We love a whole bunch of video games and recently started talking about all our favorites. So of course we had to share that discussion with you. We’re talking console games, Switch games, phone games, apps, and so on. Consider this post akin to, “Relaxing Video Game Recs from Romance Reading Folks.”
(NB: Some but not all of the links within the post are affiliate coded, so if you use them, thanks! And if not, no worries at all!)
Susan: POKÉMON.
I’m not even gonna try to be a responsible adult about this, I got Pokémon Shield and I spend the entire time cooing about how cute all my Pokémon are.
Claudia: Ooh we got that one for my son as a Christmas present, it was such a hit! He’s a lifelong Pokémon fan.
Susan: Yay! How old is he?
Claudia: He’s 13 but seriously he is a foremost expert on Pokemon since he was like 6. Always has loved the things.
Amanda: Susan!! Can we be friends on Shield?!
I have a Togepi named Chungus.
Susan: I started naming all of my Pokémon after plants, and then I forgot and defaulted back to cities again because I don’t know that many plant names.
I play a lot (A LOT) of jrpgs, visual novels, and puzzle games. Oh, and building games.
Sarah: I freaking love Stardew Valley (XBox | PS4 | Steam | Switch) .
Tara: ME TOO! Is there anything more calming than that game?
Sarah: Susan, which games do you play?
Susan: I have sunk at least a hundred hours into Turmoil and Banished because they’re very relaxing.
Phone games: The Arcana is a tarot themed visual novel (Android | iOS) where you’re trying to solve a murder before a city-wide masquerade ball, and I am INCREDIBLY invested in the romances
Merge Dragons: time- and money-sink match three game, but it’s really good for shutting my brain off. (AMZ | Android | iOS)
Ellen: Ii love The Arcana also!!! Definitely second that rec.
Amanda: I backed the Arcana on Kickstarter!
Susan: PC/console: SIMS FOR ALL THE DELICIOUS SOAP OPERA DRAMA
Transistor is about a singer who survived an assassination attempt trying to find out what’s going on and why the cyberpunk city is disintegrating
Hatoful Boyfriend is maybe the best dating sim ever made but only makes sense if you know dating sim tropes
And I will play pretty much any game with a Final Fantasy character because I love them.
Final Fantasy X and X-2 are probably my favourite, because I love Yuna and the family she assembles as she goes off to save the world! (And also for a whole bunch of spoilery reasons)
And weirdly Kingdom Hearts 2, because that was the one where the gameplay and story finally made sense to me.
Elyse: Luigi’s Mansion 3! It’s incredibly relaxing and fun.
Sarah: I love Luigi’s Mansion. It’s like if Mario puzzle Games and Ghostbusters had a baby.
Susan: Is that the one with the goo clone?!
Elyse: Yes!
Tara: Cat Condo (iOS | Android) is also a nice one to dip into for a few minutes at a time.
Susan: I like Cat Condo, I should reinstall it? Did you play Neko Atsume?
Tara: YES. Oh boy, I loved that one, and they’re totally safe for kiddos.
I’m also a huge Merge Dragons fan, but my camp is total chaos whenever I let my 4 year old play for a while.
Susan: I let my sister’s toddler play with mine, so I know that pain.
Maya: So I have a PS4 and my general rule is that every other game I play has to have a woman, POC or ::gasp:: a WOC as the main character.
Horizon Zero Dawn, with a woman as the protagonist AND she’s wearing clothes that are reasonable considering both the gameplay (she’s a hunter!) and the surroundings (sometimes it’s winter!), is one of my favorite AAA games of this generation.
Some games coming from smaller studios that I liked are Dandara (developed by a Brazilian studio and with a black woman as the main character!) and Never Alone (produced in partnership with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, an indigenous Alaskan tribe).
I keep hearing from my friends about how much they love Anarcute, which is a riot simulator where you control cute animals as they try to take back control of a city that is under police control by evil corporations.
Susan: I loved Never Alone, and I respect how hard it committed to being easier as a co-op game.
Amanda: Maya, have you played Assassins Creed Odyssey?!
Maya: I haven’t yet, but I’m totally gonna get to it!
I’m playing through God of War right now, which is essentially a story about intergenerational trauma.
Sarah: Amanda LOVES Odyssey. I struggle with a lot of killing games but it’s very satisfying to kill terrible men who do shitful things like kidnap people.
Maya: Oh yeah, I love Assassins Creed generally (Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation had interesting gameplay because you were playing as a black woman in New Orleans who was light skinned and so depending on how she was dressed she could do her spying and killing as a slave or as a rich lady), but law school/grad school messed my gaming life up, so I’m perpetually behind in terms of playing stuff.
Amanda: I loved playing a buff bisexual lady stabbing misogynists.
Sarah: Her. Arms.
I lifted this morning and was like, GETTIN’ THOSE KASSANDRA DELTS.
Tara: Oh, I forgot a couple of others. Our family loved Donut County. You’re basically using moving a hole around to swallow things up and the hole grows as you do it. There’s some kind of story about an asshole raccoon, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the story for that. It’s the one game that I was able to play with my daughters, where we all passed the controller around, and we had so much fun that we did it all in one sitting.
I also had a lot of fun with Untitled Goose Game. You play as a goose and have task lists that basically mean messing with the people in each area. It’s surprisingly satisfying, although some of the puzzles can be a bit of a pain, so I heavily relied on walkthroughs.
Amanda: Donut County reminds me a lot of the Katamari Damacy series where you roll stuff up.
Maya: Ohhhh, I love Katamari Damacy games, so noted!
Susan: Donut County and Katamari are so good. I love getting to the point in both of them where you can just go “this country can get in the hole/ball.”
Maya: Ugh, I loved one of the Katamari levels that had me rolling up planets, and then stars, and then galaxies.
Sneezy: I’m not a gamer, but all this talk of badass women reminded me of Soul Caliber. I never played it, but some of my friends loved it because a wushu master who would train us now and then motion modeled for one of the characters. Apparently the game makers also incorporated the Sifu’s bubbly personality into the character. (Which was hilarious for us, because when you perform wushu, you’re supposed to look like you’re there for BUSINESS, but Sifu Li never hid how super fucking happy wushu made her.) My friends used to do this thing where anyone who does a move in-game (like a fancy kick or something) that they can’t do in real life gets a bonk on the head.
Susan: !!!!! I want it!
Ellen: Oh, man, I’m a major video gamer so i love this for stuff we like!!!
My favorite game franchise is Fire Emblem. All of the games are tactical strategy RPGs in a fantasy setting but they all have a relationship-building/matchmaking component as well. The most recent one for the Switch, Three Houses, is one of my favorite games of all time.
I also really love the Animal Crossing series. You play as a villager in a village filled with animal people and you can do various things to make money like fish and catch bugs and harvest fruit and then use the money to upgrade your house, buy new outfits, etc. It’s very relaxing.
Final rec is the visual novel Rose of Winter (iOS). You play a lady knight, Rose, escorting one of 4 princes across a wintry mountain. depending on your choices you can have a happy or sad ending with each prince. It’s short but it’s really adorable and romantic and probably my favorite visual novel of all time??? Also the art is awesome.
Susan: I got Three Houses for my birthday!
I really need to get further in it, I got distracted by Pokémon. (I’m still in the prologue and all I know is EDELGARD HAS MY SWORD.)
Oh, and I have Rose of Winter, I’m bumping it up my priority list.
OH! And Humble Bundle is doing a $25 bundle where everything goes to Australian fire relief – expires soon!
So, what about you? What are your absolute favorite video games that you recommend? Please tell us all about them?
Stardew Valley all day every day aaaahhh. I have played “through” (till at least 3 in-game years) 5 times on PC and mobile. This time I aim to have fun with the clothes crafting that was just added. I marry a different NPC each time, so there’s 12 plays’ worth of that before repeating. Shane is up this time. He is an *absolute mess* of a character. Like, uncomfortably and relatably realistic mess.
The thing to remember about SDV is that you do not HAVE to do anything. Unlike many games, there are zero penalties for faffing about.
I really love Dragon Age: Inquisition, but I’ve read about all the burnout and awful management that went into making it, so I feel bad recommending it. It’s a short semi-open-world RPG with such. a. dang. good. script. and. characterization. omg. I can’t even gush sufficiently. My spouse still jokingly gets on my case for not dating one of the NPCs in my first play-through. Look, I shipped him with somebody else, okay?! Shipping is srs bsns.
On the other end, I got super into Don’t Starve for a while – it’s a game that drops you into an almost hilariously hostile landscape and is like, “go find two sticks to rub together and build a fire before you freeze. end tutorial.” The Edward Gorey-style art and dark humor makes it all more charming than annoying. I would not recommend it if you’re easily frustrated or get attached to a particular play-through, because there’s a lot of luck and re-starting.
@Pre: I loved playing DA:Inquisition, and I know it’s a sign of mental drain for me that I start wondering how everyone is. I’ve only done one nearly-complete play-through but am thinking of starting over. WHO DID YOU Not date?!
Oh, the Final Fantasy franchise… X-2 is one of the few long games I’ve actually finished. Loved the all-girl party and literally playing dressup for the class system. My daughter LOVES XV, which is kind of the opposite with dudes on a road trip. But XII (which I’ve finished twice) is still my favorite, about 90% thanks to the snarky, leather-pants-wearing sky pirate voiced perfectly by Gideon Emery. (There’s also some really stellar political character development, but that’s a niche writing interest.)
XII also strikes me as the least mech of all the FF games I’ve played. We’ve been waiting forever for the reboot of the iconic VII, but all the bot-fighting trailers are sapping my enthusiasm because that’s not my favorite aesthetic, no matter how beautiful it looks otherwise.
I love swords and magic, so Dragon Age: Inquisition is a favorite, I’ve played through twice. I think I know who @Pre shipped–(Iron Bull and Dorian?). It was such a satisfying NPC romance. Stumbled on it the first time then totally tried for it the second time. (And Iron Bull is voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr, interestingly enough).
Witcher 3 is my favorite for all time.
I also love the Trine series (1-4), 2D-ish puzzle game (though I never finished Trine 3).
Katamari Damacy Reroll on the Nintendo Switch. It is so much fun! You basically just roll around and pick things up, and your Katamari gets bigger and bigger. The music is great and there is a lot of humor.
-Seconding the Sims games (Sims 3 being my favorite). I love all the customization, romancing and the sheer variety of fan made challenges you can take on.
-I also love all the Pokemon games and look forward to the expansion pass coming out in June.
-Dragon Quest is another awesome series! It’s a pretty traditional JRPG , but both the human characters and even the monsters have a lot of heart put into them both personality wise and design-wise.
-Lastly I adore both The Rune Factory and Harvest Moon games. Both games are super relaxing and both have dating sim elements which is always fun .
I was never a huge gamer until I met my husband, but shortly after we moved in together we got an Xbox and the Star Wars game Knights of the Old Republic. And that game became my favorite of all favorites forever and ever. I still get the urge to play it but it’s so old now. I’m always looking for other games that will have the same good combination of story and fun gameplay, so I’m here for these recommendations.
I tried Skyrim but I think the world in that game was TOO open, like I need a more linear story or something. It was neat but not compelling. Never really got into Final Fantasy unfortunately, it always felt like maybe there was some background that I was missing in order to make it all make sense. I also tried an older Dragon Age (Origins) and it was super fun until one point where I got stuck in a combat situation my character was clearly not ready for. Couldn’t beat it and couldn’t go back, so I guess I have to start over, but meh. We love the Dragon Quest series, particularly Dragon Quest VIII. Not so much Dragon Quest Heroes which are more combat-based/button mashing games. The best thing we’ve played recently is Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That game is AMAZING. My daughter got Pokemon Sword for Christmas so she and I have been playing that off and on and it’s fun. Our entire family plays Pokemon Go on phones/iPods. It’s something fun that we can all do, and sometimes helps to keep the kids busy–recently we had to spend like 4 hours at Carmax (yay) and passed the time catching Pokemon and discussing the various attributes.
I just finished the Zero Escape trilogy, an incredibly addictive series of escape room/visual novel games. If you can, I highly recommend playing the first game on the DS or 3DS first. It does things with the DS’s double screen that I’ve never seen before, and the big climax doesn’t have quite the same impact without it in the PC version (although the voice acting in the PC port is excellent).
WoW is sucking me in again with a new patch. I’m particularly excited about new pets! Petsssss
I second recommendations for The Arcana and Rose of Winter! I had no idea that Rose of Winter was on mobile now! I’m primarily a PC gal. On any platform though, it’s a super cute little cocoa mug of a game.
Yay games! Definitely second all the love for Stardew and The Witcher games. Other games I will always recommend are the Mass Effects, Grim Fandango, Persona 5, God of War and Yakuza!
Three Houses was my first ever Fire Emblem and it owned me for three whole months last year. Only completed the Blue Lions play through as well (Felix is my moody sword boy for ever) so need to jump back in to the other houses at some point : )
My absolute favourite game of last year was Control though. Fascinating story, hilarious collectibles that actually contribute massively to the world building (which totally vindicated my collectible obsession) and the game play is so much fun! Jesse feels like a straight up X-Man with all her powers by the end. Love it and cannot recommend it enough for anyone who even remotely likes 3rd person action adventure, the X-Files and Finnish rock metal.
Currently playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and it is so pretty! I suck at the fighting but I can just about button bash my way through it. Force powers are so cool though.
A friend was playing Star Wars Fallen Order on PC and I happened to be over for dinner with him and his wife when he got to the climax of the game. So pretty and the end was really cool.
Currently playing Zelda BoTW on Switch, Factorio on PC, and AC Odyssey also on PC. Kassandra is definitely #goals
My 10 yo bough stardew valley. And I was like huh, that looks cool. 155 + HOURS in
.. I have my own switch lite. I’m a bit chuffed right now cuz my next goal is getting to level 100 in the cavern and it’s impossible. Also, I have played The Sims for as long as it’s been in existence. I go on benders with that too. I actually rebuilt my house in The Sims so I could show hubs my idea and he was mind blown… Gals, I love this newsletter so much, and already knew you were my people but omg when I saw this article…. Having a crap day and it gave me warm and Fuzzies.
I grew up playing all the Sims. Sims 3 is definitely my favorite (the day they added horses was one of the most exciting days of my life). I can never forgive Sims 4 for getting rid of the open world. It’s baffling to me.
Zoo Tycoon 2 is still awesome, and I just got Planet Zoo which has very cool, realistic animals and tons of options for building and landscaping, but it’s just a tad too realistic on the animal management side for my taste. I also love horse riding and management games like Equestriad and My Riding Stables, and I’m eternally bummed that there are never any new ones.
One of my long-standing favorite games is Black and White 2. You play as a god, taking care of your own little town and try to defeat other gods, either by taking over their towns or by making your own so awesome that all their people defect to you. It’s super fun and visually pretty and you get a giant, 30 ft tall creature that you have to take care of. I think the choices are a lion, wolf, cow, or orangutan. They’re extremely cute.
The third Harry Potter game is another old favorite. You get to transfigure little statues into a bunny or a little tiny dragon and the then hop/fly around solving puzzles!
And finally, I just discovered a channel on YouTube called Let’s Game it Out that is absolutely hysterical. The guy very joyfully plays games as creatively and incorrectly as possible with hilarious results. His videos always leave me in a good mood.
Zelda! I love most of them. And Animal Crossing. This sums up why pretty well: https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/20/17881868/animal-crossing-switch-nice-return
My mum loves playing the Jackbox Party Pack games with me because she can really get involved. There’s very little set up and you only need a smartphone to join in. Her favourites are Trivia Murder Party & Guesspionage.
Phone games: oh how I understand the time and money sink of Merge Dragons/Merge Magic. My camp was a mess until I sorted the eggs/chests separately. I do a little better with the younger Merge Magic just because I like the art better.
Seekers Notes is my current favorite hidden object+story game. The town is cursed and you’re trying to retrieve various objects for character quests.
If you’re a Miss Fisher fan, you might like June’s Journey. You travel around and solve mysteries and build your estate. Love the soundtrack too!
PC: I would remiss if I didn’t mention Regency Solitaire. I almost wish there was a mobile version.
I need to check out Arcana.
>>I think I know who @Pre shipped–(Iron Bull and Dorian?). >>
YEEEEEP. (My first Inquisitor character was a Dwarven lady, Hubs was adamant I should’ve gone for the Bull. The argument was fun at least)
Dragon Age: Inquisition. DEEP, LOVING SIGH. I didn’t grow up gaming and bought a PS4 a couple of years ago and DA:I was the first game I deeply got into. I’ve played it through at least 6-7 times. Always saying I’ll romance someone different. Always go for Cullen. Except the time I played as a male so I could romance Dorian.
Other games I love: Witcher 3, Stardew Valley, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (hello Victorian England!). I also just finished Red Dead Redemption 2 and boy was I emotionally invested in that story/game. (Literally cried at the end of the main story.) Like someone else mentioned, I try to play games that have women or PoC main characters so I wasn’t initially interested in RDR2 but tried it out and it hooked me. And I just loved getting on my horse and riding around, setting up camp, hunting, fishing, picking herbs. It’s as soothing as SDV to me in that way.
Lots of folks already mentioning the big-name games I enjoy, although I haven’t seen Life Is Strange listed, I love that series! But other than LIS, I’ll take a moment and list some hidden indie gems I stumbled into, mostly from a humble bundle or a steam sale.
Elegy For A Dead World – I don’t put many hours into it, but I just love the idea that someone made a game about poetry and writing fill in the blanks style (also a free-form mode) and it’s odd and quirky and I just love that it exists.
To The Moon – It’s a story game with more reading than play, but it’s about life and love and loss and joy. It made me laugh, and sigh, and sob. There’s a follow up too, but I haven’t set aside an emotion-travelling day for it yet.
A Normal Lost Phone was also an intriguing little story. It’s definitely “interactive fiction” (like a visual novel game) rather than what we normally think of as game-play. It was only a buck when I got it, i think it’s 3 normally, but it’s about 80-90 minutes of story and it was really well done.
Lately my game-obsession has been Equilinox, a game of genetics where you can breed up a whole ecosystem with plants and fish and animals. My mauve sheep are my pride and joy right now!
The thread I needed! I’ve been wanting to jump into a game lately and I’m looking so many things up now. Escapism here I come. Super bonus points if there’s any kind of romance.
I forever love Stardew Valley, Mass Effect, The Sims, Harvest Moon, Horizon Zero Dawn, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, aaaand although I’ve left MMOs behind they hold a special place in my heart.
Jackbox for party games and Overcooked for the couch with friends. There was a 48 hour period where I was obsessed with beating Long Live the Queen…
I want to second the June’s Journey rec. It’s the best hidden object game for phones imo. The artwork is so polished and beautiful, it just has this quality feel to it, and I enjoy the period details. It’s also completely possible to play without paying, you have to watch a few ads but they’re not mandatory. I’ve never felt like I was being harassed with ads or forced to pay to be able to play comfortably, unlike pretty much every other freemium game.
I’ve bought Stardew Valley and I’m trying to start playing but I think I lack the gaming experience to make it easy. I wasn’t allowed to play video games as a child so I really don’t have the reflexes that other people have already acquired. I hope I’ll manage to persevere until I get more comfortable with it.
I tried to play Arcana, I love the artwork style, it’s gorgeous, but it was just too expensive so I had to give up.
Sim-type and RPG-type games are my jam. Going back to the 3DS, I second the Rune Factory and Harvest Moon recommendations, with an addendum: Right around the jump to 3DS, Marvelous (the developer of Bokujou Monogatari, localized by Natsume as Harvest Moon) decided to dump Natsume and localize with their in-house team. (Given Natsume had added glitches – sometimes gamebreaking ones – and had so many typos they once misspelled their own name on the title screen, a lot of us were pretty supportive of this choice.) Natsume, however, owned and kept the trademark for ‘Harvest Moon’, so the games from 2012 on under Harvest Moon are developed by Natsume, while the Bokujou Monogatari games are now continued under Story of Seasons. (And god, the characterization since then is AMAZING.) Trio of Towns, the latest one, is my favorite in the series just because EVERY character gets at least one event about themselves, and love interests get eight plus a post-marriage one. It’s amazing, and I am so looking forward to the Mineral Town remake coming (eventually) for Switch. Gay marriage will be included! Rune Factory 4’s getting a Switch remake, too, and I CANNOT wait.
Also on the 3DS and more RPG-like is Fantasy Life. There’s a plot about the sky falling and a talking butterfly that’s pretty bouncy and amusing (if you don’t like genre-awareness and a reasonable dose of sarcasm, probably best you skip,) with a lot of coming together to solve a greater problem, but the core gameplay tends to involve the 12 jobs (called ‘Life’s in game) and advancing in them. Some of them are combat, some are gathering classes like fishing and woodcutting, and some are crafting like carpentry, blacksmithing, and tailoring. It’s fun to be a tailor on adventures, honestly. The crafting minigames all use the same mechanics, but it’s still a delight. And the character customization’s great – you actually have a choice of body types at the beginning including height and weight, which shouldn’t be as rare in video games as it is.
One more 3DS favorite series is Style Savvy. Take a shop-managing simulator, the biggest virtual paper doll closet you’ve ever seen, and make it a first-party Nintendo game and you have an extremely catchy formula. The most recent, digital-only Styling Star involves an overarching plot about three young pop stars in training who you end up the personal stylist for, and has some really delightful localization as well. The previous one, Fashion Forward, got a physical cartridge release and has a plot about fashion shows and fashion as self-expression (the bright, happy spin on being a fashion retailer), and a few gameplay mechanics were more elaborate there. Fashion Forward has a real-time cycle where Styling Star is an in-game one that’s fairly speedy, and there was a changeup in the aesthetics that makes Styling Star more pastel and shiny… and also kind of mutes the darker skin tones (and gives you fewer options with them than the NPCs have,) so caveat there.
For Switch, I cannot undersell how excited I am for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If you haven’t played the series, it’s a very chill experience with no real goal (you have a mortgage, but it comes with no deadlines for payments or interest) and, despite how we stress when leaving the town for weeks and returning to it in ruins, there actually seems to be a mechanic in the last one on 3DS where the town kind of goes in stasis after a week or so – I’ve come back after months multiple times and, while the weeds are terrible, I usually don’t have villagers move, so hopefully that sticks going forward. This new one will also add some crafting mechanics that look extremely interesting, and the Nook Miles seems like a neat iteration on the CAT coupons from New Leaf’s Amiibo update back in 2016.
Also releasing in March from a beloved, known franchise of mine is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. There’s a demo, go play it. It’s a remake of the first game in the spin-off series for GBA/DS, and is a rouguelike-style dungeon crawler, with Pokemon. You are a human who was turned into a Pokemon and sent into a world full of them with no memory. You meet another Pokemon who wants to help others in trouble. The game has never looked better (and it was damn pretty on GBA and DS!), and the storyline gets fairly meaty. (The sequel, Explorers of Time/Darkness and especially its ‘third version’ Explorers of Sky, is probably my favorite Pokemon game ever. If you have a DS and the money to track it down – or a Wii U, where it was ported – pick it up.)
And for Switch games actually out, Dragon Quest Builders is a delightful duology. Take Minecraft mechanics and Dragon Quest’s story elements, and you have a winning combo. 2’s got quality of life improvements over 1, but both stories do interesting things with their corresponding Dragon Quests while still being completely accessible to people like me who never played one. Also, 2 gives you a BFF NPC companion who’s actually pretty lovable and handles a lot of your combat. I love him.
I’ve wasted many, many hours on Sims, Elder Scrolls, and Stardew Valley–all great games. I’m currently obsessed with Raid: Shadow Legend, an Android game that is a MMORPG with the usual assortment of dragons, elves, orcs, and weaponry — good for working off a bit of aggression. Downside to it is that although its free, it is one of those where you get tempted every few days to blow a few bucks on some nice extra and eventually realize you’ve spent more on it than if you had just bought a regular game outright.
I am not a big fan of games that require quick reflexes, but I love puzzle games. I think my favorites on iOS are The Room games, the House of da Vinci games, and the games by Glitch. For free room escape games, the ones by Mani Morishita are really beautifully done.
I definitely agree with all of the Sims love. I prefer Sims 3, but i play Sims 4 too, all on PC. I also live that I can get some of my favorite games from my teen years through Good Old Games, I repurchased every variation of the Might and Magic games series and the Heroes versions. Even after all of these years, these are my favorite games to pass the time with. When I switch over to my Xbox, which I do from time to time, I usually play the Lego games: Jurassic World, Marvel, Star Wars, HP, Indiana Jones, etc.
My latest fave though actually came from a recommendation on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from a few months ago: The Untitled Goose Game! One of my friends who never games at all came over and play for awhile. It’s a fun way to while away a couple of hours.
Horizon Zero Dawn is such a great game! The graphics are stunning. Aloy is a great lead character and the story is haunting. Can’t wait for the sequel. I’d recommend Detroit: Becoming Human. It’s takes on civil right issues with artificial intelligence. While there is gameplay it’s more of a choice matters type of game. Unlike a lot of games the choices really matter. When a coworker recommended it to me he said there’s almost no point explaining it to you because the choices are so varied almost no one will have the same game play experience. He was right.
i love that there are other Merge Dragon fans here! i’ve been playing for a bit over 2 years now.
Survival horror fan here. I finally finished A Plague Tale and it’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a while. It’s dark, there’s rats, a group of medieval French kids fighting against the Church and plague, and there’s alchemy. Play if you like awesome stories about siblings, stealth games, and crying into your beer while playing video games.
I am not coordinated, so games that require reflexes & stuff are out. (I got Lego City Undercover and it beat me. bad).
I love Stardew Valley (both on my phone and on the switch) and I have spent weekends playing the Sims. Last year I did the 100 baby challenge, which is stupid, but ended up being really fun.
Question – I kind of like the idea of trying a dating sim, but it seems that most of them are really horror stories in disguise (not my thing) or have relationships that I would charitably describe as “unhealthy.” Are there any that might be something that I would like? (For an example, my last Stardew game, I ended up dating all of the town’s single people. I’d like something like that – without the farming.)
I like the series of Nancy Drew video games. They are designed for 8-12 year olds but I am an adult and I find them challenging.
Love Stardew Valley! My teenager had to show me how to play at first. Reigns and Reigns: Her Majesty are fun games on iOS, card-style strategy games and you can pick them up and put them down, which is nice when game time is limited. If you like history, Sid Meier’s Civilizations VI is super-addictive and on Switch and iOS as well as computer.
The Portal games! Female protagonist (though silent the whole game), female antagonist, fun puzzles. I love them, they were the first non-MMO games I played and they have a special place in my heart.
All the Dragon Age games. Origins has clunky combat and is better with add-ons, but the story is top notch. I have only been that invested in a few other games. DA2 has a good, tight storyline and memorable NPCs, and Inquisition can drag at points but feels super epic.
The Mass Effect games! I cried so hard at the end of the third because it was over. I was so invested in the world and the characters and Jennifer Hale basically is femShep.
The Uncharted games on PS. The main character is male, but he’s also sort of doofy. His love interest for the games has her own life and is pretty smart and awesome and gets sick of his shit so relatable.
Love the lego games – Lego Batman (1, 2, and 3) are superb. I think Lego Batman 3 is actually a sneak Justice League game. its SUPER fun. Its great to just destroy everything into tiny little lego pieces and collect coins.
Pokemon – I’ve been playing since I was in the single digits and its super fun, even now. I think, for complete newbies, Sword/Shield does a really good job introducing the world/ mechanics and keeping things much less complicated than the previous games.
I like my games simple and single player.
My current obsession is The Long Dark, a winter survival game by Canadian company Hinterland Studios. you basically get two games for the price of one – the open world sandbox mode AND an RPG mode that you play in chapters.
Chapters 1-3 of a planned 5 are out currently. If you google you may see complaints about how long it took for chapter three to come out – but there is a good reason. In the first two chapters you play as Will Mackenzie, a bush pilot who sets out on a flight in a winter storm because his ex-wife Astrid (a research doctor) needs to get a mysterious package to a remote town in the Canadian wilderness. They get seperated in dire circumstances. The original plan was to play as Will for all five chapters, with his primary motivation being to find Astrid.
When fans pointed out to Hinterland that they had set up Astrid as a potentially very cool character, and then turned her into not only a classic damsel in destress but a damsel in distress off camera – Hinterland did NOT give the usual game company response to such criticism – instead they went back to the drawing board and… in Chapter 3 you play Astrid! She will also be the POV chapter in Chapet 4 and then for Chapter 5 the player will get to choose to play Astrid or Will.
I could wax lyrical about the gameplay itself and the beautiful watercolor world you move through. I will say that Hinterland also responded to fan feedback and has multiple difficulty settings for both sandbox and RPG mode, you can make it as easy or as challenging as you would like.
I’ve been having fun with ICEY, a metroidvania style adventure game. Sometimes I trip on a mobile game that has gacha gambling elements, like Arknight, and sometimes I find stuff that has lightly weird stuff to me but it’s harmless.
Like One Night, Hot springs. Which is a visual novel about a trans lady trying to have a girl’s night with her two friends.
Choice of Games has been expanding their options for dating sub quests. I’m happy for them and their expansions with trying to expand that.
Because in their dragon game, they had candidates to date, and I couldn’t easily figure out the date’s requirements or desires to win their heart, because I had two scenes with them. Trying, then failing.