The Queue: SERENITY NOW

Do you ever just kinda carry on about your day and then you suddenly realize you have a whole lot of stuff to do, but you also still have to do all your regular stuff too? But now there’s a sword of damocles hanging over your head the whole time?

This is The Queue, our daily column where you give us the questions and we’re just gonna go get Chipotle, because heck it, right? You want anything?

So, I’m not sure if they’re involved with Wholesome, but I know they’re going to be a part of TGAFDWCATGA, or whatever the godawful acronym is, but Arctic Awakening. It’s an arctic survival adventure game, but you’re accompanied by a cute little therapist robot. It looks like a mashup of the interactions with GLaDOS and the Companion Cube in Portal, plus the overarching gameplay of The Long Dark (so for me, instabuy). It seems like something that might be involved in Wholesome, but they’re keeping the exact lineup close to their chest, so I can only hope.

Also, I’m not sure exactly how cozy or wholesome that is per se. To me, the definition of “cozy” is extremely loose, and can encompass the parts of survival games where you kick back in your (relatively) safe little base. I tend to prefer my cozy with a dash of Stepford Wives or Get Out, where it’s cozy but also wrong — Weird, in the sense of genre, not the adjective.

And also, any game that involves animals is a good time. I go feral over almost all of them.

I always endeavor and start off with the best intentions, that this year, I’m going to be on top of it and not have to run out last minute! And then something unexpected and bananas happens, and I’m out there on the 23rd, trying for the least smashed up container of candy canes. Last year, it was gallbladder surgery. This year, my mom decided that she would be taking us up on our offer to come visit for Christmas… after Thanksgiving… and the only tickets still available meant she’s going to be here for almost 2 weeks. So in addition to shopping, I have to tack on a whole bunch of extra shopping (I already had matching Christmas jams, but now I have to track down matching ones in her size now that everything is sold out because of course it is, it’s December 10th) plus clean the house, plus do a whole bunch of random repairs and maintenance tasks I’ve been avoiding because I have so much on my plate already.

So if anyone has good suggestions for like, toys? For people? Or uh, gadgets? I’m kinda drowning here.

I started thinking about it, and I really play more of them than I thought at first. I’m all about Hearthstone Battlegrounds, which is notoriously tough to monetize compared to the TCG blind bag archetype in Constructed. I usually purchase the season pass or game pass or whatever, but this season I’m (ahem) passing because I don’t even know what half the cosmetics are. No seriously, they’re blacked out until the StarCraft tie-in Constructed set drops. I don’t even really care about the cosmetics, but I’m not about to blindly hand them cash with a half-finished set of nonsense. I also drop in on Overwatch 2 from time to time, but I always forget that’s free, since I paid for it before it pasted on a John Waters mustache and insisted it was a totally different game.

Then there are the plethora of games I keep nabbing for airquotes-free from Epic and Prime gaming. The ones from Prime are usually offered up on Epic first or else they’re forgettable and buggy. I’ve played several Epic freebies — and I’ve also purchased several games on Steam that become freebies later, notably The Long Dark, Gone Home, and Oxenfree.

And then there’s mobile. Duolingo has me in a bit of a chokehold.

I feel like my taste in games is so varied I’d have a hard time pinning down exactly what my usual thing is, let alone where the deviation from that norm is. I play gory survival shooters, I play cozy puzzlers, I play story-driven choices-matter games, and I even play a decent amount of crappy shovelware (because my kids beg me to play Roblox with them and I’m both a good mom and a total sucker).

The one game type I don’t usually enjoy are story-light parkour-heavy games — but then, I suppose Portal sort of falls under this archetype. Anything with yawning chasms I have to peer over ain’t it for me, like some Metroidvanias. I don’t usually have much trouble with heights IRL, but there’s just something about pits in games. Even freakin Mario. And even if I can’t technically die, and it’s just all a puzzle. And yet, Animal Well.

So, pretty frequently, I’d say. Especially if they’re (nominally) free.