My sweet spot for gaming is pretty small.
I don't care for battles and wars, I'm not really into fantasy, competition with other people is not my goal, and I don't play games that require learning a lot of complicated lore. I play a lot of simulator games — I create fictional zoos, amusement parks, cleaning businesses, farms, and (as of this week) a burger joint that only makes one thing and where I'm the only one working. Simulators are why my YouTube homepage is currently full of recommendations for videos about how to get all the different power connections to work correctly in Cities: Skylines II. (I created the most beautiful wind farm the other day, and the cables just would not connect, and I think I scared the dog by swearing.)
One of the other avenues that this leaves open to me is mystery. I've been playing a game called The Roottrees Are Dead, in which a plane crash kills a wealthy family – the Roottrees – leaving piles of money behind. To find out who that cash should go to, the game asks you to fill in a huge family tree based on archival evidence. You can do fictional internet searches (or at least you can get summaries of fictional internet searches), periodical searches, you look at photos and find clues, things like that.
Among other things, I liked learning the game's solving language, in that it takes some time to figure out what qualifies as a clue and what doesn't. (That's why it's good that the game includes hints.) For example: Does the fact that the person in a picture maybe looks a little older than the other one count as evidence that he is in fact older? Yes, it turns out it does.
Another one I started is Her Story, a game that was originally released in 2015, which begins as an investigation into a missing man but becomes much, much more complicated. It's really just an archive of short (like, often only a few seconds) video clips in which a character named Hannah answers questions from police about that missing man. The clips are all indexed by the words that Hannah uses, so if you're interested in what she said about, for instance, "necklace," you do a search on that, and it brings up a handful of clips that you can watch. It always marks which ones you've already seen, so that you don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out which clips are new.
It doesn't take long before you start feeling quite clever playing Her Story, because you searched for a fairly innocuous word and discovered something that seems very important, and it feels like you did something that the game would not have expected, because after all, you chose the innocuous word all on your own, didn't you? But of course, good game designers are way ahead of you. They know what words from clip A you're going to search for that will take you to clip B. Obviously, there are many possible paths, but a well-designed game knows how to both lead you and let you discover.
My Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host Glen Weldon recently recommended Pentiment, and that's also a mystery game. It exists at the opposite end of the spectrum from the grainy videos in Her Story. Set in the 16th century, Pentiment is 2-D animation inspired by illuminated manuscripts. You play as Andreas, an artist who tries to figure out a series of murder mysteries in Upper Bavaria. Andreas can go up to various people and talk to them, he can examine some kinds of evidence, and most importantly, he can draw the townspeople into gossip, which is perhaps his main way of gaining knowledge. You wouldn't believe how chatty everybody is while spinning yarn. I have yet to solve Andreas' first mystery, but I'm pretty sure I'm closing in on a culprit.
Perhaps the reason mystery games work well for me is that while I don't care much about competition, I do like figuring things out, and doing it at my own pace. None of these games are rushed, none of them put you on an oppressive clock, and all of them allow for a certain amount of meandering. As I mentioned, Roottrees has particularly good hints, which I didn't hesitate to use, both because sometimes you just get stuck and because I didn't feel like constantly taking notes, which meant I did at times fail to notice something.
Glen has already gotten me to download Return of the Obra Dinn, another highly recommended game of this kind, because he once played a platformer with me multiplayer-style and I was so bad at it (and responded so poorly to the pressure) that I think it could have ruined our friendship if we'd carried on long enough. He knows that is not the way. No, the way is mysteries and research. If only they made games you had to play on microfiche.
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