Fort Triumph is XCOM for Discworld fans

VIDEO: Why you should play Fort Triumph. Also on YouTube.

Sometimes I want, more than anything else, to make little people run into cover then see them duck down behind it. Fort Triumph is one of the games that scratches that itch, and fortunately it also scratches my itches for goofball comedy as well.

The Meaning of Liff, a dictionary of things there aren't words for, defines ripon as "to include all the best jokes from the book in a review to make it look as if the critic thought of them". I'm trying very hard not to steal the best jokes from Fort Triumph, so you'll just have to trust me that its story of hardscrabble fantasy adventurers trying to earn a living is funny in a Terry Pratchett or Cowboy Bebop kind of way.

But it's also funny in a more obvious way. The turn-based tactical battles let you manipulate the environment, which leads to unexpected consequences. You fire a grappling arrow to pull a barrel into a bandit, stunning him but also sliding him across the battlefield, where he collides with your barbarian. You kick a skeleton who bounces off a pillar, which falls on top of your wizard. You cast fireball, and soon everything's on fire. Actually, I should have expected that last one.

Even when these physics manipulations go as planned they make me smile. If it's wrong to think a tree falling on an oblivious goblin's head is funny, I don't want to be right.

Fort Triumph is available on Steam and GOG.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.