How are you getting through the January gaming dead zone?

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

January traditionally isn’t the most robust time for game releases. Nobody wants to get their big title in stores after the Christmas sales rush, and even indie games are going to be in recovery from the glut of sales that most digital storefronts end the year on. Which means we tend to start the year in a bit of a dead zone, looking forward to anticipated releases later in the year—our own list of which will be arriving next week, by the by—or, if we’re, say, the person in charge of organizing a pop culture web site’s gaming coverage for the coming months, looking at February with a slowly dawning sense of horror. (Shout-out to Ubisoft for delaying Assassin’s Creed Shadows this week; you might have done it for the shareholders, but those of us trying to fit Civilization VII and Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii and Avowed and Monster Hunter Wilds into their schedules appreciate it, too.)

Of course, you can’t play “looking forward to anticipated releases later in the year,” so January has mostly been a backlog month for me. That means indulging in those genres that eat tons of time or attention, going deep on role-playing games and the esoteric puzzle bullshit that sets my inner indoor child’s nerdy heart aflutter. I lost basically a whole day in the past week, for instance, to Epigraph, a game I found because I’d gotten a hankering for the kind of “translate a non-existent language” thrills of titles like Heaven’s Vault or the more esoteric parts of Tunic, and gone searching around the Steam store for more of the same. What I found was a minimalist experience that frequently had me tearing my hair out, but which also triggered all those delicious epiphany neurons that the best puzzle games attune themselves to.

The concept of Epigraph—created and published by a designer named Matthew Brown, who’s released several games like this—is very simple: You are presented with seven artifacts, all featuring inscriptions in an unknown language. A letter gives some context, a few hints on where to start, and a sample word or two… and that’s it. The next several hours will be spent panning back and forth between multiple digital lumps of stone, trying to reverse-engineer rules for grammar, word construction, and even such simple questions as “What is an individual symbol in a made-up language even supposed to represent?” I wouldn’t say I loved every moment I spent with the game—my threshold for frustration has been badly attenuated by *gestures vaguely to every other aspect of modern living*—but slowly teasing out the meaning and the logic hidden beneath the arcane symbols was a singular experience. I may not have loved all of my time with Epigraph, but it’s the sort of game I genuinely wish we had more of.

On a slightly less esoteric note, I also finally put the final nail in the coffin of my playthrough of Dragon Age: The Veilguard—not because I completed it, but because I started a new playthrough of Owlcat Games’ very good 2023 RPG Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, and the idea of going back to Veilguard is now officially too depressing to contemplate. (True story: I loaded that game back up a few days ago, walked 20 feet, picked up a piece of “5 gold pieces” garbage on the ground, and immediately gave into the impulse to turn it right back off.) Rogue Trader isn’t perfect—although I like it more than Owlcat’s previous two RPGs, mostly because I find its combat more interesting in a strategic sense—but the feeling of being in a universe with a defined point of view was so overwhelming that it blasted any lingering urge to return to Veilguard‘s beige fantasy heroism out of my head for good.

Rogue Trader (and its more recent DLC, Void Shadows, which I installed for this new run) is so deeply invested in presenting a vision of life in the Warhammer universe—with all its Gothic goofiness, body horror, and rampant zealotry—that it can occasionally border on stifling. But the power fantasy of presenting a rigidly hierarchical, often explicitly fascist society, and then dropping the player in at the very top, in a position where they’re allowed to break almost any stricture with near-impunity, is incredibly compelling. (On a sheer surface level, the ability to start nearly every conversation by having my personal Seneschal announce my magnificence, and end it by ordering whoever I’m talking to executed as a filthy heretic, is very addictive.) All three of Owlcat’s games—Rogue Trader, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous—delight in putting players in positions of major power in their fictional worlds, but Rogue Trader feels like it goes even further, just because of how dogmatic Warhammer‘s Imperium Of Man is. Veilguard does something that’s ostensibly similar, pushing you into leadership positions or having characters shill for how amazing you are. But its actual respect for player decisions is so superficial that it feels like getting an unwanted pat on the head from the designer. Whereas, when Rogue Trader invites me to, to pick an early example, decide whether to blow up an entire planet rather than let it slip into the perfidious grasp of Chaos, it makes me feel like my choices genuinely matter. Void Shadows, which adds a fun new (very Goth) companion, only adds to the queasy fun by adding more content to the flagship my Rogue Trader’s dynasty is based in, highlighting just how much strangeness and suffering powers my character’s life of privilege and opulence gives each of those big choices a little added weight.

So, yeah: The January dead zone might be a pain in the ass from a coverage point of view. But as a way to seek out those hidden gems that get me excited for gaming in 2025 all over again? Pretty hard to beat.