Last month I bought Cairn - a game I’d been waiting for. It’s a rock climbing game. It’s got a novel, unforgiving climbing mechanic, and a story that’s set up to explore some complex themes. I booted it up, played through a few hours. I enjoyed the rock climbing - it was cool. I did some bouldering here and there in the past, and it was fun translating some knowledge into a video game. I enjoyed tactile inventory management as stuff swished around in my backpack.

And I understood that this game would be about perseverance, about overcoming a towering mountain ahead of you, one tiny step at a time. I could tell the game’s narrative would match the mechanical gameplay - I could see it in the setup and the care the developer put into some of the early dialog.

But I just don’t have the energy. I can’t persevere. I’m tired. So I give myself permission to abandon the game early on, and do so with much respect for the title.

Aava, protagonist of Cairn, climbing a narrow mountain crevice. Image courtesy of The Game Bakers. I love everything about Cairn - the climbing mechanics, the tactility, the protagonist Aava… And yet, I just can’t play it today.

This experience is not limited to Cairn. Lots of great, highly acclaimed, love-filled titles - titles which I want to enjoy - are not meeting me where I am in life.

I could see the storytelling potential of Unpacking - a game about navigating a person’s life from teenage years into adulthood through unpacking their belongings - but I just didn’t have the patience to sit through its flavor of slow-paced gameplay. I’ve read incredible things about Pathologic 2 - which seems like my type of weird, attrition-driven, survival-ish narrative game. It’s a game which should be made for me - but every time I tried booting it up, I just couldn’t push through.

Unpacking asked for my patience when I didn’t have it. Pathologic 2 asked me to suffer at a time in my life where I didn’t want to. Cairn asked for perseverance - and I’m somewhat at my limit at the moment.

At first I thought this was a “I have a kid, so I don’t have energy” issue. I have a toddler with whom I want to spend more time, and same goes for my wife - with whom I haven’t connected as much since my kiddo was born. I have a job, too, and that takes up energy. But Pathologic 2 and Unpacking were both before my kid was born.

A shadowed figure of a man attacking the knife-wielding protagonist. Image courtesy of Ice-Pick Lodge. Pathologic 2 is tense, depressing, thoughtful, messy… There are hard, meaningful choices at every step. That’s everything I love, and yet - it wasn’t the right time in my life.

Now you might think my thesis is that games shouldn’t be asking for too much. And that’s not true at all. I love when games ask me to invest - these truly are the best, most impactful games I’ve ever played. The fault doesn’t lie with the games.

I can guess that without pushing through every step in Cairn, I wouldn’t get the deep satisfaction of conquering the mountain - and overcoming or coming to terms with whatever haunts the protagonist Aava. Without patiently sorting through every sock in Unpacking, you wouldn’t get fantastic narrative moments - like finding out that there’s nowhere to put your university diploma after moving in with a boyfriend. I’m sure there was more to come. And Pathologic 2… Well, I don’t quite understand what it’s about, and I’m pretty sure people who played it don’t understand much either - but I’m sure suffering and attrition is instrumental to exploring whichever themes Pathologic explores.

I have my own attrition war going. My toddler licks shoes sometimes. And then shares her food with me. That she already chewed. While I’m not paying attention. My daughter’s winning: I don’t exactly have the perseverance or patience to spare, and I have plenty of suffering thank you very much. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a torture of my own choosing - and I have the cutest toddler on the block (sorry, Katie), and I wouldn’t trade this for anything else - but the energy I have for engaging with games is… different.

A college dorm room with a few opened moving boxes in it. Image courtesy of Witch Beam. Unpacking’s flavor of environmental storytelling was so clever - not a single word of exposition, not a line of dialogue. Yet, because you unpack the protagonist’s every possession, every time they move - you learn everything about them.

So what did I do instead of playing Cairn? I went through a few runs of Barony - a first-person roguelike dungeon crawler - all of which ended by me getting crushed by a boulder. It was familiar, simple, and demanded nothing from me other than acceptance of the impermanence of each run. I booted up my old favorite Risen - an older RPG from the studio behind Gothic. I played through the opening hours of a Total Warhammer campaign. Comfort - I went to my comfort titles.

And that’s fine, and I’m pretty damn proud of myself for not forcing these games upon myself, despite how much I want to experience all the genre-defining and pop-culture-driving goodness. Barony didn’t redefine dungeon crawlers. Risen didn’t push the RPG genre forward. Total Warhammer is pretty awesome, but I did play it for hundreds and hundreds of hours. These are good games, and these games don’t ask much from me - and they’re meeting me where I am - without much to give.