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

For all my artistic and countercultural interests, for all that I am a critic who prides himself on playing a wide variety of games, I have fairly little history with what are colloquially called “art games” or “arthouse games.” These are games that largely (if not entirely, or exclusively) eschew mass commercial appeal in favor of personal expression or provocation or meaning. I’ve played many games that people use as examples when discussing games as an artistic medium – Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, killer7, Night in the Woods – but these are all still fairly commercial projects. Two of those are owned by Sony! Killer7 was explicitly made as a sexy GameCube exclusive! Most arthouse games are simply ignored by the largest games press; they rarely enter the largest game award shows and get their largest accolades at independent shows. I have engaged with interactive art that exists on a lower scale of commercial aims, but not much, and certainly far less than I’d like to or think I should. As a critic, specifically, though I think we should always try to broaden our horizons a bit.

This small bit of frustration reached a fever on the 14th, when I learned of a sale from the soon to be defunct game publisher Nakana.io (a sale I actually did reference in the comments when it happened, so forgive me for repeating myself). From then until the end of the month, all ten of the games it published on the Switch – and, seemingly, only on the Switch – have been discounted to an absurd degree. Everything’s down to two bucks; if your Switch account owns even one, they go even further down to ten cents. While I don’t like to treat price as this paramount thing for art, this sale excited me. Within a couple days, I bought the whole thing. And yesterday, after playing way too much Chibi-Robo, I started the first game I bought: Cosmic Top Secret.

Cosmic Top Secret is a “semi-” or “pseudo-” or something close to autobiographical game in which director Trine Laier investigates her parents’ work as spies for the Danish government. You see cardboard cutouts of her parents. You walk through areas made out of documents she’s found, dozens of pictures of weapons, profiles, codes, and video interview footage. These are, according to the game, all real. While there are 3D platforming “collect-at-thon” elements, puzzles, and other features that are fairly traditional video game challenges, the experience so far has primarily been in my own head. I’m watching footage of her dad and trying to guess exactly what of what he’s saying is true or not. I’m reading a profile they had of Nikita Khrushchev (who I guess her dad stalked, or at least surveilled? Maybe?!) and idly wondering how it was written. I only played the tutorial and first main level, and I suspect the experience will be more satisfying if I take it in parts, but I quite like it. It’s very intimate, far more so than most video games are allowed to be but also not “oversharing” in the way some video games get away with. It also looks very weird in a way that no publisher of size would ever allow in our Ultra 4K era, and it’s both exciting and kinda hard to look at in a way that I find exciting.

I’m looking forward to seeing more of it, and the other Nakana games, too. EQQ0, Infini, and Aggro are probably the next three that stand out to me. And I’d like to explore more games like this. Which leads me to my prompt: what is your history with this kind of arthouse game, and which of them would you recommend the most? I’m not sure how much I’d be able to get to, but I’d love some suggestions. Because really, this is all about me, and getting the very smart people here to suggest things I can experience later.

If you’d rather I do the work myself, then, as always, what did you play this weekend?