59 Beautiful Games to Fill a Whole Afternoon and Carry You Into a Magical Wonderland | Beating Boredom This Spring Festival

黎方宇 · 2018-02-15 · English translation

If you have a beautiful game to recommend, share it with everyone in the comments.

The holiday has begun.

It is a chance to rest and reset, and also a stretch of time spent wearily keeping up with everything. However you spend it, you probably don't want to fritter away a rare holiday the same way as always.

Below is our Spring Festival edition of Hack Your Life — two things a day. Turn left to pick up a new life skill, turn right to meet a few strange and wonderful games. We've also run several wildly imaginative experiments in living, to give your curiosity something fresh to work on.

Happy New Year!

The great aesthetician Zhu Guangqian argued in 《大人者不失其赤子之心》 (The Great Person Never Loses the Heart of a Child) that "the earliest form of art is play": play involves the same mental acts of creation and appreciation that art does. Like art, play turns the images we admire into objects and builds a concrete scene; it also works through empathy, soothing our feelings and making up for what reality lacks.

But he also pointed out that, next to art, play lacks any social dimension and never troubles itself with the choice of medium or the honing of technique — which is why art left it far behind.

One caveat: limited by his era, the "play" he had in mind meant children piling sand into houses, not the sound-and-light illusions we now call games.

As technology advanced, the definition of a game stretched enormously. Today's video games pull in every technical means available — absorbing stories, picture-perfect composition, scores that linger in the ear, ingeniously designed mechanisms — to build one magical wonderland after another, the kind people love and lose themselves in. Games have even been called the ninth art.

Here are some beautiful games that might carry you through a boring afternoon.

The Simple Beauty Held in a Book

Florence (iOS) is the new work of Ken Wong (Wang Youjian), lead designer of Monument Valley. It landed on the App Store this Valentine's Day and tells the bittersweet story of its heroine, Florence Yeoh, and her first love.

In 2016, Wang left Ustwo, the team behind Monument Valley, and founded the independent studio Mountains to make this game about love. He says the inspiration came from the films (500) Days of Summer and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and from the graphic novel Slice of Life.

The game plays like an interactive comic book: you turn its pages to live through Florence's ordinary days. In mini-games tucked inside the illustrations, you follow her as she eats, works, sleeps and sinks into social media, until she meets the cellist Krish. After that come the tentative approaches, falling in love, growing, drifting apart — love in all its small moments.

Games like Florence have no lavish sets and no fierce action. They bring the pleasure of reading onto an electronic device and add inventive things to touch, so that turning the pages lets you feel the beauty a book holds.

You might also like:

Device 6 (iOS) — a puzzle game from indie heavyweight Simogo, and the finest example yet of the suspense-driven interactive novel. In the same vein: The Sailor's Dream (iOS).
Four Last Things (iOS | Steam) — live through the four last things of human life amid classic Western religious stories and famous paintings.
Gorogoa (iOS | Steam) — trace the story of an ancient, mysterious creature through exquisite hand-drawn illustration.
Traption Bakery (iOS) — rearrange the elements in the picture to get the bakery running.
Flewn (iOS) — the story of an old whale crossing the desert in search of the sea.
Celebrating 20 Years of Harry Potter (website) — a Harry Potter tribute page from NetEase, whose gameplay also pays tribute to Device 6.

The Beauty of Atmosphere in a Zen Game

Flower (iOS) is a port of a game that Jenova Chen — the "Zen master of games" — and his company thatgamecompany released on Sony's PS platform in 2009. You steer a breath of wind across mountains and open country. Wherever it passes, flowers open in its wake, petals scatter, and the grass and trees come back to life.

The play is free and peaceful, a way to escape the noise of daily life and drift through a vast sea of flowers. The game is steeped in Zen, and exploring it sets you thinking about your own life.

Speaking of Jenova Chen, you surely remember Sky: Children of the Light, the finale of Apple's autumn 2017 keynote. It is a game about exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization together, and it shares its mechanics with Journey: players who have never met must help one another, lighting each other's candles, illuminating caves, setting out on a mysterious journey.

The game is in testing in New Zealand, and NetEase will publish it in China.

You might also like:

White Trip (iOS | Android) — become a bird and fly across a winter sky.
Loner (iOS | Android) — a Chinese indie game in which a lonely flight pieces together a story from the past.
My Oasis (iOS) — raise an oasis on an island.
Desertopia (iOS | Android) — work the desert patiently until new life grows.
Alto's Odyssey (iOS | Android) — the sequel to the snowboarding game Alto's Adventure (iOS | Android); the snow underfoot has given way to a wide desert.
Frost (iOS) — draw a path home to the mother planet with your finger, leading flocks of creatures back.

The Literary Beauty of a Story

Father and Son (iOS | Google Play) is a game made by the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. A boy moves between ancient cities, facing choices that decide his fate under different identities in different eras, and through them looks for the archaeology that his father — a man he never met — loved.

The protagonist travels through ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, Pompeii and Naples. Following his steps, a panorama of ancient cities across time unrolls slowly in front of us. The plot links tightly from era to era. Threads from past and present cross and answer each other, the old and the new overlap on screen, and the weight of history comes through.

Any choice you make can change how the story runs and lead to a different ending, a reminder of how fickle time and fate are. That is exactly where the appeal of the plot lies.

Because a museum made it, the themes, details and plot reproduce history accurately, and the 2D art is a pleasure to look at. There is even an Easter egg tied to your location: when your GPS puts you at the Naples museum, extra story unlocks.

You might also like:

Old Man's Journey (iOS | Tap Tap) — follow an old man on a journey in search of his past.
Never Alone: Ki Edition (iOS | Google Play) — adapted from Alaska Native folklore; follow the girl Nuna and her arctic fox as they trace a blizzard to its source.
The Silent Age (iOS | Google Play) — from the same developer as Old Man's Journey; its hero stumbles between past and future to save humanity from extinction.
Space Age: A Cosmic Adventure (iOS) — a nostalgic science-fiction adventure in pixel art, about a band of interstellar explorers who meet aliens on the planet Kepler-16 in 1976.
Broken Age (iOS | Google Play) — a girl chosen as a sacrifice and a boy living alone on a spaceship each break with their past in search of a better life.
The Memoranda (iOS) — help a young woman who has lost her memory piece it back together; inspired by a Haruki Murakami short story.
The End of the World (iOS | Google Play) — the developer spent three years making this game after a breakup, steeping the whole story in the pain of heartbreak.
Burly Men at Sea (iOS) — three bearded fishermen try to escape ordinary life and go looking for adventure.
That Dragon, Cancer (iOS | Google Play) — Joel, the son of maker Ryan Green, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of one; the game records the family's fight against the disease.
Stranger Things (iOS | Google Play) — the mobile game of the TV series.
To the Moon (iOS | Tap Tap) — two doctors alter memories to grant the last wishes of the dying.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (iOS | Google Play) — play a swordfighter through her adventures until she breaks a curse and becomes a true warrior.

The Exquisite Beauty of a Puzzle Waiting to Be Solved

Franz Kafka Videogame (iOS) is a puzzle game built out of the novelist's work. Like Kafka's writing, it is full of exaggerated, grotesque figures, from the pictures to the puzzles, and something absurd and unreal shows through everywhere.

The game draws on The Trial, A Country Doctor, The Metamorphosis and other works. Its hero, Dr. K, happens to receive a job offer from America and sets out on a fantastical journey there. One strange encounter follows another as he wanders through the dreams, memories and hallucinations of himself and of other people.

The puzzles are wildly varied, and the usual experience with point-and-click puzzle games will not get you through them. All you can do is keep clicking anything that responds and hope for luck, until the answer arrives and you think, "so that's what you were supposed to do." Some levels offer a hint in the top right corner, but even the clues can leave you baffled.

The game comes from the team behind the award-winning Hamlet (iOS | Google Play), which was likewise adapted from a literary classic.

The Creative Beauty of a New Way to Play

FEZ (iOS) is an indie game by the Canadian developer Phil Fish that took more than five years to build and was ported to iOS last December. If you have seen Indie Game: The Movie, you will certainly remember it.

In a pixel-art world, the hero Gomez switches his view between 2D and 3D, collecting cubes scattered everywhere and saving the universe. Yes — this is not a simple side-scroller but a 3D action-adventure game.

The invention lies precisely in that switch of view. Gomez leaps from a two-dimensional plane onto three-dimensional blocks, breaking through to travel between dimensions. It hits far harder than a plain optical illusion, and the level design is astonishing.

The colors and the detail in each scene are handled with great care. The port adds virtual buttons on either side of the screen. Five years after it first appeared, it is still a game not to miss.

You might also like:

FRAMED (iOS | Google Play) and FRAMED 2 (iOS | Google Play) — break apart the structure of a motion comic to change how the story ends.
Splitter Critters (iOS | Google Play) — slice the picture apart and put it back together to show alien creatures the way.
Tengami (iOS | Google Play) — a magical wonderland built out of a pop-up book.
Monument Valley (iOS | Tap Tap) and Monument Valley 2 (iOS | Tap Tap) — the classic optical-illusion game.
Pavilion (iOS) — work sound, light and objects to guide the hero through a space where the real and the imagined run together.
Blackbar (iOS | Google Play) — guess what has been blacked out of letters in a future surveillance society. Its sequel, Grayout (iOS), lets you feel what aphasia is like.
Vignettes (iOS) — turn an object to change its shape, and watch a telephone become a hundred other things.
GNOG (iOS) — supports AR; fiddle with all sorts of small contraptions to find the mechanisms hidden inside.
The Guides (iOS) and The Guides Axiom (iOS | Google Play) — use a decoder, plus some Morse code and programming, to crack one cipher after another.
Do Not Believe His Lies (iOS | Google Play) — much like The Guides series.
Please, Don't Touch Anything (iOS | Google Play) — there is a red button on the desk, and the only rule is not to press it. What would you do?
Hidden Folks (iOS | Google Play) — a witty hidden-object game in which what you are looking for may only appear on screen after you poke at something. Recently updated with new levels.
unWorded (iOS | Google Play) — arrange letters into shapes and work back through a novelist's life's work.
If I Could Get Home a Little Earlier (《如果可以回家早一点》) (iOS | Tap Tap) — a game inspired by 《每天回家都会看到我老婆在装死》 (When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to Be Dead). Every day after work the hero comes home to a wife playing dead in some new way, and your job is to bring her back to life.

Cover image from Sky: Children of the Light.

Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.