Friend Off is a web-based multiplayer game I made over the past year. In it, you ask your friends a question, receive all of their answers without their names attached, and then try to guess who said what. It’s free and open source software, so anyone is welcome to play any time by visiting friendoff.net. Why? During the COVID-19 pandemic, my friends occasionally hosted trivia games over teleconferencing services. This was charming but labor-intensive.

Firewatch may be the most popular video game in the “walking simulator” genre. I played three other walking simulators before checking it out because I wanted a solid basis for understanding its success. While most folks will be able to appreciate the game on its own merit, this context certainly helped me understand its particular strengths. Like Virginia, Firewatch uses a cell-shaded visual style, rendering objects in hyper-simplified form. That’s probably easier to do in Virginia’s urban setting, but Firewatch makes it work for a natural environment.

For kids raised on 90’s-era Saturday Night Live, the name “Jack Handey” is synonymous with “Deep Thoughts”–absurd observations read by Phil Hartman and sprinkled throughout many episodes. I learned that the name belongs to a living, breathing comedy writer (and not just a character for the bit) when he started publishing essays in “The New Yorker.” These were like long-form Deep Thoughts: completely random and hopelessly naive. I couldn’t get enough.

Years ago, Michal Zalewski wrote a widely-circulated essay titled “Disaster planning for regular folks”. I read it because I was a fan of his 2011 book, “The Tangled Web” and because I retained an interest in emergency preparedness from my scouting days. It was entertaining and informative, and it inspired me to make some substantial improvements to my own emergency plans. When Zalewski announced Practical Doomsday last year, I pre-ordered it immediately.

Much like Tenth of December, George Saunders’ Pastoralia is a collection of fascinating yet cynical character studies. Whether portraying a troubled kid, a self-absorbed barber, or a hack writer, he’s consistently focused on the flaws of his subjects. And here again, Saunders often provides characterization by fusing a subject’s tone with a third-person perspective. The narrative trick is fun on its own, but it also makes the stream-of-conscious writing feel surprisingly authentic.

What Remains of Edith Finch? is a walking simulator and a frame story. It’s tragic and beautiful and best experienced alongside a friend or two. If you haven’t played, and any of that sounds promising to you, then I suggest you stop here and go play it. The spoilers below are minor, but the less you know to start, the better. The environment is beautiful and detailed. Books, heirlooms, photographs, and other knick-knacks fill Edith’s childhood home.

Death by Design is a two-issue one-shot that has the Dark Knight solving a mystery in a 1940’s-era Gotham. I’m a sucker for a self-contained Batman book, so this has been on my list since it was published back in 2012. The first thing to note is the fantastic art direction. Dave Taylor sticks to pencils with limited color for highlights like the Joker’s hair, the glow of computer terminals, and (my favorite) the light pollution from street-level Gotham.

For the second game in my introduction to walking simulators, I chose Variable State’s Virginia. It’s easy to talk about gameplay. As a walking simulator, Virginia limits your interaction significantly. You move through environments and press a button to interact with people and objects. This design won’t satisfy players looking for a challenge, but it’s not intended to. On the other hand (and in concert with the distinctive editing direction, described below), it’s great for casual players who’d like to share the experience.

In Perhaps the Stars, things get weird. And for a series that OPENS with a sage being restrained by a serial killer after witnessing a boy resurrect a toy soldier, that’s saying something. New themes of identity and destiny join familiar ones like gender, violence, sex, and religion, and author Ada Palmer pushes them all to twist the plot in unnerving directions. Due to catastrophes in critical infrastructure, it plays out in a context that’s surprisingly distinct from the preceding three novels.

In The Road to Unfreedom, historian Timothy Snyder attempts to explain the state of Western democracy in 2018 with an analysis of Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, and the US. Although he casts a wide net (reaching back 1,000 years to the Viking King Volodymyr/Valdemar), he gets a surprising amount of mileage by focusing on “just” the last decade or so. But it’s easy to fool a historically-challenged computer programmer like me.