For The Non-Gamers: 5 Games Beyond Fortnite & FIFA
For how versatile games are, you sure hear mostly about some variations of Fortnite, Minecraft, and FIFA.
Everyone has some knowledge of video games. People know Nintendo’s Mario, in 2020 it felt like everyone was playing Animal Crossing, you might have this one person in your life publicly losing their minds about a video game (that’s me), and you probably heard stories about some politician wanting to ban video games because the dart landed on that part of the Scapegoat Board™.
I love that games are getting more popular. AOC playing Among Us and explaining electoral processes during breaks, the Travis Scott x Fortnite: Astronomical concert, Trevor Daniel & Selena Gomez performing Past Life on a talk show hosted on Animal Crossing. That’s without touching on game stories adapted to TV or film.
I’m not going to coldly and academically dissect the medium. Instead, I want to go over five games that people that don’t play (or that don’t play widely) probably don’t know about. Five is a minuscule number given the scope of the medium but it’s digestible. It’s a good place to start.
1. Gris
No guns, no potions, no dialogue. Forget your controller or your keyboard. Gris is an experience where your fingertips pulse with your heart as it thrums to the grief you hid from yourself.
Every still frame of Gris could be a painting. Every song on its soundtrack is brimming with weight and meaning. Every time you press a button and the main character emits this ethereal vocalization becomes a moment that sinks into you. Not like a dagger. Like when you get caught out in the rain with a full and aching heart.
Even for people that play games regularly and widely, Gris came as a little miracle. Those hand-painted backgrounds? The combination of art styles used for the protagonist? That’s not something you see often. The seamlessness of interacting in real-time with a world of such beauty earned it reverence but it should also earn it far more attention.
Gris is available on phones (Android, Apple), PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, and PS4. Get headphones and set aside a couple of hours to take it all in.
2. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers
The screen goes black. You set your phone down, hoist up your headphones to sit comfortably around your ears, and wake up in Eorzea.
The sun bounces off the rough white stone beneath your feet. Waves splash in the distance. Around a towering blue crystal, people are dancing, running to market boards, sitting, talking to each other, and a fair few look extremely lost.
It’s time to go save the world.
If that’s what you want to do.
You could grab a pickaxe, look up the weather in a distant land inhabited by dragons and try your luck at finding some rare ore. You could walk up to the others amassed by the market board to find out if the price of that jacket you wanted has dropped at all. You could warp through a thousand malms (miles, but in Eorzea) in ten seconds to a large house decorated with cutouts of a cute giant yellow bird. You’d be greeted by someone shooting at a very resilient training dummy with a cannon-propelled metallic drill head while another person runs over to you and jumps incessantly to get your attention.
That’s a fraction of what could happen.
FFXIV is a lot of things. A home away from home, somewhere to mess around with your friends, a world in peril in need of a saviour, a shared space with a found family scattered around the globe, recreate the Mean Girls trailer, an arena to challenge yourself, a player-run theatre, a fashion show, a quiet fishing spot.
This is all without mentioning the exceptional story for which the lead writer received a minute-long standing ovation. (She deserved more.)
As for me? I like to get lost.
Final Fantasy XIV is available on PC, Mac, PS4, and soon PS5. It requires a subscription but there’s an extremely generous free trial with no time limit.
3. Papers Please
Papers Please calls itself “A Dystopian Document Thriller” and that is brilliantly spot-on.
You’re in charge of a border crossing. You check passports, verify information, and let people through or deny them passage based on the rules in place. You’re paid by the number of people you process. Life is expensive, you live with your wife, children, and an elderly parent.
More rules get put into place. You need to manually check everything. The time you have allotted to process people doesn’t change. People try to make deals with you. If you don’t accept, there’s a good chance you won’t make enough to treat your son’s illness.
What happens to you, a border control agent, when the relationships between nations worsen? Who will you become? Who do you side with? Are you going to break some rules? How do you deal with the consequences?
It’s one thing to watch this scenario unfold in a movie or a book, it’s something entirely different when you’re the one making the call between getting enough money to fix the heater so your family won’t get sick anymore and refusing to smuggle a package from a collapsing foreign nation.
Papers Please is available on PC, Mac, Linux, and iPad.
4. Dark Souls III
To awaken in a world with its connective tissue reduced to ash. To wander a broken land inhabited with souls bitter and torn by despair. To step forward, to be struck down, to rise, to triumph, to fail, to fail, to fail.
To rise again.
Dark Souls, for the average player, is something to overcome. Books and movies can show you a character failing. They can show you a character rising from the dead with a vengeance. They can show. They cannot allow you to be. As much as you relate, you are not the one deciding to forge ahead.
There’s a reason people with depression talk with such reverence about Dark Souls. The way you interface with Dark Souls is not the way someone else will. Some will see its dreary and bleak world and turn away. Some will fall in love with the numbers and how you can fine-tune your character into a mage ripping through enemies with spells or a mace-wielding armour-plated one-man-army. And some will find a fascinating world worth delving into to cobble together shards and strands into a semblance of long-forgotten cohesion and sanity.
Dark Souls is accepting unfair defeat, forging on through a tattered world, and bearing with an inescapable sense of hopelessness — all without giving up.
Dark Souls III is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox. You could play the previous 2 games before diving into 3 but whether or not they’re a strict requirement is a bit of a debate. I personally would say they’re not a requirement giving the way the story works.
5. Monument Valley 2
Let’s end on a happy note.
I remember being hypnotized by impossible geometry. You know, those optical illusions that create shapes that make no sense? Well, combine that with a sublime art style and beautiful non-verbal storytelling and you have Monument Valley and its sequel.
A quiet meditative experience, Monument Valley is really about tilting your head to the side to change the way you see things.
There’s this pointless and thankfully waning debate about whether or not mobile games are ‘real’ games. The same question pops up with interactive stories like Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. Both questions are mostly a vain attempt to gatekeep.
Monument Valley is not a lesser experience for the platform that it appears on. It quietly and gracefully gives you a reprieve from a world obsessed with checkboxes and spreadsheets and conventional form. Monument Valley 1 & 2 help you steal moments in what feels like being stuck in the undertow of the everyday life within which we confine ourselves.
You unravel its puzzles and the world your little character explores unfolds before her. This sort of serene satisfaction is akin to the sound of wooden blocks fitting in perfectly with each other when building furniture, it’s flipping back that little part of the coffee cup’s lid into its designated space right before your first sip, it’s sinking into a chair that cradles you just right after a long day.
Five more next month?
Trust me, I’ve got a lot more from where this came from. There were 3 candidates for the 5th slot alone but I’m glad I went with Monument Valley.
This isn’t a dunk on ‘popular’ or multiplayer shooter games by any means, just to be clear. I spent more time on Overwatch and Warzone in January than I’d like to admit. I just hate seeing beautiful things underappreciated.
Speaking of beautiful things being underappreciated: me. If you need someone who has a way with words, degrees and experience in communications, and a creative way of seeing things, get in touch with me. If you’d just like to know when the next post is up, either follow me here or on Twitter.
(Yes, I am a beautiful and underappreciated thing but I promise my ego’s not hyperinflated. Well, I know how to hide it when needed.)
