Gamer Games for Lite Gamers

🎵 The song for this post is イイナヅケブルー, by Charisma.com. 🎵

Hillel wrote a post I really like for April Cools, on "gamer games for non-gamers":

The video game industry is the biggest entertainment industry in the world. In 2024, it produced almost half a trillion dollars in revenue, compared to the film industry’s "mere" 90 billion. For all the money in it, it feels like gaming is a very niche pastime. It would surprise me if a friend has never watched a movie or listened to music, but it’s pretty normal for a friend to have never played a video game.

The problem is that games are highly inaccessible. To most people, games are "big budget games", which are targeted at people who already have played lots of games. They assume the player has a basic "vocabulary" of how games work: conventional keyboard layouts, how to parse information on a screen, etc. If you don’t already know these, it’s a huge barrier and highly demotivating.

and this article was great for me, timely for something I've observed over the past few years:

through dating, and being an uncle to kids, I've watched people hold a controller for the first time, and it occurs to me that I've been holding controllers since I was 3.

The bridge is a hard one to cross!

I like his list of games for non-gamers, I'll share a few games for what I'd call "lite" gamers: games with decent onramps to share with someone who doesn't play as much as you do. He's got great criteria for "for non-gamers," and I'll break a few of his rules for my list:

• You're allowed to own a Switch. I think PSWhatever and XboxWhatever are much bigger investments, but many families and casuals own a Switch, and if you have one, you can bring your own. The genius of the Joycon controllers means you can always have two controllers without buying extra hardware.

• I'll focus on games that can be played pairwise.

• Some of the games I'll suggest work as decent "onramps" for mechanics found in other games. His games require few reflexes or hand-eye coordination, I don't think mine outright rely on them, but they're not afraid of those mechanics.

• Like Hillel, I'll only include games I've personally seen success on this with.

Professor Layton (original trilogy)

What it is: A very charming, low-mechanics game chock full of puzzles and brainteasers. The first game boasts ~150 of them.

I've been a stan of these games for decades. My brother and his wife played through them, neither of them "gamers," and I see kids loving it too. And bonus! They're available on mobile platforms! You can download and play this on iOS or Android right now.

Skip Katrielle and the Millionaire's Conspiracy, I couldn't even finish it. But Curious Village, Diabolical Box, and Unwound Future are treasures.

Bonus: One of the earliest (and for many years, most popular) posts on this blog was when I wrote a Prolog program to solve one of the harder bonus puzzles.

The Stanley Parable

What it is: A narrative exploration "game" that gets very meta, very quickly, in a 3D game engine.

If you want to onramp someone to real-time game mechanics, this would be a decent set of training wheels. It uses the "two sticks" scheme that's popular with FPSes, and early gamers really have a hard time accustoming to this. This game gives them all the space they could want or need. Bonus! It's not violent!

That said, many times I've played it, a more experienced gamer can "drive" and the other can navigate, and it's still a fantastic time. Note that while most of these do well with kids, this one is probably the one that requires the most adult understanding of the world (not video game references, necessarily; just you've seen or heard stories before, recognize tropes as an idea, have ever thought about free will... that kind of thing).

Unravel Two

What it is: A co-op platformer with decent puzzles. It's got what I call "cowards theming," where it's a bunch of affective elements, but no commitment to anything concrete, which means it works perfectly fine for kids.

What's good about this is you have a "hitch a ride" feature for the harder platforming, so if you have a more junior gamer, they can always opt out of it by "hitching a ride" with the more skilled player (my brother's kids do this: after a few tries, they ask Tio Pablo to do the jumpy bits). But the puzzles are not time-limited and super chill, and for basic traversal, kids and less skilled gamers can still hop around with aplomb.

Overcooked 2

What it is: You know the logistics part of your job that sucks and stresses you out? It's that, in a game!

I hesitate to include this because I personally hate this game. But I've also played hundreds of hours of it because all the normies in my life love this game, which is a testament to something. And on the theme on onramps, I've seen junior gamers put in time to and come out the other end of their Overcooked journey fully proficient in holding a controller and video game mechanics.

Most of Hillel's list is games that don't have timed challenges, and which otherwise minimize stress. This game is literally "stess as a service." That said, it's so adorable, and the challenges are fun and cute enough, it motivates a ton of people to cooperate. That said, Hard Drive wrote an article with this headline:

So, buyer beware. I've seen great success and my niblings loved it, but you and the partner may force a hard conversation.