Games I Like

My favorite kinds of games are big on having the player explore beautiful places. Usually they deal with gorgeous, vast lands or castles with hidden cozy areas with the least to zero amount of stress.

• Ico explores a large castle. The game is one of the most beautiful out there, in my opinion. What more, the physics of the characters as they walk and turn and run and pull each other by the hand is so amazingly natural. Apparently lots of intentional work was put into natural movement.

• Ib is a game in a literal surreal art museum

• Slime Rancher is beautiful, comfortable, and idyllic (especially since I chose the game mode without “enemies” which were slimes turning into Tarr). I spent hours exploring the vast maps of this game

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons is not exploration, but it’s beautiful, idyllic, and comfy

• I liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and would play it all the time if the banana cult wasn’t hell bent on popping up and wiping me out on the spot whenever I just want to vibe in a beautiful area or stroll around the beautiful landscape

• Fez, despite having never finished it, was definitely something I would have finished quickly back when I was younger when I was less prone to the feeling of isolation which the game seems to magnify somehow

• I experience the same exact thing with Yume Nikki. Both these games are about exploring surreal, abstract worlds with many different kinds of areas that can be hauntingly beautiful. Yume Nikki of course has many horror elements which I also love, as can also be seen in my love for Ib

• Blade and Soul was an MMORPG with absolutely beautiful scenery. It does, however, lack that feeling of exploring nooks and crannies since it doesn’t have anywhere to really get lost in or have many secret areas if at all. Moreover, being an MMORPG, it’s all about enemy mobs everywhere which I’m not always big on. I did get many hours into it, however, due to picking an easy class and MMORPG combat is one of the easier types of game combat. They also had a storyline and cutscenes that I found engaging in my admittedly unpopular opinion.

• Flyff for Fun was my first MMORPG. Like any MMORPG it also had big maps with, at least back then with my limited experience, beautiful places. Again, the mindless, stress-free MMORPG combat appealed to me.

• Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Sky: Children of the Light which has the same developer company as one of my other favorite games, Journey. Sky is all about exploration. So far, though admittedly I’ve only explored a small fraction of the maps despite having spent many hours playing already, there are rarely damaging “enemies” to stress over. Sky’s beauty, like Journey, has a focus on an evocative, spiritual feel that is deeply felt.

• Journey is in my top three games along with Ico and Ib. It’s a linear story game that takes you in one direction running through gorgeous places and a deeply felt spiritual experience

• Star Wars is a dirty and war-torn universe, but somehow they make it so beautiful. It’s literally a galaxy full of worlds and planets to explore–of variety and diversity, strange, surreal, and magical, fantastical things. Aside from the movies and The Mandalorian, I played some Knights of the Old Republic before I ran into issues with finding combat, character strengthening, and equipment finicky and having my saves accidentally wiped twice. I haven’t found the aforementioned issues plus the start of the game I’ve already played worth experiencing a third time to continue and finish it. But I did appreciate the variety of places and their beauty, which were sometimes unconventionally so.

• When I played either Sims 3 or 4 (I forgot, perhaps I did this for both), I did apply Custom Content for more beautiful textures and other features for the Sims themselves, but I also put a lot of emphasis on making beautiful houses. When I was a child, I really liked the large, commercial areas in Sims 2 and had an interest in making them. In Sims 3 or 4, I would also look up large Custom Content houses to download for hours. At one point I did download and use a castle and liked taking screenshots with my Sims in different areas.

• In the same vein as Ib and Yume Nikki, I also used to play a lot of other rpgmaker-style horror games. They were big on exploring and I often found the maps beautiful. I think the horror aesthetic also added an element of excitement to beauty. The maps also often had small, secret areas or they were simply hard to find even if they were part of the story.

It seems that what I value most in the experience a game can offer is being a simulator for escapism. Large worlds to get immersed and lost in–and happily.

Now here are some games that are almost something I could get into, but has something preventing me.

• I haven’t finished Abzu as it gives me the same vibe as Journey and Sky, and I prefer the latter two for some reason. Though it is beautiful it doesn’t give me anything new that the other two have been giving me in a way that is more satisfying for some reason

• Skyrim looks appealing in terms of getting immersed and lost in a large world, but I don’t consider vanilla very beautiful and I have lost the patience to put the very time-consuming effort to learn, search for, and apply mods that I like. Moreover, at the very least vanilla seems to have a lot of stress with enemies.

• Final Fantasy XIV has potential to appeal to me what with being an MMORPG with large maps to explore, however I’ve grown tired of many years of grinding in MMORPG. Moreover, I don’t find it as beautiful as Blade and Soul. Additionally, the characters and storyline are very unrelatable and stuffy whereas in Blade and Soul they can often be hilarious and feel like something I can connect to. I just don’t find it offers anything new for me as the MMORPGs I’ve already spent many hours in in the past have.

So far I haven’t found a game that I can keep coming back to all the time for a feeling of “home” which I seek. Here’s hoping I’ll find one eventually.