Happy Monday, folks! Welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread.

…You know, I realize there was a great prompt for me to use. See, my expanded family’s in town today, and their new Switch owners. You know, I’ve asked before about good accessible and casual and cozy games the console, especially ones for young children. And really, that should be the prompt here. If you’d like to provide suggestions, I would absolutely love them. Call it a secret double prompt.

Unfortunately, that idea came to me mere seconds after uploading the image you see before you, one I took a day or two ago for a prompt I had been thinking of since I started my second playthrough of Xenoblade Chronicles 3. See, while many of the quests in Xenoblade 3 are ones NPCs go out of their way to give you, a ton aren’t. You have to eavesdrop on characters, listen to them gossip about problems, and once your party sits down to lunch and discusses what they heard, that causes the quest to officially start.

So on its face, this idea is kinda dumb. It adds one blunt step on the way to the quest itself, demanding you listen to things that are normally given to you. I recently watched Patrick Gil’s video on Red Dead Redemption 2 and how it’s full of “complexity without challenge”—things that exist for some sense of verisimilitude but either add nothing to or actively limit the depth of the gameplay—and such a system fits within that framework. But I think this quest thing manages to add something, since there’s a narrative component. Xenoblade 3 is a game about six characters and their relationship, and it throws so much into this. This idea of having them discuss the issues of the day directly is part of that. It also gives a sense of weight, since all of these are presented as pressing issues for communities you’ve both liberated and set adrift from their militarist worlds (and you’re choosing to listen in and help, not helping because you see something with an exclamation point over their head). This is strange, but

This has led me to a prompt about strange, obtuse, and somewhat “un-smooth” mechanics. Things that are designed to be deliberately pushy, I suppose. I don’t mean mechanics that are based around actively hindering and threatening the player, like tank controls in a horror game or stamina limits in every other game. Just things that take an extra step or demand a little work that you don’t expect from a “normal” modern game. These can be annoying, but looking at this quest voyeurism makes me interested in seeing other games or forms this might take. If you have an example of something like this that you like, I’d love to hear about it. I’m sure most examples will be negative, and that’s fine, but I’m primarily interested personally in forms this takes that you found powerful or additive.

Anyway, what did you play this weekend?