The only game I play on my phone is Minesweeper
I recently got an ad for Solitaire 95 on Instagram. I don’t know what I did to piss Instagram off so much it put me in the demographic of ‘people who play Bejeweled Blitz on non-timed mode,’ but the ad worked, because I downloaded the game. I enjoyed the novelty of the classic Windows 95 tabs and the iconic pixelated palm tree cards for one game before I forgot about it, but the experience did get me thinking about when I moved to New York City three years ago from South Korea, and the first time I saw someone on the subway playing Solitaire on their phone.
Trains in South Korea run with impeccable precision, the subways are spotless, and there’s fast Wi-Fi onboard on every line. Things are different in New York City. One time, a rat came aboard my train and all hell broke loose until someone kicked it so hard it hit the wall and died. It was the most bonded I have ever felt to other New Yorkers — and this happened around Christmas, adding to the holiday magic. The point is, this is the kind of MTA service we’re dealing with here, so of course there’s no Wi-Fi, which makes playing mobile games that need an internet connection hard.
This is actually good in its own way, because New Yorkers use their time on the subway to read or listen to podcasts, and it definitely motivated me to pick up my Kindle again. But sometimes you just want to idly waste time on a pointless game when you’re bored!
NOW I HAVE BECOME ONE OF THE VERY PEOPLE I HAVE MOCKED
In Seoul, I was working in game localization at a mobile game studio, and sometimes I’d see people playing our games on the subway. It was always a thrill, but short-lived, as the mobile game industry shifted so fast that every few weeks, there was another new game that people had already moved on to. Still, it was the fast internet that made playing MMORPGs on the train possible, and for three years on my daily commute, I saw every different kind of mobile game you could think of on the screens I’d peek over at.
Moving back to America after living in Korea was like stepping into a time warp. I couldn’t believe people were still playing Candy Crush, or even worse, 2048. To me, this was like walking into an all-you-can-eat buffet and only eating spoonfuls of ketchup. But now I have become one of the very people I have mocked. I exclusively play Minesweeper on my phone, because I saw someone playing it on the very subway I love to hate on.
I was on the train this week when I noticed a woman playing Minesweeper on her iPhone. There are a ton of Minesweeper games in the App Store, but I’ve never been able to find the right one, and here was someone in front of me, mining away. But she had her AirPods in, so I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt her to ask which Minesweeper game it was. I imagined a scenario in my head in which I would timidly ask her what game she was playing, and she’d look at me like I was a feral animal who’d never had the classic Windows game suite of 3D Pinball and FreeCell (which to this day, I have no idea how to play. Show me one person who knows how to play FreeCell), much less heard of Minesweeper.
So after downloading a bunch of different Minesweepers from the App Store, I finally found the version she was playing. It’s Minesweeper Q by Spica, and it has the best UX you need to play the game on a phone: a quick flagging mode, and a quick open feature when you tap a number next to a flag. I’m glad I didn’t have to ask her for it, because she seemed kind of rude when she was pushing people to leave the train at her stop. But without her, I never would have been reunited with the first game I obsessed over as a procrastinating high schooler. Now I never need to find another game to play on my phone when the train’s been stalled for 30 minutes in a dark tunnel somewhere in Brooklyn. So thank you, rude stranger.
Midnight Scenes are the perfect Halloween weekend bite-sized games
It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.
Midnight Scenes is a series of short, spooky games that feels like an interactive take on The Twilight Zone. Developed by Octavi Navarro, who also made The Librarian, the games capture the feel of the TV series with the same iconic black-and-white aesthetic and similar settings and stories. More importantly, the same creepiness and tension that made The Twilight Zone so influential also permeate both games.
The first episode, called “The Highway,” was released last September. It follows Claire, a young woman driving along a highway one night only to encounter an electrical pole that’s fallen across the road. Since there are live electrical wires on the pole, she can’t move it, and so goes in search of a telephone or way to move the pole safely. Each step along the way toward her goals leads her farther from the road but closer to understanding the strange circumstances that caused the pole to fall across the road in the first place.
The second episode, “The Goodbye Note,” is framed around Richard P. Griffin writing a letter to his wife. The note recounts the events of the previous 24 hours so that she might understand why he’d been acting strangely and suddenly had to drop everything and fly to Washington, DC. There is a franticness to this episode as you try to keep Richard one step ahead of whatever is chasing after him.
Both episodes are point-and-click adventure games. You have to click on a location in order to move a character to that spot, but you also have to collect a small inventory of items that you use to solve puzzles. You might find a hammer and nail, for instance, that you’ll need later to hammer a board into place. The puzzles are used sparingly, and they aren’t particularly difficult. Their effectiveness, instead, comes from when and how they are deployed.
Puzzles in Midnight Scenes are often used to draw out a moment as a way to increase the tension by having you spend time traveling somewhere to get something. This gives you plenty of time to think about all of the weird things the game could scare you with. These scenarios can also put you into a moment that feels desperate or frantic, and the act of trying to solve the puzzle feels scary in itself. It’s a bit like finding the only escape car in a slasher movie but not having the keys. You can see the keys locked inside the car, so you need to quickly figure out how to break in with what you have around you before the killer shows up.
Normally, you can go about the game at your own pace. Depending on how worried you are about jump-scares, you might move slower or be more hesitant to interact with things since you know those interactions might trigger… something. But in these more frantic moments, you feel pushed to be less cautious, to get out of your comfort zone and be riskier.
It’s this interaction that makes Midnight Scenes so good. The stories aren’t inherently scary, but the way you’re forced into action is. Being asked to click on a window to look through it, even when you know something bad is going to happen, is a lot more compelling and tense than watching a character do it on their own. It modernizes the familiar Twilight Zone-style of storytelling in a way that captures the feeling of watching the show with a new style of scare.
Fallout 76 on the Nintendo Switch isn’t ‘doable’, says Bethesda
It appears that one platform Fallout 76 won’t appear on is the Nintendo Switch. The game was first announced back in June for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC, but during a panel at an Australian convention this weekend, Bethesda executive Pete Hines noted that while the studio considered the console, it just “wasn’t doable.”
During the panel, Hines said that the Switch “is part of every conversation with dev we have now about what we’re doing going forward because we consider it to be a viable platform,” but indicated that Fallout 76 wouldn’t be ported over.
The studio has thrown its weight behind the Switch, releasing ports for games like Skyrim, Doom, and Wolfenstein II. According to GameSpot, Hines indicated that “the next Wolfenstein” game will be on the console.
Fallout 76 will be released on November 14th.