When I'm not writing, I'm a big fan of indie video games, and I've always thought there should be more overlap between the book community and the video game community. After all, video games are just another form of storytelling, and many modern video games, especially on the indie side, feature well-developed plots, memorable characters, and immersive worlds. But the video game community has done little to convince readers that it's worth their time, and the major titles that get the most attention are usually the same dull first-person shooters about grizzled old soldiers that turned off the book community in the first place. Plus, a new video game can cost $60, require a $400 console, and take twenty hours to finish. No wonder so many readers have no interest in games.
So I've put together my own list of recommendations for anyone who loves books and is interested in getting into video games. In order to make this list available to the widest audience possible, regardless of skill level, budget, or time constraints, the games generally share the following traits: a) short length, b) low cost and wide availability, c) moderate difficulty, and most importantly, d) excellent storytelling. I hope every reader will find something here that catches their interest.
Photopia
Genre: Interactive Fiction
Year: 1998
You know text adventures. They're those goofy-frustrating games from the 80's full of "you were eaten by a grue" and "you can't get ye flask" that vanished as soon as graphics cards were invented. Right? Wrong! It turns out that not only are text adventures still around, but they've developed into their own art form as interactive, high-concept short stories. There's a thriving (if extremely insular) interactive fiction community devoted to making and playing these games (you can play my own surreal historical game The House of Fear here).
Interactive fiction is very literary, so it's a natural entry point for fans of non-interactive fiction, and one of the best games to start with is Photopia. This beautiful, heartbreaking story alternates between slice-of-life and a fantasy bedtime story told to a little girl, using the different colors of the spectrum as inspiration for different settings: red is the surface of Mars, blue is beneath the sea, and so on. It's a meditative experience, and one that's over far too quickly.
Photopia is free to play online.
Portal
Genre: First Person
Year: 2007
If I was going to include just one AAA game on this list, it had to be Portal. It made a huge splash when it burst onto the scene. An all-female cast! A weapon that isn't a weapon! But it wasn't just a fad. Many gamers still list Portal among their favorites. This is by far the most challenging game on this list, but it's got a nice slow learning curve, and I think even a beginner can complete this one without assistance, given enough patience.
You are in a research facility, and a deadpan AI named GLaDOS (Genuine Lifeform and Disk Operating System) is guiding you through a series of puzzles designed to test the newly invented portal gun, which can create holes through space-time. GLaDOS promises you cake when you finish all the tests. But as you progress and notice how suspiciously empty the facility is—as well as signs that someone before you escaped the testing procedure—it becomes apparent that the cake is a lie.
This game is a masterclass of minimal storytelling. The whole thing takes place inside one building with no explanation as to who you are or how you got there, dropping only the slightest tantalizing hints about what happened. (The sequel, Portal 2, has a much broader scope, yet is a lesser achievement.) There are only two characters, one of whom never talks and the other of whom doesn't appear in person until the final scene. Plus, Portal is the funniest game you're ever likely to play, packed with dark humor that makes GLaDOS into one of the all-time great video game characters. Check out Portal for yourself and you'll discover that the hype is not overstated.
Portal is available on Steam.
Thomas Was Alone
Genre: Platformer
Year: 2012
Childhood experiences with Mario left platformers synonymous with frustration in my mind, but Thomas Was Alone radically reinvents the platformer as a vehicle for deep exploration of character. You guide a collection of colored rectangles through a geometric environment, accompanied by narration that explains who the different rectangles are and what they're experiencing. The hopeful, bittersweet story that unfolds explores artificial intelligence, friendship, self-sacrifice, and the nature of personhood.
It's astonishing how much personality this game imbues into a set of characters who are literally featureless. These rectangles are distinctly British, and their oh-so-human foibles, like condescension and self-aggrandizement, make their personalities all the more endearing—and their final choice all the more powerful.
Don't be fooled by its minimalist graphics and simple puzzles—every aspect of Thomas Was Alone is lovingly crafted, from the smoothly implemented controls to the soothing, audiobook-style narrator. You'll fall in love with Thomas, Chris, John, Claire, Laura, James, and Sarah, and you just might cry at the end.
Thomas Was Alone is available on Steam.
Gone Home
Genre: First Person
Year: 2013
You arrive at the creepy mansion on the hill at midnight during a storm, only to discover...a sweet story of teenage first love?
Gone Home defies expectations in the best possible way. It's a horror-style exploration game with no horror, a Myst-style puzzler with no puzzles, a first-person game where the point-of-view character is not the protagonist, and a romance between teen girls in an industry where neither girls nor LGBT people are valued.
You're the college-age sister who returns home from backpacking in Europe to find the house empty. As you wander around looking at things to try to piece together where everyone is, your teenage sister's diary entries play, narrating her arrival at a new school, her desire to become a writer, and her friendship with and budding attraction to the school's punk-rock cool girl. Interwoven with this are the side stories of your mom, a forest ranger, and dad, a writer of pulpy thrillers who every author will immediately relate to. The teen voice is incredibly authentic, and the sweet story is told with refreshing sincerity. Gone Home is the perfect game for YA readers, or for just about anyone.
Gone Home is available from Good Old Games.
Kentucky Route Zero
Genre: Adventure
Year: 2013
"Steinbeckian" is the word that immediately comes to mind the moment this game opens with an old delivery truck pulled up outside a novelty gas station so the driver can ask the blind station attendant for directions. The driver is informed that, to get to that address, he'll have to take a mysterious underground highway known as the Zero. The rest of the story follows his journey to find and navigate the Zero and the collection of strange, broken people he meets along the way.
But the plot isn't the star attraction here: It's the lyrical storytelling, the magical realist Americana visuals, the bluegrass soundtrack, and the deep, wistful emotions. The game uses a mixture of deliberately primitive 3D scenes and pure text scenes, with a black and white vector map connecting them all. There are loads of Easter eggs on the map, so be sure to explore.
The crafting of this game is absolutely flawless. Every line, image, and interaction builds perfectly on everything else to create a perfect image of the mix of determination and quiet despair that characterizes the lives of the American precariat. The characters and their problems are all too familiar: The antique shop deliveryman making his last trip before the store closes; the young doctor forced to shill for a pharmaceutical company to pay his school debts. The picture is bleak, but it's softened by the beauty of the storytelling and the feeling of shared humanity. The final chapter hasn't been released yet, so we don't know how it ends, but I have no doubt it will leave me as speechless as the rest did.
Kentucky Route Zero is available from Good Old Games. The final chapter is expected sometime this year.
Papers, Please
Genre: Sim
Year: 2013
Man, 2013 was a good year. In this 8-bit simulator, you've been assigned to work at a border checkpoint in a fictional eastern bloc country in the 1980s. You must stop smugglers, criminals, and terrorists from crossing the border, armed only with a set of increasingly complex entry requirements.
Oh man, this game will get into your head, and it's not just the increasing pressure of trying to process enough paperwork to earn a living wage and keep your family from starving. Will you turn away the man carrying contraband medicine, or the person whose sex doesn't match their passport? Will you do missions for a morally ambiguous resistance group? Will you place more people under arrest when the border guard offers you a cut of his wages? Why is it easier to empathize with the not-too-bright drug smuggler than with the countless law-abiding citizens who struggle to keep up with the constant rule changes?
Papers, Please is complex, it's psychological, and it will make you rethink your basic ideas of right and wrong, all in a game where your only choices are "approve" and "reject."
Papers, Please is available from Good Old Games.
Oxenfree
Genre: Adventure
Year: 2016
It's summer, and you and your high school friends take the ferry to an island that used to be a naval base and is now a state park, planning on a night of drinking and teenage misbehavior. But when your radio starts picking up bizarre signals, it turns out that the ghosts of the past aren't as quiet as they should be.
Oxenfree is an immersive, high-stakes supernatural thriller with a time-travel element and plenty of moments of outright terror. At the same time, the characters are well-rounded, their dialogue is realistic, and their relationships are just as compelling as the main plot. The protagonist and her new stepbrother are two of the lead characters, a relationship you don't often see but one that many real-life teenagers will resonate with.
A lot of modern adventure games have your in-game choices affect how the non-player characters react to you, but I've never seen a game implement the mechanic as thoroughly as Oxenfree. The radio mechanic is also unique and interesting; tuning the radio to different frequencies can either reveal clues or trigger different events. The gameplay leaves something to be desired, but the edge-of-your-seat story will definitely have you playing this one all the way through. And then maybe playing it again.
But not too late at night.
Oxenfree is available from Good Old Games.
Tacoma
Genre: First Person
Year: 2017
The makers of Gone Home are back with an even more ambitious follow-up. You play a contractor sent to recover an artificial intelligence from an abandoned space station owned by a large multiplanet corporation. You are strictly forbidden from looking around the station or investigating what happened to the crew. But the station's VR recording system has left snippets of the crew's life for you to find. It looks like someone is trying to tell you something.
The diverse cast that inhabits the space station is immensely relatable, and you'll easily get sucked into their daily life as they deal with problems like keeping in touch with faraway family and saving up to go back to school. Their world, where everyone lives precariously indebted to megacorporations who pay them in loyalty points and record their every move, is simultaneously crushingly dystopian and all too realistic. There's a quiet heroism to the characters' ability to live normal lives amid the pressures of this system, and the way they rally in the face of disaster will have you rooting for them.
Oh, and don't forget to look for the cat.
Tacoma is available from Good Old Games.
Night in the Woods
Genre: Adventure
Year: 2017
A college dropout returns to her hometown with the goal of resuming her aimless life, only to find that it isn't the way she remembers. Stores have closed, her friends have changed, and people are going missing.
This is one of those horror games that hits way too close to home. It insightfully captures the witty-cynical attitude of a generation that has watched their future be systematically stolen from them, young people who act like teenagers a little too long because they have nothing to look forward to except a job at the convenience store. It's almost a relief when a dismembered arm appears, providing the hope of a villain more concrete than structural economic disadvantage.
But don't let all that make Night in the Woods sound like a drag. The lackadaisical cast injects a lot of humor into the story, from a neighbor's not-quite-Pulitzer-quality poetry ("I got mad one time/It was online") to your mom's supply of books about children raised by eels. The unusual gameplay combines the basic adventure-game mechanics with bits of platformers, roguelikes, and Guitar Hero. It's impossible not to get sucked into the characters' lives, and the message about the connections we build and the meaning we find in the face seemingly inexorable loss resonates far beyond one game.
Night in the Woods is available from Good Old Games.
What are your favorite video games? What video games do you think the book community would enjoy?
A side note from Cyra - You should most definitely read Gwen's book AMONG THE RED STARS! It's so good!!
Goodreads
My Review
World War Two has shattered Valka’s homeland of Russia, and Valka is determined to help the effort. She knows her skills as a pilot rival the best of the men, so when an all-female aviation group forms, Valka is the first to sign up.
Flying has always meant freedom and exhilaration for Valka, but dropping bombs on German soldiers from a fragile canvas biplane is no joyride. The war is taking its toll on everyone, including the boy Valka grew up with, who is fighting for his life on the front lines.
As the war intensifies and those around her fall, Valka must decide how much she is willing to risk to defend the skies she once called home.
Inspired by the true story of the airwomen the Nazis called Night Witches, Gwen C. Katz weaves a tale of strength and sacrifice, learning to fight for yourself, and the perils of a world at war.
A side note from Cyra - You should most definitely read Gwen's book AMONG THE RED STARS! It's so good!!
Goodreads
My Review
World War Two has shattered Valka’s homeland of Russia, and Valka is determined to help the effort. She knows her skills as a pilot rival the best of the men, so when an all-female aviation group forms, Valka is the first to sign up.
Flying has always meant freedom and exhilaration for Valka, but dropping bombs on German soldiers from a fragile canvas biplane is no joyride. The war is taking its toll on everyone, including the boy Valka grew up with, who is fighting for his life on the front lines.
As the war intensifies and those around her fall, Valka must decide how much she is willing to risk to defend the skies she once called home.
Inspired by the true story of the airwomen the Nazis called Night Witches, Gwen C. Katz weaves a tale of strength and sacrifice, learning to fight for yourself, and the perils of a world at war.
