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
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.
When you want to practice dealing with the feelings around unknowing
OUTER WILDS
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
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
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
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.