Conveyance is the ability of a game to express to players what the goals and mechanics are. There is an incorrect assumption that complexity or difficulty are limiting factors to conveyance when targeting children. While genres such Kazio Mario or Soulslike may be incredibly difficult, they are made deliberately “readable” to allow players to focus on their execution without confusion of design intent.

It’s always someone’s first time experiencing anything, especially when welcoming them into a new hobby such as video games.

[Editor’s Note: Crossplay does not promote or encourage piracy. Under no circumstances is this article an encouragement to seek out illegal copies of video games, old or new. No such links exist in this piece. Our position is you take advantage of the games you already own.]

Watching parents and children learn a new way to play while my team prototyped Starlink: Battle for Atlas at Ubisoft Toronto ¹ we observed that new players would stop exploring the controller and gameplay once any path to success was found. Switching weapons to target elemental weakness was not immediately obvious to players because doing any damage, even ‘chip’ damage, was perceived as successful. Aligning player perception to design intent is a hurdle for many games ².

With the decision to progress our six-year-old from family to independent play of video games this holiday season, selecting games with high conveyance ³ was the first priority.

Embarking into Videogames

“Come with me and you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination”
- Gene Wilder, “Pure Imagination” 1971

Despite the market for retro handhelds being primarily middle-aged men hoping to relive their childhood, there is growing interest in devices for children of all ages. Our reason for selecting this device was based on the following:

• It’s a closed system, nothing gets in or out of the device without parental involvement.

• No ads, microtransactions, online play, or title updates.

• A form factor that fits well in small hands, and straightforward button layout.

• Most importantly, a device that can be “theirs” and isn’t shared with mom or dad.

• A price point that can be an ‘acceptable loss’ if need be.

When opening the gift it was immediately recognized as a real “Game Boy,” matching their plushie version. Their face lit up with the custom boot screen showing their name and made it clear it was a personal device special to them.

As the device we selected is best suited for Super Nintendo/Game Boy Advance games, that’s where I focused the game curation. The basic principles here can be applied to any library of games.

Self-Guided Difficulty Curve

“I get knocked down, but I get up again”
-Chumbawamba, “Tubthumping” 1997

Difficulty in games is a frequent topic of discourse, especially for new players. A selection of score attack titles will circumvent this by providing a smooth responsive difficulty curve that matches skill growth in the player. Reaching a new high score will be a bar that the child will set themselves and feel accomplished every time it’s surpassed.

Outside of the “things falling down” mechanic found in Tetris or Dr. Mario, classic arcade games such as Ms. Pac-Man or Frogger require handling more chaos to progress. While the games like Mario Picross or Push-Over, focus on logic-based challenges.

Dr. Mario had the honour of being the first selection. Despite having never seen any of these games before, or receiving any guidance from us, besides “match colors,” they were an immediate success. The following days were filled with my child delightfully putting their name in for every new high score and then showing it to me or my partner (who was coincidentally building a Game Boy at the time). The only hiccups were occasionally getting stuck in a menu for two play modes.

“I got a new high score!” he said, while gleefully entering their name into the score list.

Start With Already Known Games

“It’s a Unix system, I know this“
- Lex Murphy, “Jurassic Park” 1993

Sports games, especially those featuring popular mascots, remove the first major hurdle for a games conveyance, by relying on the established outside rules of the base sport. It’s a major factor for the pickup and play success of Wii Sports. These titles will allow the player to focus on building confidence in the device and button layouts.

From Super International Cricket to Super Black Bass, nearly every sport or sport-adjacent activity has an offering in the 16-bit era. For younger players with developing math and reading skills, arcade-style offerings will be more approachable over simulation titles.

Adding pinball variants to the roster of games was an immediate success, likely due to having built multiple pinball kits before receiving the console. Surprisingly, Mario Kart performed worse than expected.

“It’s a lot harder to turn,” he said, playing Mario Kart without Steering Assist for the first time.

Getting Your Feet Under You

“It’s just a jump to the left. And then a step to the right”
-Richard O’Brien, “Time Warp” 1975

Moving left to right may make platformers appear deceptively simple, but they are a discrete step up in multitasking and spatial reasoning. Checkpoints and unlimited continues are the bare minimum when just starting out. Selecting games without level timers will remove a major stress factor for learning players. Titles that use a level select/world map also provide a very clean metric for overall progress and optional routes.

Similar to sports titles, start with a selected entry from any given franchise and wait to see what tastes evolve before adding additional titles. This may not be the first game in the series, as many sequels are more refined experiences.

Platformers came a bit later, and that was where my child’s skills started to falter. Pressing/holding buttons to modify actions is a new complexity in play that has resulted in some hard skill checks. Even though they have successfully walked Mario through a half dozen levels, for now most play time has returned to the previous categories of games.

“It’s hard to keep the baby safe,” he said, playing Yoshi’s Island and being unintentionally poignant.

Explorative Play

“You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.”
- Dr. Seuss, ‘Oh, the Places You’ll Go!’ 1990

At a certain point, as with all things as a parent, it will be time to let go. Exploration-based games bring fully realized worlds with nooks and crannies that intentionally allow players to get lost and confused.

These games will require players to carry knowledge across multiple play sessions, creating a great opportunity to include note taking, particularly if there are long gaps between screen time.

Pokemon Ruby was the only explorative game we introduced to our child, with mixed success. There was an early win when setting the in-game analog clock, but after that the reading was above their level. Managing resources for pokémon health and in-game currency was also a new challenging scope of play.

“This is like my watch!,” he said, excitingly setting the in-game clock for Pokémon Ruby

Growing Together

“And now for a taste of things to come.”
George S. Clinton, “A Taste of Things to Come“ 1995

We have discovered a lot about our child in just a short amount of time as we observed their exploration of a hobby both parents love. Even the small joy of watching a gamer “handle” evolve as name entry changed from: their name, to a name variation, to made up names. Selfishly, I’m happy that the open world and RPG games are still out of reach of my child’s solo play, keeping our family couch play alive in these genres. The only major downside is now on weekend mornings both the kid (their device) and their mom (Steam Deck) are playing games in the “big bed” while I try to sleep in.

References:

1. From Game Jam to the Creation of Starlink: Battle for Atlas - Matthew Rose, GDC

2. Character Balance in Skylanders: More than the Numbers - Robert Gallerani, GDC

3. Sequelitis - Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X - Egoraptor

Deep conversations with kids can be hard.

When I pick up my oldest from school, I secretly wish that in that 20 minutes of one-on-one time, I’ll find a way to pass on some nugget of information that positively changes his life forever! The reality, however, is that’s highly unlikely.

He’s tired, and we often have to walk single file. There’s usually just silence. (I also wish that he would walk faster—sometimes not secretly at all. I think he trolls me by walking at less than regular speed, especially while crossing the street.)

Dinner time is a mix of sharing snippets of stories, random facts, and reminders of table manners. Car rides with all four family members often devolve into “Would You Rather?” questions.

Between the two boys, my youngest will tell me how he feels about everything without prompting. My oldest is a tougher nut to crack.

I, however, have found a semi sweet spot in game grinding together. This gets me one-on-one time with him where we’re not rushed or distracted. We have the space to talk freely–and not about chores or things we have to do. I ask about friends and school. Cool YouTube videos he’s watched. I work up to how he feels about big, stressful events.

I think this helps us understand each other better.

A few days ago, we were scrambling and getting ready to leave the house. It turned into a yelling match with the youngest. The oldest just quietly stuck around to help! I should tell him again that he did a great job of reading the room.

Here is my personal “game grinding recipe:”

Game Grinding (Deb’s definition) — Noun — /ɡeɪm/ /ˈɡraɪn.dɪŋ/

Playing a game, especially after finishing the story quest, in order to win extra achievements, gather resources, unlock bonus levels, etc.

Especially if you’re a completionist, game grinding with your kids allows you to focus on something enjoyable, not physically strenuous, and less meaningful. If you’ve already finished the story quest, it’s not a big deal when they collect a hidden token to complete your set. There’s plenty of time to focus on that story your kid is telling you while running around the level map, or playing with the machine that dispenses costumes.

Sure, you’ll care about the game but not to the point where you’ll say, “Shh, I want to watch this cinematic!” You don’t need their undivided attention, but you kind of have to give yours. And if you’re both bored, you’ll both nope out to go do other things.

The real caveat is that you have to find the right game. Here are some ideal conditions:

1. Couch co-op multiplayer for only two players: You want just you and that kid to play, not mix it up with the siblings. This is priceless alone time with you!

2. “Easy” gameplay: This is mixed advice, because on one hand, challenging gameplay means that nobody talks while focusing, but then you can talk during the downtime, like maneuvering around the map to find the next level.

3. Calm, relaxing gameplay: Calm is different from easy, and I mean this in the sense that you do things like power wash (with low volume!), clear ocean debris, collect plants, etc. Avoid fighting games because that raises heart rates and then we’re all thinking aggressive thoughts while out of breath from intense battles. You also don’t want boss fights that’ll cause rage quitting.

4. Something that doesn’t make you dizzy when watching: You’ll be taking a backseat to really listen, you’ll be “following” the action of your kid’s onscreen character.

5. Very family-friendly: I only say this because if you have to stop midway to explain something like characters doing stuff they shouldn’t, it derails your conversation.

The goal here is not to crack open the treasure chest of all your child’s innermost thoughts and dreams, but to create an environment that’s conducive to conversation. Turning on the tap to let the words flow. It’s also easier for some people (of all ages) to open up when they’re not forced to make eye contact.

And in the privacy of your own space, there’s nobody else listening in or interrupting.

I’ll admit that I last tried this whole game grinding thing with my oldest kid over getting him to score me a bunch of the hard-to-get bots of Astro Bot. I feel like we really connected; and it was a great prelude to spending the next five hours together at Science World and one of our favorite Vancouver restaurants. No deep conversation or hugs happen in public, but that’s okay.

It was a glorious day.

The short version: Milestone moment. She had a blast. Now, the long version…

I don’t know when the concept of “the backrooms,” or liminal spaces, entered our lives. Like many things, I suspect Roblox. (But it also could have been YouTube.) In either case, for several years now, my oldest daughter (who turns 10 at the end of the summer) has been fascinated by the conceptual horror for young people, transfixed by the notion of entering a forbidden space that feels strangely familiar and, yet, off.

The first trailer for a proper “backrooms” movie from Kane Parsons, the artist responsible for the hugely popular backrooms series on YouTube that establishes much of the accepted backrooms canon and lore, arrived earlier this year. We watched the teaser—it doesn’t show much—but my oldest, who didn’t realize they were making a movie, sat up from the couch and pointed at the screen. (Yes, like the meme.)

That was February. The movie wasn’t due out until May. But I already knew the conversation that would be bopping around the house that neared: “So…can I see it?”

A couple of important notes.

The Backrooms is rated R for “language and some violent content/bloody images.” Pretty vague! The YouTube series is also scary, a mixture of quiet tension and jump scares, but not gory. My daughter loved to watch them while under a blanket, peeking out whenever a creature, referred to as “entities,” show up. But that’s a description you could attach to Stranger Things? That show was our family’s obsession for months!

We’re a permissive family, but there’s balance between what a child believes they are capable of doing and what they are capable of doing. Part of our/my job is to navigate that, even if it means being the bad guy and saying no when they’re not ready yet.

What is “ready,” though?

Some important context: My wife and I saw the movie a few weeks ago, as part of a back-to-back viewing of The Backrooms and Obsession. We thought she could handle it.

The thing is, my nine-year-old’s ambitions can outstrip her actual convictions.

She likes to suggest ideas on what she’s capable of far in advance, because it’s easier to imagine doing them than actually doing them. We saw this play out in real-time with this year’s summer camp, an idea pitched to us months in advance. Her excitement for camp was such that we had to institute a “no more talking about camp” rule in the days before she left. And yet, as the car crawled forward at camp towards her cabin, it began to dawn upon her what was happening. She admitted to, finally, being nervous.

But ambitions outstripping bravery is how you end up doing brave things! It was too late to turn back from camp and her excitement exceeded her nervousness. It’s now a formative memory, so much so that she’s hoping to attend a longer camp eventually.

One of the trickiest parts of being a parent is trying to figure out when to push your kid. I’ve written about trying to navigate this with diving boards and rollercoasters:

Out of nowhere this weekend, my daughter wanted a “daddy daughter date.” She also asked me to be the parent who woke up at 6 a.m. each morning for that weekend’s swim meet. I was tired, but she’s at the age where I’m not sure how long she’s going to ask for such moments, so at my wife’s encouragement, we decided on The Backrooms.

This was, like camp, a rubber meets the road moment. When I proposed the idea, her reaction was excitement—and then pause. “What if I’m too scared? I don’t want to waste our money.” This is a refrain that’s come up before, a worry that backing out means wasting money. Which, look: I cannot help but respect it a bit. But at times, I also think she’s using that as a coping mechanism against being a little more daring.

So, I made her a proposal:

We’d buy tickets to see The Backrooms. If she wanted to leave, there would be no drama. No shame. No guilt. Even trying to see the movie is brave! Plus, we’d make a quick visit afterwards to Dave & Busters no matter what happens, either as a reward for surviving the movie or a way to cool down and reset if the movie proved too much.

(One thing I couldn’t tell her: one reason I can propose such an option is because the backers of Crossplay, especially the paying backers, make bold experiments possible!)

A brief pause, then a nod. She started crafting backrooms-inspired images on her phone in-between bites of food. Soon enough, it was time to walk over to the theater.

The thing about movie theaters, despite their broad mediocrity: they’re loud. It’s the part that you forget as an adult but kids clock immediately Whatever nice sound bar you have, there’s almost no chances it’s turned up as loud as a generic movie theater.

Such a volume tends to amplify the feelings of a young and slightly nervous child.

We had a plan, though, and we talked through it before entering the theater.

1. We’d skip the trailers. R-rated movies mean potentially R-rated trailers.

2. We’d cuddle up with our favorite blanket from home for two reasons:

   1. Warmth in a heavily AC-driven movie theater

   2. Somewhere to hide when we’re scared

3. Our seats were far, far away from anyone else. That would allow us to chat in respectfully whispered tones, in each other’s ears, throughout the movie

It was, truth be told, touch and go.

One trick: because I’d seen the movie, I could spoil everything in advance. I could tell my daughter if someone was going to survive. I knew when a monster was going to appear. And I had a sense when she should probably start hiding under the blanket.

The Backrooms has an interesting narrative framing, too. Nothing scary happens in the real world—only the backrooms. There are a couple of jump scare-y things in the real wold, but it’s not monsters. It’s not creatures from the backrooms. No one dies. This framing provided relief for my kiddo. Are we back in the real world? Breathe easy!

We also stumbled into another trick. Behind our seats was a layer of plastic, likely to prevent the seats behind us from spilling food or drinks. But as my nine-year-old discovered, you can see the movie on that plastic. During scary parts, she would wrap herself in the blanket, flip around to the warped plastic version of the movie, and it provided enough emotional distance from the massive screen to let her continue on.

The scariest moment in The Backrooms is the last 10 minutes. It straight up rips, man.

But it’s also a horrifying monster chasing a character down to tear them apart. I was white knuckling that scene with my wife, so I knew it would be the hardest part of the movie for my daughter, too. She tried hiding under that blanket. She tried looking at the plastic reflection. But I could feel her shaking under the blanket. It was at that point I asked if she wanted to leave. No shame. No guilt. It would be all be okay.

“How much movie is left?”

“Less than 10 minutes, kiddo,” I whispered to her. “If you can survive that, it’s all over.”

A brief pause. She nodded. I could see her peeking out from beneath the blanket.

Then, the credits hit. She’s fuckin’ did it. The movie equivalent of a rollercoaster.

As promised, we walked over to Dave & Busters. The server remembered us from before, and while making her a kiddie cocktail, he asked what movie we saw. My daughter didn’t hesitate and said “The Backrooms.” The look on that man’s face was priceless. He was impressed, and the smile on my kid’s face could’ve lit the damn sun.

Leave a comment

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

Also:

• I figured my kids would be into video games. The last thing I expected was that I’d be slowly raising little horror hounds. Can’t say that I’m too upset about it.

• We laid some groundwork with my six-year-old ahead of time, telling her the movie was too scary for her. (It is.) There was no jealousy in the morning.

• Maybe we should try playing a backrooms video game? That could be the bridge between the two worlds. If you have any recommendations, please let me know.

Based on the reaction to last week’s post, a lot of parents are also annoyed at the amount of YouTube content making its way onto platforms like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and others. Even for families that allow their kids to watch YouTube, there is a time and place, and its appearance on non-YouTube platforms is an issue.

Fortunately, for some of the platforms, there are solutions. You can block the content.

It is not, however, as simple as saying “please block anything that came from YouTube.” This requires a pro-active approach—and it won’t block future content.

But it’s a start!

Here’s your guide on how to do it…well, if your platform will let you.

(I’m looking at you, Disney!)

By the way: If there ever was a time to share Crossplay with other parents and caregivers in your life, this is probably it! Please think about sharing this one!

How to Block Shows on Netflix

1. Log into www.netflix.com

2. Click on a profile in the upper right corner and choose “manage profiles”

   

3. Click on “adjust parental controls” and choose your child’s profile

4. Under “title restrictions,” search for the shows you would like to block

How to Block Shows on Disney+

You can’t. There is no option to selectively block shows on Disney+.

How to Block Shows on Amazon Prime

1. Log into www.primevideo.com

2. Click the “your account” icon in the upper right corner and choose a kid’s profile

3. Hover over the show you’d like to block and click the stop sign icon

Note: This only blocks each season of a show. You’ll have to block additional seasons.

How to Block Shows on Hulu

You can’t. There is no option to selectively block shows on Hulu.

How to Block Shows on HBO Max

You can’t. There is no option to selectively block shows on HBO Max.

I want to be clear: I do not think YouTube is evil! YouTube is allowed in our house! My kids watch YouTub and YouTube Kids! We watch normal YouTube all the time! I’m not trying to block them from the modern equivalent of TV for their generation!

But not all content is made equal.

The distinction I’m drawing here is expectations of about when, where, and why specific types of YouTube content is watched. There is a huge difference between Salish Matters and, say, Mark Rober. As parents, we’re all making it up as we go along—much like the streaming platforms driving this. Your house rules may be different.

Godspeed. And if you so choose, happy blocking.

Leave a comment

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

Also:

• Most of these YouTube partnerships come with promises of “original” content down the line, like Mr. Beast’s reality show. I’m curious what becomes of those.

• I said I wouldn’t block Salish Matters on Netflix, but I did. I don’t like lying to my kids, but I’m just going to pretend Netlix removed the series from the service.

• If they push back, I will explain my position to them. I’m willing to allow Salish back, but broadly, those types of YouTube videos are largely going to be iPad-only.

My children are allowed to watch YouTube, be it age-filtered normal YouTube (my nine-year-old) or YouTube Kids (my six-year-old). They are not, however, allowed to watch YouTube on the family television. It’s restricted to their iPads because, truth be told, I don’t want to watch most of that garbage. I understand why they are entertained by a strange YouTube family pulling harmless pranks on one another—but I’m good!

In other words, the family TV is for family screen time (aka us watching and having a blast with Independence Day over the recent holiday) or it’s my children picking a show they both agree upon, like rewatching an episode of Stranger Things. Unfortunately for me, a recent shift in how platforms like Netflix and Disney+ operate has my children accidentally violating the “No YouTube on the TV” principle because these platforms have started licensing content from YouTube and placing them directly in the apps.

Now, YouTube is on the TV and Salish Matter’s father is turning my brain into mush.

The one place my children are allowed to watch YouTube on TV is grandma’s house. That is by design: a fun perk exclusive to sleeping over. It’s also a get-out-jail card for myself. (Humorously, the person my mom is most annoyed by is also Salish’s father!)

The other exception is that we’ll often wind down evenings by watching trailers for upcoming movies, TV shows, and games. The videos are short and sweet, perfect for my kids nibbling on the last bits of a treat before we’re kicking off the bedtime routine.

Otherwise, I let the kids have (mostly) free rein over what they watch.

They can clock when something might look inappropriate, at which point they’ll ask if it’s okay to watch. (Usually it’s OK.) And at least for right now, there’s enough across Netflix and Disney+ that they can agree upon. For a long time, that was endlessly rerunning Bluey episodes. Later, it was jumping between seasons of Stranger Things.

I don’t know when it happened exactly.

I just know that one morning, after handing the kids their breakfast, the TV started yapping with that familiar over-the-top tone that defines so much content on YouTube, especially videos aimed at younger audiences. Everyone is always yelling.

The thing is, my nine-year-old (who’s almost 10) is sharp. She’s old enough to poke holes in arguments. So when I waltzed over to point out how they’d violated the “no YouTube on TV” rule, she was more than happy to back and show that it was available on Netflix. Did she know it was a YouTube video? Yes. But she said it didn’t count.

“Motherfucker,” I muttered under my breath. Technically, she was right.

I now spend my days hoping my tinnitus drains out Salish Matter and Topper Guild.

It helps explain popular reddit reads like this one: “Don’t mind me, just blacklisting shows on Netflix so my husband stops putting them on for our young kids.” One, we gotta do better here, Dad. Two, I didn’t realize this was something you could do.

“So bye bye, little angel, bye bye cocomelon, bye bye Masha and the bear,” wrote the original poster. “and a couple other shows that no matter how many times I tell my husband not to put on for the kids, it still happens.”

(I remember that show. It was awful.)

“I need to do this because I found out my 8yo watched some trash prank reality show on Netflix (under the kids account) with two different babysitters,” said another poster. “(It’s Salish and Jordan Matter.)”

Matter haters unite!!!!!!

This is part of a broader “Youtubization of Netflix,” as Deadline recently put it:

Creators like the Matter family are supposed to eventually make Netflix-exclusive content, such as “scripted, unscripted, and animated series, in which Salish will star.”

For now, though, you’re stuck with a Netflix-curated playlist of YouTube videos.

This is also why you’ve also seen video podcasts popping up on Netflix.

I don’t think Salish and her annoying father are inherently worse than watching some mediocre cartoon. This is, on some level, a semi-selfish act in which I loathe hearing it from a TV whose audio bleeds into other parts of the house. I think it is healthy and normal to consume garbage programming—but please do so with your headphones on.

Maybe this is a boomer millennial mindset, but I prefer they watch the mediocre cartoon over the hyper exaggerated nonsense on YouTube! And that’s before we get into my general unease with families building social empires out of their children.

(Matter is 16 years old, but was appearing in his father’s videos when she was eight.)

Our approach going forward is likely to be twofold.

1. On Netflix, I’m going to block YouTube-to-Netflix shows from their profile. Salish survives, because it’s already there and that feels mean. As far as I can tell, you can’t do this on Disney+, which means I remain cursed by Topper Guild.

2. We’ll institute a “you can watch one episode, then find something else rule.”

Good controls are important. These trends are going to get worse, but if I can continue customizing the way my children interact with media, I can sleep easier.

Leave a comment

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

Also:

• How do you handle YouTube on the TV in your house? I’m curious what other approaches people take. Maybe an account that hand curates various channels?

• I do not, in general, watch YouTube myself. I realize this makes me different than younger audiences, and I’m trying to be mindful about generational gaps.

• Much in the same way that Roblox is not going to let me filter out AI videos, Netflix and Disney+ are not likely to let you block “YouTube videos.” They want your kids to become invested these kids, families, and words. But it’s annoying.

It is, at present, extremely hot in the midwest, and all my kids want to do is swim. Swim in our pool, swim in the community pool, swim in a friend’s pool. Swim, swim.

My parents were never ones who’d have us escaping to a movie theater to cool off. We would, instead, drive up to Wisconsin and do exactly what my kids are doing: swim. (In a funny twist, my most recent theater experience was back-to-back showings of Backrooms and Obsession with my wife, as we tried to catch up on horror flicks.)

So, in short, my kids are not playing many games. I am, however, indulging on my deck with a recently acquired Steam Machine. (More on that later, as I figure out where and when a Steam Machine, however pricey, fits into my love of convenience.)

How are video games fitting into you and your family’s summer?

If you represent these games and have a potentially interesting story to share about how these games consider kids as part of their audience, do get in touch with me!

• Rhythm Heaven Groove (Switch/Switch 2) — July 2

Description: No matter how strange the situation, the rules are always the same: just press buttons in time with the beat! Hop through hoops, catch flying vegetables, swing sledgehammers, and much more. Get the band together and enjoy more than 30 multiplayer rhythm games! Up to four players can star in these surprising scenarios, from forming a ring quartet of racing wrestlers to plucking the hairs off a bristly onion.
Rating: E
Price: $39.99

I have not a had a chance to play this! June was chaotic, so I put time into the Star Fox 64 remake. (Meh, but I’m excited about Star Fox’s future.) Game Informer enjoyed the game, though, saying: “The core rhythm minigames don’t offer quite the same level of bizarre surprise as previous games in the series, but they are all still very good.”

• Dungeon Crawler+ (Apple Arcade) — July 2

Description: Dungeon Clawler is a Roguelike Claw Machine Deckbuilder. Build your unique deck, fight enemies by grabbing weapons and items from a claw machine and find special artefacts that help you on your quest to reclaim something you lost... Aim carefully to claw your way through this dungeon!
Rating: 9+
Price: $6.99/month

I’ve meant to play this because the pitch is so charming. With a vacation coming up, maybe I’ll dig in. Nintendo World Report enjoyed it on Switch, saying: “Dungeon Clawler plays with a lot of familiar tropes. However, its claw machine mechanic is playful enough to make it stand out and outlast the trappings of other games in this niche.”

• Creatures of the Deep+ (Apple Arcade) — July 2

Description: What if fishing could take you into a world of ancient secrets, lost monsters, and mysterious treasures beneath the waves? Welcome to Creatures of the Deept - the most unique single-player fishing adventure on mobile. Strange rumors are spreading across the globe. Disturbing shadows move under the water. Legends come to life - and you’re at the center of it all. Dive into the ultimate mix of relaxation, exploration, and mystery.
Rating: 4+
Price: $6.99/month

My nine-year-old has asked to fish, but I don’t know jack about fishing! Which is funny, because the trip I’m going on involves hanging out for a day on a boat, wherein I’m mostly there to chill and cast. I never catch anything and pray I don’t screw up casting my line. Anyway, Hardcore Android enjoyed the mobile version of this, saying: “There is so much to enjoy in Creatures of the Deep. From its serene atmosphere to its exciting gameplay, Creatures is one of my favorite mobile games of the year so far.”

• Pocket City 2+ (Apple Arcade) — July 2

Description: Build and explore your own city! Create roads, zones, landmarks, special buildings, and live the life of a successful mayor! In this unique City Building game you can drop your avatar into the world and roam freely!!
Rating: 9+
Price: $6.99/month

The only time I’ve spent with SimCity game was on SNES, where I played long enough to watch Bowser wreck the city. Pocket City 2 is supposed to be solid, with Touch Arcade saying: “I’m very glad that Codebrew Games didn’t go all in with the social and life simulation elements here. Pocket City 2 is the perfect example of building on what people loved in the original game while adding a ton of optional quality content.”

• Draw It+ (Apple Arcade) — July 2

Description: Put your creative flair to the ultimate test. Get ready for a quick-thinking drawing challenge where your skills are tested against the clock! points you can score. In Draw It, every second counts. Sketch each word before your time runs out and see how many the perfect answer for fans of art, doodle and quick play.
Rating: 4+
Price: $6.99/month

Oh, my kids love this game!!!! I’m not sure what’s different about the “+” version of this, but I will absolutely be grabbing this for their tablets. The only problem is that my six-year-old gets frustrated because she has to ask what she’s supposed to draw.

• Moonlight Peaks (PC, Switch/Switch 2) — July 7

Description: Experience life as a vampire in a magical town full of werewolves, witches, mermaids, and more! In this heart-warming, supernatural life-sim, you will raise mystical crops, learn spell-casting and potion-making, and befriend – or even romance – the locals. And at the same time, show your skeptical father that a life of compassion is possible – even for the undead.
Rating: T
Price: $39.99

There are enough farming games with life sim elements games these days that it’s truly a blur. I’ve kept waiting for the genre to click for my oldest daughter but it’s never happened. If Animal Crossing didn’t do it, though, maybe nothing will. Game Reactor UK seemed to enjoyed this, saying: “Moonlight Peaks doesn’t really do much to challenge the dynamics of the life-sim genre, what Little Chicken has cooked up with this game is entertaining and charming enough to keep you coming back for more.”

• Backyard Baseball (PC, Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S) — July 9

Description: Relive the game that started it all! The original Backyard Baseball 1997 is now enhanced to run on Nintendo Switch. Whether you’re picking your dream team, hitting home runs, or just here for comedy, step back into the backyard and experience the game that made baseball fun for everyone!
Rating: E
Price: $9.99

If you wanna know more about how the game to be, we recently ran a feature about it!

• Tiny Bookshop (iOS, Android) — July 9

Description: Leave everything behind and open a tiny bookshop by the sea in this cozy narrative management me. Stock your tiny bookshop with different books and items, set up your own shop in scenic locations, and run your second-hand bookshop while getting to know the locals.
Rating: 9+
Price: N/A

It’s come to other platforms with positive reviews, and now it’s onto mobile. Qualbert described Tiny Bookshop this way: “If games were hot drinks, Tiny Bookshop would be a perfectly steeped cup of chamomile tea: calming, warm, and slightly floral. It won’t jolt you awake or set your heart racing, but it will leave you feeling quietly content, and maybe, just maybe, make you want to re-organise your bookshelf in real life.”

• Winx Club: The Magic Is Back (Xbox Series X/S) — July 9

Description: Winx Club: The Magic is Back captures the essence of the Winx universe, delivering an enchanting experience with a mix of magical combat, puzzle-solving, and cooperative gameplay with a friend. Play as all six members of the Winx Club, each with their own magical abilities.
Rating: E10+
Price: $29.99

If you’re buying this, you probably know why you’re buying it!

• Digimon Story Time Stranger (Switch/Switch 2) — July 10

Description: Digimon Story Time Stranger is an RPG with monster-taming elements that explores the deep bond between humans and Digimon in an epic story that unravels the mystery of the world’s collapse. Embark on an adventure that spans across the human world and Digital World, collecting and raising a diverse array of Digimon to fight in turn-based battles.
Rating: T
Price: $59.99

Another port!. Way Too Many Games was positive on the original game: “There’s little to complain about. Digimon Story: Time Stranger is everything I wanted from a higher-budgeted sequel to the criminally underrated and overlooked Cyber Sleuth.”

• Palworld 1.0 (PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Mac, PC) — July 10

Description: In this game, you can peacefully live alongside mysterious creatures known as Pals or risk your life to drive off a ruthless poaching syndicate. Pals can be used to fight and breed, or they can be made to work on farms or factories.You can even sell them or eat them.
Rating: T
Price: $29.99

This is the Pokémon with guns (!!!) riff that has, inexplicably, found its own success. It’s been in extended early access state for a minute, and this is where Palworld hits 1.0. The real question is whether it ever arrives on Switch. (Probably not!) Still, IGN liked the early access version, saying: “Palworld is amusingly irreverent, has a surprising amount of content and deep survival mechanics, and is absurdly difficult to put down.”

• D-topia (PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch/Switch 2, PC) — July 14

Description: Step into a future where happiness is curated by artificial intelligence, in this gentle-paced puzzle adventure.
Rating: E10+
Price: $19.99

I was charmed by the 15-ish minutes I played last month. The puzzles, at least early on, are of the sliding block variety. It has a neat feature where after you “solve” a sequence, the game asks if you’d like to stick around and solve harder puzzles. It’s an interesting way to incorporate difficulty that doesn’t rely on “easy” or “hard” options.

• Denshattack! (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, PC) — July 15

Description: Flip, trick and grind your train in a fast-paced, off-the-rails ride through a colourful Japanese dystopia. Take back the tracks with nothing but skill, speed, and style.
Rating: $19.99
Price: T

It’s either going to work or not work. I don’t think there’s another way for a game like this to go. But Quest Daily enjoyed an early version, saying “The charming personality and intriguing premise of Denshattack! wouldn’t matter without tight controls and rewarding level design to back it up. Now that I’ve had hands-on experience, I’m confident that the team at Undercoders is driving along the right track.”

• Puppergeist (Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC) — July 16

Description: Journey through the Doggie Underworld in this heartwarming rhythm and visual novel hybrid. Reunite with your lost Pup by connecting with the souls of other dogs, learning their stories, and lifting their spirits through rhythm games full of charm and playful challenges!
Rating: E
Price: TBA

This comment on Steam in response to a demo of Puppergiest sums up what’s funny about this: “pretty good, only problem was with the belly rubs in the 2nd minigame it was unclear how long I was supposed to hold spacebar and there is a delay when clicking that occurs through the whole game, otherwise this game is great.”

• eBaseball: Pro Spirit 2026 (PC, PS5) — July 16

Description: The latest entry in the Professional Baseball Spirits series, “eBaseball: PRO SPIRIT 2026” has arrived. Experience realistic baseball powered by the eBaseball Engine.
Every movement and sound inside the stadium is brought to life with remarkable realism.
From the flight of the ball and the players’ intense actions to the eruption of the crowd, every moment is recreated with impact. Combined with smooth, live-style play-by-play and commentary*, the game brings you closer than ever to “real baseball.”
Rating: E
Price: $59.99

Way Too Many Games was cautiously positive about an earlier version of this one, saying: “if you’re unwilling to spend a hefty sum for each new MLB The Show iteration, and all you really want is a pretty, competent, and responsive baseball simulator, one which is very forgiving to newcomers and perfect for quick, local matches, then Konami’s brand new F2P sports game does a remarkably good job in that aspect.”

• Heave Ho 2 (Switch 2, Switch, PC) — July 16

Description: Get a grip, it’s Heave Ho 2! The insane 2-4 player party game sequel takes the couch co-op mayhem online for the first time. Grab what you can and swing to win!
Rating: N/A
Price: N/A

Missed the first one, but always room for more local co-op, and reports on the sequel are good, with Checkpoint Gaming saying: “Heave Ho 2 understands exactly what made the first game work. By the end of our short play, we were chatting about what other levels could look like and also jokingly who was the dead weight in the team (me).

• Dewdrop Dynasty (PC) — July 21

Description: Gun-jump your way through a buzzing world full of quirky monsters, tricky puzzles, and outlandish bosses in this fast-paced, lighthearted Metroidvania.
Rating: N/A
Price: N/A

I never tire of a good Metroidvania and will happily dig into this one if it’s any good.

• Dodo Duckie! (PC) — July 23

Description: Waddle into a reality-bending odyssey where simply being a duck is your greatest superpower. With the help of your magical cap, switch instantly between 2D and 3D to uncover hidden paths, outsmart aliens, and rescue your kidnapped chicken friends in this wholesome puzzle platformer adventure.
Rating: N/A
Price: N/A

A 2D game that is also a 3D game is, inarguably, a fun premise. I hadn’t heard of Dodo Duckie! until putting together this list but it’s absolutely on my radar now. Video Chums enjoyed a demo of the game, too, saying: “There’s just something about shifting to 3D, lining yourself up, heading back to 2D, and proceeding down new paths to amass a whole fortune of gems that makes me smile and when you throw in the possibilities for puzzles and platforming challenges, it adds up to one promising adventure that I can’t wait to explore every 2D and 3D nook and cranny of.”

• Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC) — July 23

Description: Featuring hand-drawn 2D animation faithful to the series’ roots, Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game lets you experience the world of Avatar like never before. Choose from 12 playable characters and go head-to-head across a variety of modes, including Offline & Online Versus, Story, Arcade, Training, Spectator, and an Art Gallery.
Rating: E10+
Price: $29.99

Are fighting games a new meta? I’ve never touched the series, but IGN enjoyed their time with an early version, saying: “Thirty minutes isn’t nearly enough time to tackle everything Avatar Legends has to offer, but it was enough to make me want to play more of it, and I loved eking out wins and playing around with all of these characters.”

• Splatoon Raiders (Switch 2) — July 23

Description: In this single-player-focused game, play as a mechanic working with Deep Cut—a trio of swashbuckling musicians—and venture out into the mysterious Spirhalite Islands Customize your character, kit yourself out with mechanical gadgets and ink-splattering weapons, and take on waves of enemy Salmonids as you raid the islands for treasure.
Rating: E10+
Price: $49.99

Splatoon is the rare multiplayer game I’ve put hours into. Not enough to become any good at it, but anytime someone is playing Splatoon, I’ll pick up the controller and give it a round. You can’t say that about many multiplayer games. (I think it has to do with the game fusing platforming with shooting.) So, we’re going to toss that into a single-player game? Hot dang, yes please. We’ll see if my kids come along for the ride, too.

• An Eggstremely Hard Game (PC) — July 24

Description: As highly qualified goose parents, work together to bring your little egg home safely. Every crack makes it harder to control, every mistake more hilarious. A co-op physics game for 2 or 4 players about teamwork, clumsiness and honking. HONK!
Rating: N/A
Price: N/A

Very charming. Gotta love this Steam review of the demo: “I never gonna have kids with my boyfriend….” That’s such a ringing endorsement of what this game’s going for.

Leave a comment

Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen is a good game, a game more worthy of the Bluey name than the franchise’s last outing. But one of my knocks against Quest for the Gold Pen was that my five-year-old couldn’t play it on her own because she couldn’t read yet.

As I wrote at the time:

I was delighted, then, to read recently that Quest for the Gold was getting a free update with “fully voiced narration throughout the entire adventure, making it easier than ever for younger players to follow the story, stay engaged and jump right into the fun, while making the experience approachable for families and players of all skill levels.”

You can imagine the smile on my face. It’s like they read my mind!

One of my pet peeves with many games that pitch themselves as family friendly—especially ones from Nintendo, who has the resources to avoid this—is their baseline assumption that children can read. A child who can figure out how to navigate Mario or Princess Peach from left to right should not have to ask a parent for help figuring out how to load up the level that will allow them to move those characters left to right.

This feature is often called, to use accessibility terms, “voice over” or “text to speech.” It’s basic functionality most devices, including phones and tablets and many game consoles, where the system reads the text of what you’re highlighting in the interface.

(To Nintendo’s credit, Switch 2 has a feature supporting this but only in the interface; games are on their own. This is not unique to Nintendo, this level of accessibility is, sadly, a game-by-game basis. Lots of Microsoft games, like Minecraft, support this!)

You might not like the Paw Patrol games, but one thing they do is have the menus speak to the player while they’re navigating. It helps remove friction and judgement.

Why, then, add this to Bluey’s newest game?

“The simplest answer is that we always want the game to be the best version of itself,” said Eli Hodapp, CMO of Quest for the Gold Pen developer Halfbrick, when asked.

“Bluey’s Quest is intentionally rated for the broadest possible family audience across platforms and regions,” said Hodapp. “That is great, because it means very young players can enjoy the game, but it also means some of those players may not be reading yet. Adding full voice narration makes the game more accessible, more natural to follow, and just a better Bluey experience overall.”

Voicing all the text was not the original plan, but it became part of the plan following feedback from the audience—including my own kid!—playing the game. What was part of the plan was a recording session with the actors from the show in the event that Halfbrick “needed changes to [cutscenes] or had other content needs.” Voicing all of the text became “the most meaningful thing we could do with that opportunity.”

“Before joining Halfbrick, I worked on the Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl games, and I saw firsthand how much voiceover can transform a licensed game,” said Hodapp. “It helps the characters feel present in a way that text alone usually cannot. For Bluey’s Quest, that felt especially important.”

He’s right.

It’s also—knock on wood—hopefully a sign of more developers taking this seriously.

The update is live now and available on every platform right now.

Leave a comment

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

Also:

• The Bluey movie arrives next summer. It feels like it’ll be the last hurrah for the Heeler family in the house, because sadly, my kids appear to be aging out of it.

• I’d say Bluey is a little on the decline, too, but it’s also the case that we haven’t had a new episode of Bluey in more than two years. Two years is such a long time.

• Completely left-field, but somehow my nine-year-old managed to hear (catchy!) songs from the Hazbin Hotel soundtrack, a wildly inappropriate show for her age.

Grounded is the rare feel good story at Microsoft, a company experiencing enormous tumult as it struggles to find a new direction for Xbox, amidst layoffs and price increases. But Grounded, a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids-inspired survival adventure where players work alone (or together) to progress, has been a quiet hit since 2022, in part because it’s a wonderful game for adults, children, and adults playing with children.

“One of the best challenges of working on it [Grounded],” said senior producer Mike Winzeler in a recent interview, “is people that play it and ‘Oh, this is so nostalgic for me because the game is set in 1992. I was in high school back then.’ You have people that are like, ‘I play this with my six-year-old, and we build bases together.’”

I was chatting with Winzeler after spending 10 minutes getting my butt kicked fighting a boss in Grounded 2. We lost, though I’ll blame my mistake of choosing a spider as the creature that came into battle with me. While I am not wholly arachnophobic, I do not mess with tarantulas and the creature I picked was one!

(An early story I wrote about Grounded was about how it carefully handled the inclusion of spiders in its game, even though people might be phobic—or anxious.)

“The focus has always been on making sure you can play the game the way you want to and going beyond just difficulty settings on that,” said Winzeler. “We also have a creative mode. So if you really want to build bases, you can go in and do that.”

My children have spent hundreds of hours in Minecraft—but almost none in the game’s survival mode. It’s entirely “creative,” where they can build to their heart’s content. You cannot die, and Minecraft becomes a virtual form of stacking LEGO bricks. “Enemies” are simply goofy creatures to be part of whatever story they’re telling that day. It’s an extension of the social-first, friction-reduced gameplay dominant on platforms like Roblox and also often seen in modern “friendslop” games.

In Grounded, there’s a “Playgrounds Mode,” where players can assign logic to parts of the game. You could, for example, build a racetrack and have bugs compete. And in August, Grounded’s bringing back custom game settings, which means you can dial in how you want the game to feel. Do you want to make it harder? Turn enemy aggressiveness off, which means you can just wander through the beautiful world?

“You can tailor your experience to what your situation is, whether it’s with your friends or your family, or someone young who’s just getting into games,” said Winzeler. “For us, tonally, we’re always making sure we’re hitting both the nostalgia audience and just letting these characters breathe and be their own pieces of the puzzle. And then on the sort of gameplay mechanical side, just making sure that you can really tweak things and make it work for you.”

Some changes are driven by what the team observes, some comes from the game’s active Discord server. (Winzeler assured me the team is always reading the Discord.)

For some players, games are all about friction. But increasingly, younger players are growing up with expectations of being able to customize experiences, introducing friction where they want it—or removing it entirely. When I was a kid, these were called “cheat codes.” Today, it’s a mixture of “accessibility” and “customization.”

“Grounded’s always been about meeting you halfway, “ said Winzeler, “and letting you take it on on your own terms. There are people that don’t want to deal with the fact that when you die, you drop your backpack and all your gear. That’s the deal breaker, so you should be able to turn that off. Anything that’s going to make you go ‘Oh, I felt bad, I feel like you wasted my time,’ or ‘You’re too mean to me,’ it’s just a barrier to entry to any game. If we can find ways to preserve the foundation of what the game is and and let you find a way to love it, we’re all for it.”

It is, by my estimation, one of the great coming changes to design. I expect games to fall into two camps: games with specific, developer-driven experiences where you cannot change anything (i.e. Silksong) or you control every aspect (i.e. Grounded).

I also expect this to be wildly divisive among the players who enjoy the former, which is why you saw handwringing over Mina the Hollower, a great and traditionally challenging game that lets players granularly modify how much of the game works.

Whatever you make of that shift, Grounded has proven very popular with families.

I asked some parents to explain why this survival game has become the game to play with their kids. To kick things off, here’s John, who plays with his nine-year-old son:

And Brandon, who’s played on and off with his two sons, ages 12 and 19:

There’s also Nick, who’s played with this 15-year-old son since since he was around 11:

Maybe it’s finally time to give Grounded a try with my nine-year-old.

Leave a comment

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

Also:

• Making games customizable doesn’t ensure success. Elden Ring was a massive hit a few years back, and it’s one of the hardest games around. There’s no easy mode.

• But even when developers like FromSoftware don’t include options, players will modify the game to make it easier. This mod’s been downloaded 500,000 times.

• If players are going to do it anyway, why not include options from the developers, as with Mina the Hollower, where they have fun with it? More, please.

My nine-year-old became obsessed with the movie Parent Trap last year. The obsession, thankfully, was not taking notes about what to do if your parents get divorced, but camp. A camp where you’re bunked up with other kids, spending days swimming in a lake, eating by a fire, and most importantly, you’re far away from home.

Months after, we ended up somewhere that coincidentally took place in and around some local campgrounds. Can you guess what they were advertising? Camp. Pictures of kids having a blast in bunks, around fires, in the water. My oldest’s eyes went wide.

“Can I go?”

My wife never did anything like that as a kid. Nor did I. So, uh, maybe?

Stacks of application paperwork and many, many months later, it arrived: camp.

Our oldest has done many sleepovers. But she’s has never been away, in somewhere decidedly foreign and with no friends or family, for a week. If something went wrong, or she wanted to leave, we weren’t a block away. It was 30 minutes. On drop-off day, I’m not sure who was more nervous about the reality of the situation: her or us.

A week away from home. And importantly, a week away from screen time, too.

Read more

I’d like to tell you about my dad, Bob.

Five years ago, I lost him to cancer. I think about him every day. But funny enough, I also think about his camping spot in the 2002 video game Medal of Honor Allied Assault.

Bob was a living image of Boomer masculinity. Think: Red Forman, Tim Taylor, and being from New Jersey, even a little Tony Soprano—just, you know, not evil.

He served in the Marines. He drove an old, wobbly Ford pickup—manual, of course. For most of his life, he worked as a lineman hanging off power poles, or standing in a bucket surrounded by transformers and high-voltage cables. It was dangerous, but he was really good at it.

In his off time, he occasionally played video games. Mostly Medal of Honor Allied Assault’s multiplayer. And despite Bob embodying the idea of working-class manhood, he spent lots of time in Allied Assault using one of the most undignified strategies in gaming: camping.

Growing up, my first gaming PC wasn’t mine—but my dad’s, and to my little-kid sensibilities, that PC was mesmerizing. Standing near it was like standing at the gates of Disneyland. I can even recall the smell when it was first put together—a combination of rubber, plastic and stale air.

My earliest memories of gaming came from that PC. The thrill of flying away from an exploding lunar base in Descent. Call of Duty’s phenomenal multiplayer—where you definitely shouldn’t snipe in Carentan. The demo for Halo: Combat Evolved, which showcased perhaps the greatest single level of all-time. The Silent Cartographer. Return to Castle Wolfenstein scared me enough that I couldn’t sleep for a week and was banned from playing M-rated games. (It didn’t last).

Medal of Honor Allied Assault released in 2002, a transitory period for games, particularly between the shooters of the 90s and the mainstream popularization of Battlefield and Call of Duty that took place in the mid- and late-aughts.

Set during World War II, Medal of Honor Allied Assault’s relatively realistic gameplay is what I think attracted my dad the most. He had a fascination with history in general, not just military history. He loved learning how ancient people lived and what old cultures were like.

In the midst of renewed public interest in World War II thanks to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and, uh, Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers, Allied Assault was the perfect game for a middle-aged, working class veteran/history nerd delivered at the perfect time.

A big part of my memory of that time was this dark little alcove in a destroyed building:

Allied Assault gives you a small, class-like list of weapons to choose from, with each side (Allies vs Axis) getting equivalent weapons. The Allies have the Thompson; the Axis have the MP40, etc.Both teams have a sniper rifle, and that was my dad’s choice—usually.

I don’t remember if he was any good or not, but I loved sitting next to him with my brother and watching him play. It was actually one of my favorite things to do. I distinctly remember one night (and even the map: Snowy Park) when my dad was getting decimated. Surprised at how badly his team was losing, I said, “They have to be cheating! Or maybe they’re all working together?” My dad laughed.“They’re just better than me.”

This was, perhaps, the one and only time in gamer history that sentence was spoken.

To improve his K/D ratio (or maybe because he just enjoyed it), my dad developed a strategy: camping with a sniper rifle! And that dark little alcove was his favorite spot.

It’s from the map Destroyed Village, which I remember being my favorite of Allied Assault’s multiplayer maps.

Destroyed Village is somewhat circular, with a street that cuts through the middle flanked by a line of buildings and a church. It has a good mix of short- and medium-range sightlines, with a few long-range sightlines if you can get the angle right.

The alcove is across the way from the Church’s front door; a ruin obscured by shadow and a half-destroyed wall.The wall cuts the first floor in half and both sides give good views of the lanes beside the church. If you position yourself correctly, you can even sit behind the wall and lean between the sides.

From this vantage point, many players were sent respawning, unaware as they thoughtlessly turned a corner that they were about to be domed by an old man.

The right line is definitely more dangerous for enemy players. Those who walk down the street are farther away and have less cover.

The left lane is still dangerous, but enemies are closer, so it’s easier for them to see you and react. From this side, you’ve got a shorter window to fire. If you miss or an enemy gets to a blindspot, be ready for a few grenades to bounce at your feet.

The worst case scenario is the church’s front door. Not only is it close, but it’s hard to catch enemies coming out of the door to begin with. If an enemy approaches from the church’s door and knows you’re hiding in this spot, you’ll find yourself at a cramped disadvantage.

In the few times I’ve reinstalled Allied Assault over the last two decades, whether it be for another playthrough or just a quick nostalgia hit, I’ve returned to this spot, as though I’m completing a digital pilgrimage.

As there are no official servers for Allied Assault any more, my trips back here are solitary and quiet. I hide myself in the debris and think about all the fun I had watching my dad do the same.

Like I said at the top, he’s been gone for five years now.

The things you reminisce about after you lose someone are strange. For me, his old camping spot is one. It’s a spot we shared. As ephemeral as early 2000’s Allied Assault multiplayer matches were, this spot holds meaning to me. It means more than the actual rooms we were sitting in; even more than the houses!

I’m certain my dad probably didn’t play so much for his own enjoyment, but because it was a way to spend time with us. We’d sit next to him and cheer him on (or probably back-seat play) and those silly multiplayer matches are now some of my favorite childhood memories.

Leave a comment

Last week, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), where the company detailed new updates to the operating systems for iPhones, iPads, etc. Amidst Apple’s artificial intelligence reinvention, the company spent a shocking amount of time—more than 10 minutes—discussing updates to its parental controls.

You can watch the relevant clip below, which is worth watching in full:

The most important update in Apple’s next OS, which tends to drop in September alongside new hardware and is already available in beta form if you’re feeling spicy, is the interface for “Screen Time” being completely overhauled and much easier to parse.

The other updates include:

• Children can ask permission to add a new contact

• The system will now block “gore or violent content” in a shared image or video

• Upon setting up a child account, the system recommends apps you should allow at device start, based on science-driven recommendations around what’s appropriate for various age groups. Parents can also choose to allow (or deny) any apps

• “Ask to Browse” allows kids to be granted permission for new websites on demand

  • In the current system, a website is blocked until a parent enters a passcode to grant permission, or they manually add a website to a permitted list in settings

• “Time Allowances” streamlines granting different time permissions for different apps (and groups of similar apps, like games) and makes it easier to differentiate how children are likely to use devices differently on both weekdays and weekends

• It’s now (finally) possible to immediately pause a child’s device with a single click

The interface update is terrific—it looks like it’s made by humans! Humans who actually have children using Apple devices! The previous interface looked like it was made by technologists completing a check list. The interface was so obtuse and weird, not to mention buried deep in the settings app, that I often avoided engaging with it.

One of those problems (the interface) is better. One of the others (buried in the settings app) is not. To engage with Screen Time settings—like wanting to tap that new button to immediately pause a device—involves too many steps for a simple task.

1. Pick up your phone

2. Wait for FaceID to engage

3. Navigate to the Settings app

4. Click on “Family”

5. Click on the appropriate family member

6. Tap “pause devise use”

Apple confirmed to Crossplay that Screen Time is, sadly, not becoming its own app, akin to Google’s excellent Family Link app that Screen Time appears to be riffing on.

But could you ask Siri to lock your child’s device? Sadly, the answer is no.

In theory, more robust options for when and how long your children are engaging with various apps means you should be spending less time futzing around with the customization options, but at least in our house, we’re conservative on the amount of time the children are given to use their devices. Extended use becomes a conversation over “Are chores done? What else were you asked to do today? Did you take the garbage out? Sorry, we’re leaving soon.” We often grant more time—after talking.

(In general, the kids have one hour of free time on weekdays, two hours on weekends, and anything beyond that is where we talk about what they’re doing and when. We do not currently really differentiate between whether it’s videos, Roblox, or something else, but there are occasions where, say, we’re only bringing the device so that one of them can practice drawing by using a specific app for that purpose and nothing more.)

It’s possible some changes could come before the update is finalized, but Screen Time getting its own app seems unlikely. The best we can hope for is being able to invoke Siri, or use the system’s Shortcuts app, to find a way to better achieve these features.

Oh, right. My other hobby horse.

I’m told that, once again, the only options for extending time when a child asks for it is increments of “one minute,” “15 minuets,” “one hour,” and “all day.” Which means Screen Time is, once again, lagging behind functionality available in Family Link.

There are also other basic and foundational issues with Apple’s Screen Time. Just yesterday, my six-year-old was home in-between a cheerleading camp and daycare. I was finishing up some emails, so I let her use her device a little longer than usual. Her request for more time came through to my laptop, I granted her 15 minutes, and…nothing. On my side, it said the request was approved. On her side, nothing changed.

Instead, I had to walk over and manually punch in her passcodes. Wonderful.

I’m told the architecture has been reworked for this update—an update, mind you, that won’t be available for several more months, aka all summer—but if your response is “Why didn’t this work from the start? Isn’t Apple’s pitch stuff just works?” Mmm.

All told, these are positive steps. But to crystalize my requests to Apple for the future:

• A dedicated Screen Time app

• The ability to invoke Siri or other shortcut-like features to lock devices

• Granular control over extending screen time to accommodate specific requests

Maybe next year.

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

Leave a comment

Also:

• Apple’s policies on parental controls has long been fraught. In general, the company wants you to use their controls. I get it. But they need to be best in class.

• Parental controls from the companies that make devices is, on its face, a problem. They are selling the devices and telling you the safest way to use them?

• The move to Ghost is happening soon. I’ve been waiting for Crossplay’s annual subscriptions to move through the backend before hitting the big, scary button.

My daughter has just turned two, so she’s not playing video games just yet. She’s curious and really likes poking the controller buttons. She can even tolerate sitting on my lap until I find a checkpoint to quit whatever game I was frantically playing while she napped.

Still, a part of me is already anticipating her forays into gaming. Another part of me expects her contrarian toddler mindset to extend to games. Maybe she won’t be into them at all. But if she is, she will need my help—to play and understand, but also to choose. I’m not naive in thinking I’ll have full control over what she ends up playing as she gets older. (Cue memories of wildly inappropriate games I played at a wildly inappropriate age myself.)

A very unscientific self-selection survey that I ran on Bluesky revealed that parents with gamer kids, when in doubt, do their own research on specific games. Looking at reviews on Google, watching playthroughs on YouTube or Twitch, and sometimes researching the studio or developer behind it.

Not a single reply mentioned game ratings, except for this delightful person who recalled their own childhood experience:

“My parents never played video games but let my younger brother and I pick out games based on their ratings.”

My mind rebels at the idea of looking at ratings to determine if a given game is kid-suitable. What am I, my parents? Still, that’s the first thing I think about when imagining making a game purchasing decision. Someone has done the work to review the game, to make my job as a parent easier, so why not use it?

Ostensibly, this is the reason the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), responsible for rating interactive entertainment in the US and Canada, exists. I’m used to seeing the black and white rectangle on game jackets at Gamestop and EB Games, as well as in game trailers on Steam and the like.

The ESRB’s rating classification and similar systems in place in other countries, like the Pan European Game Information (PEGI), struck me as reductive and overly broad.

The criteria by which rating authorities determine their ratings include the usual suspects of violence, sexual content, nudity, gambling, and substance use, including tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. There are subtle differences in how the ESRB and PEGI approach different content warnings, but their idea is similar: broadly, the less explicit or realistic these content themes are, if present, the lower the rating.

Within ESRB, there are five ratings possible for a video game: “E” rated for everyone, “E10+” rated for everyone 10 years and older, “Teen” rated for, I suppose, kids 13 years old and older, “Mature” rated for 17+, and “Adults only” rated to folks over 18.

PEGI uses numbers and colours for achieving essentially the same thing: 3 rated for kids over 3 years old (green), 7 rated for kids over 7 years old (green), 12 rated for teens over 12 (orange), 16 rated for teens over 16 (orange), and 18 rated for folks over 18 (red).

Mild cartoonish violence and some mild language are allowed in games rated E for everyone. Blood is rated T for Teen, as are “suggestive themes.” Intense violence and sexual content are 17+. Simulated gambling is A-OK for teens, but gambling with real currency is 18+ only, as is graphic sexual content and prolonged scenes of violence.

Age, as the crux on which the whole system rests, is the ratings’ biggest weakness.

Everyone’s idea of “age-appropriate,” let alone what constitutes a “mature” theme, is wildly, wildly different. Violent content generally falls lower on the rating spectrum than sexual content or gambling, but some parents may feel differently about this hierarchy. It sticks to sweeping generalizations by design—it has to. '

A convenient, clean, and tidy system of five ratings would be impossible otherwise.

Its lack of specificity is even more evident with Roblox, a platform with a mind-boggling user count of upwards of 150 million and millions of user-generated games. Moderating them alone is a gargantuan task. Giving these games an official, board-approved rating? So far, nothing.

Since ESRB et al cannot ignore Roblox, their solution is to slap it and other platforms like it with a “Diverse Content: Discretion Advised” content warning and move on. PEGI does the same with an exclamation mark “!” rating that reads like so: “PEGI!”

Go on, parents, figure it out yourselves.

(At least, PEGI has been rethinking its approach to rating games with in-game purchases. As of June 2026, games with loot boxes and battle passes will be rated at least PEGI 16, signaling a turn towards more control when it comes to spending real currency.)

My daughter will certainly start with games that my husband and I pick for her, games that we have played ourselves or know well. But there will come a point to consider games for her that I have no first-hand knowledge of. There, I’ll need help figuring out if they could scare, confuse, or upset her. If they are, gasp, age-appropriate—the very thing interactive software ratings boards set out to accomplish with their video game rating classifications.

Is it nearly time to call ratings boards obsolete?

They certainly still matter to game publishers, whose reach can be altered by a restrictive rating, but they’re less relevant to consumers than before. Even sites like Common Sense Media are more top-of-mind for parents than ESRB/PEGI. Readily available resources, more tailored to parents’ needs, make direct research of games possible, bypassing some ratings board that cannot account for each child’s specific interests and sensitivities. The ratings boards fail because they’re an attempt at a one-size-fits-all, where one size just isn’t possible.

Game ratings won’t be a surefire way for me to choose games for my daughter. I won’t rely on them to decide what my child does and doesn’t get to play. I’ll look, sure, if they still exist by then, but I’m already resigning myself to researching each specific game, playing it, or at least looking over my kid’s shoulder sometimes when she plays. I don’t know if she’ll take to Roblox or another big gaming platform that comes after.

All I know is that I will have work to do if I want her gaming experience to be safe and entertaining while she’s little.

So, more homework for us parents. As usual!

Leave a comment

Backyard Sports was a popular edutainment franchise that started in 1997, though there hasn’t been a new entry since 2010. Fans have been waiting for a new Backyard about three years longer than the next Grand Theft Auto. (There was, technically, a mobile game back in 2015.) It’s perhaps best known for its cast of diverse and memorable characters, especially the first sports GOAT for many millennials, Pablo Sanchez.

The gameplay in the Backyard is much more arcade-focused than other sports games: less NBA 2K, more NBA Jam. As opposed to the simulation games that dominate the sports game market, Backyard Sports is more focused on fun—after all, it was originally “edutainment.” The focus was teaching the rules of baseball, rather than a challenge.

But after all these years, a new game didn’t come easy. It took a lot of work, including hiring a private investigator. But on July 9, Backyard Baseball will be released on Steam, and is coming to Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S at a later date.

“What if you had the opportunity one day to work on your favorite franchise?”

It’s a question that Playground Productions’ Lindsay Barnett (CEO and voice behind four characters, including commentator Vinnie the Gooch) and Matthew Berk (CMO) posed to me during our recent interview. It’s one they get to answer every day, as the company bringing back Backyard Sports.

It’s hard to argue that any game beats Backyard Baseball in terms of inclusion. Kenny Kawaguchi, a boy in a wheelchair, is one of the best pitchers you could ask for. Keisha Phillips, a Black girl, is the best power hitter in the game. And the flagship character, Pablo Sanchez, doesn’t speak English. You would be hard-pressed to find a kid who picks up Backyard Baseball and doesn’t someone who looks like them or acts like them.

“How many other games do kids get to see the representation that they see in the backyard, right?” said Berk. “When they look at this game, they get to see themselves. And especially for those who [are having] their first gaming experience, they’re gonna look at these kids who will become backyard heroes, or legends, or whatever they become to them and know that they can do that too. It’s a wonderful place to start.”

As a teacher, Barnett saw firsthand the lack of fulfilling games for children available.

“I had to see for my entire teaching career, students that were getting taken advantage of by the games that they were playing,” she said. “They had to buy things in order to win them, or they were just exposed to violence and inappropriate themes much earlier. There’s a simplicity to the backyard of, you know, ‘you can play here.’”

“It’s a time suck,” said Berk. “Ask a kid after two hours of playing if they’re happy, if they’re satisfied—if they feel good about it. I’d be hard pressed to find one who doesn’t walk away from playing Backyard and saying, ‘I loved it.’”

In an era where live service games are dominating, both in children’s and sports games, time is the valuable commodity. Keep playing to level up a battle pass. Complete the limited-time challenge today, or miss out on a skin of a cool character.

The team has no such aspirations for Backyard Baseball. Not only are parents and children able to play against each other locally (no co-operative multiplayer options, unfortunately), but Barnett and Berk want this togetherness to go beyond the screen.

“If you are inspired to go and get an actual glove and a ball and go outside and play, that is a huge win for us,” Barnett said.

“For those young fans who have not [played baseball] yet, they’re playing and saying ‘I get it. I can go and do this,’” Berk said. “And for the parents or adults playing with them, it’s ‘I want to go do this with you.’”

Playground Productions is helping enable this with new product partnerships. Pablo Sanchez is a sponsored athlete for Wilson Sporting Goods. Louisville Slugger is offering themed bats, including one based on the Aluminum Power power-up. The best part? These deals were initiated by people at Wilson and Louisville Slugger, aka “fans who have grown up to have now grown up to have cool jobs,” in Barnett’s words.

A fun part of testing the game for the team has been seeing how children, like their own families, react. Would kids be able to see what see millennials fell in love with?

“I was really struck by, when my nephew was picking players, he picked players with positive self-talk, and looked like they were excited to play,” Barnett said. “And you start to realize how important these characters and what they say can be to the development of a child.”

Another way that Backyard Baseball is trying to be inclusive is in the difficulty. Barnett and Berk promised there would be plenty of accessibility modes to get everyone involved, but the way they discussed the harder difficulties was especially interesting.

“Difficulty in our world is different from difficulty in some of the other sports titles out there,” said Barnett. “It’s not… having to click a million different buttons. It’s increased comedy. There are more fireball pitches. There’s more errors, there’s more kids that are falling or spinning around. Even if it’s difficult, you’re going to be laughing and having a good time.”

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Barnett and Berk who their favorite characters in the game were.

Barnett showed a wood carving the Playground Productions team had made for her of the commentary duo: Sunny Day and Vinnie the Gooch.

“She [Sunny] is the one reporting at every single game in the entire Backyard,” said Barnett. “No matter who’s playing, no matter what time of day, what time of year, you’ll see Sunny Day out there. I always imagined… that Sunny was always part of the assembly of how these games all get together. Somebody’s got to be organized in that environment to be reporting and bringing the kids together.”

A fitting answer, for a CEO who hired a PI to hunt down the rights to a franchise.

Berk’s answer, however, was a little more controversial: Ronny Dobbs.

“Ronny’s there because [his older sister] Sally’s there, right?” he began. “He’s not particularly good at any one skill. He falls and he makes errors, and he cries. But Ronny walks up to every at bat, hopping with glee towards the plate with renewed enthusiasm for each new play. I think that that’s so emblematic of the spirit of the backyard. When we fall and trip—and Ronny does that a lot—we get back up and we keep going. And there are players that are better than him, but they play with Ronny, too. They’re both on the same field.”

If that’s the kind of kids that Backyard Baseball helps inspire on the real diamond, the team at Playground Productions will be satisfied.

When Stranger Things wrapped, fans were so upset over saying goodbye, plus the conclusion’s polarization reaction, that “Conformity Gate” was born. The theory was that Netflix was hiding a secret final episode that had yet to air—the real ending. There were no “Conformity Gate” truthers in our household, but I was rooting for it anyway, because it would have given our family more time in the world of Hawkins.

I still wish it was true.

I didn’t need Stranger Things to have a secret ending; the final season was okay, the finale was pretty good, and I do not regret spending time in that world. But it was the first time my entire family—kids and adults—were so collectively enthralled by a TV show that we all did our chores faster, we ate our food faster, and we finished homework faster in pursuit of fitting in another 20 minutes of an episode before bed.

Honestly, it’s surprising it happened at all!

Months ago, my wife and I were watching the final season. It’s a show close to our hearts, because of its throwback nature and because its airing parallels my oldest. (Stranger Things debuted in July 2016; my nine-year-old was born a month later.) Vecna, the Freddy Krueger-like villain that appears midway through the series, is wrecking. Our heroes are getting beat. Vecna is scary as hell. Naturally, this becomes an evening where our youngest, then five, waltzes out of her room and declares she can’t sleep.

Our general policy when the kids are having trouble falling asleep is they can color next to us, but they’re watching what we’re watching. Now, there’s limits, but Stranger Things did not rise beyond it. One reason for this approach is that if the kids determine what we’re watching is boring, they’ll go back to their room and fall asleep.

In this case, my youngest decided to stick around and was immediately transfixed. Grabbing onto my wife’s arm. “Who is this?” “Who is that?” And that evening, a kid who never has nightmares had a nightmare…about Vecna killing her. Of course. Sigh.

Later, when my nine-year-old raised the idea of watching Stranger Things, fueled by a YouTube Shorts algorithm that was apparently funneling her spoiler analysis videos, there was some pause about my youngest. Vecna didn’t show up until later in the series, so by the time he came around, maybe she’d be into the show and not care?

Jackpot.

One rainy afternoon, we watched four episodes in a row. I haven’t watched that much TV since before kids. It was special. I figured it would take us the better part of a year to watch all of it, but after school, the kids would beg for “ramen and Stranger Things,” and suddenly, we’d blasted through five seasons of Stranger Things in mere months.

Then, it was over. Not without tears, gasps, and a few is-so-and-so-gonna-die moments, but the credits rolled and we were left without any. more. episodes.

We tried to watch the behind-the-scenes documentary…but that lasted 15 minutes. We tried the animated show…but it’s aimed at children and my wife and I were bored.

Quickly, I could feel this moment—this connection—slipping.

While we regularly watch and enjoy movies together, it’s usually with entertainment aimed at my kids. Stranger Things was a rare “oh, we’re all having a blast.” And it meant many nights of the family cozied up on the couch, yelling and screaming together.

I searched online for “shows like Stranger Things for young kids” and found a few recommendations to try. I jotted down eight into my phone, queued up some trailers on the TV, and asked everyone to sit down. The plan was to watch every single trailer, poll the family on which ones were their favorites, and come up with a handful of shows to trial. Maybe, if we were lucky, one would grab us how Stranger Things did.

Here’s how that experiment played out! All told, we had eight shows in consideration:

Read more

A few days back, my nine-year-old asked if she could ride her bike to a friend’s house.

This friend’s house is not far, but it’s not exactly walking down the street, or even around the block. It’s less than a mile but, well, almost a mile. She’s been further away from the house with a group of older friends, but it would be the furthest she’s gone alone. It gave me pause. I said no, but also said I would talk to her mom about it, because honestly, I did trust her to make the ride. She’s smart, cautious, and capable.

I have written about wanting to avoid becoming a helicopter parent. I want to trust my kids to be independent, out of sight, and making mistakes the same way I did.

Mostly the same way, anyway. It’s no longer the mid 90s. There is technology at your fingertips to keep an eye on where your child is at all times, if you’d like. You can snoop on their messages. What’s the line between caring parent and privacy invasion?

Anyway, this is all to say: we bought my nine-year-old an Apple Watch.

There were several considerations that went into this undeniably expensive solution.

Read more

Summer is not the kindest time for this roundup; the pools are open, the schools are closed, and there’s just a general downturn in video games targeted at families.

Which is fine, but also has me asking a question: what is your family’s relationship with video games in the summer? This was where I’d spend hours upon hours upgrading my characters in RPGs for the SNES and original PlayStation. My parents would discover this because…uh, I would not wake up until sometime closer to lunch.

If you represent these games and have a potentially interesting story to share about how these games consider kids as part of their audience, do get in touch with me!

• eFootball Kick-Off! (Switch 2) — June 2

Description: Originally known as PES, the ultimate football action game is coming to Nintendo Switch 2! Build an original team and enter tournaments around the world! Take your one-of-a-kind dream team to the very top! Jump right into an action-packed match with friends or family using real national teams and clubs!
Rating: E
Price: $19.99

The launch of eFootball was a disaster, and even after Konami rolled out extensive updates, IGN said the game was “no longer a laughing stock due to its most hilarious visual bugs being resolved, but now it’s just kind of sad.” Woof. It’s hard to tell what’s changed in the years since; mainstream critics have largely been ignoring the series.

• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S) — June 3

Description: The second game of the FINAL FANTASY VII remake trilogy. After escaping from the dystopian city of Midgar, Cloud and his friends set out on a journey across the planet. New adventures await in a vibrant and vast world—sprint across grassy plains on a chocobo and explore expansive environments.
Rating: T
Price: $49.99

The first 10 hours or so I spent with this game were jaw dropping. And then I spent entirely too much time trying to do everything in the game and kinda ruined it for myself. I would have been better off just shooting through the story and getting to the other side. Still, Square Enix’s approach to these “remakes” has been more interesting and ambitious than what you usually get and the Switch 2 ports have been excellent.

• Mini Football Legends (Apple Arcade) — June 4

Description: Kick off the ultimate soccer experience with Mini Football Legends! Step onto the field in this premium edition of Miniclip’s hit game, now available exclusively on Apple Arcade. Get ready to compete with teams from all over the world, as you build your team and rise through the Leagues, becoming the Legend you were born to be. Whether you’re playing with friends or diving solo into a full Career, every match brings you closer to greatness.
Rating: 4+
Price: $6.99/month

Adding a “+” typically indicates an existing game coming to Apple Arcade without microtransactions, but Mini Football Legends appears to be that in another form. (If you weren’t aware, the World Cup is imminent; hence the soccer games.) Would you be shocked to learn the many complaints on Google Play are about microtransactions?

• My Talking Tom 2+ (Apple Arcade) — June 4

Description: Every day is an adventure with the cool virtual pet, Talking Tom. The superstar virtual cat is going on the ultimate pet adventure, and with you, it’s going to be more fun than ever! Your favorite funny friend is ready to dazzle you with his new wardrobe, amazing skills, and special features.
Rating: 4+
Price: $6.99/month

This game is massively popular—nearly a million reviews on the App Store. Most people love it, and it’s funny to see reviews that suggest you flip off wi-fi on your device because it cuts down on some of the ads. Mobile games are often gross, friends.

• Coffee Inc 2+ (Apple Arcade) — June 4

Description: Coffee Inc 2+ is the Apple Arcade edition of the hit business simulation game. Build your coffee empire across the world — without limits. Every feature, upgrade, and expansion is fully unlocked, with no in-app purchases required. Start as the founder of a single cafe and grow into a global powerhouse. Craft new products, inspire employees, expand into major cities, and dominate the market. Every decision is yours.
Rating: 4+
Price: $6.99/month

The problem with so many mobile games, and trying to give you a sense of what to make of them, is so few critics review mobile games. You’re relying on the wisdom of the crowd, but in general, people leaving reviews are typically leaving negative comments. From what I can tell, it seems like a totally serviceable tycoon-style game.

• NBA The Run (PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC) – June 9

Description: Take your favorite NBA stars to iconic streetball courts around the world, in this fast-paced, online 3v3 basketball game. Stack wins, earn cred and become the GOAT of THE RUN. Who’s Got Next?
Rating: E
Price: TBA

At some point, my desire for games like this should manifest in the form of an arcade cabinet in my house. In the meantime, Game Informer enjoyed trying NBA the Run, which apparently comes from ex-NBA Street folks: “While I still miss the Street games, I came away from my hands-on time extremely impressed with not only how well NBA The Run plays, but how the quick-hit structure compelled me to want to keep playing.”

• Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains (PC, Switch/Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X/S) — June 11

Description: Assemble your team, build your roster of iconic Star Wars™ characters, and battle with your friends and family for control of the galaxy as you move across storied planets and locations. Choose from a wide array of Star Wars heroes and villains, each with their own unique abilities. Whether you’re teaming up with Luke Skywalker or unleashing Darth Vader, every match is packed with team strategy, surprises, and classic Star Wars moments. No two battles unfold the same way, the fate of your team is yours to shape!
Rating: E10+
Price: $29.99

This is from…Ubisoft? I’m baffled. And also not convinced Monopoly is a good game.

• to a T (Switch 2) — June 11

Description: to a T is a narrative adventure game that portrays the extraordinary life of a 13-year-old teenager, whose body happens to be in the shape of the letter “T.” They live in a modest seaside town that they explore by foot, train, or even their favorite unicycle, and interact with a the charming cast of characters who live there.
Rating: E
Price: $19.99

I missed to a T the first time, but I have an affection for everything designer Keita Takahashi touches. I should just play this. Plus, while reviews were a little middling, places like RPGFan found it worth trying out: “It’s almost poetic (or pretentious, if you’re cynical), but the fact that to a T is an imperfect game is in itself perfect.”

• Barbie: Horse Ride & Rescue (iOS, Android) – June 16

Description: Start your Western horse riding adventure with Barbie at Roaming Hearts Rescue Ranch. Rescue and rehabilitate charming horses, test your riding skills and customize your style as you uncover the mysteries of Moonrise Valley!
Rating: 4+
Price: TBA

The screen shots make this look charming, but then read the fine print and realize the numbers are bleak. This children’s game is charging $2.99 per week, $9.99 per month, or $80 per year. What are we doing here? This is a game meant for kids. Come on.

• The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (Switch 2) — June 18

Description: A brand-new action RPG from the creators of Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default – The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales combines stunning HD-2D visuals and exciting action-adventure gameplay for the first time!
Rating: T
Price: $59.99

Strong Zelda vibes, and perhaps more approachable for youngsters than, say, Mina the Hollower. I’ve had this on my radar, and Polygon said the “relentlessly satisfying and succinct gameplay loop of The Adventures of Elliot made my hour with the game fly by.”

• Destroy All Humans! (Switch) — June 23

Description: Crypto is back and humanity is still very much in trouble. Already wreaking havoc on Nintendo Switch, the cult-classic alien invasion lands on Nintendo Switch 2 later this year with richer visuals, denser worlds, improved shaders, and support for full HD up to 1440p resolution. Unleash chaos with powerful psychic abilities, outrageous weaponry, and a sharp sense of humor. Invade Earth, harvest DNA, and remind the human race exactly who’s in charge. Includes the downloadable content “Skin Pack”!
Rating: T
Price: TBA

Maybe you don’t want to explain what “probing” is, but they don’t make goofy action games like this anymore! No word on the Switch 2 version, but Nintendo Life called it straight last time: “a remake that refreshes the original’s visuals, modernises its controls and adds a few new weapon and traversal upgrades to proceedings, all whilst failing to make any meaningful changes to the game’s rather outdated core gameplay.”

• Wanderstop (Switch/Switch 2) – June 23

Description: From the creator of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide comes Wanderstop, a narrative-centric cozy game about change and tea.
Rating: T
Price: $24.99

I enjoyed Wanderstop, but fell off it because these are just not my games! What makes Wanderstop work longer than most was being more character-focused and objective-focused than other cozy games. Game Informer felt like I did, calling it “a pensive, funny, and surprising story set in a charming location with enjoyable characters.”

• Star Fox (Switch 2) — June 25

Description: Step into the cockpit and fly across the stars and skies with Fox McCloud and the Star Fox team! With the Lylat system under attack by evil scientist Andross, it’s up to you and the squad to fend off his forces. Blast your way through enemies in a fast-paced adventure that will have you tearing through space, soaring across planets, and shooting loads of foes out of the sky at every turn.
Rating: E10+
Price: $49.99

Star Fox 64 is an all-time favorite. I am reluctant to revisit it because it’s an ancient, linear game that you can finish in a few hours. What I actually want is a version of Star Fox that’s more expensive, fitted for the year 2026. But I will undoubtably give this a shot because my kids were so tickled by Fox McCloud in the recent Mario movie.

• #Drive Rally (PS5, Xbox Series X/S) — June 28

Description: #DRIVE Rally isn’t just a trip down memory lane; it’s an arcade-inspired rally-driving experience set in the golden racing era of the ‘90s. Experience the thrill of rally racing with passionate co-drivers who react dynamically to your driving, offering both praise and critique while helping you navigate the twists and turns of every stage.
Rating: E
Price: $19.99

You don’t get many rally-focused games, unless you count Forza Horizon? Mostly, this makes me want to listen to the Sega Rally Championship soundtrack. If you need to scratch an itch, this might work, but WayTooManyGames was meh on it: “Again, it’s not that #Drive Rally is a bad game; it’s just yet another arcadey rally game.”

Leave a comment

Currently, my family has over 150 hours playing Stardew Valley together. It is rare that we find an activity that the whole family enjoys this much, but Stardew Valley has become that. My kids will now not ask for just screen time—but instead ask for Stardew Valley family time.

All of this has caused me to think about why this is such a hit for my kids.

Stardew Valley is, at its core, a 2D farming simulator, very similar to the old Harvest Moon games. It also contains elements of a relationship simulator, top down Zelda combat, resource gathering, fishing, and crafting. Each of those gameplay elements has been simplified, but they all work together to create an experience where you can easily shift between different types of gameplay. It is this variety of gameplay and level of polish that I can see why Stardew Valley is still going strong even after 10 years.

The game is really easy to control.

My kids are twin eight-year-olds and although they are beginning to dabble in more complex games, they haven’t quite mastered camera control or complicated button pressing. From the beginning, they understood what every button did. The simple controls allowed them to not focus on the controller and dive into all the other aspects of the game.

It also has the right blend of individual and team objectives.

Right now, we are working to complete a very hard optional task of collecting rare seeds from a man named Mr. Qi. This demands the whole family working together to accomplish the task. Before we started this, my son was working on raising his fishing level, and my daughter was trying to find the resources to craft different outfits for the whole family. Now we are all focusing on this one task. That is what makes Stardew Valley really great for the entire family.

At some points, we are working together as a team on a shared goal, at other times we can each work on our own individual goals.

There is a perfect blend of shared and individual goals, and though we encourage our kids to help with the larger goals, it is never forced upon them. They have the freedom to choose what to do, and it is this blend of goals that seems to keep my kids interested. My wife and I encourage their freedom and are really proud when they agree that they should be helping the family with a large shared goal.

Importantly, the game also gives my kids the ability to express themselves in many different ways.

My son likes to dress like a real farmer, and has a cabin to match this aesthetic, while my daughter likes to do something more stylish and has themes for each room in her house. (She also has tailored outfits for each of us for each season.) This creativity not just in aesthetics, but in game play really means they can play how they want, while also contributing to the overall family farm.

One last thing that I am grateful to Stardew Valley for is that it is teaching my kids responsibilities, chores, and contributing to the family. Each Stardew Valley day my daughter is in charge of the animals, and my son is in charge of harvesting crops, mushrooms and sap. They know this is their morning responsibilities, and that if they want to do anything else with the rest of the day, they can—after they finish their morning chores.

It has gotten to the point where they do these chores each morning, without having to be reminded. This behavior has carried over to doing chores in real life, where they don’t complain about doing them, because they relate that, just like in Stardew Valley, they need to contribute to the family.

My wife and I have seen Stardew Valley teach them not just to do chores but that everyone has their own responsibilities within the family.

I am so glad that Stardew Valley has come into our lives and given us this amazing family game. Each night before bed, we usually do one or two Stardew Valley days. It is family time for us, doing something everyone in the family enjoys.

I don’t know when my kids will want to play or do something else, but for now, my wife and I are loving our time with them on our farm in Stardew Valley.

Leave a comment

A few weeks back, there were some notable headlines about Roblox:

• CNBC: “Roblox shares plummet 18% as child safety measures weigh on bookings”

• Investopedia: “Roblox Slashes Its Outlook as Users Grow Slower Than Expected. The Stock Is Plummeting”

• Bloomberg: “Roblox Shares Fall Most in Four Years on Slowing User Growth”

For Roblox? Ouch. For everyone else? Potentially, some good news.

One of the platforms we regularly interrogate here is Roblox, and one of the questions that regularly comes up about Roblox is whether it’s safe to let your kids play on it.

The answer to that question is, like many gray areas in parenting, “no, but..?

My personal worry is that for whatever meaningful changes have come to Roblox, the changes necessary to push the needle on safety requires sacrificing capitalistic ascent. It requires bleeding money and users alike. It means the number can’t go up, because such changes would, by definition, introduce friction that would stand in the way of it.

Such financial pain was inevitable and necessary.

Some context, per CNBC:

“Roblox shares plummeted 18% on Friday after the company reported first-quarter earnings as its new child safety measures weighed on bookings. […] In a letter to shareholders, the gaming company wrote that its new age-check feature “restricted on-platform communication for non-age checked users, diluted communication for age-checked users, and slowed new user acquisition,” causing greater-than-expected headwinds.”

And what this means relative to what was expected, per Bloomberg:

“The video-game company’s 132 million daily active users fell short of analysts’ estimates of 143.8 million. While that’s a 35% increase year-over-year, it marks the second consecutive decline compared with the previous quarter. Bookings came in at $1.7 billion, compared with Wall Street’s expectations of $1.73 billion.”

Roblox has, also according to Bloomberg, “projected another quarter of user declines.”

It’s worth remembering this is a company that still has 132 million daily active users. It dwarfs the most popular games on any other platform. It is, for some, their world, and while Roblox will not dominate forever, there’s nothing suggesting it’s going away.

I’ve documented the changes Roblox has made over the past few years, including overhauling its parenting controls (good) and introducing age requirements for features like chat (messy but well-meaning). But Roblox has found itself in a tight spot, where it’s on the verge of being regulated while also being sued by several states, because it prioritized growth over everything else. It wanted the most users possible.

Which isn’t to say Roblox didn’t think about safety at all—we’re talking priorities.

Roblox, despite its hundreds of millions of users and vice grip on youth attention, also isn’t profitable. It remains in the red, because revenue is different than profit. There are creators publishing games on Roblox making money, but to date, Roblox continues to invest more in building and scaling its platform than it does making money off of it.

A similar playbook has played out with companies like Facebook and Amazon: burn an extraordinary amount of money, year after year, while capturing a huge amount of attention. Later, you’ll find a way to make a gazillion dollars. Roblox is popular and has attention, but it does not yet have a gazillion dollars. Maybe it eventually will!

The question for me, though, is whether Roblox is willing to keep enduring more tension in growth in service of containing to lock down the platform even more.

One of the best reporters on the Roblox beat is Bloomberg’s Cecilia D’Anastasio. Yes, she’s the one responsible for the “Roblox’s Pedophile Problem” story that arguably helped kick off much of the increased scrutiny Roblox is under. I’d asked D’Anastasio to answer a few questions about this latest news and they were so good I figured I might as well just include everything she said below. You’ll get more out of it that way.

So, is this an existential crisis for Roblox?

Stop listening to me. Onto D’Anastasio:

Do you anticipate Roblox to keep adding, as you phrased it in your piece, additional “friction” to the platform in response to ongoing lawsuits and potential regulation, despite the recent financial news?

Cecilia D’Anastasio: Safety has become central to Roblox’s public messaging. So while I suspect that many of the most high-friction changes have already been implemented—like restrictions on chat and age-verification—I absolutely think the company will continue to roll out new updates and tweaks.

Experts say safety is a moving target. Not only do predators trade tricks on how to evade moderation on darknet fora, but also, kids are always finding new ways to exploit systems and do bad stuff, like harass people or gamble. Roblox’s big challenge is both making sure users don’t find ways to circumvent its current safety measures while also keeping up with unpredictable new threats.

But yes, we saw a trade-off there when Roblox shares took a hit recently. I often hear parents express discomfort over Roblox because of what they read in the news. Roblox is making a long-term bet that enough parents will feel comfortable letting their children play in its online sandbox that it will eventually outweigh any short-term financial hits.

Does Roblox face an existential crisis of sorts? The platform is not yet profitable, but as the result of the path it chose to encourage exponential user growth, it’s being forced to make user growth more difficult.

D’Anastasio: A lot of companies aren’t profitable. I don’t think most people close to Roblox would say it’s facing an existential crisis. Overall, Roblox is growing its revenue, bookings, user base and cultural footprint. It’s certainly done a lot better than other game companies.

Roblox’s CFO warned that last year’s growth—especially with hit games Grow A Garden and Steal A Brainrot—might be hard to replicate this year with safety changes adding friction to sign-ups, etc. But when it comes to finances, Roblox has shown some signs that it’s trying to find more ways to monetize its user base, like by skimming a percentage of revenue off game developers’ ad deals on the platform.

Countless tech companies have grown their user bases for years before figuring out how to sustainably make money. We’ll see how well Roblox balances that against retaining game developers’ trust.

Roblox, like many modern social platforms, chased user growth and decided to enact privacy and safety measures after a growing public backlash. What might Roblox have looked like if it’d built these features in tandem with growth?

D’Anastasio: I wish I could tell you. This is such a common occurrence that pointing it out would feel mundane if not for the countless people who say they’ve been harmed from a failure to implement certain safety protocols. I remember even playing Valorant in beta and realizing that Riot Games didn’t implement some of the anti-harassment features they’d already honed for more than a decade on League of Legends. Safety is so often an afterthought.

Roblox says that it’s always been designed with safety and civility in mind. I think the standards for what that looks like have changed as more and more governments are paying attention. But kids who grew up on the platform have always been calling this out. For years, vigilantes have publicly demanded the removal of Roblox games like Bathroom Simulator or “condos” where avatars simulate sex.

Their idea of a safe Roblox has been clear in their minds for more than a decade. And if you ask them what they envision, it’s pretty simple: no sex games, no racist role-plays, no predators posing as kids. But I’m sure a lot of product designers at Roblox would say it’s not so easy to actually design these features in a way that doesn’t restrict creative expression or user growth.

Leave a comment

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

Also:

• Roblox use is way, way down in the house. When the kids do have tablet time, they are spending it watching videos. My six-year-old is into Minecraft again.

• Movies based on Roblox properties were inevitable, but it’s hard for me to imagine many of them actually get made. Call me when I can buy a ticket.

• A few weeks ago, I did not know what “condo games” were, and much like bathroom simulators, it’s utterly bizarre they lasted on the platform this long.

There are times where my children want to play a video game on their own, like the way my nine-year-old keeps asking to borrow my Switch 2 to play Tomodachi Life. There are times they want to play games with one another, like role-playing in Roblox.

One of my favorite dynamics is when they want to observe me playing a game and make suggestions on what would happen next, what character’s names should be, etc.

That’s the rhythm we’ve fallen into lately with the surprisingly delightful Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, a new Switch 2 game that’s ultimately far more (in a good way!) puzzler than platformer. Sure, you’re still jumping quite a bit, but this is a game without death. If you fall in a pit, there are no consequences. Which isn’t to suggest Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is without difficulty, challenge, or nuance! It’s quite the opposite. Instead, what the game asks of you is a deep well of curiosity and patience.

Onto my review…

Yoshi and Mysterious Book

• Platform: Switch 2 (No support for Switch 1)

• Rating: E

• Price: $49.99 (Digital) / $59.99 (Physical)

• Players: 1

• GameShare Compatible? Yes

• Good For Kids? Yes

• Difficulty Modifiers: A very good hint system

As the title suggests, Yoshi’s on a new adventure with a “mysterious book” named Mr. E, whose pages contain access to a litany of odd creatures. Yoshi’s asked to play a detective, trying to decipher the patterns, behaviors, and secrets of those within.

The game is divided into chapters, with different “levels,” or areas of exploration, contained within. Each level focuses on a single creature that, at the start, you’ll know nothing about. There are no goombas here! It’s your job to hop in and…mess around.

What happens if you use Yoshi’s tongue to eat them? What happens if you toss them in the water? What happens if you butt stomp them? What happens if you feed them an apple? What happens if…? Each time you discover a new characteristic, it’s literally marked on the level, as a form of visible achievement. And it sticks around forever, too, so if you sweep through an area again, you’re reminded of past achievements.

Some humorous examples from my own time with the game:

• “Easily dazed when bopped.”

• “Tastes a little sweet.”

• “Sings when stepped upon.”

• “Sudsy sleepers nap underground.”

These are not the “traditional” goals of a video game. The levels don’t have end screens! You bump into a part that is no longer drawn and are stopped in place.

The real pleasure in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book comes from stumbling into the unknown, recklessly and mischievously. Like most Nintendo games, it doesn’t have traditional difficulty options, nor extensive accessibility features that, in turn, allow you to tweak the game’s challenge curve. (This is me, once gain, pounding the table for either voice acting or voice over support, because it frustrates my six-year-old that she can’t tell what’s going on while we play. ) Because you are not required to “do” all that much to move from one area to the next, that becomes the game’s “easy” mode.

There is also, thankfully, a very good “hint” system that has two layers. One, a small hint on what to do next. Then, a very specific hint on what to do next. You unlock these using the coins you collect while exploring, but I always had more than enough.

Much of your time are moments below, where you stumble into “oh, you can do this”:

(In case it’s not clear, the little fluffy creatures are “drinking” the water.)

Or you can pursue legitimately stressful sequences combining puzzle and platforming:

(Yoshi’s iconic fluttering makes navigating platforming stressful in its own right!)

Early on, you’re constantly rewarded for discovering things that often feel entirely driven by chaotic accidents and happenstance. You might not have meant to drop a creature into a hole, triggering a random series of events, but it turns out that was something for you to discover. At times, it’s not immediately clear why the game is congratulating you for something, which over time can give a sense of detachment from what’s happening onscreen. There’s a main goal in each area—like getting three big flowers to bloom—that prompts the game to ask if you’d like to leave and move on.

Again, this is where the game is offering an “easy” mode. How deep do you want to dig? When I played with my kids, we would quickly whisk off to the next area to see what weird stuff was on the other side. Later, at night, I’d come back for its secrets.

When you choose to move on, there’s an important task for Yoshi: naming the creature! This, as you might imagine, is where my children came in. Please meet…

Peekoo, as named by my nine-year-old:

Baba, as named by my six-year-old:

And Pokoloko, as named (again) by my nine-year-old:

There’s many more, but you get the idea.

It is, indeed, a strange game. I’ve never really played anything like it from Nintendo.

But in the hours I’ve spent with it, solo and with my kids, I’ve smiled a lot. It’s a joy to hop into a blank page and ask my kids for ideas on what we could try. And because each individual page has dozens of mini goals, just goofing around is going to unearth some reward. But if you want to eventually find all the mysteries, and if you want to track down all the collectible flowers, you will have to put your big adult brain to use.

(Some of them are really tricky…well, for me at least. I am not a puzzle master, and I eventually had to concede defeat on some objectives, knowing I’d require a guide.)

Like Kirby, Nintendo has used Yoshi to experiment, and Yoshi and Mysterious Book falls neatly in the tradition of the character’s spin-off origins with Yoshi’s Island, through Yoshi’s Wooly/Crafted World. Some experiments work better than others.

This, thankfully, is an excellent one.

No reviews from my kids this time around. They were mostly on the sideline here. It’s also not a complete review—I only finished the first few chapters. If I have any longterm concern, it’s that the game’s charm could diminish over many, many hours.

Leave a comment

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

Also:

• I’m a little surprised this is a Switch 2 exclusive. I can’t speak to what’s running under the hood, but it’s too bad people who only own a Switch 1 will miss out.

• The game grew on me over time. Again, puzzle games are hit or mess with me; I loathe leaving a collectible behind, but there’s a truly great hint system in here.

• Separately, my daughter is now obsessed with an old 3DS of mine. I’ll be writing about this later, but thankfully, she was smart and picked my Majora’s Mask 3DS.

It’s January 3, 2026, a lazy end-of-holiday-break Saturday in the Fanelli household, and one day before the theater group we’ve joined holds auditions for this year’s show, The Little Mermaid. For months, my nine-year-old daughter Olivia has said she wants no part of auditioning for what would be her first lead role.

Then, Liv and I are watching The Game Awards’s 2025 Game of the Year orchestra medley, which ends with Jenny Kidd, the voice of Donkey Kong Bananza‘s Pauline, making a surprise appearance to sing “Breaking Through,” the game’s end credits theme.

“We’re breaking through

Down to the core

No stopping us

Not anymore.”

Olivia, unprompted, says to me, “Dad, I think I changed my mind. I want to audition for Flounder.”

When Bananza first launched, the soundtrack quickly became a Fanelli favorite. Routine repeats of each of the Bananza songs would play on TV and iPhone alike, thanks to a YouTube montage of the Bananza songs. We watched that montage periodically for the rest of the year, while also having the occasional discussion about Olivia potentially auditioning for a lead role in the next show.

Up until January 3, the day before the audition, Olivia was steadfastly against auditioning. Now, she’s decided she wants to go for it. Pauline, and by extension Jenny Kidd, has inspired her.

Alongside the copious destruction of Bananza’s main gameplay lies a story of stage fright, and the struggle to overcome.

When DK first finds Pauline and saves her from her purple rock prison, she’s then asked to sing the Kong Bananza song and transform her simian companion. She immediately freaks out.

“No way! I can’t sing! I’m not ready to. The crowd is so big. I won’t do it, I can’t do it!” DK finally convinces her to try, and with a “here goes nothing,” the Kong Bananza song is unlocked. She succeeds.

With every new song, Zebra, Ostrich, and Elephant, Pauline’s confidence grows a bit more. By the time DK and Pauline reach Snake Bananza, the fifth and final song, Pauline is a completely different person. Instead of hiding from the crowd, she embraces it. She snaps her fingers in rhythm before saying, “DK, give me a beat,” and the snake party begins.

That growth eventually leads (spoilers!) to her rescuing DK from a purple rock prison of his own, just as he had done for her, before the final act of the game begins. She broke through, and in turn, helped her best friend break through, too.

Olivia and I work on a piece of Flounder’s main song, She’s In Love, for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday. We then head to auditions, and when her name is called, she goes up and performs the piece we practiced without a second thought. The nervousness and stage fright that fueled Liv’s hesitation throughout the summer and fall was gone, and a confidence not unlike late-game Pauline formed in its place.

Later that night, the callback list is sent to the group, and Olivia is on it.

Excitement soon turns to that all-too-familiar chagrin, and we continue to work for the next few days. Finally, it’s Wednesday, January 7, callback day. We load into the car and head out.

On the way, I ask her what song she wants to use to warm up. She thinks for a moment, and then says, “Can we use the Pauline song, the one from the awards show you went to?” Thanks to the Nintendo Music app, I can load up “Breaking Through,” and she belts it as loud as she can in the car as we drive.

I instantly think of Snake Bananza Pauline. Same energy. Same confidence. She’s ready.

We arrive at callbacks, she goes in and does her thing (I can’t watch this time, which adds to my anxiety), and we leave. We’re told the cast list will be posted on the group’s website “tonight or tomorrow.” Great.

Liv goes to bed, not a care in the world. I turn my F5 key into dust on the group’s website, waiting for a list of names. Eventually, the list of names arrive…and she did it.

She got it.

She’s Flounder, and she’s splitting performances with one of her best friends in the group, so she’ll have three performances instead of a full load of six shows, which will ease her into her first role. Dream scenario.

My wife and I celebrate like the Phillies just won the World Series. We call and text everyone we know. Many tears of parental pride are shed. She sleeps, unaware of the huge surprise we’re going to drop on her tomorrow.

As the season goes on, I watch that girl shine on stage, her little personality pouring out of every spoken world and sung note. The closer we get to the show weekends, the more excited the family becomes.

When Olivia steps onto that stage as Flounder for her first performance on April 18, she makes it look easy. By the closing show, the transformation is complete. This will be the first of many roles for her, I imagine. She’s breaking through, down to her core.

No stopping her. Not anymore.

Leave a comment