The games that got me through 2021

Hello! Hi! You’re here and so am I! What a miracle, truly.

It’s been pretty quiet on the Gentle Gamers front for about, uh, two years. Truthfully, I’ve had some trouble stringing words together for this past bit of time. But even as my will to write went into quiet hibernation, I was still playing games: quiet games, games that turned off the louder portions of my brain, games that were lovely and just what I needed.

I can feel the writing gears slowly move back into motion as we step into 2022, so I’d like to take a moment to help them along by saying: Hi. I love you. I hope you’re well. Here are some games I liked this past year. Maybe you’ll like them too.

Wildermyth

Most games have a story in mind for the player to follow. Even in “open world” games like Breath of the Wild, I might make a million diversions, but in the end, I will always be meant to face Calamity Ganon and save Zelda.

Wildermyth does something that puts a huge amount of trust in the player: inspired by tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, it invites a collaborative approach to creating a story, one made between the game and the player. Whereas most tabletop games invite beautiful chaos through the inclusion of other players, Widlermyth builds most of its systems by randomly generating large aspects of the story.

The player begins the game with a randomly-generated group of adventurers. From there, they are put on a randomly-generated map, filled with possible battle encounters with fantasy-world enemies. As the party explores the map, randomly-generated story beats pop up, inviting the player to make decisions on how their characters react to the environment. After battles, the party receives randomly-generated stat-boosting equipment, which they can add to their little sprites, turning their generic outfits into bespoke ensembles.

Each bit of Widlermyth is deceptively simple. But when all these random bits and bobs come together, it makes for a surprisingly personal story.

By the end of my first campaign, my adventurers had changed drastically: one had raven wings from a pact with an old god; one had lost an eye trying to help another; all were grey-haired (as the adventurers age during their journey); one’s child fought along side them in the final boss battle. As I bid farewell to one group and went into the next campaign, a couple of my old crew popped up in my new adventure. I was thrilled to welcome them back.

The whole thing felt like a world emerging out of many small parts, all moving together in tandem. In a time when most chaos feels big and scary, Wildermyth was a reminder of the joy that chaos can also bring.

Unpacking

I have not met a single person that enjoys moving. The stress of putting one’s material life into boxes and moving them to a new place is often stressful, no matter how many friends you bribe with pizza and beer.

Unpacking is a puzzle game about, uh, unpacking. The game follows an unnamed protagonist as they unpack after a number of big life changes: moving to a new house as a kid, going to college, moving in with a partner, etc. The “puzzle” element of Unpacking involves trying to find appropriate homes for each item. The game only allows you to progress when items are placed in generally correct spots (e.g. clothes must go in closets). With limited amounts of space, there is some light strategizing about how best to organize the space.

The protagonist of Unpacking is never seen or heard; the player only gets to know them through the objects that they pull out of their moving boxes. From this, a surprisingly captivating and tender story emerges. Certain objects are brought across multiple moves. Objects are picked up from old roommates and held on to, even as the roommates become former roommates. The part that really got me, though, was when I was unpacking boxes when the protagonist moves in with their boyfriend.

Across multiple moves, the protagonist had packed a framed certificate, showing some sort of achievement. I had dutifully placed it on the wall in each new move. However, as I looked around the boyfriend’s apartment, there wasn’t any wall space. There were lots of concert posters and framed photos, but no room for this one item. I spent a good deal of time trying to find space, until finally resorting to storing it under the bed. I was surprised how genuinely sad I felt.

Most games involve getting to know a space. Unpacking looks at what what our spaces say about us.

Dorfromantik

Dorfromantik is both 1) intensely fun to say (“Dorf! Dorfromantik!”) and 2) the mind-numbing relaxation I needed this year. Here’s what I wrote about it earlier this year:

One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Age of Empires with my little brother, and it really set the tone for what I wanted from video games. Being predisposed towards anxiety, there was something reassuring about playing a game where I didn’t control a single person, but where I was in charge of the environment. Early Maxis games like SimCity, SimPark, and SimAnt scratched the same itch. Even though these games had goals and challenges, I found them relaxing. There was something about seeing their digital worlds grow and change from a bird’s eye view that just settled my mind.

Dorfromantik — a game that describes itself as a “peaceful building strategy and puzzle game” — really focuses in on the relaxation, while keeping it just challenging enough to be captivating. The player is given a stack of hexagonal tokens with different landscape features: trees, houses, railroads, rivers, and farmland. Players can earn points and, more importantly, get more tiles in their stack by following certain challenge prompts (e.g. creating a river of a certain tile length, or by creating a village of an exact number of houses). When the player runs out of tiles, the game ends.

It’s really the design of the game that shines: as the land grows, subtle changes occur. Forests change from green to fall-colored on different ends of the map. The houses in the villages give off little puffs of smoke. Boats and trains travel their ever-growing paths. Little geese fly across the landscape in a soft V. It’s like looking down at the world from an airplane, which imbues the whole experience with an air of calm detachment. There are no troubles or problems to solve, just little hexagons to rotate and place, building a world out of thin air.

Inscryption

Going off of aesthetics alone, Inscryption really isn’t my normal cup of tea. It’s marketed as a combination of deck-builder and puzzle-escape-room, with lots of light horror elements stuck in. Namely: You’re in a room! Trapped by someone for reasons you don’t know! All you can see are their swirling orange eyes! To track your points during a game, there’s a scale with gold teeth on it! If you need to tip the balance in your favor, you can tear out one of your teeth!

But I was intrigued. The game was made by the same person who did Pony Island, a game that was seemingly about a pony on an island, but which unraveled into a meta-contextual fight against the devil. I has heard rumblings that Inscryption took a sharp left turn as well, and my curiosity won out.

And I’m so glad it did! I didn’t love the game as much as some others did (it won Polygon’s Game of the Year title, handily), but I did find it pretty captivating. It’s a game best gone into blind, so I won’t say too much here. What I will say is that it doesn’t feel like a one-trick pony. In fact, I thought that the sharp-left-turn was one of the weaker parts of the game. The core game itself — a strategy card game with new rules thrown in at odd intervals — actually required a fair bit of thought and strategy. For that reason alone, I wanted to keep playing.

The fact that there was a whole story that just kept unfolding and unfolding and unfolding? Well, that was icing on top of an already pretty delicious cake.

Overboard!

Another one I wrote about over the summer, and I still love it! Here’s what I said before:

Sure, a murder mystery is a good time. But what about a murder mystery where there is no doubt that you are the murderer?

Overboard! is a snappy and charming little game where there is no doubt about who is trouble; the game starts with the player’s character pushing their husband over the railing of a boat while they’re out at sea. From there, it’s up to the player to move around the ship and avert suspicion away from themselves and to literally anyone else. At some point, their late husband’s disappearance will become apparent to other people on the ship, and a Poirot-style living-room “whodunnit” sequence will determine whether or not the player actually got away with murder.

No matter if they get off or not, the game will loop, and the player will have another chance to do a run. Overboard! does a great job of keeping things moving on future loops. The game remembers what choices the player made in the previous run, and so there’s an option to fast-forward sequences using the same answers, if you choose. Also, little side quests come up as smaller mysteries arise (what is the captain trying to hide? why did the often-drunk high society lady say the ship is sinking?). It can be hard to make a repeated story feel fresh and fun, but OverboardI manages to do just that, all while teasing that maybe you can get away with murder better, faster, more slyly next time.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

OK, let me get this out of the way: I didn’t finish Echoes of the Eye.

Echoes of the Eye is a new added adventure to Outer Wilds, which is, perhaps, my favorite game of all time. Outer Wilds is a perfectly contained adventure: you play as a character, stuck in a time loop. The sun explodes every 22 minutes, resetting the world, and you’re the only one who knows. It’s up to the player to explore the game’s solar system and figure out what’s going on. There’s not a hair that’s out of place in the original game. When the mystery is revealed, everything falls into place perfectly, making a supremely satisfying (and incredibly moving) ending. So, when Echoes of the Eye was announced, I saw a number of game reviewers wonder how the Mobius Digital team could add an expansion to this perfectly crafted world.

Like Inscryption, both Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye are best gone into blind. Suffice it to say that the expansion feels perfectly slotted in, creating a new space to explore that is both entirely self-sufficient from AND YET deeply connected to the base game.

But, like I said, I didn’t finish it. Because it was too scary for me.

I got about halfway through before I decided that I was good. The latter half of the game becomes a pseudo-horror game, having to avoid things creeping in the dark. I hate navigating dark games. I hate survival horror. And I hate when messing up in a game means being punted to the very beginning of the scary section. Echoes of the Eye does all three, yet it’s still a game I can’t stop thinking about.

Thought I didn’t finish the game myself, I did watch a playthrough. Like the original game, the ending of Echoes of the Eye shows the entire exercise to be a beautiful meditation on our relationship to the unknown. If Outer Wilds was about the joy of exploration, Echoes of the Eye is about fear, and what happens when we succumb to it. Though it’s not something I was ready to face on my own, I am so thankful to have a team as thoughtful as Mobius Digital reaching out to me in the dark.

New Pokémon Snap

When I was little, I loved going to Blockbuster because they had an arcade console where I could play Pokémon Snap. Without an N64 at home, the Blockbuster demo version was the best I could hope for. The game itself wasn’t much to write home about: as the player, you follow an on-the-rails path through a world of Pokémon, taking pictures of them in their natural habitat and enticing them to interact by throwing apples their way.

I played the same route, over and over. I knew it backwards and forwards. It was elusive. It was coveted. And when it disappeared and was replaced with a new demo game, I was heartbroken.

Cut to: me — an adult woman — pre-ordering New Pokémon Snap for the Switch I bought with my own money. I played it on day 1 and can safety say that it is so stupid. It is slow-paced and repetitive and is utterly confounding to play.

I love it so much.

Like a little rat hitting a button to get a pellet over and over again, New Pokémon Snap delivered serotonin straight into my brain. I can’t count the number of times I gasped when I got an especially good picture. I was a fool for the bright colors and lush scenery. I threw apples, tossed little orbs of light (I’m still not sure what they were), and played a little ice-cream-truck jingle from my Jurassic World-style orb vehicle, all of which were supposed to entice the Pokémon to interact with the environment in fun ways, but only if you did it at the right time in the right pattern. There was no way to intuit when you were supposed to toss what at whom, so I mostly looked up walkthroughs and/or joyfully button mashed my way through landscapes.

Is it good? No. It isn’t. But who cares? It’s fun.

A short hello of short games for short summer nights

Hello! Hello! Hi! Long time no see! You know how time is essentially a hole these days? Difficult to untangle and even more difficult to track? I’m still swimming through it, trying to find a small bit of land to help me get steady on my feet, but until then, I have a small gift:

Through all this temporal mishmash, I’ve had the company of a few excellent short games. They’re just about what my brain can handle these days, and they’re all perfect little serotonin snacks for the summer. Maybe you’ll like them too.

And soon I’ll be back with some actual thoughts about game design! But until then:

short games for short summer nights

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One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Age of Empires with my little brother, and it really set the tone for what I wanted from video games. Being predisposed towards anxiety, there was something reassuring about playing a game where I didn’t control a single person, but where I was in charge of the environment. Early Maxis games like SimCity, SimPark, and SimAnt scratched the same itch. Even though these games had goals and challenges, I found them relaxing. There was something about seeing their digital worlds grow and change from a bird’s eye view that just settled my mind.

Dorfromantik — a game that describes itself as a “peaceful building strategy and puzzle game” — really focuses in on the relaxation, while keeping it just challenging enough to be captivating. The player is given a stack of hexagonal tokens with different landscape features: trees, houses, railroads, rivers, and farmland. Players can earn points and, more importantly, get more tiles in their stack by following certain challenge prompts (e.g. creating a river of a certain tile length, or by creating a village of an exact number of houses). When the player runs out of tiles, the game ends.

It’s really the design of the game that shines: as the land grows, subtle changes occur. Forests change from green to fall-colored on different ends of the map. The houses in the villages give off little puffs of smoke. Boats and trains travel their ever-growing paths. Little geese fly across the landscape in a soft V. It’s like looking down at the world from an airplane, which imbues the whole experience with an air of calm detachment. There are no troubles or problems to solve, just little hexagons to rotate and place, building a world out of thin air.

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Lydia Davis is one of my favorite authors. She mainly is known for her short stories, some of which are literally only a sentence long. Her work, to me, feels like magic. Here’s a noun. Here’s a verb. String just the right ones together and, POOF, a story: perfect and compact.

Big Ocean Wide Jacket feels like the video game version of a Lydia Davis short story. There’s not a lot to it, in either story or graphics. It’s about a camping trip, with the four main characters rendered as kind of floppy polygons, traveling in a low-poly world of wide swaths of color. But despite its simple premise and short run time, I can’t stop thinking about it. .

I get frustrated with big-name video games that so clearly want to be movies. I can’t be bothered with their cinematic cut-scenes and action sequences that are more on-the-rails than challenging encounters (lest it interrupt the plot’s need to be driven forward). Big Ocean Wide Jacket feels like a movie, too, but in a wholly more interesting way. Rather than concerning itself with exciting cinematics, it is more interested in cinematography.

There’s a moment where all the characters are sitting around a fire at night. The player can see only one character at a time, and is instructed to press an arrow key to rotate around the circle to move from person to person. As the player loops around, the characters move and shift into new spaces: someone gets a hot dog, someone ducks out of the circle into the dark, someone has their head in their hands. Big Ocean Wide Jacket knows that what’s not seen is often just as interesting as what is seen. This very simple sequence gives a sense of the tone of the characters’ evening more than any cut-scene ever could. It’s a sort of magic

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Sure, a murder mystery is a good time. But what about a murder mystery where there is no doubt that you are the murderer?

Overboard! is a snappy and charming little game where there is no doubt about who is trouble; the game starts with the player’s character pushing their husband over the railing of a boat while they’re out at sea. From there, it’s up to the player to move around the ship and avert suspicion away from themselves and to literally anyone else. At some point, their late husband’s disappearance will become apparent to other people on the ship, and a Poirot-style living-room “whodunnit” sequence will determine whether or not the player actually got away with murder.

No matter if they get off or not, the game will loop, and the player will have another chance to do a run. Overboard! does a great job of keeping things moving on future loops. The game remembers what choices the player made in the previous run, and so there’s an option to fast-forward sequences using the same answers, if you choose. Also, little side quests come up as smaller mysteries arise (what is the captain trying to hide? why did the often-drunk high society lady say the ship is sinking?). It can be hard to make a repeated story feel fresh and fun, but OverboardI manages to do just that, all while teasing that maybe you can get away with murder better, faster, more slyly next time.

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Listen. This one isn’t complicated. Dating sims are stupid fun, and even more stupid and fun when the people you’re trying to win a date with are sexy monsters.

Monster Camp is the sequel to Monster Prom and, in terms of gameplay, is essentially the same. The player (or players, since it can be played either solo or multiplayer) has a certain amount of rounds in order to try and win over the monster of their dreams. Each round, the player chooses a spot at camp to spend the day in order to level up a stat: going to the haunted house makes them more Bold; going to drama makes them more Creative. Level up the right stats, and you might just have a chance to ask your favorite monster to join you to be your summer love.

It’s meta and goofy, with dialogue that is tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek. Given that its surprisingly replayable, it’s a great way to spend some time that, refreshingly, doesn’t take itself too seriously.

I'm Going That Way: a game of the year discussion

I love an end of year list. It’s so charming, to me, to see folks putting all their ducks in rows (look at those ducks! so lined up!) and ruminating over the Year That Was. Normally, I would join in the fray, with a list of gentler games that brought me joy.

But I’m not doing that this year.

It’s not because I found it hard to be as omnivorous as I usually try to be with games (though that certainly was true since my attention span in 2020 was, uh, a bit shot), but because, ultimately, the discussion can’t be without recognizing the reality we found ourselves in (alone, together) and how certain cultural touchstones resonated with a frequency that became louder by virtue of their setting.

To go with an obvious example: Animal Crossing: New Horizons would have been big any year, but it would its daily tasks have felt so very needed when we were grasping for any resemblance of productivity in the early spring? Would I have put up with Nintendo’s truly terrible online system to invite friends to my island so we could play our ocarinas at the digital shore? Would I have cried when it was my birthday and I woke up to find my villagers celebrating me, dancing bobble-headed around my in-game room on their little anthropomorphic feet? No, no, and no.

But Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn’t my game of the year. Nor is Hades, the game I enjoyed most and played in a fugue state, only later realizing how apt it was to play a game where I was trying to escape hell over and over again, only to be told There Is No Escape.

No, my game of the year is an episodic game whose final “act” came out in January of this year, before I had ever heard the term “shelter in place.” It’s a game that always felt prescient, concerned as it was with the great quaking storm of capitalism that’s always roiling overhead. It’s a game that I wouldn’t shut up about until the moment I finished playing the final act and found myself completely unable to talk about. It’s a game that, more than any other, shines brightest in this moment, serving both as an elegy and a hopeful clarion to some collective future.

Friends, it’s Kentucky Route Zero. It’s always been Kentucky Route Zero.

Equus Oils

Equus Oils

(Spoilers to follow, naturally.)

Kentucky Route Zero is, ostensibly, a point and click adventure game about trying to make a delivery.

At the very start of the game, Conway (an older man with an even older dog, and driver of the delivery van) pulls up to an unlit gas station, which is shaped like a giant horse head and is named Equus Oils. He’s looking for 5 Dogwood Drive, an address that can only be reached, he’s told, by taking the Zero, a highway that runs under the surface of the Kentucky soil in odd and confusing patterns. He needs to make this delivery; it’s the last one before his friend and employer, Lysette, closes up shop. She’s losing her memory. She’s also not there, though her ghost sure seems to be.

Lysette’s ghost is one of many encounter by Conway over the course of an evening:

There are the ghosts of drowned miners that appear in the flicking light of Elkhorn Mine, where Conway injures his leg in a tunnel collapse. Their shadows appear to be walking alongside Conway and his accidental companion (and daughter of two of the drowned miners), Shannon Márquez, moving out of the mine and into the moonlit entrance.

There’s Weaver Márquez, Shannon’s cousin, a woman who's there and who’s not, who tells him how to get on the Zero and mostly exists in television static.

There is the ghost of the town that used to exist. The player can drive around the above-ground Kentucky highways, reading descriptions of all the buildings that were closed and abandoned after being used by the Consolidated Power Co., the same faceless corporation that came in, bought the Elkhorn Mine, didn’t install quite enough safety measures to protect the miners, and have bled the town dry.

There is the storage facility that plays the recording of a church sermon, the congregants long gone but the rite still kept sacred.

There are the glittering undead skeletons who run the Hard Times Distillery, working there because they went into debt to Consolidated Power (who, of course, run the distillery) and this was the only way to pay it off. When Conway breaks his sobriety and takes a shot at the distillery, he learns that he, too, owes the company back. They thought he was there to work but, since he’s not, the celebratory drink is now actually at cost, and it was the Good Stuff.

Though Kentucky Route Zero is a narrative game based squarely in the court of magical realism, the metaphorical ghosts exist by nature of our literal American economic system, one that barrels down from on high, running on debt, and destroys what’s in its wake; a sort of capitalism that views everything and everyone as assets to be used; and one that flies out on gold-plated wings while yelling behind its receding silhouette to please forgive and forget, let bygones be bygones, even as we walk blinking back into the sun to survey its destruction and see what still stands.

The Echo River

The Echo River

And I’m not just leaping to conclusions with the whole “forgive and forget” aspect. Act IV of Kentucky Route Zero takes place along an underground river called The Echo. It’s a dark, subterranean space that people have moved to, constructing floating homes and drifting along. The river feeds into Lake Lethe, named after the underworld river of Greek myth that granted any drinkers pure forgetfulness. Along the Echo stands the Radvansky Center, a facility that tests peoples’ memories and is named after real-world researcher Gabriel Radvansky, who studied the phenomenon of why people forget things when they walk into another room. (Turns out, walking through doorways serves as a neurological reset cue for short term memory.)

Also along the river is a memorial to the drowned Elkhorn miners. When Conway and Shannon boat come across the monument — a great wooden structure with hard hats floating under it — while making a mail run, the game displays the following text from the plaque, written in all caps:

WE CLAIM THESE HELMETS IN THE NAME OF THE FOLKS WHO WORE THEM AND WE PLACE THEM HERE IN THEIR MEMORY BUT ALSO AS A SPIT IN THE GREEDY GREEN EYE OF THAT POWER COMPANY WHO BOUGHT UP OUR OLD MIND AND TRADED OUR BROTHERS' AND SISTERS' SAFETY FOR A LITTLE MORE YIELD BUT ONLY YIELDED TWENTY-EIGHT GOOD MEN AND WOMEN DEAD WHEN THE WALLS COLLAPSED AND THE TUNNELS FILLED WITH WATER.

THEIR LUNGS WERE BLACK BUT NOW THEY'RE WASHED CLEAN AND FULL OF WATER TOO AND SWEPT THROUGH HIDDEN TUNNELS INTO SOME AWFUL CAVE WE NEVER WILL FIND AND SO WE GUESS THE WATER BURIED THEM FOR US SO LET THIS HERE BE THE MARKER FOR THEIR GRAVE

AND IF ANY SON OF A BITCH FROM THAT POWER COMPANY WANTS TO TAKE BACK THESE HELMETS AS COMPANY PROPERTY JUST YOU TRY IT AND SEE WHAT WILL HAPPEN

Conway says to Shannon, "Looks like it's been here a while. I sure as hell wouldn't mess with it.... you think whoever wrote it is still that angry?" Since the bulk of gameplay is through conversations, the player is given two options for how Shannon can respond, but both tell the same story: “I don't think you ever forget anger like that.” Or: “Sure, angry. Mainly just hurt.”

They boat on, and soon Conway is taken by the glistening skeletons from the Hard Times Distillery, there to bring him in to pay off what he owes. Conway’s human body evaporates, and he too becomes a glistening skeleton, as Shannon watches from the shore, unable to stop what’s happening.

Going to 5 Dogwood Drive

Going to 5 Dogwood Drive

If all this sounds dark and dire, it is. Especially (to crib language used by a billion marketing emails) after a year like this one, with so much pain, unduly distributed to those most at risk of hurt. Biking down the street and seeing buildings boarded up as the US government decides whether or not to be so kind as to give folks $2000 while deriding that they may use it to pay down their credit card debt, I feel the same storm from Kentucky Route Zero, ready to lay bare this little tract of earth we tried to make home, despite the odds.

And of course, through all this, I say that I am lucky, because I am lucky. I am safe, I am fine. But my community hurts, and yours probably does too. And this hurt isn’t new; it’s just been thrown into high relief. Like with crises before, we see with glistening clarity that forces outside of our control make decisions that continue to use humans like cogs to be worn down with time and use.

Sorry. I’m angry, have been angry, will continue to be angry. And I don’t think you ever forget an anger like that.

But Kentucky Route Zero isn’t my game of the year because it reflects this anger through the lens of magical realism Americana (or rather, this isn’t the only reason). It’s my game of the year because, among all that sad and angry, there are bright glistening moments of people just trying.

On his overnight journey — before he’s taken by the skeletons and Shannon must complete the journey herself — Conway comes across a number of people who have carved out something for themselves. There are the folks of WEVP-TV, a community television station that broadcasts out homemade documentaries and late-night poetry by middle-aged women and long phone calls about raccoons. There are the many musicians making music: a theremin player, a boy who takes field recordings on cassettes, a man playing an organ in a giant cavern. There are poets, and experimental electricians, and trouble-makers. There are two robots who used to be used to clean out the Elkhorn mines but who have fashioned themselves into humanoid forms, playing ethereal music that literally blows the roof off the joint, even if there are only four people there to listen, if you include the barkeep.

It’s a reminder: even in all this, people still live, and they find each other.

In the final act of Kentucky Route Zero, released in January, I expected some big explosion, some divine reckoning for Those Who Have Hurt People. I wanted to tear down Consolidated Power Co. and save Conway. But that’s not what I got. Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t pretend that these few are going to change the crush and the roil of our current state of late capitalism. They aren’t the antidote or some white knight that’s going to rush in and slay the beast. The TV station is washed away by the storm. Folks aren’t sure if they want to make music anymore. Conway disappears. People are lost.

But, in Act V, I do make it to 5 Dogwood Drive, in the end. Most everyone does. They all step out into the light and survey the destruction to see what still stands. They drag away the refuse and salvage what’s still usable into a new home where no roads can reach them. They mourn what they lost. And then they play music, again.

For the past few months, in the early morning or at dusk, a vision crosses my mind. It’s a vision that, when I try to focus on it too hard, brings a pain to my heart so strong that it knocks the wind out of me for a moment.

I imagine a collection of houses in the woods— small houses, nothing fancy, made of wood and full of cozy yellow lights. I imagine these small houses circling a center square with other small wooden outhouses: a kitchen, a stage, a greenhouse. I imagine my friends and family and me living in these houses. I imagine us all having lives there, caring for one another, making things that bring us delight, cooking together, getting into fights, learning to live together, and moving forward in collective warmth.

It’s the same utopic vision, I’m sure, that spurred on Back to the Land folks in the 1970s, those doomed hippies who wanted to shun the life that capitalism laid out for them, but who found farming and homesteading to not be the promised solution after all. Even with this knowledge, I want it so badly.

And though I might not literally have a group of houses in the woods, in the moments when I’m writing with friends, or working on weird little art projects, or making my mom and dad laugh on the phone with a dumb joke, or seeing my partner quilt, or cooking a soup, or hearing my friends sing a beautiful song…

I’m there.

Games to Get You Through the Inside Times

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you need to stay inside, for an indefinite period, for some reason. In this hypothetical situation, you are likely to be able to go back outside and see other in-the-flesh people at some point in the future, but the uncertainty to that “when” might be difficult.

If you find yourself in this hypothetical situation, having a video game to sink into for a few hours might be a nice reprieve, especially if that game scratches a harder-to-reach-than-normal emotional itch: a moment of escapism, a feeling of community, a gentle feeling of vastness, etc. etc. etc.. 

Here are some games for just that.

When you want companionship, but can’t possibly stand another Zoom call

ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS

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I don’t think Nintendo could have ever anticipated how well Animal Crossing: New Horizons would do. Sure, it’s a follow-up to one of its most popular franchises, but in the first three days of its release in late March, it sold nearly 2 million copies… and that was just in Japan. These sales obliterated sales records set by beefier titles like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Pokemon Sword & Shield, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

But, why? This little game about almost nothing? I’ve had friends ask me, “OK, but what is it? Is it just… existing?” Well, it kind of is. In New Horizons, you are the lone human on an island full of anthropomorphic animals, charged with making your new home a nicer place to live. You weed, plant flowers, chat with your fellow villagers, and catch fish and bugs to donate to the local museum.

With so many rote tasks, it’s easy to fall into a sort of meditative trance, checking off your myriad To Do boxes with the gentle backing tunes of the Animal Crossing soundtrack. It’s especially soothing when feeling out of control with the outside world. I knew to expect this from the game, and I’m thankful for the many calm hours I can now spend carefully tending to every Nook and cranny on my island, trying to make it just a little bit nicer every day.

But what I didn’t expect to love so much was the interactions I can have with actual-human-friends who also play New Horizons. The game allows players to visit each other’s islands via online play and just… hang out. More than phone calls or Zoom chats or the many other ways we’re trying to stay connected with one another, hanging out in New Horizons makes me feel the most like I’m goofing around with friends.

This is, in part, because the in-game chat function is a little unwieldy: it has 50-or-so character limit, and every letter is type by poking at the Switch’s small screen, leading to wanton misspellings. So, in-game chat is often abandoned in favor of a more, uh, physical style of communication. My friends and I run after our favorite villagers; we toot at each other on ocarinas; we send presents; we whap each other on the heads with our bug-catching nets; we serenade each other with ocarinas; we build things to surprise each other.

I showed up on my friend’s island the other morning to find that she had made it into a pagan wonderland. As I arrived, I could not stop laughing — big dumb tears running down my face — as I rolled in to find that she had made an ominous maze of campfires at her island’s entrance. When I got through them, I found her avatar seated on a chair in its center, a fortune-telling set laid out in front. I asked her to tell me my fortune. She typed back, “is uhcertaim.”

I miss seeing my friends more than I can possibly say, but mostly I miss the chance to be lighthearted together, and I’m glad this game allows us to do just that, for a long little while.

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When you want to practice dealing with the feelings around unknowing

OUTER WILDS

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The thing that really gets me about Outer Wilds (more than its ability to elicit strong emotions, or its moments of pure awe, or its gut-punch of a story) is that, despite it being a game about solving a cosmic space mystery through careful exploration, the answer to what you’re looking for is there from the start. You could start this game and finish it in 10 minutes. The “answers” you’re looking for are there, if you happened to make the right guesses in the right amount of time.

But you’re not going to do that.

Instead, the game itself starts with very little instruction. You learn that you’re a member of a civilization that recently developed a space program, and that it’s your job to go out and, well, explore. From there, mystery unfolds, but the game itself doesn’t do much to tell you the What of that mystery, much less the Why. Though it does a wonderful job of giving you implicit clues on what to do next, Outer Wilds shies away from being explicit; without any combat to fall back on, the way to gain experience is through…. well… experience.

And experience it I did. Throughout the game, I felt frustration, and fear, and anxiety, and innumerable moments wondering if I was doing the right thing or going the right way. But just when I was sure I was going absolutely nowhere, I would stumble across a missing puzzle piece, or a part of the story I didn’t know, or a landscape that absolutely took my breath away, and I would feel awe, and joy.

I wrote about Outer Wilds' ending right after I finished the game last year:

Like Celeste, Outer Wilds teaches the player to be aware of a negative emotion and challenge it fully. In Celeste, the main character’s panic attacks and anxiety became a useful tool to explain the difficulty of the gameplay. Here, Outer Wilds hones in on the terror of exploring the unknown. It recognizes a deeply animal fear of the dark, of the eldritch, of the world-outside — and it asks the player to push through it to a place of wonder and curiosity.

Outer Wilds ends with one of the best game experiences I’ve ever had. Anyone who knows me knows that I come easy to tears. A beautiful sunset can make me cry. But it’s rare that a video game is able to get that out of me. I’ll get a good “aw,” in, or maybe one lonely tear squeaking past a tear duct.

I was in full, horrible sobs, completely overwhelmed by how all the threads finally came together. Once more, I concerned my partner; he walked by, saw my tear-stained face, and asked if I was OK. I managed to sob out, “IT’S JUST SO NICE.”

The ending, even months later, still sticks with me, an emotional memory that feels deeply and truly mine, personal and dear.

The beauty of Outer Wilds is that even though the answer that was hidden at the start slowly but surely comes into view, it is ultimately secondary. The path to getting there —in all its terror and glory — is what you ended up needing to see.

When wallets are light and times are tight, but some variety would be nice right now

APPLE ARCADE

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I’m no stranger to mobile games — 2 Dots kept me great company during many long commutes and I was as taken by the Pokemon Go as anyone — but I tend to drop off these games pretty quickly. Don’t get me wrong; I do enjoy them very much. But when it comes to free-to-play games, I get overwhelmed when I see a sudden difficulty spike built into the game, made to entice me to spend my actual human money buying upgrades so I can progress past particularly hard levels.

I get it. Developers have to make money off their games somehow, otherwise they’d quickly go out of business. But at the same time as I’m unwilling to pay for in-game purchases for “free” games, I’m also slow to pick up games that have an up-front cost as an alternative. Though these latter games might not have in-game asks, I’m hesitant to invest in a game I may play for a few minutes, only to find it poorly made or, even worse, plain boring.

Enter Apple Arcade.

Apple Arcade is part of a growing number of game subscription services. Like Netflix, users pay a fixed amount on a recurring basis (here: $4.99 a month) to gain access to a broad swatch of games, which can be downloaded as one wishes without limitations.

For developers, it’s a way to get an assured income for their games without having to structure their gameplay around in-game purchases (i.e. no more random difficulty spikes in order to entice payment). For players, you can dip your toe into as many games as you want without worrying about an additional up-front cost. Does a game seem kind of weird but maybe cool? Give it a try! If it’s not your cup of tea, there’s certainly something on the platform that is.

Here are just a few of my favorites:

  • What the Golf? Included on my favorites of 2019 list, What the Golf? is, ostensibly, a golfing game. But it’s a golfing game like tomatoes are fruits. Sure, yes, they are, but no one is going to call them that at first blush. What the Golf? is, more accurately, a joyously goofy exploration into the absurd. In my 2019 write-up, I said: “It’s pure, dumb fun. Each level pulls the rug out from under you, every single time. I found myself joyously cackling as joke built upon joke upon joke in a ridiculous joke layer-cake. It’s a sink-hole of light-hearted inanity, both too smart and too silly for its own good.” If that’s not the energy I need right now, I don’t know what is.

  • Sneaky Sasquatch: Like What the Golf?, just when I thought I knew was Sneaky Sasquatch was, it changed up on me. You play as the titular Sasquatch who is sneaking (naturally) around a park, trying to steal food from campers without being caught. However, you quickly are able to buy some upgrades from a friendly raccoon (of course) that makes it much easier to avoid detection. From there, you join a golf tournament, learn to drive, improve your house, become a pro on the ski slopes, and also work to find the location of a secret treasure. Just a day in the life (of a Sasquatch).

  • Grindstone and Card of Darkness: There’s something relaxing in the repetitious small-scale strategizing of free-to-play games like Candy Crush or 2 Dots. If those games are you jam, Grindstone and Card of Darkness are for you. Both have that familiar level-based progression, wherein you clear one screen and then do much the same actions again on the next, and the next, and the next, until you’re fully satisfied. Both have enough strategy to be interesting (in Grindstone, you’re trying to link together enemies of the same color in long chains in order to destroy them; in Card of Darkness you’re trying to clear a path through a desk of monsters who each have different status effects), but both are chill enough to play while listening to a podcast.

  • Tangle Tower: I only just picked this game up, but I’m enjoying its vibes immensely. It’s a mystery, wherein you play as a detective team sent to investigate a murder. The premise sounds bleak, but the art style and writing make it anything but. It has a new-era Cartoon Network feel to it, with characters drawn in round-edged style. The environments are gorgeous, detailed and warm-hued. The game itself involves interviewing possible suspects and solving small puzzles, but the aesthetics of the game push it into something I can’t take my eyes off of.

  • Sayonara Wild Hearts: Here’s the game’s description: “Sayonara Wild Hearts is a dreamy arcade game about riding motorcycles, skateboarding, dance battling, shooting lasers, wielding swords, and breaking hearts at 200 mph.” This, combined with a killer soundtrack (that makes the whole thing part video game, part music video) is just too much to pass up. (A brief editorial aside: if you do have a Switch, it’s more enjoyable to play the game there, even for the extra money, but when times are tight, Apple Arcade is a fine plan B.)

When you just need to turn your brain off for a second

PicrossLUNA2

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Now, I know I just went on about my difficulty getting into free-to-play games, but I guess I’m a dirty liar because, for the past three weeks or so, I have spent more hours playing PicrossLUNA2 compared to most anything else… including Animal Crossing.

Picross games (also called “nonograms”) are like a fraternal twin to Sudoku. Each picross puzzle is a grid , usually either 10 x 10 or 15 x 15 squares. Along each row and column are numbers. These numbers tell you how many shaded squares you must fill in in that given row or column. So, 6 1 4 means that there must be 6 unbroken squares filled in, followed by a single filled-in square, followed by four unbroken squares. The puzzle lies in cross-referencing columns against rows and getting your shaded squares right. When you’re done, a picture emerges.

It’s so very simple, and utterly fulfilling for my little order-loving brain.

There are tons of picross games, and I only started playing them recently after I downloading a murder mystery game, Murder By Numbers, in which mysteries are solved by *you guessed it) completing picross puzzles. It was a great introductory tool, but I frankly got a little bored by the game’s narrative. I desperately tried to fast-click my way through dialogue in order to get back to the picross. I needed more puzzles.

So, after a brief search, I came across a Polygon video with a whole heaping of options. PicrossLUNA2 was at the top of the list, and so I downloaded it. And from there, a minor obsession was born. I play it while I wait for my oatmeal to cook. I play it when waiting in the car for my laundry to finish (since waiting in the laundromat isn’t as fun as it used to be). I play it on the toilet. I play it before bed. It’s soothing. It’s simple. it’s picross.

When you just need space

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

but without fast travel

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I’ve played a truly incredible amount of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (or “BotW” for convenience’s sake). But can you blame me? I certainly don’t blame me; it’s a nearly perfect game in ever respect.

Unlike previous Legend of Zelda games, BotW does away with the usual dungeon-crawler, linear-story mode. Instead, the opening moments of the game set the tone for the rest of the adventure: Link, newly awakened from a 100-year slumber, leaves the cave in which he’s been hidden away and runs out into the sun. As he emerges, the camera pulls back, and the vast county of Hyrule stretches out in all directions as the music swells.

It’s an invitation: literally every surface you can see is accessible. The mountains in the distance? You can climb them. The forest? Full of trees to chop and scale. The hills and valleys? They’re there for you to explore to your heart’s content. Sure, there’s a quest to complete (beat the great evil that destroyed the land 100 years prior & rescue Zelda), but the path you choose to get there is yours to decide.

A few months ago, I picked up BotW again. I had already played through the game twice (once on the normal level, the second on the “Master Mode”) and was looking to dive in a third time. But what could I do to bring something new to the game? “Aha,” I thought, “No fast travel.” Fast travel is the in-game ability to move quickly from one place to another. BotW allows Link to teleport to different locations; the map is so large that it would take a not-insignificant amount of time to travel “on foot” back and forth between different locations. However, I was curious to see what the game felt like if I had to climb every mountain, ford every stream (as it were).

And. I. Loved it.

The Hyrule in BotW is full of vast expanses. Sure, you might come across an enemy or settlement or hidden point of interest. But, more likely than not, you’ll mostly spend your time among the beautifully-rendered blowing grass or shifting trees with nary a soul in sight. The music accompanies this expansiveness well: sparse piano pieces that lilt in on the breeze. When I tried of running, I would get on my horse and ride; when on roads, the horse automatically follows the path, meaning I could literally take my hands off the controls and watch the world go by.

It was certainly a slower experience, and sometimes a little tedious as I tried to find ever-new ways to get from point A to point B. But I enjoyed the feeling of adventure. I felt more in-tune with the changing weather and passing of time in the game. I would hide under rocks when it was rainy, and set up camp at night. I started to notice the other characters on the roads, and looked for familiar faces over time. But, by far, my favorite difference was how I noticed new little surprises. One such moment came about during a trek through some rolling foothills, a seemingly endless expanse of green. As I rounded a bend, I came across a small field of flowers. These foothills were attached to no major part of the game; there was nothing here that would help me complete a quest. I probably wouldn’t have ever touched upon this part of the map, were it not for my self-imposed limitation. These flowers weren’t here for any reason. Except, some developer, at some point in time, had thought they would look nice there, and so put them in the game. They had no purpose; they were just pretty.

And I stayed in that field for a while.

Favorite Games of 2019

I could write a whole bunch about the year that was, and my feelings on year-end lists, and guesstimates on where we’re going next. But let’s keep it simple: As I said last year, I liked these, and maybe you will too.

(Interested in any of the games? Check out THIS DOC with links, platforms, and prices here, put together by my kind and incredible friend, Lauren.)

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Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds is the sort of game that makes me write, and rewrite, over and over, something that I hope will reach out and digitally shake you by the shoulders, saying — half to myself, and half to you — “oh jeez. OH JEEZ.” I have already made an attempt, not once, but TWICE, to work through why this game has so firmly lodged itself in my craw. And I’m not the only one. Outer Wilds was listed as Polygon’s Game of the Year. It was Austin Walker’s #1 game at Waypoint. It made it to the final round of discussion for the Besties GOTY.

Listen: It’s a good game.

But when I try to explain it to people, I end up making little crab-claw grabby-hands, literally trying to pluck words from the air. But my difficulty is the game’s virtue: it’s about mystery and the unknown. By nature, it should ought to be difficult to describe without giving the whole thing away.

So, let’s say this: Outer Wilds is game about space exploration. You are a member of a nascent space team from the planet Timber Hearth. Your spaceship looks like it was strapped together with rope and wires. You know nothing about what’s waiting for you in your solar system, and are given no direction besides, “Go out there, kiddo.” Oh, and after your first 22 minutes, you learn that you are stuck in a 22-minute time loop (natch), at the end of which the sun always goes supernova, and which no one else seems to know is happening except you.

That’s all the game gives you at the start, and it does very little hand-holding from there. What a bracing breath of fresh air it is, in our contemporary world that loves nothing more than to load you down with exposition — with every quest needing a clearly articulated reason, and every superhero movie needing a MacGuffin — to give you so little, and to instead ask you to hear what’s being implicitly (vs. explicitly) communicated.

And what a communicator Outer Wilds is.

It is sometimes unrelenting. I would work hard on a puzzle, only to lose all my progress when I was accidentally sucked into a black hole at the center of the planet I was exploring, or crushed by falling sand on Ember Twin, or sucked up by a cyclone on Giant’s Deep, or instantly frozen by ghost matter, or autopiloted into the sun, or any number of equally horrible fates, only to be re-set to the start of the loop.

It is sometimes frustrating. There’s no autosave function, which led me to realize how much I use autosave as a safety blanket: something to clutch to before doing something risky. Here, I was left to make bad decisions dozens of times over, but those bad decisions were necessary to learn how the solar system worked. In fact, in exploring, you stumble across old messages from an ancient civilization, and half of them were along the lines of, “I thought this thing would work, but it didn’t, and here’s what I learned…”

It is sometimes boring. I would sometimes wander for loops without learning anything new, retracing old steps and wondering what on Earth (or Timber Hearth, as it were) I was missing. It wouldn’t be until loops and loops later, when I had just a little bit more information, that I would realize why that rock kept attracting my attention, and would know what to do with it.

Other times, Outer Wilds is terrifying. Certain sequences caused my hands to break out into a sweat, and when I listen back to the (truly beautiful) soundtrack, I still feel my heart race when End Times comes on.

All of these sound like negatives on paper, but they led to one of the most affecting storytelling experiences I’ve had in a long time. These moments of boredom, frustration, and terror are carefully constructed. They are their own puzzle pieces in this puzzle of a game. They fit together so that, when you do figure out the riddle, or the pattern, or the tiny missing piece of the larger story, you are rewarded with a feeling of genuine elation and, above all else, wonder. And it’s made all the more powerful because it manages to make you feel like you stumbled across it — with a little bit of work and a lotta bit of luck — all on your own.

It’s beautifully built, and entirely special, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

Now, please go play it so we can make little crab-claw grabby-hands together.

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Untitled Goose Game

Ah, the game that launched a thousand memes. I’ve been seeing Untitled Goose Game excluded from a number of year-end lists, and I kind of get it. It’s been so meme’d out that it’s hard not to think of it as a joke. Oh, right, the game where you’re a goose, terrifying a quiet village. You flap. You honk. You’re terrible. A good goof, but a better goof than a game.

But here’s the thing: comedy in video games is difficult. What’s even more difficult is physical comedy, which usually hinges on a finely-honed sense of timing. How, then, is one supposed to make a comedic video game that is entirely reliant on physical comedy? When the player can choose when they execute an action, that would seem to throw out any ability for the developer to hone the beats of the game in order to make it genuinely funny.

But what UGG does well is not only that it uses physical comedy to great effect, but that it teaches the player how to have a better sense of comedic timing. It’s built right into the gameplay. When you’re given the direction to steal the gardener’s keys, you could just grab them off his belt and run, but that doesn’t have as high a success rate as being sneaky. So instead you waddle up to him, realllllll slow…. reaaaaaaallllllllllllllll slow……. and then just GRAB THOSE KEYS and run off into the distance as fast as your terrible webbed feet will carry you.

Now that’s comedy. Honk honk.

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Disco Elysium

There are so many things computers can do well, but having realistic conversations is not one of them. Think of the Turing Test, a contest used to evaluate how well an AI emulates human speech (success is fooling a human into thinking they’re talking with another human). It’s a contest because it’s hard to do well. Conversations are just so full of delightful human foibles, and they’re not usually results of direct inputs and outputs. They’re full of meanderings, dancing around topics, innuendos, distractions, hesitations, and interjections. Conversations are also full of constant self-evaluating; you might be talking with someone, but you’re also constantly processing what they’re saying, or what they’re trying to say, or the weird shocks of non-verbal conversation that are continually flowing from one person to the other and back.

In short, having a conversation with a person is an incredible feat of near-instantaneous alchemy, moment after moment of self-realization and re-definition.

Video games, with their increasing complexity, have gotten better at simulating conversations, but generally continue to fall short. There are lots of efforts to make it seem like your conversations have real-life weight, but I’ve always found them lacking. I’ll never forget how genuinely angry I was at The Wolf Among Us, where it ultimately didn’t matter if I played my Big Bad Wolf sheriff as a do-gooder or sociopath. No matter how many times I was prompted that a character would “remember that you said this,” the ending cutscene was the same regardless of how I treated folks along the way. My character was set in stone, even if the game pretended that it wasn’t. It wasn’t a conversation. It was a lecture.

Enter Disco Elysium. It’s a role-playing game that comes in a familiar, dour-looking package. You play as a cop in a dystopian world still reeling from a war between communists and capitalists. You’re just waking up from a multi-day drug and alcohol bender that got so out of control that you not only trashed your room and distressed the local townsfolks, but you’ve forgotten where you are, what you’re doing there, or even what year it is. Quickly, you find out you are in this town, Revachol, to investigate a murder (a hanging, which you, on your bender, have left in the back courtyard for over a week). But other than that? Your mind is blank. You don’t even know your name… not to mention what happened to your missing cop badge… or your gun.

Sure, sure. Ho hum. Just your regular ol’ mystery-solving adventure in a dystopian nightmare. However, besides being a bit of a Trojan Horse for radical political theory, genuinely well-written, and surprisingly funny, Disco Elysium also features an intricately-built dialogue system.

Part of this intricacy is based on how central dialogue is to the game: there is no physical combat to clutter up the action. Instead, 95% of the game is simply talking to other people. Not only that but, as it is in our own crowded minds, conversations with people in Disco Elysium aren’t a one-on-one affair. Rather, your interactions feature interjections from your own brain. AUTHORITY fires up when someone questions your standing. EMPATHY is there to wheedle out the words behind the words. ELECTROCHEMISTRY is, honestly, just here to party. Twenty-four distinct personality aspects roll around in the main character’s brain and, as you gain experience points and feed them into aspects of your personality, certain voices become relatively louder.

Additionally, the game introduces an element of chance through occasional skill-checks via randomized die rolls. Need to convince someone of something? Roll a die, add your SUGGESTION ability, and see if you pass or fail the check. As I made certain aspects of my character’s personality stronger, I could see how it affected how others interacted with me: being super-authoritative would mean I could more easily pass certain checks to crush folks under my heel; being hyper-logical meant I could usually reason my way out of most any pickle. At the same time, I had a finite number of experience points, so, in order to build up certain aspects, I would have to forgo other parts of my personality. If I filtered points into EMPATHY, I could manipulate folks emotionally, but I couldn’t bust down a door to save my life. Avenues open. Avenues close.

And here is where it feels like a true conversation. More than just being skillfully-written, Disco Elysium simulates the real-life and real-time reflection of oneself through the lens of conversation with another person. In having the player constantly consider what’s going on in their character’s brain and how others respond to it, Disco Elysium creates one of the most satisfying role-playing experiences I’ve had in a long time. Normally, I’m pretty quick to abandon any sort of serious commitment to role-playing in games but, here, I couldn’t escape it. I was constantly asked to consider my reactions. I was literally building up this character from scratch and deciding, moment by moment, how he was going to interact with his world, and I found a great joy in fleshing out who this amnesiac fuck-up of a person was.

The game is definitely about solving a mystery — in that there’s a dead body and up to you to figure out what’s up with it — but the game itself is more about figuring who you are going to make yourself into when you have nothing else to hold onto.

What The Golf?

Ah, beautiful, dumb What The Golf? My sweet, sweet, secretly ingenious child.

What The Golf? came to me late in the game. After years of clinging to my iPhone 5 as it wheezed through its final death rattles, I bit the bullet and got myself a new phone. To be completely transparent, one of the things I was interested in getting was Apple Arcade, a subscription service for mobile games that my old refused-to-update-in-over-a-year phone couldn’t handle.

I had my doubts about yet ANOTHER bottomless money pit of subscription services, until I heard an argument that posited that, currently, mobile games are heavily reliant on a “free to play” system. These “FTP” games can be downloaded for exactly $0, but build their profit model on offering in-app purchasing options to make gameplay easier. For example, Two Dots sure does allow you to play for free, but when you get to a level that’s especially difficult, suddenly there are a number of nudges to spend your real-life human money on power-ups to complete said level. You can truck by on paying nothing, but it’s in the game’s interest to make it eventually hard enough to require you to purchase something.

If games weren’t FTP, then they usually had a regular-ol’ price tag for downloading. For games I didn’t know much about and wasn’t invested in, I am not often inclined to spend upwards of $5 per game to give it a try. With a subscription model, all the games listed in Apple Arcade are indeed free once you opt in. With no in-app purchases, games are no longer incentivized to escalate difficulty disproportionate to their levels. With no up-front individual costs, players have a lower barrier to entry to try out games that sound interesting, but were not so interested in as to willingly pay to purchase just that game. (This latter point was addressed by the makers of Outer Wilds, who said that the game’s inclusion on Xbox’s Game Pass subscription service led folks to download the game out of curiosity.)

In other words, via a subscription model, games have greater license be weird, or short, or experiential.

This is a long way of saying that I did indeed download Apple Arcade on my new phone and am happily paying the monthly subscription price. I’ve been thoroughly charmed by games like Sayonara Wild Hearts (“dreamy arcade game about riding motorcycles, skateboarding, dance battling, shooting lasers, wielding swords, and breaking hearts at 200 mph”); Grindstone (an addictive and well-animated puzzler); Assemble With Care (a game where you fix small objects for local townspeople, with a story that I found both over saccharine yet also moving?); and Card of Darkness (another lil puzzler, but animated by Penn Ward of Adventure Time fame, with the humor to match).

But What the Golf? is the one that surprised me the most, in part because it was an impulse download, and in part because (as such) it was a total surprise.

WTG? is styled like your typical golf game: there’s a ball. To propel it forward you press your finger to the screen, pull back, aim, and release, hopefully driving it towards the hole. At least, that’s how the first level goes. In the second, there are suddenly cats in the way. And then, instead of the ball, the person hitting the ball is flung, rag-dolling forward when you release from the pull. And then the hole moves when you try to drive towards it? Then you’re a house?? And then you’re, like, 100 golfballs, all moving at once???

It’s pure, dumb fun. Each level pulls the rug out from under you, every single time. I found myself joyously cackling as joke built upon joke upon joke in a ridiculous joke layer-cake. It’s a sink-hole of light-hearted inanity, both too smart and too silly for its own good. After finishing the game, I find myself handing it off to people and giggling maniacally as they realize that things are quickly going off the rails. And, as we trudge into 2020, when we’re all just feeling a little… worn out… that moment of surprised delight feels rare and special.

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A Short Hike

Today, as I was tooling around Facebook, I came across a Tumblr thread, posted by a friend. It was a back-and-forth discussion started by user margotkim about how tired they were with contemporary re-vamps of fairy tales that used added violence, “gritty realism,” and a lack of happy endings to assert that this is how the real world is.

In the thread, a user posted a quote from Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

This is a whole heap of expectation to ask A Short Hike to shoulder, but the beauty of the game is that it celebrates little moments of happiness with such soaring ease that it feels like a magic trick.

In the game, you play a bobble-headed anthropomorphic bird (think: Animal Crossing aesthetics). Your task is simple: you’re spending the summer is a park with your aunt, and you have to make a phone call. The only place you have reception to make said phone call is at the top of the local mountain, which is a bit of a hike away.

That’s the whole game: getting to the top of the mountain. It’s not especially difficult. There is no hard left turn to a dark story or a seedy underbelly. The music is sweet and lilting. The townspeople are kind and have small tasks for you. There are corners to explore. The mountain will wait for you when you’re ready to climb it. It’s just nice.

Listen, the world is full of horrors. It always has been, and it looks like it will continue to be. The easy thing these days is to make media that reflects or amplifies that horror. I get the impulse: you want to bring attention to it so that people don’t look away (see: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a notoriously difficult-to-watch play that moves from [and finds links between] domestic violence to war crimes. Or, see the DCU). But in this load roar and crush of noise and terror, it’s easy to shut down. Dissociation is an excellent way to keep yourself emotionally safe when it’s all just too much.

The antidote to this, as I see it, is to take moments of quiet. Separate from the churn and roil, you can take a moment to breathe and to observe closely the world around you. It’s a hike through the woods, where you start to notice the way the sun dapples the ground, or the specific bird calls that come through the trees, or you ask yourself, “Hey, what flower is that?” as you lean in to something small and delicate and easily trampled underfoot.

This is what A Short Hike feels like. This isn’t an escape from the “real world”; the real world has horror, but it also has moments of quiet happiness that might give you the re-focus you need to face the world’s harsher elements with a fresh eye and warmed heart.

A Few Other Worthy Mentions

OK, I was going to try to keep this all pretty short, but there are lots of games that, though they might not have stuck with me as much, were still experiences and stories I will remember. So, here’s a short lightning round:

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Mutaztione

Mutazione is one of the most distinctly beautiful games I’ve played. It’s mossy and earthy palate feels distinctly its own, and there were a couple of moments that were jaw-droppingly illustrated.

It’s the perfect framing for a magical realist game about finding your home among a group of outsiders, trying their best fo hold each other close despite their foibles.

It’s easy to see Mutazione’s soap operatic influence, but that part of the story didn’t mean as much to me as its distinct gardening mechanic. As the protagonist, Kai, I enjoyed the task of planting gardens around the island of Mutazione, watching the plants grow and flourish and bring comfort to the islands mutant inhabitants and their all-too-human problems.

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Later Alligator

I will champion literally anything Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera put out. I’ve tried (and failed) to have my partner watch their strangely affecting and also, yes, wonderfully twee and weird Baman Piderman Youtube series (“THEY’RE BEST FRIENDS,” I shout, to no one), and I’ve enjoyed watching their distinct animation style crop up in crowd favorites like Adventure Time.

So, I was distinctly tickled to see they were trying their hand at video games, starting with Later Alligator.

You play an alligator private investigator in Alligator New York, hired by Pat (the Alligator) to figure out what his shady (alligator) family is up to. They keep talking about “an event”? Is it a threat? Are they gonna off him?

Obviously not. But along the way to convincing Pat of that fact, you get to meet the various equally odd members of his family, cajoling them into giving you info by playing their mini-games (keep the ghosts away from the baby! swat the flies away from the hippie so he can reach nirvana! beat grandma at go fish!).

It’s charming in all the ways you want it to be, and goofily-well-written in the ways it needs to. Long live Alligator New York: greatest alligator city in the world.

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Islanders

I love a city-building sim. I was raised on Age of Empires and still find a deep-set comfort in lining up the houses just-so.

But I’m terrible at acting under pressure, and city-builders are usually all about pressure: getting your city the biggest and the strongest before your foes come and raze it to the ground.

In Islanders, there is no time limit. Instead, the challenge of the game is economy of space: you gain points by placing certain complementary units close to each other (houses like to be near the circus; farms like to be close to fields) and lose points if certain overlapping buildings are too close (shamans like to be alone; so two shaman huts next to each other will give you negative points). Every time you hit a point milestone, a new pack of buildings is unlocked. Don’t get enough points by the time you run out of buildings in your current pack? The game ends.

With no time limit, I could twirl and move my buildings until they were perfectly wedged together, watching cityscapes unfold in gently-rendered seaside landscapes.

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Dead Cells

“But wasn’t this on your list last year?? It’s it a game from 2018??” It was! And it is! But the good folks over at Motion Twin just keep updating this thing! Every time I turn around, there’s a new update, bringing in new content and making subtle little tweaks to keep the gameplay new and interesting. There have been so many updates that they just released a Legacy mode, where you can play the version of the game that you like the most.

Dead Cells remains a thoroughly enjoyable hack and slash, and I find the same level of meditative enjoyment running through its many, ever-changing levels that I do with quiet games like Islanders.

I put on a podcast, read the patch notes for the newest update, and jump back in, ready to dodge and roll my way through whatever Motion Twin joyously and ceaselessly throws my way.

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Dicey Dungeons

In Dicey Dungeons, you’re a person who has been turned into a die as part of some elaborate game show. In order to get your “heart’s desire,” you have to beat all the denizens of the dungeon. Too bad the game is rigged.

That’s the story of the game, but the gameplay itself is what I found both puzzling and satisfying. It’s a deck-building game, where you collect cards that represent certain moves. In order to execute these moves, you have o roll a pre-set number of dice and see if any can be used to trigger your attacks. Want to hit ‘em with a dagger? Better hope you rolled a 3 or below. Want to unlock a special move? Pray for a 6.

There are six playable die characters, and each have a slightly different rule-set. So, despite the repetition of enemies, each character will have to use a different method to try and beat them: the Warrior can brute-force his way through hard enemies, but the Rogue (with his lower-power moves) will have to be trickier.

Even when I was frustrated with sudden bouts of bad die-rolling luck, the art style, clever writing, and promise of eventual success had me re-entering the dungeon, fingers crossed.