I am a big fan of comfort media. The playlists you constantly return to when you’re alone on the train. The movies you watch when you’re sick or it’s a rainy day. The books you reread again and again until the pages are practically falling out. The paintings you go to in the National Gallery when you’re having a rough day and need to be reminded of a moment of beauty in the world. Returning to works of art like these is an act of nostalgia and an act of reflection. You’re reminded of who you were when you first fell in love with the works, and you’re pushed to think about who you are now. For me, that’s never more true than when you replay old video games: branching paths, improving skills, changing builds all are concrete examples of how different the You is now from the You you were. And so, for my final article with TN2, I hope you’ll allow me this self-indulgence to reflect on some of my favourite comfort games and give you the excuse to return to some classics from your past.
Tetris is the perfect game. There are literally no ways to improve Tetris. Avid readers of TN2 will have noted that in every article I have written over the course of the year, there has been at least one reference to Tetris. Tetris is the most recent comfort game for me, despite it being the oldest comfort game on my list. I got into Tetris in the year of our lord, 2020. I was stuck at home for months without the funds to purchase a console and so, one day, I just typed “Tetris online” into my browser and away I went. The first time you play Tetris, you will likely get mildly overwhelmed. It’s intense. It’s a lot. It goes at a steady, unrelenting pace that makes it feel like the walls are closing in on you and no amount of pushing and shoving will slow them down. That first Game Over screen is demoralising, but also encouraging. You know you can do better. So you try again and that score is a little bit higher, and again, and again and again. That initial feeling – the inescapable pressure of the falling blocks – stops being a cause of stress and becomes the defining pull factor to playing again. When you play Tetris, you Play Tetris. The world around you dissolves into colours and shapes and you are cut off from reality in a way that I have never felt before in a game. It took the solitary, loneliness of lockdown and turned that into a positive.
Tetris stayed on the backburner for me for quite some time, with the purchase of my Switch Tetris Effect became a mainstay. But it sort of held the same space in my life: a solitary escape for me alone. This changed on March 19th, when I played Tetris on the arcade machine in Token against my friend. She absolutely destroyed me and managed to get the 8th highest score on the machine. But suddenly, this thing that had been solitary and self-driven, became somewhat competitive, but more importantly cooperative. We stood there cheering each other on, encouraging each other. Afterwards I realised that she too had had a Tetris phase in her past. It was a penny drop moment for me where I suddenly realised that this thing that had been a comfort and escape for me, had also been the same for so many people. Now, when I play, I’m reminded that, despite enjoying it as a solitary experience, I am not alone.
The most excited I’ve ever felt driving home after buying a game was in 2008 with the purchase of Mario Kart Wii. It was the kind of can’t-sit-still excitement that you only really have when you’re eight years old. I took out the plastic steering wheel, I read the manual under the passing street lights. From the second it entered my Wii, until I eventually moved consoles, it became a fixture. It was the game to play. Still when I’m asked my favourite tracks of all-time, I think of Maple Treeway, Coconut Mall, and Moo Moo Meadows. It was my first ever online gaming experience, spending late nights attempting to connect to Nintendo’s servers in rural Meath only to come dead last. In fact, I’m the youngest in my house; I always came dead last, often not even being given the chance to finish the race and getting last minute Bullet Bills to propel me to slightly-less-behind-but-crucially-still-last-place. Yet, despite my lack of prowess, it was always fun. I never felt demoralised in loss, I just loved the excitement of the race. I would drive around tracks backwards, look for the secret shortcuts, pick a CPU to be my enemy and target them with all my items. I spent hours with my brothers trying to unlock every character and every kart. It is such a simple game that provides such simple pleasures.
I still play Mario Kart 8, and I presumed it was basically the same but with a bit more polish. Recently, however, I returned to Mario Kart Wii and it just felt right. The races felt claustrophobic and chaotic without the modern iteration’s underwater and sky driving which opens up many more paths. The characters looked chunky; the sounds felt robotic. Your kart felt like it was fighting against you. Mario Kart Wii is not a perfect game, in fact objectively it’s not even the best Mario Kart. But all of those imperfections, those little quirks, the inclusion of Funky Kong, are all the things that make me love it. It’s your favourite jumper that has a hole in it. It’s the oven pizza that tastes a little bit like cardboard. It’s the movie where you can see the strings controlling the puppet. It’s all the comfort and the magic of your first childhood experiences.
As I said above, I’m the youngest in my household and so, I got used to watching games and not playing them. I would take the controller for a level or two, but most of my experience with older games is as a passive observer, rather than Player 1. The first game I wanted to play – and I mean really wanted to play – was Kingdom Hearts. For those who don’t know, Kingdom Hearts is a crossover series between Final Fantasy and Disney. It began on the Playstation 2, our first household console. The story is an absolute mess with lore that grows and builds upon itself with the coherency of your least favourite amatuer improv group. It is a ludicrous melodrama that seven year old me thought was the highest form of art. I’ve watched the opening cinematic more times than I can count. I would start new games just to watch that intro (a HD – by 2002’s standards – surrealist cutscene set to Hikari Otaku’s ‘Simple and Clean’) and play through the tutorial (a dream sequence with a choral score and stained glass floors which disappear underneath you while a narrator says things like “Take your time. Don’t be afraid. The door is still shut.”) The mystery, the intrigue, the drama, the romance of that first instalment, when paired with the silliness and familiarity of all my Disney favourites, was a game that felt like it had been designed for me. Even watching playthroughs of the tutorial for the sake of this article still gives me butterflies.
As the series went on and became more and more convoluted, I lost track. I missed out on Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep (yes, dear reader, all of the spin-offs have ridiculous names) because I didn’t own a PSP, I never finished Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, and I played Kingdom Hearts Re:coded out of a sense of duty rather than any love of the game itself. Kingdom Hearts 3 is out now and is supposedly the conclusion to the series (though since writing this they have announced Kingdom Hearts 4), yet I have not even attempted to buy it. I adore the first game with all my heart, but every entry since has been diminishing returns. I don’t think that Kingdom Hearts is necessarily better than any of the subsequent instalments, but it is mine. It was the first game that I truly loved, it’s the game I could replay over and over and over again, it’s the game whose soundtrack still plays on repeat in my head as I’m walking around. It’s a messy, silly, ridiculous game, but it’s the game that showed me what games could do, how they could make you feel. I think if someone came to it now, they would find a strange, clunky, cringey, awkward game that takes itself way too seriously. But when I play it, I see that game that was once the highest form of art. To me, it still is.
Comfort gaming puts you back in the shoes of your younger self. It reawakens muscle memory that you thought was long gone. It asks you to recall the secret paths in Coconut Mall. It lures you into a 15 minute Tetris break in the middle of studying. It reminds you of everything you loved when you were seven years old and your entire world was inside your PS2. It’s a way of reacquainting yourself with the versions of you from the past and a way of reminding yourself that they are not very far out of reach at all.
