SIMS FRANCHISE
It is no surprise to anyone who knows me that I play The Sims! I played The Sims 2 for the first time in 2008 (it’s crazy to think this was over a decade ago now!) and I was hooked from the first couple of hours. I loved how the game presented itself as a template for all of my creative outbursts at the time, especially Build Mode. I believe this is where my love for level design began – I was free to utilise the tools in the game to create anything I wanted, something unique. Although its Build Mode is much more limiting than the present one in The Sims 4, I felt like I had the whole world at my fingertips. I would spend hours building houses and creating and customising sims to move into them, making up all sorts of backstories along the way.
I still play The Sims 4 today – the talented custom content artists and mod developers in the community inspire me to constantly try new things, majorly increasing the replay value of the game for me.
mINECRAFT
I still remember Minecraft in its beta phase when it was free, water and lava sounded the same and Herobrine was at large. I first started playing in the early months of 2011 and, similarly to The Sims, I love the freedom it gave me. The catch here was, if I wanted to build or craft anything, I would need to source the materials first. This would push me to venture into the world and its depths, praying I’d be able to find diamonds quickly so I could brag to my friends after. I knew the game by heart at this point, I had memorised every crafting recipe known to Notch.
There have been so many changes and improvements to the game over the years that when I go on to play nowadays I’m almost overwhelmed with the volumes of content – everything from all the different tree types all the way to Netherite. I still enjoy it as much as I did back in the day, I have a world I share with some of my friends and I’ve had a blast building different structures, castles and houses, yet I still occasionally look back at the times when I knew the game like the back of my hand.
Portal
Given the Portal project I’m currently working on, one might suggest I’m quite keen on the Portal games – and they would be right! Portal is where my interest in puzzle games began, I love the way it ties its story into the different levels you have to complete and reveals little by little at a time, making it all the more addicting. What kept me interested in it, other than the story, is the fact that every single room was solvable – something that I doubted time and time again during my first playthrough. It was fascinating to me how a puzzle could go from impossible to perfectly solvable with just a shift of perspective. In my adolescence, this resonated with me on a personal level – I started looking at predicaments and situations in my life from a different point of view which helped me explore new possibilities. Although it might sound crazy to some, this game played a significant role in who I shaped myself to be as a person.
I haven’t revisited the Portal games in a while, outside of doing research for my project, but it seems I will have to change that very soon.
Skyrim
When I first started playing Skyrim I didn’t have too much experience with combat games, I found myself dying instantly dying at the shout of the Draugr Death Overlord in any given dungeon on the map, let alone a powerful dragon. In all honesty, I’ve abandoned the game prior to completion a couple of times in the past until one monumental playthrough back in 2016 where I started paying close attention to the skill trees and the build I was using. I got a hold of an Ebony Axe fairly early into the game and after that, Tamriel was my oyster. I completed the main quest and even went on to do the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild sidequests, along with several others. Finishing it gave me a sense of confidence to play through other similar games like The Witcher and Breath of the Wild, although I am still scared of Dark Souls!
papers, please
One of the best indie games I have ever played Papers, Please, pleasantly surprised me with a heartfelt and well-executed storyline which more than made up for the lack of traditional game mechanics. This game resonated with me specifically because I’m Eastern European and, although I wasn’t around during the communist regime, my parents and grandparents were. I learned a lot about their struggles and lack of freedom from their stories and, although I have no experience with it myself, I think the game does a good job portraying the challenges civilians were faced with at the time.
I streamed my second playthrough of Papers, Please on my Twitch channel in February of 2021 and everyone who stopped by to watch was delighted with the game and its unique UI and art style.
Grand Theft Auto
Essentially every single one of my gamer friends played GTA: San Andreas before 2013, I had dabbled in it a bit, although I specifically remember downloading save files that had the main story completed and everything in the world unlocked for me to utilise and explore (I guess I still had the Minecraft mindset). When GTA V first came out for Playstation and Xbox, I watched a couple of playthroughs on YouTube and it looked amazing to me. Unfortunately, I only had a PC at my disposal so when Rockstar released it on PC in 2015, I begged my parents for it for weeks. After finally acquiring it, I was obsessed – the driving mechanics, the shooting mechanics, the story, the ability to switch between characters, the city of Los Santos, all of those things and many more made me fall in love with it instantly. I couldn’t wait to come home from school and play it and my love for it made me open up to the rest of the franchise, playing through GTA IV and Stan Andreas later on.
I have played through GTA V several times at this point and my love for it branched out into Red Dead Redemption 2 when it came out in 2018. I had to borrow my boyfriend’s PlayStation 4 to get the most I could out of it and I went on to replay it once more when it too was released for PC.
God of War
I have been a PC gamer for all of my life and that was becoming increasingly difficult with the PlayStation exclusives Sony Interactive kept releasing. God of War was no exception to this – once I had a taste of what the world and story had to offer, I knew I had to play it. Once again borrowing my boyfriend’s PlayStation, I ventured into Midgard and was instantly immersed and infatuated with the story amount of lore it had to offer. It wasn’t long until I finished the whole game and was left amazed by absolutely every aspect of it. God of War and Breath of the Wild are two games I have great difficulty with critiquing as they hold a very dear spot in my heart.
Upon God of War’s PC release in January of 2022, I knew exactly what I was going to be doing in the foreseeable future – playing through the main story once again and setting out to defeat all the Valkyries! (Still a work in progress!)
Breath of the Wild
In the summer of 2020 at the height of the COVID pandemic, I had saved up some money and finally decided to buy my first console. With the craze around Animal Crossing: New Horizons at the time, I decided the perfect console for me would be the Nintendo Switch. Looking back, I definitely made the right decision as having a Switch opened up the world of Nintendo games for me – Animal Crossing, Super Mario Odyssey, Pokemon Sword & Shield and many more. But one experience stood out to me the most and that was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The shrine puzzles reminded me of my Portal days and the story has me coming back to BotW to this day. I wasn’t stopping at the main story though, I had to free all of the Divine Beasts, collet all of the spirit orbs and obtain the Master Sword in preparation for my fight with Calamity Ganon. I did, however, stop at the korok seeds – there are 900 of them!!!
Death Stranding
My most recent favourite game is Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding which is, quite literally, genre-defying. That genre being ‘stranding’ as he himself put it. When I first started playing it a couple of months ago, I would have never thought it would be joining God of War and Portal among my favourite games ever. In fact, I started my playthrough off disliking it – the long cutscenes felt like being forced to watch a film I’m not invested in (it does have a saturation of cutscenes in the beginning when you don’t quite care much for the characters yet), the user interface made little to no sense to me and sneaking around BTs was just a stressful hassle.
All of this changed though as I persisted to Episode 3 where vehicles, hematic grenades and road building was introduced. I was getting more and more invested in the story and the UI slowly but surely started making sense. And then it hit me – I love this game! I can’t wait to see what happens next! I was raiding MULE camps on a daily basis, trying to gather resources to build more roads to make my experience even more enjoyable. Winning people over, connecting them to the chiral network, using other players’ structures, returning lost cargo and building a reputation for myself – all of this came together like a beautiful symphony and I loved it. I’m still playing through everything it has to offer and, given the density of content, I think I’ll be doing that for a while – something I’m very pleased with!
