It’s my eight year blogiversary!

But it’s been five years since I started talking about games on the blog, in addition to books. And when my blog turned five years old, I made a post about my five favorite books in five years of blogging. So now I’m doing the same with games.

That was a really clunky paragraph, but you get it, right?

There are definitely more than five games that I love and want to shout about, and it was so hard not to, but I had to narrow it down in order to adhere to the spirit of the blog post. So here are the five I chose, in order of when I played them!

Honorable Mention: The Sims 3

I know I said I was sticking to five, but hear me out. It would feel weird and probably confuse people who know me if I didn’t mention The Sims because it is definitely one of my all-time favorites, but I feel like it doesn’t count for this. I’ve been playing The Sims franchise since I was a child, not just since I started blogging. I do love it though, especially The Sims 3!

My Sims 3 Shenanigans

Monster Prom

This was one of the first games I tried (outside of The Sims and other childhood games), and man, it was such a great one! So funny and fun with great, ridiculous characters and all sorts of wacky shenanigans. So much stuff to find and unlock. Beautiful bold art. I loved it so much that I even spent time making my own special ending for one of the characters when the mod tool came out.

My Review

West of Loathing

Absolutely hilarious! A funny, silly, fantastic game. It’s an RPG set in a sci-fi/fantasy Old West with organic sorta puzzles and turn-based combat, and you can’t actually die, so it’s chill. You can go on different quests. There are some different endings. You can stick your hand in all the spitoons! Just so much fun to play, and it made me laugh so much. (Please ignore the fact that I took the photo with my phone rather than taking a screenshot lol.)

My Review

Lake of Voices

I fell in love so hard with this haunting visual novel about crossing a lake full of monsters at night. If you’re not really a gamer, but you are a book lover, you should try this one. Because this one made me care about the characters so much. I would actually love a whole regular novel about them. They were complex and interesting and wonderful. It’s an intensely emotional visual novel that made me feel so much, because no matter what you do, in every playthrough, someone dies. It also has absolutely gorgeous art. And I just felt so immersed while playing, that feeling of forgetting the real world exists until you look up and suddenly remember you’re just in a room reading words.

My Review

Overland

This game was a complete surprise. I hadn’t heard of it, but I got it as part of a bundle. When I first started playing, it wasn’t what I thought it would be, but I kept playing… and playing… and playing… and I got so hooked. It became my comfort game for a while. Weird, right? That a post-apoc game in which you’re constantly trying to avoid creatures and get supplies so you don’t die would be a comfort game? But, depending on your settings (difficulty is super customizable), it’s pretty chill, since it’s a turn-based strategy puzzle game. But one that made me feel an unexpected amount of emotion the first time I finished and some of the other times I’ve played, and it’s gorgeous to boot. Plus, you can pet the dogs!

My Review

Project Zomboid

One of these things is not like the others! I don’t usually do real-time combat, and I had to turn the zombies off at first so that I could play at all. But the fact that they have so many difficulty settings and options that you can adjust is part of the reason this is so great. It’s also just an incredible game with sooooooooooo much detail and small realistic touches and all sorts of systems (cooking, crafting, farming, health, weather, and so much more) that goes so far beyond just killing zombies. I have both loved playing it my way as a post-apoc survival life sim with pathetic zombies and watching videos of people playing it in much harder ways. And the team is constantly updating and improving the game, so it’s only getting better!

My Review