If you've ever been a depressed and aimless 20 year old overwhelmed by a life that isn't what you expected or wanted, you can probably relate to Mae Borowski.

I have a fondness for the idea of games that are more like places where you can hang out (I think it’s Animal Crossing’s best idea), and this game feels that way. The town of Possum Springs feels genuinely inhabited, and Mae's relationships to her friends feel as real, loving, difficult and damaged as real friendships are. The writing deftly handles the way that relationships drift and decay and can never return to what they were, but importantly, they retain the potential to blossom in different and possibly better ways. People can’t stay the same forever, so it’s nearly impossible for their relationships to.

One thing I love about this game is how gently and unexpectedly it approaches difficult subjects. It's a game about decay and loss, but it's just as much a game about hope and community. Ultimately it's about the necessity of hope and community in the face of despair, anxiety, fear, and a world that often seems terminally ill. It's also one of the only games I know of that's overtly about the damage caused by capitalism, the way it makes everything homogenous as it crushes individuals under its heel. The nihilism of capitalism has infected the town, as it infects everywhere, and the environment it creates affects everyone in one way or another.

But, also, the strengths of Night in the Woods don't stop at the narrative. Just in terms of play, this game is really fun! So many things are satisfyingly interactive. Leaves blow in your path as you frolic in autumnal delight. Telephone wires bow and twang in an incredibly pleasing manner as you balance upon them in the fresh morning air. You can jump up and down on your neighbor's car for no reason, and you’ll want to, because everything in this game feels so good. There are fun little minigames about moving furniture or smashing light bulbs or looking at stars with a cool old dude or hanging out with your mom. I’d also be remiss not to mention it’s the funniest game I’ve played other than Butterfly Soup. Night in the Woods proves that a charming and generous sense of play is no less engaging than dense mechanics.

This is a game I fully expect to return to occasionally for the rest of my life.

It's a masocore game with a heart of gold, that focuses on fun mechanics and a joyful sense of motion rather than punishment. Yes, the mountain you climb is a heavy handed metaphor. But somehow this metaphor that would bother me in a novel doesn't bother me even a little bit in this game. This is a kind hearted story about coming to terms with the parts of yourself you don't like or that you feel ashamed of, and it’s good at being that. It's about overcoming that feeling that nothing you do is right or ever will be. It's also a game that I started playing at a time when I needed something like that, so that does factor into its placement, which I think is entirely valid because this is my 100% subjective list of video games. There are so many dark narratives about ruined worlds, despair, fear and evil, that sometimes a story with an optimistic message is preferable. It's not dreary or navel gaze-y when dealing with its topics, it's bright and emotive and colorful. Did I mention it’s a very, very pretty game? The art and color palettes are vibrant and lovely like a breath of fresh mountain air, and the character portraits are expressive and sweet. The pixels are satisfyingly chunky without being a retro pastiche.

This is another of those games that feels like a place to inhabit. In the category of games for peacefully whiling away the time, there's almost no match. It's the game I always wished Harvest Moon or Rune Factory would be. One of my favorite things about this game is there’s absolutely no way to fail, and you’re never penalized for allocating your time however you see fit. Even if you die in a cave, the punishment is practically nonexistent. Also, you never have to go in there. If you waste a day going to bed at 1pm, it literally doesn’t matter. If you wanna spend all your time gathering berries and hanging out with a wizard, go ahead. If you have a burning desire to become an exceptionally wealthy melon and truffle oil tycoon, no one's stopping you. If you just feel like catching fish and falling in love, do it. You could also just do it all. It’s wonderful.


Good games made by a single person or a small team aren’t extremely rare these days, but rarely do they get pretty much everything right. In terms of art and music, it’s a beautiful game, but never ostentatious. It’s beautiful in such a warm and inviting way. The art is cute and humble in a way that perfectly matches the way playing this game makes you feel. The music always feels seasonally appropriate and provides the perfect backdrop for your new life. There are few things I've seen in games quite as lovely as your first time watching the seasons change in Stardew Valley. “Labor of love” is an understatement.

Ugh… MMOs. The genre I initially hated as a teenager, that I allowed to win me over in some ways, that I now have extremely mixed feelings about. I probably should’ve just stuck with that initial dislike of them. First, they’re designed to take up time, which I find especially heinous in this age where the majority of video games expect me to spend a huge chunk of time on them. Even a relatively short game now expects me to spend 30-40 hours on it, and genuinely short games are extremely rare outside of indie games. It’s not that I want every game to be over in 5-10 hours, I just think there must be a better middle ground to be found between 10 hours and 100 hours. “Over 100 hours of gameplay!!!” now feels obligatory, rather than a specific design choice. The big problem is that an MMO wants to be a lifestyle, not a game. So, even if I think an MMO is a good game, I still have a hard time liking it because I know what it wants is to eat up all my time. The thing is, I know myself. MMOs turn me into my own worst enemy. When I played Destiny, the only game I wanted to play was Destiny. The reason I quit Warframe after breaking the hundred hour mark, even though I really liked the game, was that I could see hundreds, thousands of hours of Warframe stretched before me, and I didn’t want to be a person who only plays Warframe, just like I didn’t want to be a person who only plays Destiny, especially when there are so many other interesting games to play out there. I feel like my thoughts about games are more nuanced, interesting, and beneficial to myself when I play a wide variety of games. I like Destiny and Warframe, but I don’t want them to be a lifestyle, and that’s really the only way to play an MMO as it’s meant to be played. That’s the core reason why I can never really be a fan of MMOs. Like the quarter munchers of the past, they’re just designed to consume something, and that thing, time, is something extremely valuable to me. When I played Phantasy Star Online 2 a few times over the past week, I could feel that MMO player tendency rising up in me, that insatiable urge to complete every quest and tick every box and gain every level and collect everything and just do for the sake of doing. No matter how cleverly it’s disguised in an MMO, you’re not really doing anything. It’s a game that would eat up my life if I let it. This is why to me MMOs feel… oddly predatory. My second big problem with MMOs is this: when it’s well done, I really like that sense a game can give you of inhabiting a different world. In MMOs, I can’t help but feel that it’s a world made of cardboard. Even outside of microtransactions, everything in an MMO is transactional, everything is a thinly veiled coercion, everything is nagging me towards inevitable and meaningless progress. The end goal of an MMO is to make you feel like playing an MMO some more. I resent it. I resent it enough that from now on I kind of just want to stay away from MMOs on principle. It has game mechanics and classes and monsters and items and systems, but it seems pointless to go into any of that, because I feel like all I have to say about PSO2 is that it’s an MMO. You put time in and nothing comes out.

Never really succeeds at being more than just okay. It's not exactly a bad game, it was just consistently underwhelming in every aspect. The genre is so well-trodden at this point that I kind of expect more from a metroidvania in 2022. The level design is definitely the low point, but most of the abilities are kinda bland as well. Combining smaller maps into one bigger map and unlocking new paths is a great idea, I just wish the game surrounding it was a bit less lackluster. It's also extremely easy, which isn't necessarily a downside... it's just that I played the game on hard mode and it was still easy.