7 Games to Play for the Start of School
Welcome to September, the seventh month, the much-anticipated or dreaded return of pumpkin spiced ubiquity, the first hints of fall especially around the edges of sugar maple leaves, the too-early stocking of Halloween candy, and the return to schools, carpools, campuses, and homework. This time of year always makes me think of the opening paragraphs of Don Delillo’s White Noise, which describes the quotidian drama of move-in weekend at a fictional pastoral university. As the narrator describes, “I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction.” September is a time of anticipation and transition. Therefore, as the month gets underway and we settle into new routines, here are seven recent-ish games to help with the changes, trepidations, vicissitudes, experiences, even boredom of the first weeks of classes.
— Edmond Y. Chang, Contributing Editor
1. The Quiet Year
https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year
Buried Without Ceremony
The past couple of years have been anything but quiet. And yet the next school year is starting, and with it, a desire to come back together and to find a new normal. The Quiet Year is an excellent choice for an in-person gaming session with your vaccinated pod after a long year apart. Described as “part roleplaying game, part cartographic poetry” by the game designer Avery Alder, that short description does not do this game justice. While originally released in 2013 (with a revamp in 2019), the events of this year particularly resonated with its themes. The premise of The Quiet Year is that some apocalyptic event has happened, and you must rebuild a community after the collapse of civilization, but before the “Frost Shepherds” come and end the game.
Working with a group of 2-4 people, guided by the game’s questions, you create a whole world by drawing a map. While in most games you experience somebody else’s creativity, this game implores you to really open up your own imagination in an exercise in world-building. We used it to create a setting for a new Dungeons and Dragons-type campaign, but it is also a great way to crowdsource an idea for writing, game design, or art. If you are looking for something to do after not having seen friends, classmates, or colleagues for a long time, this is a great way to relax, collaborate, and create.
—Claire Brownstone, Contributing Editor
2. Sephonie
Analgesic Productions
The newest game from creators Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka, best known for games like the Anodyne series and Even the Ocean, Sephonie takes place on a fictional, eponymous island off the eastern coast of Taiwan. The game opens with three biologists named Amy, Ing-wen, and Riyou shipwrecked and stranded on Sephonie Island. According to the game, the three scientists must “analyze the island’s rare species using their new, mysterious ONYX technology.”
While the full game is not yet available (hopefully sometime later this year), the demo is worth playing, exploring, and experiencing. Sephonie is a mixture of a 3D platformer, role-playing game, and puzzler. An interesting twist to the platformer is its “parkour-esque” mechanics that allow players to run along walls, jump from surface to surface, and flip from ledge to ledge. (I must confess that I’m terrible at this.) The game is visually rich, colorful, full of fantastical flora, fauna, and landscapes; like other Analgesic games, the music is wonderful and atmospheric. The three characters, which you can toggle among, are dimensional, each with their own strengths, limitations, and personality. I look forward to playing the full game and to uncovering the whole mystery.
—Edmond Y. Chang, Contributing Editor
3. Spirit Island
Handleabra Games
Summer's nearly over (in the Northern Hemisphere), so let's hit the beaches of Spirit Island. It'll be a blast: we'll awaken ancient powers, honour our compact with the indigenous Dahan, and drive the European colonists into the sea. I'm jonesing to kill Captain Cook, who's with me?
Spirit Island is a board game about resisting colonization. It bears some overt similarities to Settlers of Catan: every turn, colonists explore new territory, build on lands they control, and ravage that land, killing or enslaving indigenous people in the process. The twist on the 4X formula (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) in Spirit Island is that the colonising powers are the bad guys. It's a difficult, complicated game, and deeply cooperative: winning any but the easiest scenarios requires attention to the limited sphere of each Spirit's influence, and making the most of how they can work together.
Handelabra Games is known for their polished and painstaking adaptations of really complicated tabletop games, and I'm in awe of how they made R. Eric Russ' Spirit Island playable on phones (as well as tablets and PC). Given that Spirit Island is a game by a white man that draws on an abstraction of diverse indigenous traditions, beliefs, culture and history, it is definitionally open to accusations of cultural appropriation. However, my white ass is inclined to cut it a lot of slack: it's a much-needed intervention, an attempt to call out the pervasive colonial, extractive, and expansionist assumptions not just in Eurogames but across the entire space of tabletop and video gaming. So break out your longboard, but don't forget to bring trash bags and your Nifty Nabber, we can hang ten after we clean up the beach.
—Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor
4. Mini Motorways
Dinosaur Polo Club
Midway through a round of Mini Motorways, I turned to my partner and said, “Hey, I think you'd like this one.” She replied, “We were just in LA traffic less than an hour ago.” She had a point. But, much like I enjoy the Sega classic OutRun and even though I've logged thousands of miles on busy highways, Mini Motorways provides a fantasy of traffic that's far removed from the real thing. In this case, it's in the simplicity of the thing. Playing on an iPhone, it's literally a pocket-sized simulation of urban management.
Developers Dinosaur Polo Club distilled that management down to building and regulating connections between tiny garages and larger destinations, all rendered in simple geometry. As time passes, the complexity of the operation grows, and with it, the density of traffic. The challenge is to keep going in the face of that increasing motion, which bustles in a way reminiscent of early artificial life simulations. The best part is the emergent music that builds from the chiming of successful round trips and the soft honking of congestion. It's an engaging exercise in minimalism. Personally, I would play it after a long commute.
—Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
5. Dorfromantik
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1455840/Dorfromantik/
Toukana Interactive
Ever play Carcassonne? It’s the German-style board game with the fun little tiles where you try to have longer roads, bigger cities, and more expansive farms than the other people. It has the little wooden people and shit. If you’re playing Carcassonne in 2021 it’s for one of three reasons, which I will list below:
You have a friend who is really into drawn-out, complicated board games, but they do not have enough other people to play with, so they are trying to get you hooked by introducing you to a game they consider to be simple enough for your tabletop baby brain. Carcassonne is a gateway drug.
You are the friend who is trying to hook innocent victims on drawn-out, super complicated games, because nobody will play Scythe with you. You are a pusher.
You just like to take the tiles out of the box and arrange them in pleasing pastoral patterns.
If you are (or think you could be) in the third category of Carcassonne players, do I have a game for you: Dorfromantik.
In Dorfromantik, you are given a big stack of hexagonal tiles with forests, villages, fields, rivers, and what have you. Some of the tiles have cute extras like a clock tower, a windmill, or a little boat. In order to keep your stack from depleting and ending the game, you have to complete “quests,” which involve connecting a given number of a particular kind of tile without violating the rules that define tile placement.
Dorfromantik is perfectly calibrated for the best kind of solitaire. The occasional quest tiles introduce just enough challenge to keep you playing, but never so much that you stress out. The tiles have just enough dynamism to hold your attention—the windmill turns, tiny deer wander through your forest, and the boat will sail if you build it a river. (I cheered when I realized the boat moved.) The soundtrack has just enough Eno-esque floatiness to keep you listening. It’s basically a chill smoothie with the exact right proportion of fruit, milk, and yoghurt, but for your eyeballs. Go ahead--dump that smoothie right in the peepers.
—Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
6. Demon’s Souls
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/demons-souls/
PlayStation Studios and Bluepoint Games
I’m only about 10 hours into my first playthrough of the Demon’s Souls remake. I’ve already killed an important NPC. The world tendency system annoys me like no other From Software mechanic since probably the curse system from the original Dark Souls. I can’t believe your Soul Form halves your hit points. In other words, I love this game.
Many people have connected the experience of playing a Souls game with experiencing anxiety or depression. I also suffer from anxiety and find the feeling of defeating a tricky boss like the Maneaters or Old King Doran very similar to my own psychological struggles. A better comparison for me would be to kink or BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Domination and Submission, and Sado-Masochism). As psychologist Brad Sagarin argues, BDSM practiced with consent can be therapeutic: “[d]ominants show evidence of flow, a very pleasurable state that occurs when people are in optimum performance and tune out the rest of the world” while the submissive enters “sub-space—a pleasurable and timeless, almost floating feeling.”
I see such states in Demon’s Souls. When I first met the Tower Knight, he seemed like an immovable object. Now he’s a shell of his former self. Was he ever that difficult? Miyazaki rejects the notion that his games are too difficult, relating them instead to “accomplishment by overcoming tremendous odds.” Perhaps Miyazaki is like a dom consensually providing a safe space to practice doing things that would otherwise be dangerous and traumatizing.
Maybe you aren’t the masochistic Demon’s Souls fan I am. But as we enter into another dark winter dealing with COVID-19, I find a certain pleasure in tuning out the rest of the world, floating atop my countless screams of frustration and agony, and letting Demon’s Souls have its way with me.
—Roger Whitson, Managing Editor
7. Islanders
https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/islanders-switch/
Coatsink Software
Islanders is a town builder, like Sim City or City Skylines, but it’s also a puzzle game, like Tetris. Each run in the game features a series of procedurally-generated island chains, each one belonging to a biome that presents its own environmental challenges.
Desert islands don’t exactly foster farming, but they do offer plenty of rich resources for brick building. More mountainous island chains are especially challenging, as you swivel around the various buildings, fields, fountains, and other structures, trying to squeeze in as many building blocks as possible. That’s the Tetris aspect of the game, reinforced by the game’s central mode--a high score mode that pits you against others on a global leader board. Players that want to optimize their runs will pay careful attention to point bonuses different structures possess. Shaman huts lose points if they’re placed near cities but gain points when surrounded by fields of flowers. Getting enough points sends you to another procedurally-generated map, so that racking up points rewards you with a new, beautiful landscape.
The art in the game is simple and elegant; birds float by in the foreground, the sea shimmers, windmills turn lazily. The angles are sharp enough to easily read the environment but soft enough to remain inviting. Despite it rating your building skills (which you can opt out of in the game’s creative mode), Islanders never feels stressful. You have as much time to decide what to build as you like, and when you lose (meaning you don’t have the resources or room to build more structures), you’re rewarded with a stunning new vista. It’s like going on vacation, except you’re building your own little paradise.
—Christian Haines, Managing Editor
Bonus Level: Clusterduck
https://pikpok.com/games/clusterduck/
PikPok
Perfect for detention or a long meeting (if you are allowed to use your phone). Clusterduck is a fun, kooky, sometimes bizarre, nearly mindless mobile game where you hatch, collect, mutate, and marvel at digital paddling of ducks. It is kind of like a Frankenstein’s monster-version of Neko Atsume except with wild and weird waterfowl. The sacrificial pit awaits!
—Edmond Y. Chang, Contributing Editor
