Luke’s Roblox Games of The Week: 5th April 2024

I know, this is late. Very late. It was already a joke with friends when I released this first ‘weekly’ article on the 10th March that I’d forget about it after the first week.

Truth is, I’ve been very busy. But we’ve made some strides at RTrack and finding these games has been more straightforward than ever, so here’s that second edition. I’m really enjoying finding these games – Roblox just doesn’t do a good enough job right now at surfacing games with solid but relatively small audiences. There is the recent announcement of a curated sort, essentially a return of the Featured sort that was previously discontinued, so let’s hope that pushes these games up.

Playing games on Roblox these days I feel a lot of pride for what this platform has become, I remember the days where this same platform I still recognise was still trying to master basic obbies – and now I can play an RTS, an FPS, a pet roleplay game, an emergency services simulation game, a football game – I could go on – all on this one platform. It’s incredible. Still, though, I do think there are way too many incredible games that never really found the attention they deserved, still sitting in the shadows – and Roblox could do more for them. But today we’re just focused on new, rising titles.

PARACAM is a first person, intense horror game. The sound design is great, there are custom voice lines throughout the game, the suspense is there and the map is nicely made.

It’s definitely a step up from what you usually see in Roblox horror, very dark corridors and random jump scares, there’s a storyline and pacing. This game has voice chat and you can play in many different group sizes, I predict this game is going places pretty soon.

Some gameplay footage:

This game is incredibly new, being created only a month ago and already hitting an incredible 4.9M visits.

I’m not sure what’s going on with horror games recently, but this is another superb entry to the genre on Roblox.

Again, this game is available with voice chat and in multiplayer. You begin in a dimly lit house at night, in the living room. A telephone rings – you pick it up and calm, slow elevator music plays. A robotic voice begins calmly and unemotionally explaining that you have applied for the job of ‘reporter’, tasked with reporting anomalies in the house. “Your only task is to report that anomaly, and we will handle the rest”.

You are equipped with a tablet, equipable by pressing R. Using the tablet, you can report ‘anomalies’ when you’re standing in that room. Be careful, though; you must identify the type of anomaly exactly for it to be rectified, and if you and your fellow reporters don’t identify the anomalies fast enough, the threat level will increase.

This game is truly terrifying, the ‘THREAT LEVEL’ counter in the bottom right, gradually increasing in severity, the clock in the hall ticking faster and faster as you fail to recognise more anomalies, all the while anxious of what will happen when it reaches the final level… and, what is the final level? Are we already there?

Anomaly Watch was created on the 20th of December 2023, I’m not sure exactly when it released but I’d guess somewhere around the 9th of March, as that’s when RTrack first picked it up. It wasn’t until the 20th that the game really started to pick up steam and get noticed, however:

This is…. yeah. Another horror game. The depths below tells a tale of a protagonist whose wife has gone missing, you will enter into a dark, maze-like cave system with just a headtorch and a backpack, in search of answers.

This game differs in it’s third person view, and the initial cutscene as you load into the game is brilliant. My only comment from a design standpoint is that the initial UX on first join could be greatly improved, it’s unclear how to just get straight into a match. A great big ‘PLAY’ button with matchmaking that puts you into a server with other players would be ideal.

This game is smaller than the others so far, with 500,000 visits at the time of writing. It’s showing a clear growth trajectory, though, and I suspect with some straightforward UX improvements the developer, LazyDev’s Workshop, will see interest continue to rise.

General Quarters is an interesting twist on the wave defence genre. In this game, you take the role of a sailor on one of the ships in a naval battlegroup. You and your fellow sailors on board all of the ships must fight wave after wave of enemy (AI) planes and naval vessels. In your armoury you have various types of guns on the ship deck, as well as some ships having the ability to launch aircraft of their own.

Watch as ships and submarines attempt to intercept you, enemy aircraft perform strafing runs on your boats and huge swarms of planes emerge from the clouds, shortly met by a hail of anti aircraft fire.

General Quarters is another criminally underrated game. The place says it was created 9 years ago, but RTrack’s data shows that until the 15th of March this year this game only had 15,000 total visits. That now stands at 738,000.