Games I Played in May 2026

Night in the Woods

Steam | itch.io

I wanted therapy in the form of a video game. I got it. I’ve played the opening parts of Night in the Woods before and the setting really grabbed me. I wouldn’t consider myself to be from a small town, especially not in a way that people beyond my own street ever knew me or even my name. But the feeling of coming back home after time at college still rang true. Playing it again some time later, now well out of college for good, the vibes still hit. I’m not a dropout like Mae is, but the feeling of “Your plans changed and now life keeps going” is one that’s often hard to wrestle with.

This game’s cast is so good. The tense yet still caring relationship between Bea and Mae is incredible. The “you annoy me so much on my bad days but they’d be so much worse if I knew you were gone” energy reminds me so much of a certain time in my life. And while I spent less time with Gregg, the balance between self-destructive behavior and trying to be there for others, look I began by saying this is therapy in the form of a video game. And that doesn’t even touch on Mae’s struggles with dissociation which in a game full of familiarity is like having my name be yelled at me from the screen. I didn’t mention Angus. Angus is great too.

The main plot doesn’t entirely mesh with the setting. In a way that fits Mae’s perspective really well - she’s latching onto this grand larger-than-life conspiracy affecting her home and friends after time away in order to distance herself from the mundanity of needing to pay an expensive bill. But there are a few moments, especially the climax, where it feels like we definitely moved past a couple things way too easily. Again, I can see an intention with handling the story that way, but it does distract me a little from the rest of the experience. Which is a shame, because the smoother parts are so immersive. This world feels truly lived in, and the open invitation to replay it to give more time to parts of it I left underexplored is a very tempting one. Plus, there’d be more chances to play bass badly to songs I don’t even know, and who doesn’t like that?

Earthbound

Nintendo Switch Online

“Earthbound fan excited to finally play it for the” HEY! HEY! This was my SECOND time!^[1] How do I even begin to talk about Earthbound. It’s a game that knows itself better than the majority of its players do. That sounds like a meaningless statement, but each step of this game’s journey is weird and sometimes confrontational, and yet they all feel completely at home with each other. Even following a woman into a hotel room where you’re ambushed by zombies sounds like a nonsense plot point but just… feels like Earthbound when you sit down and play the parts before and after it as well? Like, immediately before that you arrive in this city by riding in the tour van of a band whose debts you just paid off and scare off all the ghosts in the connecting tunnel because the music is just that loud, and afterwards you play as a new character who rides the Loch Ness monster to Stonehenge, where his emotionally-distant father gives him the keys to a bladeless airship that crashes into a graveyard. This is the game where you open a dungeon by standing outside a waterfall without pressing any buttons for three minutes and then the boss of the dungeon is a pile of vomit that is weak to honey.

But I’m not talking about Earthbound yet. I’m pointing at a few choice moments and going “Gods this game has a strange but good vibe.” Earthbound is weird - it’s a game where battles are turn-based but your health decreases in real-time. Earthbound is weird - Ness is your tank, most consistent healer, and has the strongest basic attack, meanwhile Poo struggles to have any identity in battle. Earthbound is weird - you have a very limited inventory in a game where you need to have a specific item to collect the money you earn from winning battles. I have been trying to write my thoughts about this game that I’ve known so much about for so many years for two months and I’m still struggling.

If you have any interest in Earthbound, play it. Take your time. Talk to the characters in towns. Let yourself be lost in its strange world. It is one of the most mainstream examples of “weird art” I know of, and yet it’s still so proudly unique even after so much time.