Though I bet many of these games are available on the other platforms, especially PC. I'll repeat some suggestions, but say why. This subject means a good deal to me so I figured I'd pontificate.


AdVenture Capitalist: This game is utterly stupid, but consoles don't get many clickers because, well, you don't click as much on consoles. I just opened this game for the first time to start this article, and was welcomed with the screen: you were offline for 12,519 hours, 2 minutes and 56 seconds. You earned 3.538 nonillion on Earth while you were gone. Now get in there and maximize those profits! I press X to reply, "Dandy!", and then see ten meters constantly going up. Again, this game is utterly stupid, but I didn't even need to play it to make significant progress and feel really good about myself for not uninstalling it. That is the sadistic - and charming - aspect of the genre in a nutshell. Cookie Clicker is the OG, which I never played.

Fez: I wonder if the charm of this game is gone now that all the answers can be found online, but when I WASN'T playing this game I found the conversation surrounding it utterly fascinating, and I still think it's a genuinely rewarding mix of personal puzzle solving and community engagement that emphasizes how no one person can do everything by themselves even long after all the mysteries have been solved.

Celeste: This is the most applicable to this specific situation in recent memory, though I found it too hard to finish I was also just too stubborn to turn on the assists, which are also thematically relevant. Sometimes life is just fucking hard, and it's not a bad idea to confront what it is about you that makes living feel that way, or a friend (the assists) to alleviate that personal pressure.

Grim Fandango Remastered: Finding life too hard? Try being an underpaid processing agent for the recently deceased.

Pinball Arcade: I think this platform was decimated by an exodus of major board producer sponsorships recently so maybe Zen Pinball is the better recommendation...which is sad considering Pinball Arcade is a near physics perfect representation of so many classic pinball tables it's the closest thing to an innocent afternoon at a pizza plaza in the '90s you can find on a video game console.

Pyre: I suppose this game isn't *non-violent*, as it involves dunking balls and evolves around narratives of civil war and sacrifice. But I really love this game's fusion of weird Slamball + Adventure Game rulesets and find the endless optimism of its characters a useful antidote to current events.

The Fall: It's depressing, but it's also a story about a suit containing a dead pilot who refuses to give up on saving said pilot but also constantly has to reckon with being a husk of dead weight in a world that diagnoses the suit as pointless given that fact. A valuable lesson, maybe, for the depressed and depressed adjacent.

Bound: What's the fusion between dance, nostalgia and spiritual survival? Maybe everything.

Gone Home: I'm way less sold on this game than most were, and maybe that's just the passage of time and advances in "walking simulators", but Gone Home is still the Citizen Kane of wandering around an environment wondering how anything came to be the way it is. "What Became of Edith Finch" is a game I haven't played but is free this month for PS+ members that may be the new answer to that question.

Journey: Give this kid Journey, please.

Sportsfriends: This game can be super frustrating, but honestly I'm not even recommending the whole game, just one of the four. The one where you hold a pole and try to play an extremely goofy game of basketball. It's wonderful, yet competitive, yet understands how silly the concept of competition can be when you just want to have fun.

Doki-Doki Universe: Travel the universe saying hello and making people happy with stickers and whatnot. It's corny, but it's Japan-corny, so it's beautiful.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: If this game works, it slams the dunk. If it doesn't work, it's still an engaging story of the need for others in a life that too often seems insurmountably hard on one's own.

Firewatch: Like Gone Home, it won't work for everyone. It barely worked for me. But the journey to get to that Barely Working was, like a lot of games on this list, a valuable lesson on the human need for interaction, cooperation and simply experiencing the space in which you exist (or imagine yourself existing).

Thomas Was Alone: The Fall without the depressing overtones, narrated by a tongue in cheek British guy that totally gets puzzles are at their hardest when you just want to move on and do anything else with your life.



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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
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