Written by guest writer and friend of the site Danny Page.
Parental Leave has some similarities to going on a vacation. You pack your bag full of books and video games. “Finally, some time to relax and catch up on the back log in between activities.” An infant sleeps for 16 hours a day in their first few months of life! This is exactly like those long-haul flights to Asia or train rides between European cities.
Wrong. Those naps are frequent, but not very long. After the bottles are clean and the clothes washed, you may think you get a chance to fire up a gamWAHHHHHHH!!!! Well, time to be a parent again. Hope you can pause whatever you were playing. (sorry Elden Ring, l may finally get to play it in 2025) That said, I did manage to play and even beat some games in 2022. Here are my Top 5 Games – for a New Parent – in 2022.
Wordle
The world’s best 3 AM game to play while trying to rock an infant back to sleep. Sure, there were times I put in the same word twice. And thank goodness it wasn’t timed. I’m quite certain it would be quite embarrassing to see how long it took to solve. But it was the perfect way to keep my mind just active enough. I needed to have some wits about me to handle a diaper change while still being relaxed enough to go back to sleep.
Eventually I stopped playing it and its many many clones (my favorite had to be the Quordle aka Quad Wordle). Perhaps there’s only so many patterns of 5 letter words you can figure out. It was also a game that had A Moment. Once it was sold to the New York Times, everyone snapped out of it and, presumably, went back to Words With Friends.
Tunic
The new parent’s Elden Ring. Plenty of secrets to behold, tough fights to master, and a cute little fox cosplaying as Link. A truly delightful game that was always hiding something at literally every corner. A lot of game developers would probably stop after the faux-NES game manual and a few walls to bomb. “That’s enough to make sure Nintendo doesn’t sue us.” It was called Secret Legend for goodness sake! Well, it still is. Just look a little closer at the logo. And in fact the entire game demands that you inspect your surroundings for secrets in plain sight. And the third act. My god what a thematic and mechanical twist. “This isn’t your father’s Dark World,” I said to my daughter.
If there’s anything to take away from Tunic, it’s that it hits the end game and it’s suddenly a puzzle game. In order to get The Good Ending, you need to find all the collectibles and solve various puzzles from obscure hints. I might have solved it all on my own had I the time. Instead, I looked up the ending and the completed manual. And that’s fine! There’s a density of secrets in a very small game world for those who have the ability to find them. And it has such a charm too. a masterpiece of a game. PS; go watch the Devs watching a speed run (Tunic Developers React to 24 Minute World Record Speedrun)
Neon White
I’m 36 years old. I have very little time to play video games (see: having a kid). And when I do play games, I prefer to play a variety of games, rather than just one game. Speedrunning requires so much knowledge and time to experiment and practice with just one game. It’s a fascinating sub-culture of gaming that I sometimes wish I had the ability to participate in.
Neon White makes me feel like a speedrunner, and that’s a powerful feeling. Many other games have leaderboards and time attacks, but rarely give you the tools or direction in order to achieve better times. The medals unlock in-stage hints on where to look or how to skip entire portions of the obvious path, the gifts help you find new ways through the stages. And the easy reset button makes it super easy to try again when you mess up that perfect jump.
The levels are very quick, sometimes doable in under 20 seconds. I could jump in, get a few medals or unlock dialog scenes, and get a good fill of the game before the kiddo wakes up. But when I had some time to dedicate to a level, it became very alluring to practice and improve my times. Even past the platinum medal, there’s the Red Medal to earn. This is the time that the developers of the game set. Getting a few of these was difficult, but very rewarding to know that even with my limited time, I can still beat them at their own game.
Last Call BBS / Zachtronics Solitaire
Some of my earliest memories of computing was playing on a 1990s Macintosh. It didn’t have a modem – never used a BBS as a result – but it had plenty of games of a similar vibe contained on Last Call BBS. Spin Doctor. Solitaire. Lemmings. There was little distraction to be had: you launched a game and there were no forums or websites to distract you. If you did have a modem, you had to get online, get what you want, and then disconnect so as to not tie up the phone line or use too much data.
The individual games in Last Call BBS are bitesized experiences that were perfect truffles of nostalgia. I don’t have the time or space to store plastic models, but “STEED FORCE Hobby Studio” scratches the itch of assembling and painting mechs with no punishment if you need to put it aside. “Kabufuda Solitaire” & “Sawayama Solitaire” are slight twists on the core Klondike Solitaire game rules. (These and more were also released on mobile, and it is a great distraction during those 3 AM feedings, much like Wordle was.) “X’BPGH: The Forbidden Path” is an interesting puzzle-programming game with a sick aesthetic that reminds me of Lemmings levels in hell. There’s many more, but these are the ones that continue to stick out to me.
Maybe one day I’ll let my daughter play around with this game or a classic Mac. It’s something I often think about; how will I introduce her to gaming and computing? Back in the 90s, there was a hard limitation. Now there’s 30 different ways to interact with computers with an almost infinite number of games. I know that if I’m playing some old SNES roms, I might bail after five minutes when I hit the first roadbump. Will she do the same? Is this just my nostalgia where I can value going back to a system like Last Call BBS, but it’ll be utterly alien and restrictive to her?
Vampire Survivors
To answer that question, maybe the future of my child’s gaming is playing games that will replicate the past, but with more modern conveniences. Hi-Fi Rush instead of Jet Set Radio. Tunic instead of the original Legend of Zelda. Or Vampire Survivors instead of <insert any shareware game that you don’t remember how you ever got.> There’s a faux-nostalgia element to this game. I swore I played this sort of game in 1998. It had ripped sprites from Mega Man X. Zero was the main character and it was running around this dystopian city on a 2D plane, firing a blaster at zombies. Who knows how that came to be.
And who knows how Vampire Survivors came to be. All I know is that it plays great, especially on iPhone at 3 in the morning. I can establish my Garlic Shield, Peachone, and Magnet setup, adjust an almost-asleep toddler in one arm, and move my character around just enough to collect XP gems and coins with the other arm. It’s just good fun to be a moving Tower Defense character, and easy enough to control that I truly think this might be the first game I share with my daughter. And eventually, when she has a toddler of her own, she’ll be playing a Mixed Reality game called something Zombie Defender. It’ll look like a mobile game of the 2020s, and the cycle will begin anew.
Danny is a full stack developer, sports analyst, data viz designer, and new father. You can find him on Twitter at @DannyPage.