Some Alternatives for the Bored Gamer

I love Battle Royale in Fortnite the way that an 11-year-old loves … hmm, also Fortnite. It is the perfect game and right about now, the only place where I can’t feel the sweaty cold hand of anxiety gripping my heart. Fortnite has just enough emotional candy, enough threat balanced with hilarity; it’s sometimes really hard and sometimes easy; it has goals that you can take very seriously or not at all.

But everyone who likes a battle royale format eventually has to try other games in the genre. For people who don’t play games, “battle royale” means, basically, a big, sprawling Thunderdome-style brawl. Twenty or 100 or whatever people enter some land mass, either on teams or alone, and then kill everyone else — or do other stuff (like run around as a snowman, or catch fish) while everyone kills everyone else.

I really wanted to be a Call of Duty: Warzone kind of person. That’s got slick, militaristic, shoot-em-in-the-face mayhem. My male friends all like it, shouting and grunting into their slippery little gamer headsets. But it makes me feel bad and I’m not good at it.

Truth be told, I’m way more Realm Royale. It’s not really clear how many people play this game, but as long as the realm’s lights are on, its weird, clunky, magical, cartooney universe can be very comforting. You drop into some sort of messed up and badly drawn Earthsea island, looting chests (and shoving things into some incomprehensible inventory system) and then beat up your fellow elves or paladins or whatever. Maybe they’re all bots! Who knows! (The color palette is a bit diseased; so many purples and greens!) It’s familiar enough for Fortnite players while having a cute and chunky cadence all its own, and a nice long learning curve to keep your messed-up mind occupied.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/arts/video-games-alternatives-coronavirus-covid-virus.html