What Hailey is up to NOW: January 25th

Last year in November, finding ways to stay entertained inside after months of quarantine got the best of me, and I decided to purchase a Nintendo Switch. Since then, many many games have been purchased so most of my free time NOW revolves around gaming- something that hasn’t been true for me for at least a decade. The following is a brief list of games I would recommend.

1. Unravel Two- Unravel Two has done it again with taking a very simple concept- being attached to the other player by a string, and very simple mechanics- swinging and tying knots and shown what collaborative puzzle-solving gameplay is at its finest. I wished there were 500 more hours of this game to play as the 5 hours it takes to complete flew by.

2. Rayman Legends the Definitive Edition- Born and bred on Mario games, I had never played any Rayman games until recently. Although I’ll never turn my back on any of the classic Mario platformers, Rayman’s level designs and music compositions give me the kind of creative inspiration bubblegum-pop Mario could never. I found the best feature of this game to be that when playing two players, characters will not bump into each other and therefore, can occupy the same space (my number one cause of death when playing Mario with my partner).

3. Hades- Playing as the son of Hades, Zagreus, I found this game to be incredibly addicting as each run a player makes in an attempt to escape the Underworld is made unique by “Boons” which change up your abilities and health. The greek mythology nerd in me had me pausing the game each time a new God or Goddess was introduced to read their Wikipedia page.

4. ABZÛ- While the game of this plot will definitely have to be googled and can be beaten in about two hours, the graphics of this game are beyond beautiful, incomparable to any game I have ever played. There are basically no goals, collectables, objectives, etc. to this game but, that’s lowkey the whole point, ABZÛ is a game you can relax to.