Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

The latest chapter of Deltarune released last week, and I tore into it over three days. There’s a lot to say about it, much of which constitutes a spoiler and none of which I’d spoil for a header. That’s the Wolfman Jew promise to you. However, I don’t feel scared to mention that Deltarune Chapter 5: Festival Day does give us another look at its unnamed village setting, and an event that the previous four chapters have been setting up. What happens in Festival Day? You’ll just have to play it yourself to find out. But looking over the images I had and what I considered the least laden with narrative and mechanical spoilers, it did make me think about Hometown as a whole. It is very much like other eccentric small towns in games, movies, literature, and especially TV shows, eccentric and homey and pretty creepy. It’s what many of us are used to after Twin Peaks.

Of course, that isn’t the only way to do a hometown. Many role-playing games have a bucolic and relatively safe first town for their new hero to triumphantly leave. There are also sandbox games set in a smaller community, whether that’s Springfield in the innumerable Simpsons games or Twilight Princess‘ Ordon Village or the also very Twin Peaks-inspired towns of Bright Falls and Greenvale. Those are both horror games, and Silent Hill has… well, Silent Hill. Smaller towns are kind of interesting from a purely mechanical sense, since they demand a level of specificity that can often work against the technical limitations or expectations.

Anyway, this is a somewhat nebulous prompt: what are your favorite small towns, villages, hamlets, or communities in video games? I’m certainly expecting a few examples from JRPGs, survival horror, action-adventures, maybe even a platformer or two.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend?