Non-holiday games to play during the holidays

Ah, the holidays: that time of year when end-of-year lists are compiled, bank accounts are checked for available funds, TSA lines are waited in, and New Years Eve plans are hastily thrown together.

If you're like me during this month (i.e. conked out in a sugar-cookie daze on your parents' sofa while trying to readjust your made-soft-by-California-seasons body to the East Coast winter), you could use an opportunity to do something completely non-holiday-related and low stress.

No surprise here: there are plenty of small games out there that will serve this exact purpose. These are games that are perfect for the holiday season while having absolutely 0 to do with the holidays themselves. Boot them up, take some time, and maybe even use them as a replacement for your family's annual tradition of getting into Very Heated disagreements during Scrabble. (Sorry, Mom. Love you.)

PET THE PUP AT THE PARTY

Pet the Pup at the Party is a game made for holiday decompression (or, really, any situation where social anxiety might come into play). The aim is simple: you're a person at a party, and you've heard there is a pup there that is waiting to be pet. The goal: navigate the party while avoiding the hipster patrons while following the sounds of a friendly dog barking from another room. If you find the dog within the allotted time limit and give it a pet, its image is added to your log of dogs, and you get another chance to find a new pup.

It's not a hard game by any means. When I played, I mostly just yelled, "GET OUT OF MY WAAAAY" with a huge grin on my face. It's a game that rejoices in the heights of internal drama and the joys of comically elevated stakes. Also: gotta pet those pups.

LOST CONSTELLATION

Lost Constellation was one of the first games I wrote about on Gentle Gamers for a very simple reason: it's one of my favorite games. 

It was put out by the team that made Night in the Woods as a preamble/apology for the increasingly delayed NitW, and (dollars to donuts), I think Lost Constellation is the stronger game, and one that is a joy to replay in the middle of winter.

It's a game that quiet and thoughtful, about love and loss. It's short, but that makes it a well-contained story. It's tongue-in-cheek, and that keeps it from being too dour. To use what I said in my original review when I played through on the first day of winter, "It's a beautiful little present: a modern ancient story that asks you, 'What's waiting for you in the woods, and what are you willing to do to get it?' "

SONIC MANIA

If you're spending the holidays in your childhood home (metaphorically or literally), you might as well spend some time reliving a part of your childhood. Regression is a thing, and you might as well embrace it.

For me, that part of my childhood is classic Sonic. For once, Team Sonic did something kind of right and put a new release into the hands of fans. With Sonic Mania, the love for the game shows. Each stage features a classic level, plus an additional stage that plays upon and updates the classic. It's a game that recognizes the joy in the original, and trades upon the very real pleasure of feeling In On the Joke.

Also, it's fun to go fast.

PANORAMICAL

Sometimes, you just need something pretty. And Panoramical is just that. There's no plot to speak of (that I know of, at least). The game simply gives you some scenes and some sliders. Manipulating the sliders changes the scene (perhaps tall trees grow out of the ground, perhaps orbs appear in the sky, perhaps everything tilts, just a little bit to the right). Each change in the visuals is accompanied by a change in the soundtrack, creating an auditory landscape that rivals the one you see.

And that's it. Turn off the lights. Turn on the game. Give yourself a few minutes to be the God of a small beautiful world of your whims.

Another game along these lines (that I have yet to play but have heard wonderful things about) is Proteus, which bills itself as an "an ambient musical exploration game where your exploration of a changing island creates an abstract-immersive soundtrack to your wandering." I'm not 100% sure that that means, but it sounds right up my alley.

HERDING CATS

Listen: if I'm going to start with Pet the Pup at the Party, this seems like the logical bookend. Leave it to anna anthropy to make a perfect little puzzle game about trying to pet all the cats. 

Herding Cats is a short puzzle game, wherein your character has to be able to collect all the cats on the screen at once in order to progress to the next level. The design and mechanics are simple, and petting all the cats is a cause I can get behind. It honestly doesn't have to be more complex than that.

All in the Timing: "Queers in Love at the End of the World" & "Where the Goats Are"

I doubt it's solely a modern metric, but there definitely seems to be a trend in contemporary art criticism: the exultation of "getting lost" in artwork.

Living in the era of binge-watching television means that television must (natch) be binge-watch-able. Good books are "page-turners." I've lost count of the number of times I've heard theatre-goers lament the show that feels too long. ("Two intermissions? Who needs two intermissions??")

This metric is equally applied to video games, and I know it well. Whether it be my childhood obsessions with The Sims and Age of Empires, or my more recent dives into Dead Cells or Stardew Valley, it's really no challenge for me to log dozens (if not hundreds) of hours in the world of an especially immersive video game. Indeed, all the games I listed have been lauded as "easy to get lost in." It is seen as a positive virtue when you are so enrapt in a game that you forget how long you've been playing it.

However, this metric assumes an antagonistic relationship between art and time. By the above criterion, art is good when it surpasses the oppressive weight of time, allowing people to feel -- however fleetingly -- that they are removed from time's binds and limitation

This relationship doesn't need to be antagonistic. It is much more interesting to think of time as one of the many components a work can use to influence a viewer.

Recently, I played two games that use time as a calculated storytelling mechanic in their game, rather than an antagonist: Queers in Love at the End of the World by anna anthrophy & Where the Goats Are by Memory of God. 

Click here to keep reading.

The Mary Sue & Gentle Gamers

Things have been a little quiet around here recently. Like: tumbleweed blowing across the landscape quiet.

One of the main reasons for that was because I was working to adapt my piece about Portal on Gentle Gamers for The Mary Sue! It's now live on their website, and it concentrates a little more on the false image of AI as inherently unbiased, using GLaDOS from Portal as an example of "AI'd" internalized misogyny.

A quick blurb:

As we surround ourselves with increasingly automated systems, we’d do well to examine how our decades of human biases are programmed into the devices that populate our homes, offices, and pockets. Without this examination, we’ll find that the worst of the voices in our heads—voices that, granted, were “programmed” into us by society at large—will find their way into what we create.

Read "Portal, GLaDOS, and the myth of the objective robot" in its entirety here.

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A quick post-script: it seems that there's something in the air/some sort of fantastic hive-mind going on, since the podcast 99% Invisible just yesterday released an episode about the biases in analytics. It's a fantastic addition to the argument I'm making above. You can listen to it here.

Ah, yes. I remember you.

My pediatric dentist was a man named Dr. Wolfman. (That was his actual god-given name. Some people have all the luck.)

When my mom and I first walked into his office, I was shaking with fear. As far as I was concerned, there was a high likelihood that Dr. Wolfman he was the Wolfman, having gone straight and gone for his DDS. 

However, I was immediately won over when I saw, in the corner of the office, an arcade-style SEGA system that featured Ecco the Dolphin, the X-Men game, and (most importantly) Sonic.

I like the little bits of sound design that wheedle their way into your ear: the coin collection sound from Mario, the battle theme from Pokemon, the theme for Logical Journey of the Zoombinis.

But picking up Sonic Mania this week, I didn't realize how much one sound in particular stuck in my head: the sound of Sonic doing a skid stop from the original SEGA Genesis game.

It's amazing how a one-second-long sound can instantly make me smell the antibacterial cleaner used in Dr. Wolfman's office, can make me remember the glow of the screen against the fluorescent lights, can make me feel like I'm three-and-a-half feet tall and willing to overlook the fact that my dentist might just be an actual man-turned-into-a-wolf, so long as I could have a few more moments going so fast.

"Everything" & Nothing

OReilly's 2014 game Mountain has a website with only one quote, from Youtuber "Total Biscut" who says

it's fucking nothing

It's only natural that OReilly would follow this up with a game called Everything. It mixes the metaphysics of Alan Watts with some good ol' 2017 existential dread to make something that is, at once, a conversation with itself and an invitation for the player to reexamine the way they interact with the world.

Also, you can fill the entire universe with snakes.

Read the full review here.

Early Access Snapshot: Dead Cells

Early access games are little presents from possible futures: you're not quite sure where the game is going to end up, but the developer is playing around with ~*~something~*~ and wants to know if it works. For this reason, early access games are chances for the developer to have a dialogue with players: what works in the game & what doesn't; what's exciting & what's rote. 

Sure, you may have to contend with some bugs and crashes, but watching something grow and develop (and getting to see how a game is built from the ground up) is unlike anything else in gaming.

Today, we take a quick look at Motion Twin's upcoming game, Dead Cells, currently available on Steam in early access.

One of the things I continue to find alienating about the gaming industry is the prolific use of insider terminology. Games are often categorized by their similarities to games of the past. If you don't have knowledge of those prior games (due to access, only more recent interest in games, or any other variety of reasons), these terms can be opaque to the extreme.

Such is the case for most articles that discuss Dead Cells, an early access game from developer Motion Twin. Heck the promotional website for Dead Cells is subtitled "a metroidvania rogue-lite with some souls-lite combat" (it continues, but the rest of the title is cut off due to the merciful Google gods).

I could write a whole article about the use of language like this, and how it distances potential players while, I suppose, drawing in the type of folks who believe that "real games" are a thing. I had to put three hyperlinks in that above sentence! That's absurd. Gatekeeping is boring at best.

But Dead Cells kept getting stellar reviews for how flat-out fun it is. So, when the Steam sale rolled around, I decided to give it a try. I figured I'd play for a few minutes, get anxious, and reaffirm that this just isn't my sort of game.

Turns out, it's a gosh darn blast. 

I've been playing it for hours, and have felt nothing but adrenaline-fueled excitement. My partner, who is usually petty video-game averse, even picked it up. We passed the controller back and forth, cheering each other on, only taking breaks for Honey Nut Cheerios and high-fives.

At its heart, Dark Cells is simple: the player battles through randomly generated levels (meaning: the enemies and general feel of each progressive level is consistent on each play-through, but the layout of the level/general composition changes each time), trying to get as far as possible. When the character dies, the player starts back at the beginning.

The excitement comes from a number of individually small factors: 

First, the game is fast and exceptionally smooth. Battling requires thoughtfulness, but is always swift. The limited number of inventory slots help with this: you can only have two weapons and two special items (like bombs or bear traps) at any given time. To get a new item, you have to eject an old one. 

Further, as you play, you collect "cells" from fallen enemies. These cells can be invested in upgrades at certain checkpoints. (If you die before reaching a checkpoint, you lost the cells you accumulated up until that point, natch.) These investments can be in weapons upgrades, unlocking new weapons, increasing the number of health potions you get in between checkpoints, etc. These investments remain in place even after you die. So, though frustrating to die (especially with the checkpoint in sight and 40 cells in your pocket, ready to invest), the game feel like you're still progressing. 

I also loved the necessary adaption that came with randomly generated levels. There were certain weapons I preferred to others. However, the game always starts you with the same basic weapons, and what weapons you get from there depends on whatever the game's algorithm throws your way. So, on a certain play-through, I might not get the dual swords I usually prefer to use. This means I have to work with what I have. If I get a weapon early on that does twice the damage to targets on fire, you can bet that I'm going to try and get my hands on fire grenades down the line. This "work with what you have" mentality makes the game feel different every single time.

To put it simply: the gameplay is incredibly smart.

Motion Twin recognized that they were making something difficult and, so, made sure that the design was as smooth as possible. 

In playing difficult games, I usually get pretty anxious. I never feel quick or good enough at these sorts of games to ever feel confident. I can usually feel the anxiety building as I get further along in the game: I know that the farther I get, the more frustrated I'll feel when I inevitably fail. That's why I haven't played Dark Souls, and why I've avoided anything like it.

But Dead Cells hasn't once even given me a whiff of that anxiety. 

The game is certainly difficult, but it feels extraordinarily light and breezy. Dying in the game isn't a gut-punch. Sometimes, it's a chance to start fresh. Every time I fail, I'm greeted with a familiar but still entirely new scene, and I get to start over from scratch and experiment with what comes my way this time. (Until I die again.) 

Motion Twin should learn something from their own design when it comes to promoting Dead Cells: it could be a wonderful introduction to a whole different style of gaming for folks like me. I would have picked it up a lot quicker had it not come burdened with its own weighty subtitling. (I still can't believe I had to use three different hyperlinks.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some dungeons to crawl.

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Grab Dead Cells on Steam. (15% off if you get it before July 5. Get on that Summer Sale bandwagon!)

Watch a short playthrough via IGN here, or below.

'Tis the Season

The longest day of the year has come and gone for those of us in the northern hemisphere. I've gone swimming not once, not twice, but THRICE this week. (Put my body in water; it's where I belong.) I've been buying fudgsicles from the corner store on my walk home from work. 

To some, this might mean summer is finally here. To me, it means that the annual Steam summer sale is now underway.

It's that beautiful time of year when all the games on one's wishlist finally feel like they're in financial reach. Sure, I might not get to some until winter rolls around, but at least I'll have them when the nights start getting longer.

Looking for recommendations on what to get? This is what I've picked up so far:

Age of Empires II (75% off; $5): Age of Empires hold a certain place in my heart. It was one of the first games I played almost daily. A childhood friend of mine had the first Age of Empires on her dad's computer. The only catch was that it was in Italian. But that didn't deter pre-teen me: I was quickly sucked in to the resource management, the army building, and the intricate strategy of the game.

Age of Empires is a classic real-time strategy game. You start with a small village on a mostly-dark map. You collect resources, build fortifications, develop an army, and hopefully overtake your enemies. You can choose your preferred civilization with the knowledge that each has its own particular benefits. (The Chinese, for example, get gunpowder earlier than others.)

Honestly, I'm not that great at Age of Empires; I've never been very good at planning ahead. But even as my village is crushed by an opponent's army again and again, I find it deeply satisfying. I build. I hope. I repeat.

Dead Cells (15% off; $14.44): Dead Cells is still in its early access stages, but it's received quite a lot of positive press. It came on my radar after Polygon posted a short playthrough video. Roguelikes are not usually up my alley, what with their fast pacing and permadeath. Both of those usually spell out instant anxiety for this gentle gamer.

However, this looks like a load of fun. The sheer variety of options, along with some delightful ways to combine elements/attacks, somehow alleviates my nervousness. If the game is about just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, I can deal with that.

The likelihood that I'll get nervous and throw my controller across the room is, admittedly, still pretty high. I'll likely grab a friend and cheer them on as they dungeon crawl to their heart's content. 

Shelter 2 (85% off; $2.24): Shelter 2 was one of those games Steam recommended to me. (I never know what to do with Steam recommendations. Sometimes it recommends Proteus and all seems right with the algorithm. Other times it recommends Prey, and I wonder if it's been toying with me the whole time.)

Shelter 2 drew me in with its idiosyncratic design. Everything looks like a paper cutout. The sun is a big swirling ball of yellows. It feels like nature, but nature through the eyes of something else.

This makes sense, since the player controls a lynx trying to survive in the world and raise a litter of kittens. Pursuing user reviews, it seems like this game might tug on the heartstrings a little. As someone who regularly cried over pictures of cats available for adoption from the SPCA, I can't wait to become a blurbing mess over 3D rendered felines.

Kentucky Route Zero (50% off; $12.49): OK, so I already own Kentucky Route Zero. I've played it over at least four times, but I'm including it here anyway because you now have no excuse not to play it. It's the best game I've ever played (and was the first I wrote about on Gentle Gamers). It's a perfect package and does things I've never seen other games do. With its themes on debt, ghosts, and Americana, I can't imagine a better time to spend an evening on the Zero.

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Other Gentle games available for sale on Steam:

• Stardew Valley (40% off; $8.99): Gentle farming sim that lovingly held me in its clutches for 100+ hours. Review here.
• Everything (34% off; $9.89): Game that breaks the idea of what a game can and should be. Proper review forthcoming, but for now, you can read my ode to David OReilly here.
• Papers Please (60% off; $3.99): A game that, using the simplest of mechanics, will make you challenge your humanity and morality. Review here.
• The Witness (50% off; $19.99): The most furious you will ever be at a series of lines and dots (contained within the most beautifully rendered world). Review here.

Fluff Piece

Dealing with the world is just a thing sometimes. When everything is just such a thing, it seems wrong to expect too much of anyone. It's like how Shirley Temple could only be Shirley Temple because of the Great Depression: that saccharine sweetness only was palatable because everything else was so sour for so many people. Escapism works.

I don't really advocate for escapism. As someone with heaps of relative privilege, I feel like I should do my best to exert emotional energy on behalf of my friends & loved ones whenever possible. For that reason, games that offer a short wade into Mindlessness come as welcome little presents. They're little oases of quiet before trekking back out into the bight light of the 24-hour news cycle.

If you need something short, absurd, and utterly without consequences, I recommend HOT DATE, a speed dating simulator where your potential paramours are pugs.

They don't act especially pug-like. There aren't dog-based puns. You just ask them some questions, they scoff at you or tell you their favorite starter Pokemon, and then they're replaced by another identical-looking pug.

It shouldn't be as relaxing as it is. But I can say this: when asked what my name was, I entered in "Mr. Tootsday," and dang it if it didn't make me laugh every. time.

Sometimes you just need a fluff piece.

There's something in the woods

Spoilers to follow for Infinite Fall's Night in the Woods

It's been a few months since I played Night in the Woods. In my original write-up, I lauded the game's ability to create complex, identifiable characters. However, I wasn't as taken with what felt like the tacked-on supernatural element of the game and a clunky reveal of the Big Bad. 

The third act of the game reveals that the "thing" haunting the woods is actually a secret cult of men from the town, who take part in a dark ritual wherein they kidnap and sacrifice townpeople to some eldritch horror that lives in an old mine. 

When asked by Mae why they're killing people for this thing, a spokesman for the cult says: "You got to understand. In those days it was the end of the world. Jobs gone. Our kids were leaving. Government didn't care, only wanted our votes. Just puttin' in more regulations, sendin' our jobs overseas, spendin' our taxes on lazy people and immigrants, while we worked ourselves to death." [Mae's friend Bea interjects: "I hate this crap. You old dipshits."] 

He explains that praying at the church didn't help, but once they started sacrificing people to this old god, money came back to the town, people got healthier, things were stable.

This game came out right at the start of 2017. Trump's election was still new and raw, and it felt like people were grasping at any straws they could to explain what was happening. Part of my frustration with this turn of events from Night in the Woods was that it felt like this was their attempt to do just that. I remember telling a friend, "Oh, this is why the game got delayed," meaning that I assumed they probably meant to release it sooner, but once the election happened, things needed to be rewritten to address our new shared reality. I mean, the language used by the cult leader was familiar to the point of being tired. I sighed and added this to my growing pile of, "All Art is Now About Trump."

In the months since playing, I'd forgotten about this moment, until I came across an article about the rise of Odinism in America, specifically among white male populations. 

The headline was pretty matter-of-fact: An ancient Nordic religion is inspiring white supremacist terror (tw: anti-Semitism, Nazi imagery). The article explores the recent popularity of Odinism, a religion based around worship of Nordic gods. Odinism is preferred by some white supremacists who feel it is a "pure" white religion, "untainted" by influence from people of color. (Christianity is eschewed because, after all, Jesus was Jewish.) Further, it is a religion that can be based around militarism, where violence against the "other" is a positive, is righteous.

I suddenly felt like Night in the Woods' final scenes were more knowing than I originally gave them credit for, and perhaps more nuanced. In the above article, the author describes rituals held in the woods at night, mysticism embraced by populations who might not be normally seen as practitioners of the occult. (W.I.T.C.H.es, these men are not.) I

was clouded by the familiar language of Night in the Wood's cult leader. The cult was a metaphor to a larger thing. In my original overview, I wrote:

I found a real satisfaction in not knowing (before, during, and [honestly] after) if that "thing" haunting the town was an actual thing, or if it was just the shadow of desperation in a town that feels like its been forgotten by the rest of the world and is slowly falling apart.

Or both, tied together.

And I stand by that. Obviously, Odinism is not the keystone. It is one part of a many-headed hydra of white male fear and anxiety. However, there was still some gut-punch feeling I got reading the above article and realizing that though the game's cult is still a metaphorical representation of adherence to a certain sort of desperation, it has a literal analogue in the real world.

There is something in the woods, and we'd do well to understand that and root it out.

Non-gaming, but still,

I like Polygon. It's a gaming website that doesn't really fall into the gross pit of presumed mainstream gaming culture. Their website is fine, but it's their video series that I like the most. 

Because of the amount that I've watched Monster Factory (and I could write a whole 'nother piece about just that series & its breaking/bending of games [or really about their Boy Mayor of Second Life]), Youtube is quick to recommend other Polygon videos.

So, when it recommended an episode of Issue at Hand, a series hosted by Susana Polo, I shrugged and gave it a click. It could also have had something to do with the clickbait-y title of this particular episode--"Wonder Woman: Her Kinky Origin Story"--buuuuuut

what I ended up watching was a video that featured a woman who reminded me of the women who work at Fantastic Comics, a comic book store I frequent in downtown Berkeley. Like Susana, the women at Fantastic Comics are not only incredibly knowledgeable, but they are unabashedly so, even in a field that has been presumed to be dominated by men. For me, Fantastic Comics was an oasis: I stopped reading comics when it felt like I was being stared at every time I walked into a comic book store; I'd buy trade editions from my local bookstore instead.

But when I moved to Berkeley, I happened to wander into Fantastic Comics. I was greeted by not one, but TWO women working behind the counter. Behind them hung a sign, styled like a "_ many days since we had an accident." Only it read: "It's been _ days since Heather & Juliette have mentioned WicDiv" with a big zero scrawled into the blank space. 

Now I go there every Wednesday, before I go for a swim at the Y. They've recommended I get into the new Hulk run. They hold my Sex Criminals NSFW-cover editions for me. They're smart, they're relaxed, and they're the best.

And Susana's series on Polygon is very much like stepping into Fantastic Comics: showing that the medium is much wider than its presumed audience or, rather, that something that seems exclusionary is actually much more diverse and wide than others might have you believe. It's the same thing I hope to do with Gentle Gamers.

And she made me want to get into Wonder Woman, so: kudos, Susana.

Video here or below.

Early Access Snapshot: Overland

Early access games are little presents from possible futures: you're not quite sure where the game is going to end up, but the developer is playing around with ~*~something~*~ and wants to know if it works. For this reason, early access games are chances for the developer to have a dialogue with players: what works in the game & what doesn't; what's exciting & what's rote. 

Sure, you may have to contend with some bugs and crashes, but watching something grow and develop (and getting to see how a game is built from the ground up) is unlike anything else in gaming.

Today, we take a quick look at Finji's upcoming game, Overland, currently available on itch.io as a late-stage alpha.

When I was a kid, my dad taught me how to play chess. I think it was an attempt to calm me down and teach me reasoning, but mostly my tiny horse-obsessed self was excited to play a game that featured pieces that looked like horse heads.

For long rainy afternoons, my dad would teach me how to approach the game, how to plan steps and steps ahead, but also how to stay responsive to the ever-changing field. 

I wasn't very good at it.

In an attempt to bolster my confidence, my dad would go easy on me. I think he didn't want be to be discouraged, but I hated knowing that he was being more lenient than he would for, say, a peer. I disliked this more than even losing. What was the point of a difficult strategy game if it wasn't hard?

Overland bears a resemblance to a chess game: it too is turn-based, with different sprites on the field having different powers. It too takes place on a limited field, divided up into squares.

More accurately, though, I guess I should say that Overland  bears a resemblance to the chess I played as a kid against my dad... but only when he finally said, "OK," and took off the training wheels. 

Overland is unrelenting and difficult. But, as a strategy game, it should be. Its leanness and its meanness makes it captivating.

Overland is a turn-based strategy game with roguelike elements (specifically: the levels are generated algorithmically [thereby changing with every play-through], its gameplay takes place on a grid, and characters experience permadeath).

It takes place after an unspecified apocalyptic disaster. The player starts with one (possibly two) characters, and can build their team as the game progresses. Each character has a random skill: some get an extra move on their turn, others can revive fallen comrades within a certain time.

The player navigates these characters as they attempt to cross the United States. Along the way, the player can decide when to make pit-stops. Each pit-stop might bring the player some needed resources (a med kit, a toolbox, gasoline, a new car, a new companion), but each stop is also full of scuttling little alien mutants. These little mutants glow like they're straight out of Attack the Block and intend to kill every human that they hear. 

Any little noise will attract more: move a dumpster, and a few will pop out of the ground, drawn to the sound. Pit-stops that seem relatively relaxed could suddenly become out of hand with one ill-timed explosion. I lost a whole group of survivors over the course of one awful turn when my car exploded, drawing in a whole bunch of nearby mutants to pick off the one un-scorched human.

Most of my games ended quickly and frustratingly, with a group of survivors I had carefully tended and curated suddenly done in by one wrong move on my part.

I say it was frustrating, because it absolutely was. But it always felt fair, albeit difficultly so. So, I was never frustrated at the game, only at myself for not adequately thinking far enough ahead. Whenever I invariably lost one group of survivors, I would just start a new game and try again.

The more I think about it, this website is my attempt to reason out why I don't connect with a vast swath of mainstream video games. Specifically: I run in circles around the question of why mainstream video games lean into very specific horror/tension-generated mechanics (first person, survival, jump scare, etc.).

Playing Overland , I ended up thinking a lot about how it effectively shows a different and, ultimately, successful way of generating tension and horror in a gaming mechanic. There aren't any jump scares, and I'm never lulled into a state of empathic connection with a first-person perspective. However, throughout the game, there's a looming sense of dread. My partner started to watch me play, but had to quit due to the tension he could feel building in his chest.

Overland doesn't pressure you into any timed requirements. In fact, it gives you all the time in the world to plan your strategy, since the monsters only move once you say it's the end of your turn. Sure, you're limited by how many moves your characters can take each turn, but with a "go back," button to undo any thoughtless clicks, there's room and time to make sure your character goes where you want them to.

But, within this, the game finds ways to make you feel tense. The board is small, creating a feeling of claustrophobia that seems incongruous with the vastness of America, but totally in line with the myopia of terror. The sound design is a constant low and ominous hum, something that would be perfectly at home in a David Lynch movie. The mutant monsters move erratically, in ways that follow rules but are unpredictable to the player.

And, to go back to it: the game is hard. Like I said, one ill-timed move can spell the permanent end for a group of survivors you've grown attached to. (I felt especially tied to one all-women group that had made their way out of improbable escape after improbable escape. They were ended when I misjudged how many tiles away I was from a fast-moving mutant. It took out my group's strongest member and medic, and the rest crumbled from there.)

This difficulty means that the game requires the player's undivided attention. It draws you in. I played with a furrowed brow and clenched jaw. I was determined to beat it, even as it continually caused the pit to drop out of my stomach whenever I realized (yet again) that I was about to lose.

I haven't beaten Overland (/I don't even know if Finji has built out an ending yet), but I don't know if I ever beat my dad at chess either. That really wasn't the point. The point was to keep trying and to push myself past the point of tension or nervousness or self-doubt (or even just to sit in it). It's the only thing I've ever wanted, anyway.

Overland can be purchased and played on early access at itch.io. The game definitely has some mechanics to work out (how to store items in my car??), but these are few and minor for such an early-stage game. Overland explores horror in an exciting way, it is tight and lean and satisfyingly difficult, and it's beautiful to boot. There's little not to love.

"If Itch.io were personified, it would be a literal mosh pit full of art punks."

If the gaming distribution software Steam were personified, it'd be a yuppie: a young person with lofty dreams, in some well-tailored suit, ready to embrace both the good and bad parts of capitalism. They'd be all about efficiency and streamlined design. They'd use phrases like, "We have our finger on the pulse," or, "Gamifying the game market." You know what you're getting with Steam, which certainly isn't a bad thing.

On the other hand, if Itch.io were personified, it would be a literal mosh pit full of art punks: scrappy, excited, and rough-around-the-edges. It'd reply to questions about content and curation with a shrug and a "Why not?"

Steam might be great for bigger released, but for trolling around to see what folks are working on at the periphery of gaming, there's no better place to go than itch.io

itch.io was founded as a direct response to the difficulty of getting small games onto Steam. An April 2017 article on PCWorld explains:

[Developer Leaf] Corcoran started working on Itch.io in late 2012 as a response to Valve’s Steam Greenlight program, which used a community voting system to let indie games into the store. He wanted to create something more open, inspired by the online music marketplace Bandcamp. Developers would get to list their games for free and customize their game pages. Shoppers would be able to pay any price above a minimum as a show of appreciation, and the whole marketplace would be decentralized, with no way to browse the entire catalog or comment on any of the games.

In this way, itch's ethos centered around "do what thou wilt" and gave both developers and buyers a vast amount of freedom.

With no barriers to entry, itch has grown into a breeding ground for exploration. Developers can test out new mechanics and ideas without worrying about price points. They can experiment with ideas and game mechanics that deviate wildly from the established norms of gaming. Developers can test and patch their games, honing in on what they're excited to make, with no outside pressure besides their own drive to do better.

Meanwhile, gamers gain access to hundreds of games, many of which are available for free or almost-free. Gamers can also get early access to games that are still in progress (like Overland, which I'm currently devouring). It all feels very relaxed and personal, like you've stumbled into a friendly discussion with a group of highly-educated strangers... and weirdos, natch.

Sure, the download process isn't nearly as elegant as Steam, and the UI of the site can get a bit wonky at times, but who cares when you still get what's most important: access to a wider variety of games than can be found most anywhere else.

Looking for some games to while away the hours? I've created a few small collections of games in my itch account: gentlegamer, including games I will always recommend and games I'm eager to get to.

But, with a whole world of games being added by the day, the thing I recommend most is diving in and seeing what excited you.

Games to play when you are sick (in body and/or soul)

I live with children (who are not related to me by blood, but who are the children of my housemates). This means that, as an adult, I am occasionally suddenly thrown back into the world of Kid Sickness. In fact, my whole block is full of children, and they all get sick, one by one. I can see the sickness careening down the block before it gets to me. Like fast zombies. But in slow motion?

All this is to say that I've been under the weather recently. 

Maybe you, too, are feeling like you could use a little oasis of comfort or moment of self-care. Or, maybe you're too fever-addled to interact with the real world or construct actual human sentences, and it would be nice to spend time doing something more abstract. Or maybe you've just been lying in bed, refreshing the NYTimes homepage on a near-constant basis for the past 36 hours, and you just need a moment Away. From All That.

With that in mind, here's a shot list of a few video games I like to play when I am feeling sick in body and/or soul:

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Cookie Clicker

When did Cookie Clicker come on the internet? In my head, I feel like it's always been here, hanging out the outskirts of the internet with the The End of the World Flash animation and Badger Dance.

Cookie Clicker is the ur-click game. You click the cookie a bunch. After a while, you get enough cookies from clicking to buy upgrades that do the clicking for you. Soon, you can just let things run and watch your cookie empire grow into the millions (and billions) (and trillions). You can even just leave it running as you watch Netflix or go about your Internet Day, and it'll just keep accumulating. 

Sure, it's basically, "You too can be a capitalist," but with imaginary cookies.

When I'm sick and lying in bed, feeling utterly useless and too tired to do much of anything, watching the cookies roll in is strangely satisfying. "There it is," I whisper to myself while chewing on ibuprofen, "my glorious empire."

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Everything

David OReilly is no stranger to making games that piss people off. His games annoy some folks not because of the game itself, but because of the way these games push against the conventional definition of "video game."

OReilly's games are usually meandering and rely on the player to find moments of meaning, rather than handing them a narrative They also often take away conventional gaming mechanics, replacing them with gameplay that lives in a video game uncanny valley: simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. His work is, as a result, sometimes classified as "interactive art." While that may be true, I'd argue that they are absolutely still video games, and they're beautiful ones at that.

Everything makes a grand promise: in the game, the player can become anything in the world. The game starts with the player inhabiting a quadrupedal creature in the world (in my case: an elephant). From there, the player can phase in and out of other nearby plants, animals, inanimate objects, galaxies, and atoms.

I particularly enjoyed being a cloud for an afternoon. 

There are a handful of other mechanics introduced later in the game (such as the ability to multiply the creature that you currently inhabit, or to make the creature very large or very small), but the game is--at its core--about the nature of being.

Interspersed throughout are little audio clips by Alan Watts, the British philosopher with an astoundingly sonorous voice and penchant for discussing the ~*~nature of being~*~

Everything is calming and centering. If your brain is full of fuzz (either from the world or from a sinus infection), it's a clear bell, ringing at just the right frequency to cut through the static.

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Stardew Valley

Much like Cookie Clicker, I return to Stardew Valley in times of illness because of the inflated sense of accomplishment it provides. When I'm not feeling well, I'm happy to take feelings of success and self-satisfaction wherever I can find it, and Stardew Valley is in part so popular because it knows exactly how to press on that little part of your brain that gets all dopamine-happy with completed tasks.

Sure, I might be spewing snot everywhere, but on my little virtual farm, I can watch my starfruit harvest come in, check my fishing traps, get on the good side of some villagers, and still have time to spend the in-game evening exploring the Skull Cavern.

Suddenly, my farm is making more money than I know what to do with (see above), and I'm feeling Very Proud of Myself, Indeed.

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Slither.io

Sometimes, when you're sick and tired, it's just really nice to yell at something that can serve as a scapegoat for the frustration that you feel with yourself/the world/humanity.

And there's nothing better to yell at than slither.io

.io games are a whole online thing. They're usually simple multiplayer games that can accommodate large numbers of players. Most don't have a in-game chat element; it's all gameplay, no talk. There are a handful of hyper-popular .io games, but something about the little wormy snakes with their googly-eyed looks in slither.io appeals to me most.

In slither.io, each player controls a little snake. As a snake, you can die by running into a wall or another snake. While you avoid dying, you also move your snake around the game arena, eating up little glowing orbs of light to become larger. The larger the glowing orb, the more it helps you grow. There are little ambient lights around the space, but no orb glows bigger and brighter than the orbs let off by freshly-dead snake. Therefore, there's an incentive to take out competitors to nom on their light. 

Most of the time, I don't make it very far at all; it's easy to be taken out early by a larger, more aggressive snake. But sometimes I get on a roll and have one of the bigger snakes in the arena. And the bigger my snake gets, the more other players are trying to get me to accidentally crash my snake into something. It's just enough adrenaline to make me feel peppy enough to (occasionally) jolt me out of illness catatonia.

And when I do inevitably crash my snake, it's a nice bit of catharsis to yell (or: hoarsely whisper-scream) a long string of insults at the probably-teenage players who caused my snake's downfall. 

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ISLANDS: Non-Places

I finally played through Islands after seeing it recommended by Cardboard Computer. It's a very short, very ambient little game.

In it, the player encounters a series of hazy, nearly monochromatic scenes. Most are familiar geometric structures. However, after a few moments, little oddities reveal themselves, and the scene opens and unfolds in surprising and strange ways.

It feels wholly immersive: the sound design and striking colors enticed me to to play with headphones on and in a pitch dark room, where it could be experienced without distraction or outside interference.

It felt like a dream, which was exactly what I needed when my fever made it impossible for me to find a comfortable position to sleep in. If I was tossing and turning, unable to dig a couple of fingers into sleep, this felt like an adequate substitute. 

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Literally any dress-up doll game

If you've read this far, I have a secret to tell you. It's something I've literally only told a few people, usually after a couple of drinks:

I love playing online doll dress-up games.

If you've never seen them, they're basically the digital equivalent of paper dress-up dolls. Sometimes there are mermaid ones, or witch ones, or period piece ones. Whatever: it doesn't make a lick of difference to me. I love it. I love how mindless it is. I love how much control it gives me, especially as someone who has a weird relationship with her body (or any bodies) (what are bodies?). I rejoice in its pointlessness. I cherish the fact that it's 100% just for me: not for anyone else, not for sharing, and certainly not for "real gamer" points.

It's dumb. It's not trying to be anything other than what it is. 

When I do share it with people, I also love how everyone approaches it in a way that is intuitive for them, but utterly unique from anyone else. When my partner and I each made our own gem (a la Steven Universe) on DollDivine, I looked at what he made and said, "THAT'S SO UTTERLY YOU." And I meant it. I put his next to mine, and even though they were on opposite ends of the doll-creation spectrum, there were each Very Us.

There are fewer games that allow you such pure extensions of how you prefer to create an image of yourself, when given the chance. 

I play it when I'm sick. Honestly, I play it when I'm not, too.

A short list of things to play, courtesy of Cardboard Computer

Cardboard Computer (developers of my absolute favorite game, Kentucky Route Zero) have put together a list of recommended games on itch.io. 

Most of the recommended games are short, or inexpensive, or both. All of them look like gems that play with and expand the name "video game."

Check it out here.

"Let's Play" It: Little Nightmares

As a Gentle Gamer, there are some games I'll just never play. My nerves just can't deal with the stress, or I know it will give me nasty dreams for months, or whatever other thing might affect a soft soft buddy like me.

But that doesn't mean less-gentle games don't intrigue me. So, I found my loophole: watching Let's Play videos on Youtube. Watching other people play games doesn't fill me with the same sort of anxiety that playing first-hand does. With this little bit of distance, I can see what mechanics games are toying with, without having to deal with subsequent anxiety dreams.

This week, I watched a play-through of Little Nightmares, a beautiful game that falls into some icky tropes. We ask instead: how can we use the familiar language of horror to expand our world instead of contracting it? 

READ MORE.