#depression simulator

I like Kent Hudson's game The Novelist.  Not just because he's a fellow Midway survivor and it shows he's gone on to do good things, but because of how much affect it had on me as I played it.  The Novelist has resulted in more immediate thinking about my life than probably any other game I've played. 

I think there's an autobiographical side to the game, even though Kent doesn't have kids.  It's clear he has, like so many creative professionals, struggled with the push and pull of working on very demanding projects and what they do to our personal lives.  In the game the player is a "ghost" observing a family where the father is conflicted between trying to complete his novel and save his fading career, versus fixing his relationship with his wife and spending time with his son.  Setting up the conflicts in the game, you can tell Kent's been through some of this, and learned the hard lesson that you can't have it all.  You can't make everyone happy. 

But beyond the subject matter, the other thing I really like is that there's a real game here.  He's taken inspiration from the emerging "first person walker" genre (see Gone Home, Dear Esther, etc), but then taken his own experience on big games like Deus Ex and Bioshock and added meaningful gameplay, beyond just navigation.  In order to be effective in helping these people, you have to evade them detecting you.  It's super light stealth, not hard gameplay at all, because that's not the point.  But as with all well-done gameplay, I found it increased my engagement in the world.  I wouldn't have minded a third, harder difficulty setting for those who wanted it, but what's there was enough to hook me and pull me into the world. 

I don't think The Novelist is a perfect game, but what is? I also haven't finished it yet, though I will, soon.  But the ending hardly matters, because it's already had an affect on me, and made me think.  While I was writing this, my son came into my room and asked me to pay attention to him, and I thought about that just a little bit differently just because of having played The Novelist.  It's exactly the type of game I think the world needs more of.