I said it yesterday in the piece about the GDC relief fund, and I said it before in the article on shows to watch during this time. The world and the people of it are having a bit of a sad face moment. No one can take away your worry, it is natural to do so. However, only you can distract yourself from constant concern over friends and family members that are stocking shelves, providing public transit, and most importantly, working in hospitals. So while the important work is being done by those people, let us more useless people, now with a lot of free time, play something.

In the last article, I said I am not one for doing a list article; in fact, that was my first time writing one. I don’t care how much a Hufflepuff you are, I could have told you that for free, and would have probably used more swear words than that stupid hat. Nonetheless, my point still stands that I’m going to do this my way; by singing Frank Sinatra songs and rabbiting on about something you probably don’t care about.

Dark Souls/Borne series

Yes, I’ve still not managed to play them all (including DLC) with nothing but a dance mat, my left testicle, and three-minutes on the clock. Nevertheless, if you want a game series with more depth than that big black thing we’ve been falling through for all of time, FromSoftware’s Dark Souls and Bloodborne series is what you want and need right now. I can honestly say I’ve not put enough time into Sekiro, but I also don’t care too much for it either. So while some others might tell you to play them all and when you hit a brick yell that you’ve to “git gud!” I’d rather use their now liquified head as spackle for that glory hole I met their mum in.

You don’t “git gud” in Souls games, you are learning patterns through repetition, the same as every other game. However, unlike other games, Dark Souls and its ilk don’t make it the easiest way to learn when there is a monster with warty sphincter using you as a fleshy bidet. Goliath sized beasts with health bars longer than the loading times on the PS4 make it intimidating, making frustration a thing of ease when it comes to death. Take it slowly, don’t let it overwhelm you, and buy an extra controller when Ornstein and Smough cause you to bite through that first salty controller.

Wilmot’s Warehouse

Ok, I get it, some people don’t like Amazon and their “supposed” horrible working conditions. Hear me out, you love that true-crime podcast about the serial killers than would eat their prey’s genitals, I get that, but you look weird listening to that staring out at your exercising neighbors. Maybe if you did that on the toilet while playing Wilmot’s Warehouse on the Switch, you would be a bit more like the rest of us who don’t want to tidy up our own house but will clean up a digital warehouse. My point is, try being a bit less creepy and a bit more organized.

The game is just that, you play as Wilmot in a warehouse with a large amount of stock in guitars, flowers, and that one music note that no one will order, but I have in stock. It is one of those games with the pressure of time ticking away as you’ve to find that one paddock you thought was in the bottom right. No, you moved that to the top left yesterday when you got in that supply of ten cricket wickets, and now you’ve spent 30 seconds going down there to find out you moved it. This game is both infuriating, as your organization skills aren’t what they were when you ate man sausage, but also very pleasuring seeing everything all tidied away.

Dishonored

Oh, I love me a bit of Dishonored; the smokey steampunk industrial city of Dunwall has either a lot of claret brick roads or sleepy residents, depending on my run. I’ve elected to name the first one because it is the one I prefer. Despite the second, adding bits to the formula, falls short with some of its powers and story. Dishonored isn’t really a series about the story, it is about being sneaky or stabby in the blackest of nights or that one well-lit party level. Either way, it is fun to play both styles even if you have to scream bloody murder and hide in a bin during no-kill runs.

Think of the newer “Hitman” games, wide-open levels with lots of different ways of accessing areas and achieving specific kills. It does not have a depth of an ocean; in fact, I’d go as far as to say it is quite shallow in terms of 1998’s Thief, but it does the job. You can go in guns blazing, knives soaked in blood, and bombs inexplicably exploding in guard’s faces, or you can sneak in a back way, steal everything, and have sex with the camp commandant’s wife without anyone else noticing.

Red Dead Redemption 2

While I don’t like the story in Red Dead Redemption 2, I think there are several problems with it as a game, and it could have done with a bit more fun, it does have something about it. Yes, we might be stuck indoors right now, so go out into the wild-wild-wild west and play poker; burn a KKK member with his cross, brothers, and now dead pony, or just go hunting for a doe, a deer, a female deer and go fishing in the rivers. This is a problem with the Red Dead Redemption series as a whole, I use them to be that man every grandparent hopes their grandson is instead of a “swishy sissy” that writes about video games online all day.

Whether it is ripping the skin off a rabbit via its anus, getting help in the bathtub by a lady with her two tomb raiders bursting out the seams of her dress, or just sitting watching the world pass by on the plateau. I said it before, it is HBO’s interpretation of Michael Crichton’s 1973 Westworld in the best possible way. Yeah, sure you can’t spread Arthur’s chlamydia to others, but you can’t do that either, so go out into the world of the west, lose all your money on poker and leave the bodies on the train tracks.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Going from one man’s inability to spread sexual disease across the continent to a man with only that on his mind. Yes, when I played as the eponymous Witcher of his Netflix series and games, I slept with every woman with a heartbeat; I draw the line at the ones I’ve killed and look like spiders. However, between the several witches that I’ve slept with, I did a bit of that witcher-ing I’m supposed to do. Contrary to popular belief, a Witcher isn’t someone who’s just a male prostitute for all the local witches to ride on like a pony, you have to kill some of those demon hell beasts with seventeen legs, two anuses, and three and a half heads too.

With a story that’s both more complex and better written than Game of Thrones, you could easily mistake it for being a high-fantasy RPG that’s good and I like. The Witcher 3 is the reason I’m more accepting of RPGs in general, it showed you didn’t have to make use of useless plot blocking just to make your game 60 hours long. With side-quests and DLC that would be as deep as a puddle of a man’s genital excretions in any other case, you’ll forget you have a main quest half the time anyway.

The Crew 2

Have you ever wanted to drive across America at speeds that would have you featured on one of those internet videos I’ve heard so much about? Yes, it is a bit crap and there’s not much to do after 30 hours of driving, flying, and boating across, over, and around the continental United States, but at least it’s not Death Stranding. If you’re like me and played quite a lot of other driving games, The Crew 2 is just a bit more of an arcade racing game that features all the major car brands.

Rubber-banding and bumping off of one another like fancy dodgems, there is nothing special with the driving mechanics. Where the game really shines is the cross-discipline events where mid-race you’ll switch from a boat going down the east river, fly down the east coast to Miami, and switch mid-air to your pristine Aston Martin that’s about to drop out the sky and drive up to Chicago. It is stupid in all the fun ways video games should be, as you crash land an F1 car on another player that’s idle and probably just defecated themselves.

Metal Gear Solid series

This is arguably the only thing Hideo Kojima was good at, making a camp cold-war era espionage drama filled with conspiracies, love of the Americana, and women treated about as well as what I last dropped in the toilet. The Metal Gear Solid series is one that you could probably play a majority of, guess most of the plot, and still have very little of a grasp on the point. The Legacy Collection that released back on the 7th generation consoles matched with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain would give you 140+ hours of dodgy dialogue, espionage vampires, and that useless spod Raiden.

Trying to contain a game series’ plot that’s lasted almost 30-years and in-game 70-years of complete madness would be a stupid task. You play as a man sometimes called “Snake,” often with the adage of “Solid,” “Liquid,” “Venom,” and “Naked.” All different men, of course, playing different parts in an ever branching narrative of double-crossing, nuclear weapon firing metal dinosaurs, and more “incidents” than that time I ate out at that burrito truck next to the row of porta-loos and empty cardboard boxes.

All the game giveaways

Ok, this is one is more straight forward, it is exactly as it seems. During this quarantine time several developers, digital storefront holders, and likewise are offering free-to-play weekends or outright giveaways of their games. The Epic Games Store has done so for long enough. Though it is not a giveaway, I’ve got several Twitch Prime games I know I could be catching up on if I had some free time. My point is, you’ve accrued several games you’ve not even played yet, they are there to be played.

I know I could lose many hours just listening to a podcast while playing FTL, I even did a series of it on our YouTube channel. Between that and several others that we’ve covered, there is a lot to play during this free time you have at home.

If you’re still looking for something to pick up, we have plenty of reviews available on the site, some with different opinions than my own. Personally, I’d also suggest: XCOM, Wargroove, The Last Federation, Sonic Mania, Final Fantasy XV, the Yakuza series, WWE 2K17, Mad Max (2015), Doom (2016), God of War (2018), Far Cry 3, Burnout 3: Takedown, Shadow of the Colossus, Automachef, A Normal Lost Phone, Broforce, Devil May Cry (1), Enter The Gungeon, Gunpoint, Hacknet, Oxenfree, Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter, Civ IV, SteamWorld Dig 2, Tyranny, Tokyo 42, and so much more. I could go on for days.

Play some indie games and support small developers. Our own mononymous Dari recently made a turn-based RPG (Disclaimer: This was not sponsored in any way and nothing was provided to talk about the game) called, Slimes. There are plenty of creators out there making games, go support them while they can’t go to conventions and promote their games. If you can’t support them financially by buying, talk about their games with your friends and on social media.

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