Stardew Valley
I’ve known about Stardew Valley for years but never really bothered to play it because the mood wasn’t right, I guess. I decided to give it a go, being stuck on the couch as I was, and for the most part, I really enjoyed it! It was a really nice distraction from post-surgery pain and brain fog, but only just. It’s a very grindy game, which is fine, but after a few days of playing, I got a little bored with it. I don’t know if more of a story develops at some point in the game, but I got bored of the repetition, with no real end goal in sight. I think it’s a fine enough game to pick up now and then, but not one I want to dedicate a lot of attention to at once.
Heaven’s Vault

I so badly wanted to love this game. It’s an award winning game by Inkle, the same studio who did the Sorcery! games, which I absolutely loved years ago, so I thought I would really enjoy it. The concept hooked me immediately—archaeology, lost languages, puzzles, interplanetary travel, and a mystery to boot! It’s everything I love! However, when I started to play, I almost immediately lost interest. I don’t know if it was the combination of post-surgery brain fog, pain medicine, or the difficulty of reading the text from the distance between the couch and the TV, but I found it really boring. I tried picking it up a few more times after that first week, but I could never really get into it. The puzzles with the language translations are really obtuse, and for the most part, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing or where I was supposed to go at any given time. The art was really pretty, but the gameplay itself was too jarring, awkward, and difficult to follow. I gave up on it.
Untitled Goose Game

An easy favorite for most people who pick it up, Untitled Goose Game is a relatively mindless game, solving puzzles while causing chaos and being a silly goose. I greatly enjoyed playing through it, though I didn’t come close to finding all the hidden quests or completing it 100%. It was probably the best distraction in those early days of recovery.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
Donut County
This was a weird one I found on Xbox Game Pass. You start the game as a raccoon donut delivery guy, who instead of delivering donuts, delivers a hole to the address that you then control to consume everything in sight. It’s like a weird version of Katamari. It was a fun little distraction, but the levels are too small and too short, I think, and the game is bogged down by a lot of back-and-forth between characters. There is a little bit of a story, but I feel like they could have scaled back on the dialogue quite a bit. It’s a silly game, and you can pretty quickly skip all of the dialogue, so if you have the Xbox Game Pass, you might give it a go. (Though, it just made me want to play Katamari again.)
Call of the Sea
This was probably my favorite game that I played during recovery,
by far. I did a write up for the blog last month, in case you missed it, but it
was absolutely everything I could have asked for in a puzzle-based mystery
adventure game. It delivered on everything that I had hoped Heaven’s Vault
would be and totally blew me away. I highly recommend it.
My husband and I had our anniversary while I was recovering from surgery, and he gifted me Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. He’s played through all of the main games, but I never have—not being the biggest science fiction person. When the Legendary Edition was announced, I thought it could be cool to play through them for the first time, but I held off on buying it as I was busy playing other games at the moment. I haven’t gotten very far (I just left the Citadel on my first mission as Commander of the Normandy) but I’m enjoying it a lot. I like the focus on dialogue and spending as much time as you want exploring an area, or a subject, and the number of side quests available so far. I made an older, gray-haired Commander Shepherd named Selena, and I’m leaning toward Paragon. (Though I accidentally messed up one quest and ended up getting some points in Renegade. Oops.) I’m looking forward to continuing the story.
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