Why do we shy away from games that expect many hours of our time, only to spend it playing smaller, seemingly undemanding games instead?
I think I'm afraid of commitment. When I was a child, it was a small matter to sit in front of the Nintendo 64 for hours. Time meant nothing to me; now, it's all I think about. I look at upcoming games, at the hundreds of hours of playtime required, and I cannot fathom where to find time to actuallyIt's ironic, then, that my solution to the resulting crippling inertia is to sink over a hundred hours in Islanders.
Schnepf and his Grizzly Games colleagues, Jonas Tyroller and Friedmann Allmenröder,"found most of them [city-building games] complex," Schnepf says."It always stressed me out that you have to be in so many different places at the same time with your mind." This focus on a single, robust mechanic appears to drive Schnepf's games so far. Where it's undistracted flight, tending to an industrial garden, or the rhythm of The Ramp, another game of small arenas, in which you guide your skateboarding avatar around bowls and ramps via a series of rhythmic inputs.
That lack of temporal obligation feels core to the appeal of games like Islanders and Cloud Gardens. With the stress of reaching a section in Final Fantasy 15 that wouldn't let me save for well over an hour or of losing progress to Stray's arbitrary checkpoint system fresh in my mind, I know Islanders won't do that to me. I can stop when I want.
As I grew steadily more concerned about what was going on outside, being able to hyperfocus on something undemanding for an ambiguous period of time helped ease my growing anxiety., it's a prospective balm for the continuing chaos around us: small, accessible episodes compared to releases that demand you give away much of your future free time.
"Yeah," Schnepf says when I suggest this."I think that's actually something that always mattered to me, that I didn't have to make this massive commitment."
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