The Games We Play: What the Paste Team Is Playing This Week
Every Friday Paste’s editors, staffers and games contributors share what they’ve been playing that week. New games and old, TV and tabletop, major hits and wild obscurities, action-first knuckle-busters and slow-and-stately brain-stokers: you can expect it all, every week, in The Games We Play.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Platform: Switch
I woke up at 4 a.m. the other day. Wide fucking awake. I’d only been asleep for two hours, but after fighting it for 45 minutes I committed to being awake and logged into the island I share with my partner.
The little blobby personification of me, dressed like a Playmobil Kardashian, walked out the front door of my low-key alpine cottage and smack into Wisp.
He’s a ghost who comes out some nights. I went up to talk to him, and well, I scared the crap out of him.
When Wisp gets scared he jettisons his soul in chunks. Usually he asks me to find them. Usually I do.
But this time, the clock struck 5:01 a.m. right as I was preparing to go track down his missing soulstuff (his biggest fear is losing his soul forever, which is fair, he’s a ghost).
Isabelle interrupted with an announcement. It was a new day on the island of Delaware (really, it’s a peninsula). She talked about her television habits, wished us all a good day, and then I was walking back out of my front door again as the sun rose into the sky.
Wisp was nowhere to be found. I hadn’t gathered the bits of his soul.
Honestly, it’s fucking me up a bit more than I expected. There he was just minding his own anxious business and boom. Now I’ve made his worst fear come true, because I wasn’t paying attention to the time.
I’m really sick of “dark” Animal Crossing. I’m exhausted by the “villager trading is so edgy,” cult of Pietro, stalk market as emblem of capitalism with Tom Nook as its first-against-the-wall hegemon takes. They’re boring, no one really goes anywhere with these ideas or turns them on the players. And they’re just so fucking numerous—like creative writing major dudes who want you to blow them to the Garden State soundtrack.
But the darkness just under the hood of Animal Crossing is undeniable. The candy coating smooths it over and hides some of it, but I just traumatized a ghost.
There’s no real getting around that. Even when we want to.
Hope he gets his soul back one way or another. Sorry, buddy.—Dia Lacina
Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age
Platform: Switch
For some reason, many in the west look at Dragon Quest and think “not for me.” I was the same way—I remember buying Dragon Quest VIII just so I could get my hands on that Final Fantasy XII demo and struggling my way through the first five hours. I decided to retread the series when Dragon Quest XI released back in 2018 and remember thinking… wait, am I actually obsessed with this? From the corny, peasant-like voice acting to the deep character building and gorgeous graphics, Dragon Quest XI is an exercise in camp, tradition, and evolving in the tiniest ways, just enough to keep old diehards onboard and allow for new players to feel like they’re in on the joke. I was also shocked to find a surprisingly emotional storyline and a deft awareness of tropes and how to spin them on their head. It’s no Iliad, but I felt emotionally invested when I expected another grindy 40 hour JRPG.
I’m still not sure what Echoes of an Elusive Age, the game’s enhanced release available only on Switch, actually adds to the game. I’m only a few hours in and wading through a long, long (long) segment spent with Erik, the party’s thief, who for some time has one-sided dialogue with the game’s silent protagonist and therefore woodenly narrates the plot for a little over three hours. I’m eagerly awaiting obtaining Veronica and Serena, the game’s two mage sisters, and I’m even more desperate to reach Sylvando, a foppish circus performer with a buoyant Spanish accent who is perhaps my second favorite videogame character of all time. I’m very eager.
If you’re afraid to commit, Square-Enix very generously offers a 10-hour demo with ultimate freedom—the only content you’re not allowed to access in that time is the special 16-bit graphical mode, which is impressive but little more than a fun added treat. I’m as shocked as you are when I say Dragon Quest XI is one of the best JRPGs ever made.—Editorial Intern Austin Jones
Star Wars: Dark Forces
Platforms: PC, Mac, PlayStation
Here’s a list of things I have typically not done throughout my life:
1. Play Star Wars games
2. Play games with a mouse and keyboard (unless it’s Civilization)
3. Play games in the year 1995
4. Play games on my computer (unless it’s Civilization)
My resolve on that last one has crumbled a bit over the last decade, and the first point was more just circumstance than anything else, but the middle two can’t really be changed. If I somehow could live in 1995 again, playing games wouldn’t be anywhere on my list of priorities. And if your computer game has the option of being played with a controller, I will always take it, without question.
So it’s a little weird that I’ve been playing Star Wars: Dark Forces over the last week.
This 1995 Stars Wars shooter won’t work with the controller I have for my PC. It’s a game that I have no nostalgia for, in a genre that I avoided until the late ‘00s, from a series that I’ve never cared about outside of the movies. And yet I’m playing and greatly enjoying this silly old thing.
Forget all the parts where people talk—I couldn’t care less about this Kyle dude—but Dark Forces has some of the twistiest and most inventive level design of its time. It’s a clear bridge between the flat, single-level spaces of Doom and the sprawling, vertically spacious maps that shooters would be build around by the late ‘90s, which makes it fun to explore in ways that most early first-person shooters weren’t. The Star Wars dressing is fine—the sounds of Star Wars will always trigger something positive in my brain, even if the mid ‘90s graphics are too rudimentary to faithfully recreate the look of Lucas’s world—but the levels of Dark Forces are so well-crafted that any kind of setting would work just as well. Given the game’s quality and popularity, it’s surprising that there hasn’t been a modern remaster or remake.—Senior Editor Garrett Martin
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