One of the major video game releases in February had players navigate the chaos of a growing empire, with Civilization VII introducing historical ages to the turn-based strategy series. Another, the fantasy role-playing game Avowed, gave an emperor’s envoy incredible power.
There were more intimate stories as well, including The Stone of Madness, a tactical-stealth game set in a monastery turned asylum, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, whose opening chapter has rebellious grit and an inspiring riot grrrl essence.
Here are three other games you may have missed this month:
Keep Driving
If you’re the sort of person who feels nostalgia for picking out CDs from your dashboard visor, making long-distance calls on your Nokia brick phone or scarfing down a slice of pizza while tinny rock music blares into the quiet night, the appeal of a game like Keep Driving is obvious.
Set in the fantasized memories of nascent adulthood in the early 2000s, Keep Driving is a fun, low-stakes adventure about hopping in a car and going on a long drive somewhere, or nowhere in particular.
Your ostensible task is to make your way to a music festival a few towns over. In order to simulate the hazards you’ll encounter along the way, the game cleverly retrofits classic card game mechanics.
A virtual deck of cards, each card with its own thematically appropriate skill — “Drive Fast” uses extra fuel to clear obstacles — will help you make it past slow-moving tractors, flocks of sheep and even distracting rainbows. You’ll fight exhaustion and a perpetually depleting gas tank. You’ll pick up an assortment of hitchhikers. You might even choose to get drunk and party, crashing your ride and winding up in rehab.
All these surprises and disasters are the kinds of experiences that texture and support a rich and interesting life. Although Keep Driving has a profoundly hopeful message, it also captures the raucous plasticity and vivacious drive of youth, reminding us that we all once wound up stranded without gas on the side of an empty road.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center
Azami Fukurai, the high-strung heroine of this Japanese visual novel, has a problem: She sees ghosts. At least that’s what she thinks until she follows up on a Tokyo advertisement and visits the Urban Myth Dissolution Center, where she hopes to find a remedy for her onerous gift.
When she meets the director, a cerebral young man in a wheelchair, she learns that the hazy apparitions she sometimes glimpses are not wandering shades but “vestiges of persons and objects that existed and are retained everywhere.” The director convinces her (using a bit of financial leverage) to join his detective agency, which specializes in matters that fall outside the purview of traditional police work.
Azami’s investigations enmesh her in the personal lives of those who have been affected by things that seem to defy ordinary explanation — a livestreamer who sees a ghost in a mirror; a woman terrified by a man who creeps around her apartment at night. But what gives this game a special flair is that it’s really about the battle against misinformation. Again and again, Azami watches how social media latches on to sensational stories and then amplifies rumors, biases and half-baked theories.
I wished the game’s episodes involved less backtracking. A little bit of editing could have gone a long way in delivering a punchier experience. But while not all of the game’s plot twists are created equal, its skeptical bent mitigates its languors to some extent.
While Waiting
For those who have been bored, frustrated or even anxious when killing time, the often-charming, sometimes-perplexing While Waiting offers a tantalizing series of wait-based minigames.
Here, biding time isn’t a chore. That’s because the narrative arc of one’s life feels true.
At the beginning of 100 short experiences, I was born a boy. The birth included a lemming-like line across a bridge before I was dropped through clouds that flowed like water. As a child, I reclined warily, hoping for sleep yet haunted by ghosts. As a soccer goalkeeper, I found a ray gun in the sky to shoot targets. My reward was being hit in the face by the ball. I should have concentrated on the pitch.
Each scenario is timed. Although you can just sit and relax with a fidget spinner, the player really should accomplish a few tasks before time is up. When you’re hanging out in a cafe watching for a bus, the rain dripping down the window inventively turns into a Space Invaders-style game. During class, you avoid the teacher by unhurriedly crawling on the floor. It’s kind of a version of Pac-Man, if you were a slow loris.
Likely inspirations for While Waiting include the WarioWare series, but this art is never lurid. A delicate pen-and-ink art style features minimalist yet endearingly convincing facial expressions in a game where you must often decipher an objective as the clock ticks down.
The post 3 Video Games You May Have Missed in February appeared first on New York Times.
