AN OFFWORLD THANKSGIVING: L-TRYPTOPHAN EDITION

Fallout 3

As I recently discovered — quite unintentionally — Bethesda’s RPG makes for perfect extreme-hangover gaming, a mindstate not too far away from a belly-full coma. Though it might sound like a slight, I take it as an asset: one of Fallout‘s draws is that a number of its sidequests and its exploration in general aren’t the most mentally taxing. In fact, one of the things I think the game does best is let you stumble almost continually on a series of small messes that exist only for you to tidy. It became almost a mantra during that hangover head sick session: “I found a building. It was a mess. I cleaned it up. I felt satisfied. I moved on.”

Animal Crossing: City Folk

Though I’ve never heard any of its directors or designers explicitly state it, I’ve got a strong hunch one of Animal Crossing‘s guiding principles was that of the Slow Life movement that spread across Japan in the early ‘oughts, seeking to “shift from a society of mass production and mass consumption, to a society that is not hectic and does cherish our possessions and things of the heart.”

It’s not just the provincial setting or the townsfolk whose lives are little more than neighborly gossip (see also: basically any post-war Yasujiro Ozu movie for the real world cultural touchstones there). It’s straight down to the game’s interactions themselves: try and get basically any task accomplished in less than a minute and you’ll be strained. The series forces you at every turn to sloooow down and settle into its signature torpor.

Soul Bubbles

Developer Mekensleep was taken to task by a number of enthusiast reviewers for a perceived lack of difficulty in its DS debut, but its underlying old-world and naturalistic environments basically demand more leisurely exploration. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have its own difficulties, or that complete runs of its levels are anything approaching a cakewalk. Soul Bubbles keeps its difficulty in places for you to seek it out if you want it, but leaves you free to enjoy yourself without it, making it one of the more suitably relaxing (and unfortunately underappreciated) games for the handheld.

As for me, I’ll be spending the rest of today wending my way slowly through a backlog of things I haven’t yet had a chance to get to and would like to talk about in the coming weeks: Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, BioShock‘s PS3 exclusive downloadable Challenge Rooms, and the European release of Grasshopper Manufacture’s DS adventure remake Flower, Sun and Rain.