A selection of games to help you escape reality and find a moment of joy during challenging times.
Hey you. Yes, you. How’s it going? Feeling okay? Taking care of yourself this week? Need some ideas for what to play? While it’s important not to hide from reality, no matter how harsh or sideways it gets, we also all need a happy place we can go to play, feel inspired, and recharge. Here are some Great Games that are Getting Us Through It. If the following recommendations don’t spark your interest, there’s some other cool stuff that came out recently.
Multiplayer skiing racer Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders had a surprise launch this week. Cozy witch sim Mika and the Witch’s Mountain also just came out. I’m personally looking forward to checking out 2D Soulslike sequel Ender Magnolia, and a new post-apocalyptic city builder called All Will Fall was just announced with a free playtest you can try to get into. Speaking of free, incoming JRPGs The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II and Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero just got demos on console, while the inventive Soulslike deck battler Death Howl just received one on PC. Otherwise, here are six games we’re dipping back into this weekend and can’t recommend enough. Before Your Eyes Play it on: PC, Netflix, PSVR2 Current goal: Remember there’s good in the world The truth is that I’m probably not going to play video games much this weekend, so instead I’ll take this opportunity to recommend a game that might help remind you there’s good in the world in these trying times. Before Your Eyes is a blink-tracking adventure game that takes you through the life of a guy named Benjamin Brynn, with each blink jumping forward to a different point in his life. Its reflections on the way we try to play storyteller with our own lives make for one of the most affecting games I’ve ever played. It’s 90 minutes long and well worth spending a night in complete distraction-free darkness to finish it on one sitting. You won’t regret it. — Kenneth Shepard 2024: Mosaic Retrospective Play it on: PC Current goal: Not play this at some point My fascination with 2024: Mosaic Retrospective all started when I found Proverbs in November, a vast puzzle game the size of a wall, in which you deduced which tiles to fill and which to block based on the numbers splattered all over it (it’s Fill-A-Pix, basically), to create a vast recreation of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Netherlandish Proverbs. It was tremendously entertaining, and a perfect game to play on one monitor while watching things like Game Changer on the other. Then after I finished it, I discovered the developer—Mark Ffrench—had made a previous, similar game, Mega Mosaic. I played that one while catching up on two years’ worth of Nebula’s Jet Lag: The Game. And just as it was done, to my complete delight Ffrench put out yet another one, 2024: Mosaic Retrospective. And once again, it’s a wall-sized puzzle that eventually depicts dozens of events that occurred in the last year. I’ve been playing it for days, and am 33.61 percent through. What am I watching for this one? Why, Nebula’s version of The Mole (a game in which one player was designated the Snitch) called The Getaway, which has the crucial difference that they’ve secretly told all of the players that they’re the Snitch. Hilarity results, as seven people attempt to sabotage each other while not getting noticed, at the same time becoming increasingly bemused as to why everyone else is so terrible at everything. It’s great. As is 2024: Mosaic Retrospective, which is free! FREE! And even better, because it’s free, the game encourages you to pay what you think it’s worth to Unicef.—John Walker Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth Play it on: PS5, Windows (Steam Deck OK-ish) Current goal: Prepare for Hard Mode Was 120 hours of FFVII Rebirth last year enough for me? Hell no. All it took was firing up the recently released PC version of Rebirth and hearing the gentle swelling strings of its main theme to make me ready to jump in all over again. Read More: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: The Kotaku Review This time around, I’m looking to put this wonderfully messy and strange alternate-dimension revision of one of my favorite games of all time through its paces on Steam Deck (and I’ll report my findings next week for ya’ll). Initial impressions are, well, interesting. The game does look quite blurry and soft, with some texture pop-in here and there…but it also plays quite well, typically sitting at a decent 30-40 FPS during combat. And speaking of combat, that’s probably the most appealing aspect of replaying Rebirth. While I loved this game dearly, I won’t disagree with much of what its critics have had to say. The story can be wildly confusing, and jeeze, the mini-games are just too much sometimes. But the combat is a ton of fun, both to play and to see in motion. And thus far, it doesn’t look and feel too bad on Steam Deck (for my tastes, at least). We’ll see how that pans out when I get to the more substantial boss fights and the open-world roaming
VIDEO GAMES ADVENTURE GAMES PUZZLE GAMES RPGS COMBAT GAMES STEAM DECK FINAL FANTASY BEFORE YOUR EYES 2024: MOSAIC RETROSPECTIVE
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