Granted, there is some minor peril in its near-closing moments, but even that its about jaw-dropping magnificence rather than twitchy action. You glide alongside the shoals, or take occasional rides on the back of larger creatures, and the central thrust is the pure joy of whatever burst of colour and flutter it shows you next. Abzu is tour of an undersea world that basically looks like a megamix of all the most impressive scenes from Blue Planet. There is time (and slow-time) aplenty to place the powerlines and water pumps required to make it all function - to build a city in Skylines is to gently lose yourself in an unhurried world.Ī game about swimming with the fishies, and the prettiest fishies you've ever seen at that. The core Skylines experience is instead calmly 'painting' districts, pipes and roads, the land a canvas for what most pleases your eye. But Skylines has a particularly tranquil and forgiving take on mayoral simulation - you really, really have to work at it to make a catastrophic error, and even if you do, new citizens will cheerfully stroll back in en masse once you've cleared the mess away. Some city-building games, as this is, can be fairly exacting affairs - the constant terror of running out of money or being unable to prevent an entire suburb from burning down does not exactly promote relaxation.
Most of all though, it's the sound and feel of the wind roaring around you that makes this sing: that sense of being in another place, free as a bird. It's beautiful to behold, and it's up to you if you want uninterrupted flight or to try to better your own score in a challenge mode that has you circling or flying through rock formations at speed. Flying, walking, puzzling, driving, building, dreaming, climbing, stretching, swinging (not like that), swimming, wondering: these are just a few of the ways in which flashing pixels can make you feel a very different sort of accomplishment.Īn extremely cheap (£2/$3) wingsuit-based gliding game, in which you can soar freely over a vast voxel landscape. I'm chasing a certain feel rather than a certain category. Primarily we're talking violence-free games here, but I wanted to drill a little deeper than that - so nothing that generally requires a competitive streak. Looking for a broader mixture of games? Check out our regularly updated list of the best PC games you can play right now. I crave an altogether more sedate beginning to next year, and so my mind turns to games in which violence, reflex or any other kind of unblinking attentiveness takes a back seat.
Nerves have been sufficiently jangled as of late, not least thanks to the slew of action packed games that have landed in recent months.