phenomenon Manor Lords have brought their own exciting and distinctive flavours to the act of settlement construction. Even factoring in the disastrous launch of Cities: Skylines 2, the city building genre is far fuller and healthier than it was five years ago.

Nonetheless, while all the aforementioned games are fantastic (except perhaps Skylines 2) I think Anno 1800 remains the most comprehensive example of the traditional city-builder. It simply has an incredibly pleasing arc that's granular without being fussy, and the way your cities don't just grow but evolve architecturally and technologically is hugely gratifying.

Either way, Anno 1800 is undoubtedly worth the £5/$6 Ubisoft is currently asking for it. The offer remains available until Thursday March 13, when Ubisoft's publisher sale ends.

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