Game Recommendations
Thought Ticker:
Thought Ticker:
I grew up playing a lot of video games, and continued doing so into my adult life. While I've fallen out of it as a solo-hobby, there seems to be more people passionate about video games than ever. I figured, why not recommend some of mt favorites?
I link to the game's steam page, generally, but many of these you can find elsewhere if it suits you better.
GRIS is hands-down one of the best video games I've ever played. Like a few others on this list, it's a bit more of an interactive art experience than it is a full-on game, but don't let that stop you.
In GRIS, you play a young woman who loses her voice and all the color in her world. You traverse 2D platforms and puzzles, and each emotional victory brings one color back. The music, by Berlinist, is deeply moving, which befits the game's overarching metaphor of healing through deep grief. I assume that's the metaphor, anyway - the secret achievements are all named after stages of grief, but GRIS' dream-like surreality is accompanied by no dialogue. I suppose it's open to interpretation.
The creators of GRIS recently released a second game, NEVA, which is a bit more direct in its themes. It's very much inspired by Princess Mononoke; a warrior woman, a spirit wolf, a horrible corruption consuming the forest, a powerful antagonistic woman... it's a fabulous game in its own right, but major trigger warning if harm to animals upsets you. Take me seriously about that.
If you haven't played Wandersong, what are you doing here?? Go play Wandersong!!
In Wandersong, you play an ever-chipper bard (whose supposed canon name is Kiwi, but good luck at the name entry screen) who is explicitly not the Chosen One. They fail the test, not realizing what it was, and decide to set off into the world to save reality anyway - prophecy or no prophecy. They're quickly joined by a grumpy witch and a whole cast of funny characters as they solve problems and rescue towns from trouble. Along the way, the bard meets the actual Chosen One and learns more about the true nature of the threat to reality.
Wandersong uses a simple color-wheel system to represent the musical scale, and it's honestly impressive how creative the get with it. While most of the gameplay boils down to moving around and mousing over colors on the wheel, the devs put a lot of thought into varying how, exactly, that process can be used to advance the game. You'll play rhythm games with ghosts, you'll use song to counter high winds and roaring monsters, make plants grow, and way way more.
It's sort of a theme with the games on this list, but Wandersong is both one of the funniest, most charming games I've played, and responsible for some absolute emotional wreckage on my part.
Urbek City Builder is a very different city-building game from any other I've played. Rather than money and taxes, you start with the basic resources of food, labor, wood, and stone. You have to manage your real resource constraints and balance them against the capacities of your labor force, and that's just the first difference. As you build your city, you develop more resources: skilled labor, iron, coal, nightlife, green space, education, and more.
You have the power to set down specific buildings, but those buildings will change organically based on their surroundings. Houses turn into coal mining barracks, fisherman's homes, suburban houses, rowhouses, and more based on the configuration of the environment. New possibilities are unlocked based on what is sitting near what and what resources are available. It's a very different kind of puzzle from SimCity, but a ton of fun. Definitely check this game out. If you like, there are a couple of DLCs to consider (including trains!! TRAINS!!!).
If GRIS is a game with an art piece attached, then Genesis Noir is an art piece with a game attached. In this barely-qualifies-as-a-point-and-click-puzzle-game piece of interactive software, you take the role of No Man, a classic hat-and-coat-clad man of mystery and watch salesman on the streets of a big city. No Man is enchanted with Miss Mass, a local lounge singer, who herself has a tempestuous relationship with an arrogant saxophonist playboy known as Golden Boy. A charged argument leads Golden boy to pull out a gun and shoot Miss Mass - but before the bullet can reach her, No Man stops the clock.
Oh, yeah, so it's a classic noir story, but you might be the concept of time, your lover is the concept of mass, and the gunshot aimed for her heart is the big bang that started the universe. Totally normal stuff.
As No Man, you traverse the lifespan of the universe, looking for clues to stop the bullet before it finds its mark. Along the way, you start to question whether saving the woman you love is worth retconning the existence all of creation. It's a beautiful, moving, and sometimes very funny story. My main critique is that the ending drags a bit, but so what? This is one of the only games that has ever made me cry.
Bug Fables is a quirky and earnest JRPG inspired heavily by the Paper Mario games, but don't expect a simple insect-themed copy of the Nintendo cult hit. This game is very much its own thing.
Set in the fantasy land of Bugaria - which is, of course, a suburban American backyard - you take the role of the adventuring insects Kabu, Vi, and Leif. There's a lot going on in Bugaria, from political tensions between rival nations - especially the sudden, aggressive turn of the wasp queen - to murderous beasts (a centipede), mysterious lost civilizations (roaches), the unexplorable realm of giants (a house), ancient technology, lost magics, and much more. Bug Fables has a very quirky writing style that pivots back and forth between heart-wrenchingly earnest emotional scenes and laugh-out-loud funny cartoonishness, but it never loses its hopeful and heroic tone. The characters are a delight that bring the world to life, especially our protagonists: Kabu, a honorable beetle warrior with significant survivors guilt; Vi, a rogueish honeybee with a chip on her shoulder about "polite society"; and Leif, a moth with ice powers and no idea how he got them, or how he survived long enough to see his grandchildren grown when he hasn't aged a day.
If you're used to JRPG-length games, Bug Fables runs a little short. I don't consider that a complaint - there's no bloat or filler, but there's still plenty of optional areas and secrets to explore.
Cities: Skylines is the spiritual successor to the SimCity franchise after the disaster that was SimCity 2013. It also has a sequel now, Cities: Skylines II, but the launch was such a disaster of its own that I never picked it up.
Cities: Skylines is good. Cities: Skylines is great. It is one of the best and most comprehensive city planning simulation games on the market. And get this: the DLC is worth buying (on sale). A quick glance at the steam page shows an overwhelming amount, but most of those are radio stations and creator asset packs - the actual expansions are, well, more than I would think reasonable, but far less than it seems. I'm a big fan of Parklife, which adds modular parks, nature reserves, zoos, and amusement parks. Once I have my cities in the green financially, I always sit down to detail my parks and make them really come alive while I'm waiting for the town coffers to fill up. I also recommend Mass Transit and Green Cities, because of course I do are you kidding me? Snowfall is one of my favorites, though I understand YMMV with that one; I can't help it, I love snow, and yes I do want to plan out my city's snow plow and heating systems, thank you, especially if it means I get hot springs and Christmas Markets as a reward. And I must mention Plazas & Promenades - while I don't entirely find joy in the mechanics of pedestrian-focused cities (why do they cost so much? Why? You're telling me that hiring people to scrape bubblegum off of benches and cart recycling to pick-up centers costs more than hiring construction crews to do road maintenance?? Absurd) the high-density buildings and car-free area assets are absolutely stellar.
When I was in planning school, it turned out a lot of my classmates - you know, people training to be actual city planners - were big fans. That's not to say it's an entirely accurate simulation; as a successor to SimCity, it also inherited a lot of SimCity's underlying biases and philosophy. So if you're looking for mixed-use or cop-free cities... sorry, bud.
