If our math is right, it's been about a month since we've all started to shelter in place as best we can, so maybe it's time shake things up a bit. A new hobby is a good way to keep sane while stuck indoors, and few hobbies are as conducive to an indoor lifestyle as video games—a medium with as many ways to kill time as the days are long.
There are all kinds of games for every kind of taste, and while the consensus favorites are very good (your Zeldas, Smash Bros., or Red Dead Redemptions), they can sometimes make it easy to miss out on the variety that's out there. So here's some of the best games just a little off the beaten path—one pick for those who want a chill, more relaxing experience; one for anyone looking for something more social, now more than ever; and one with an engrossing story to get lost in.
For Nintendo Switch
You know how some people watch Law & Order: SVU to relax? That's what the Phoenix Wright games do for me. In them, you play a lawyer taking on a set of strange and unusual cases. Don't let the "lawyer" part trip you up—the Phoenix Wright version of the legal profession is an extremely cartoonish one. Mainly, it involves gathering as much information as you can, and then using what you know to corner someone on the stand in court. Phoenix Wright games demand little more than your attention; they play like interactive comic books featuring ridiculous characters with absurd motives. Solving a case feels like putting together a modest jigsaw puzzle, only with more jokes. Besides, who doesn't enjoy winning arguments?
One of the nice things about video games as a social experience is that they give you something to talk about once you've exchanged the now-standard how are you holding up self-quarantine pleasantries. When you're done talking up your indoor endeavors with your buds, you can start yelling at them about how you need some lettuce chopped right now or you will never speak to them again in Overcooked 2. A party game where you and up to three others work together to complete orders in a busy kitchen beset with all manner of uniquely video-game-style problems. (A kitchen with a river in the middle! Grilling on both sides of a busy street!) Overcooked 2 is absolutely zany, and one of the best games that you play with friends and not against them.
The most impressive thing about Hollow Knight is how it manages to be simultaneously charming and sad. A kingdom of friendly-seeming bug people has fallen to madness and decay, and you're a wanderer trying to puzzle out what went wrong. Hollow Knight is a game in the style of Metroid or Castlevania, one that sets you loose in a sprawling 2-D world full of gorgeous sights and strange foes. Challenging enough to feel substantial and alluring enough to make you want to push through that challenge, Hollow Knight is one of the best games in recent memory.
PS4
Dreams is an engine for creativity, a game that breaks video games down to puzzle pieces and asks you to make a game of your own. If you're the DIY type, you'll find a playground for making all kinds of things, from the traditional to the weird, abstract, and broken. If you're the game-playing type, you'll have an endless stream of creations to play through, from the lovely and inspiring mini-games made by the creators of Dreams to inspired re-creations of classic games and weirdo internet ephemera made by others online. Dreams is an attempt to present play in its purest form: showing you something fun, and inviting you to try doing it yourself.
Rocket League has one of the most perfect pitches in video games: What if cars played soccer? And those cars had rockets? Imagine NBA Jam but with a net and four wheels, and you've got a sense of how ridiculous and fun an experience Rocket League is. Goofy enough to be played as a casual hangout game, yet engaging enough to play competitively if you want to get serious, Rocket League is a consistent delight.
You might think it foolish to jump into the fifth game in a series cold. Wouldn't you be missing out on context? As someone who has seen the context, I can tell you: not really! Metal Gear Solid V is deliberately confounding, a story with opening hours completely different from the many that follow it. You play as Snake, a disillusioned soldier building a mercenary army of his own in the 1980s, as a twisted conspiracy to bring about world peace through nuclear proliferation and cultural domination begins to take shape. The Phantom Pain has much to say and, despite being many hours long, not enough time to say it. The result is a game that ironically has so much room for you, it sets you loose as a single soldier on a battlefield full of enemies and lets you decide how to strategically take them apart. The confusion you create reflects the confusion you feel as the story unfolds and you find out why everyone is fighting a war where there are an astonishing number of new ways to be a villain, and none to be a hero. There's no real resolution, and that's the point.
Xbox One
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Like Groundhog Day but without the nihilism, Outer Wilds is about being stuck in a time loop. You're a little blue alien from a race of friendly explorers, and after rocketing off on your first trip to see the solar system, you discover something is wrong: It's all going to blow up in 22 minutes. You learn that because it happens to you again, and again, and again. But instead of being frustrated, it's enlightening. Outer Wilds is about the love of exploration, about how beautiful it is to open your eyes and learn something new. Every 22-minute loop is a new opportunity to see something you didn't see last time, to figure out how another piece in the clockwork of your beautiful little solar system works. Gather enough pieces, and maybe you can close the loop—and leave the universe a little better than how you found it.
Like the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Sea of Thieves understands that actual piracy is only a small part of the pirate appeal. There are other allures: telling your mates to lower the sails, gazing upon the horizon through a spyglass, and, of course, performing sea shanties. These are all things you can do with your friends in Sea of Thieves, a low-stakes game where you can gather your friends on a boat and work together to plot a course, sail the ship, and loot some booty ad infinitum. It's like being in a Pixar movie about pirates, only with your friends. Do make sure you bring a crew, though: You might catch scurvy on your own.
Imagine if the DMV were actually a front for dealing with the supernatural, and you'll have an idea of what Control is going for. Playing as a woman named Jesse Faden, you arrive at the Federal Bureau of Control—an agency that isn't supposed to exist, in a mind-boggling building that's bigger inside than it is out—in search of your brother. Something is wrong, though: The Bureau, which is supposed to contain otherworldly entities, has failed in its mission, and something not from Around Here has escaped. Control is a journey through the bizarre hidden in the mundane, an action game that gives you fun-as-hell superpowers and unsettles you with the question of where they came from. Like Twin Peaks, an influence it cribs from liberally, it wants you to stop seeing your TV as the everyday object it is, and as the window into something strange that it could be.
Quarantine threatens to become one never-ending work shift if you don’t establish some boundaries.
