Illustration of a cozy gaming scene featuring a cheerful woman with gray hair, sitting on a comfortable green armchair, holding a game controller. She is dressed casually in jeans, sneakers, and a colorful knitted cardigan. Beside her is a wooden side table with a potted plant, and a gaming console is connected to a screen out of view. The text "Gaming Tales" appears on the left, with a small cup of coffee adorned with a gaming controller symbol. The ambiance suggests relaxation and enjoyment. Published on: LadiesGamers.

Gaming Tales with Margaret

Usually, at this time of the month, you will see Paula’s Ramblings appear here. But due to personal circumstances, Paula is taking a little break from writing, though she is still pretty active behind the scenes. Our writers have kindly stepped in and are taking turns by writing Gaming Tales. Let’s kick it off with Gaming Tales with Margaret!

Gaming Tales with ….

Without getting into anything in particular because *she gestures vaguely at the world*, not everything one does in hard times has to be about activism. You need to take time for yourself, to rest, to energize, to feel like life is worth living. Having fun is self-care. Making and enjoying art is self-care. Play is self-care, whether you enjoy it in a group or alone. I promise. You can’t help make things better if you can’t make yourself believe that things can be better. And that’s as serious as we’re going to get today because if we want to be depressed, there’s plenty of other places we can go to feel that.

So. What are we playing lately? I know that even beyond our cozy community, there’s been a ton of games providing some great escapes in what’s also, for me, now an absolutely freezing cold winter. My partner is all over both the Tales of Graces F remaster on Playstation and the HD Donkey Kong on Switch. When it comes to new stuff, aside from what I’m looking into for Ladiesgamers, I’m kind of in a holding pattern waiting for the new Monster Hunter, Rune Factory, and Fantasy Life games right now. But that doesn’t mean I’m not gaming. I’ve just gone back to some fairly recent favorites.

Powerwashing (and Flipping) Away the Pain

There’s a sense of peace in making things better, and let’s face it, if you’ve got ADHD, it’s going to be a lot easier to do it in a video game than trying to tackle whatever’s going on in, say, your office-slash-storage space. Okay, let’s not be coy. I have a nice, professional desk flanked by a comical amount of dangerously stacked cardboard boxes. Looney Tunes lookin’ office. It is not exactly glam in here. So House Flipper’s ability to delete a Dumpster’s worth of trash with a button is an instant relief I wish I had in my life.

A ruined corner of a House Flipper home, with exposed walls, garbage, and wrecked furniture
I promise my office looks better than this, at least.

I think most of the reason I beat the main campaign was so I could go on to re-buy houses and clean them. I never seem able to stick with the decoration phase as long as others in the community; I slap some Landlord White paint onto the walls, drop some flowers, and pick a new place to fix up. I do better with fully building a place from scratch, oddly. My current office in House Flipper 1 is an eerily precise replica of my childhood home. I don’t know what that says about me.

But flipping only gets me so far, and maybe it’s even a little too active when I truly want to zone out. For those hours of the day, I returned to Powerwash Simulator, the cornball that became my game of 2023. The best thing that happened to me over the New Year was discovering that my save was borked, so I had to start from scratch. Don’t threaten me with a good time, I guess. I’m most of the way through the campaign again, and eyeballing the Alice add-on. The Warhammer one was a ton of fun in a nitpicky way, but being all machines makes it less visually exciting.

A watermelon themed portion of a skate park in Powerwash Simulator
*feral noises of satisfaction as things ding to say they’re clean*

There’s also a terrific game along the lines of both these games on Steam that I’ve put a lot of hours into lately, but it’s far too bloody black comedy for our conversation here. I will only say that if you see a highly recommended House Flipper style game but it looks like it takes place in, say, John Wick, it’s probably that.

On That Note: Veering Out of Standard Comfort Zones

Before I get into my other genre of games I return to in between big lulls, I wanted to quickly acknowledge a lot of gamers out there who love lighter games, but have some faves that are big deal comforts, even though they’re not the sort of games we cover here. Everything from Skyrim to Elden Ring can be cozy to somebody, and I think that’s great! Gaming is for everyone!

Monster Hunter Rise shows off a red eyed Nargacuga, a huge feral cat
In their hearts, every cat thinks they’re a house-sized jaguar whose zoomies bring fear to the land.

For me, that slightly edgier cozy game is Monster Hunter. I love the lighter spin-off games, too, like the RPG-styled Stories games. And did you know there was a Japan-only game all about the kitty-cat palicos? I weep that we never got it, as does Yvonne. She even tried playing it on her Japanese DS! But, to me, there’s also something purely great about hunting giant fantastical monsters with even funnier and fantastical giant weapons.

Are these games easy? I would say they’ve gotten a lot more accessible, although easy is probably a stretch. And yet, they’re my top warm blanket games. I started with Freedom Unite on the PSP, which was incredibly difficult back in the day, so the new ones let me really play around with weapons and builds.

You determine your coziness level! Heck, I have a friend who thinks Hollow Knight is cozy. Couldn’t be me. I cannot platform for beans, much less have the patience for its combat more than once every two years. So the upcoming release of Monster Hunter World is keeping me going.

Farming for the Community

Farming sims with engaging, lively communities are catnip to me, which is weird considering I’m pretty introverted if I’m not on a keyboard. Yet there’s only so many times I personally can restart Stardew Valley in a year, so I end up trying out a lot of other ones. I did pick up Fields of Mistria off a recent Steam sale, but I’m also still mostly leaving it alone until the March big update. It looks gorgeous, though, and I’m super impressed with what I already played.

Meditating on a flat stone amidst water and soothing environmental blues in Immortal Life
God, I wish this was me.

What I went back to this New Year, though, is a still lesser-known oddity our site reviewed early last year. Immortal Life is, at first brush, an odd, clunky game, and it doesn’t help that you can’t adjust the clunkiness — which is actually just a standard controller scheme for China — at all. But once you get the muscle memory in, I really do think it’s my second favorite indie farm sim. Between the magic and the gadgets, your friend Wei Hong quickly starts inventing, farming is quick and satisfying, leaving you plenty of time to go do other things.

Bonus, there’s no real time limit on those other things. The whole point of Immortal Life is to work towards becoming an immortal. So who cares if it takes you half a year to get around to building a fishing pier? You get there when you get there. Don’t want to visit the combat zones for a while? Eh, send your brothers and sisters in the sect, and putter around the forest. It feeds my need to have a variety of things to do, all of which do need doing, but, like, not right this minute if I don’t want to. And I found out some recent updates cut the grind of certain things, which has also helped.

Moving on to Spring

If I were a better writer, I’d have a nice way to wrap up all these rambles into something stirring and contemplative, some dang thing about realizing that my gaming habits wind up being things that help me follow schedules, pay attention to details, get things done, and practice socializing with others, but come on. The things we enjoy don’t necessarily reflect on and help us understand ourselves, right?

Oh. Erm. This got awkward.

Maybe I’ll try to clean up at least one of these boxes soon. Preferably before they attack me when I slither past a tall column to get to my exercise bike, which is also shoved in here. I can try, anyway. And that’s all any of us can do, when we come out of our gaming hazes and focus on trying to do our best in a world that’s… that’s… yeah. Let’s just leave it at that, and look out for each other, instead. Because we’re worth it.

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