I’m back for my second installment on the video games that helped me survive nursing school without shooting my cortisol levels perpetually to the moon (that’s one of the primary stress hormones, if you are blessed enough to not need to know this information).
In my first installment, I talked about sim games, which are my go-to for all-round stress relief. But I find that sometimes, when using a particular part of my brain a lot, e.g. to memorize hundreds of pharmaceutical side effects for an exam, the best way for me to unwind is to actually consciously engage a different part of my brain on some kind of thinky problem-solving endeavor.
For that, I turn to puzzle and card games. I get the feel-good dopamine hit of figuring something out without the stakes associated with an exam, or, you know, actual patient care.
Once again, I’m sticking to indie games here, some made by a lone developer. The games here span a wide array of difficulty levels from “appropriate for children” to “high frustration tolerance needed.” There should be a little something for everyone, from the puzzling novice to the person who used to get the maximum available math extra credit by completing logic puzzle worksheets (was that a thing at anyone else’s high school?)
Just a Wacky Little Game: Toem
This game is a tiny (I beat it in a few hours) but mighty black-and-white puzzle RPG in which you play as a little mouse (I think it’s a mouse? Or mouse-like creature) who takes a bus from place to place and completes tasks and challenges for the people in each locale, mostly (but not always) using a camera.
It’s cute, it’s funny, and completing the challenges as I explored every nook and cranny of each new area gave me a little tickle of delight every time. I could see this game being particularly great for a kid in the 7-12 range who can fully appreciate the game’s sense of whimsy and wonder, as well as anyone who is young at heart.
Difficulty level: Appropriate for children
Just Another Wacky Little Game: Fossil Corner
Fossil Corner is a relatively simple puzzler with a few fun features that make it a standout. For the puzzles, you arrange fossils in a sort of family tree according to simple Mendelian genetics. In other words, you identify which fossils belong to which “generation” of the puzzle and who the “parents” and the “children” are, based on simple changes in fossil traits.
The puzzles themselves are fun if not overly complex, but what really makes the game is its wacky home-scientist trappings. For example, you have an e-mail account that receives hilarious and bizarre messages. You also get to keep one fossil from every puzzle you complete, causing you to amass quite the collection of fossils. You make money, which you can use to buy supplies to show off your collection in your garage-slash-lab. It’s a cute wacky puzzler with an off-beat sense of humor.
Difficulty level: If you can complete a Punnett square, you can play this game
Blood, Guts, and Colors: Grindstone
Grindstone is a Viking-themed puzzler where you plan and then execute long chains of color-based monster-slaying combos to advance through puzzle stages. You amass points by slicing your way through the maximum number of monsters in a succession.
In general, you have to stick to one monster color (i.e. if I start by slicing a yellow guy, I have to keep slicing yellow guys) although there are of course many items (like the titular grindstone) that allow you to switch colors partway through a chain to rack up more points. There are many special items, mechanics, and monsters to mix it up as you play.
The whole game has a cheeky psychedelic-meets-heavy-metal aesthetic, where everything is both neon and cartoonishly gory. Gameplay itself is absolutely addictive; while it’s not a match-3 game, it gives me the same “just one more level!!!” feeling Bejeweled or Candy Crush used to give me back in the day.
When I started nursing school, my entire first semester was over Zoom, and I would play this game for an hour or so after 4 straight hours of Zoom class to recuperate.
Difficulty level: Starts easy, gets medium-hard
If You Love A Challenge: Dicey Dungeons
This game is incredibly fun, but also kind of hard to describe. It’s an episodic roguelike card/dice battle game where you are also a giant die??
Put simply, you progress within the game by beating discrete episodes, which are each made up of 5 levels and a boss. The levels involve battling a series of enemies in a card/dice game–you roll a set of dice each turn, which you then use in concert with the cards in your hand to do damage and defend yourself.
So throughout each episode, you need to manage your cards, your dice, and your health so you can keep progressing and eventually beat the boss.
The episodes get harder and harder as the game goes on. The main critique of this game I have seen in other reviews is that it is slightly too difficult. I personally would say the game is pleasantly challenging, but this may not be the best choice if you get easily frustrated. Otherwise, if you enjoy a challenge, this is a very fun and satisfying experience for anyone who likes card, board, or strategy games.
Difficulty level: Four out of five dice-shaped people
Excellent Visual Puzzlers Part I: Islanders
In Islanders, you get points by placing buildings on islands according to particular rules. Over successive rounds, you build up a jam-packed urban sprawl until you eventually meet a point threshold to go to a new island, where you start the whole process over (but keep your points).
It’s an aesthetically pleasing visual puzzler that engages both the right and left hemispheres of my brain. There’s not much in the way of progression, since it’s an arcade-style puzzler. (This means you play until you can’t get enough points with your existing buildings to unlock more, and then you have to start a new game). In spite of this, I’ve spent 30+ hours on it, so it was well worth the five bucks I put down for it.
Difficulty level: Zenlike experience
Excellent Visual Puzzlers Part II: Dorfromantik
Dorfromantik might be the best visual puzzler of all time. A deceptively simple conceit–place hexagonal landscape tiles to match different terrain types together for points–masks a wealth of complex strategy.
You get additional tiles for perfect placements and for completing challenges, so you have to manage your resources to be able to keep building out your landscape. The satisfaction of matching up tiles perfectly while creating beautiful, sprawling landscapes is frankly unmatched. I have often opened up this game intending to play for only a few minutes and realized only several hours later that I never ate dinner. Even the relaxing music conspires to get me to keep playing!
Difficulty level: Easy to pick up, hard to master
Bonus Recent Release Game! Wildfrost
This game came out a couple months after I graduated and took the NCLEX, so technically it had no part in my getting through nursing school. However, it was my main way of unwinding while I was job-hunting, and it is a truly incredible game, so I decided it was worth a mention here.
Wildfrost is a totally adorable and extremely difficult roguelike deck-builder where you try to advance through a cartoonish apocalyptic snowscape to defeat the Frost King. Between each battle you have the option to pick some new cards, upgrades, and/or companions. As you craft your deck, you have the opportunity to build strategies around complementary cards and companions.
There are acorn-based strategies! Junk-based strategies! Teeth strategies! (This will all make sense if you play the game, I promise).
There is a lot to unlock as you get killed over and over trying to figure out how to advance through some truly punishing battles. I found this game almost too hard for the first couple weeks, and then all of a sudden, something clicked and I now find it a satisfying challenge.
Difficulty level: Scream inside your heart
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So there you have it. A smorgasbord of puzzling goodness from my Cabinet of Curiosities (and by “cabinet of curiosities,” I mean massive digital-only collection of indie games).
These games brought me great solace during an extremely grueling time, and I hope they will bring you joy as well. Please shout out any other good card or puzzle games in the comments!
Toem and Dorfromantik both look especially delightful.
I like pretty much anything by Studio Amanita, the Somorost games, for example. The art style is lovely and weird and there are plenty of odd corners to explore. The puzzles are occasionally fiendish, but most just involve a bit of thinking and experimentation to figure out (and yes, the occasional glance at a walk-through). I’m not so keen on games where you’ve got to have split-second timing, but there’s not much of that.
Townscaper – this is more of a sandbox game – it starts with an area of sea marked with polygons, and all you do click to create islands and buildings. Different features appear depending on how you’ve grouped buildings together – nothing huge and dramatic, but it’s just nice to suddenly have bunting appear between a couple of little towers, or a little garden with benches pop up. You can also change it from day to night, and play around with angle of the lighting, etc. No stress, nothing to go wrong, just little pastel-coloured seaside towns.
Also, Sam & Max Hit the Road.
Fossil Corner looks so fun! I love both paleontology and Punnett squares lol.
My go to relaxing games are hidden object games. Most of these combine ISpy style object hunts with other simple puzzles like connecting wires in the right order, rotating things to form an image, find the difference puzzles, etc. They typically take 2-6 hours to complete. There’s an endless supply of them on Steam with a bit of a range in quality and difficulty, but you basically can’t go wrong. They have 0 stakes and are impossible to lose, they can be creepy or whimsical, and as a bonus they often have the wackiest storylines, about mind control or evil clowns or interdimensional travel. In one memorable instance, I used a grenade launcher that my character found lying in a pile of trash to blow up a Portal-like turret that was guarding a hallway. Big Fish is a developer that has about a thousand games on Steam of consistently good quality. The most beautiful and engaging one I’ve found is Adera. It’s longer and more fleshed out than the average HO game with lovely artwork.
Luna is another fun puzzle game with pretty visuals. You play as a lone child dropped onto the ground in a mystery place and you climb a giant tower room by room with the help of an adorable little cat creature. Each room is a puzzle and you switch between controlling the kid and the cat to solve it, often by playing with the placement of light and shadow or by doing tasks in the right sequence. It’s cute, pretty, and relaxing with just enough story to be interesting.
I also want to shout out Fresh Start. It isn’t really a puzzle game, but it’s what I’m playing right now, and it fits the theme of relaxing. I found it after completing Power Washer Simulator and looking for similar games. The premise is that you’re cleaning up the environment. You have a gun that can shoot water or suck up items, and you go to an area that’s absolutely buried in giant piles of muck and trash and start cleaning up, watering the plants, helping the animals, and generally restoring nature. It’s immensely satisfying and very simplistic. The same developer has a more complex version of the same concept called No Place Like Home that adds much bigger maps, a story, human characters to talk to, and some simple farming to the same cleaning mechanic. Both games are just fantastic.
Turns out Romance novels are what got me through nursing school. And eventually led me to this site. I haven’t been able to stop since. Yay!