Because we live in the future, the answer is now, finally, “Yes.”

In Ship Graveyard Simulator you play a white dude (you can see your arms) who lives in a village of brown people (you can see them) and whose job it is to ram sailing vessels into the ground, then break some of the parts, then sell them.

That’s it. That’s the game.

In some ways, this is the purest version of a crafting game I’ve ever seen, and I must admit the simplicity of it is very relaxing. You order a boat, climb on to it, and use your tools to break it down. You can either sell those component parts directly or, for more profitability, take on contracts and combine them into more worthwhile alloys.

As you go along, you power up your tool seller (why am I paying for a business I paid to increase?), your storage space (to achieve better alloys), and your barracks (to hire NPCs to more quickly strip the vessels).

The gameplay is very simple. You approach a component, and it tells you what tool (hammer, saw, blowtorch, etc.) you’ll need to break it down. Use that tool, collect the bits, fulfill requests, build better facilities, get bigger ships. You don’t break down the entire ship, although later in the game you will start to take apart the hull, and every component tells you what tool you must use to deconstruct it. Cleats and pipes need a sledgehammer. Other items need a power saw.

And then there is my personal Satan: the blowtorch. The blowtorch is by far the most difficult part of the game, as the items you use it on are mounted on the wall, which makes it hard to maneuver around. Also, to “cut” with the torch means to drag the tool along a narrow line. The controls aren’t really sensitive enough to do a slow, steady movement. It’s more like watching a small child color with a crayon, desperately dragging it back and forth.

Cutting with a handsaw can also be a pain, as the component will display how much of it remains to be cut. But if you end up with a stump attached to a wall, figuring out where to position your player so he can actually make the cut can be difficult.

Story-wise, there isn’t any. It’s not that the game is mindless, the point of the game is to be mindless. There are no enemies, there is no conflict (other than your profitability), and it is immensely satisfying to hit L several times to break up whatever it is on the ship. There’s also a lockpicking mechanism that’s straight out of, well, most games, that allows you to find bonus materials.

But the main appeal of this game is just beating the crap out of old steel hulls and selling it to others. The graphics are janky (circa ’90s), and there’s no world-saving plot, just an idea to make a buck doing an honest day’s work.

I found it oddly appealing.

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Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening is the 16th game in a series that’s been running for 40 years. Set over the feudal period of Japan, you select a time frame, choose a region of Japan over which you will be the daimyo (lord), and try to consolidate power over your region (or the entire nation) through negotiation, subterfuge, and war.

The game’s tutorial, such as it is, presents you with an absolute firehose of choices that must be made. You have to appoint lords and sub-commanders to your castles and counties. For the castle your character controls, you must also tell them how to improve the territory (building farms) or your castle (adding a market or defenses against invasion).

Next you have to adopt policies for your kingdom, again assigning retainers. But your retainers are broken into ranks, and not every one of them can accept each task. For example, if you try to negotiate with another kingdom, that retainer will be tied up for months, leaving him unavailable for a sabotage mission.

Also, your retainers will frankly not shut up when it comes to suggestions of missions you can send them on. They were constantly interrupting me while I was trying to learn the interface and build a damn irrigation channel for my castle. Why do you want to attack this kingdom I’m barely aware of? How does this help?

The number of things you must keep track of is staggering. There are policies (which must have someone in charge of them), policy chiefs who oversee the kingdom (another retainer), diplomacy, covert actions, plans to develop towns, plans for castles, general territory goals, the labor available to accomplish all these, food, money and trade.

Then there’s war, which is sort of the calling card of feudal management games, and this is where I really started to hate Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening.

You win the game by convincing other territories in the region to ally with you or by going to war and capturing castles. Once you decide to march on a castle, you’re presented with a list of all your military forces that can be sent to attack the castle. All of them. How do you deselect some of them? Should you deselect them? Shrug emoji! Strictly by accident, I was able to send out a force of 6,000 to attack a castle defended by 2,500 and got wiped out. I retried it again using my entire army.

“Bill,” you might be saying, “Won’t sending your entire army out of all of your territories leave your territory vulnerable to attack.” Yes it will!! Hostile forces immediately moved against my lands, but I decided to let it ride just to see how the capture mechanic of my attack would play out.

In addition, even though my massive force did in fact capture the castle, afterwards they just kind of…hung out. Units started to die because they ran out of supplies. My reputation suffered as allied forces “failed.” How do I get my army to go home? The game didn’t tell me, and because this is a new release, there is no documentation for what I consider to be basic questions.

Let me stress, this was while playing the tutorial. I felt completely lost from minute one as I was overwhelmed by options and choices, and no sense to figure out what I was supposed to be doing to enjoy the game.

Even more aggravatingly, because Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening is striving for historical accuracy, you’ll be periodically interrupted with updates about important things that had been happening at the time, even though they have nothing to do with the region you’re in. Imagine going out to do your laundry and suddenly you get a Star Wars-like crawl informing you that “Meanwhile, Lord Halcon continues to consolidate his forces on the Ice Planet of Zeist, thousands of miles away…”

Further, if you’re playing a Lord who was actually involved in something interesting, you get pulled into battles that have nothing to do with the game you were managing. Getting prepped for a war? Well, now you have to play a mini-game where you have to defend this particular castle, kill this particular lord, and defend this particular gate. Now, back to the game you were paying attention to.

I said at the beginning that I recognized this type of game from the ’90s. When they were on PCs. And because they came for PCs, they had a robust shortcut and command system. This is made absolutely opaque by the controls on the Switch. Your main control for commands is brought up using the Y button, then the left stick. However, to access some of your commands (like listening to your retainer’s suggestions) you have to hit ZR. This takes you to a drop down menu on the upper right hand corner where you select from a group of unhelpful icons. The X button stops and starts time, but it’s also the “yes” button for jobs and policies.

Using the sticks on the overworld map allows you to pan across the world, but you can’t zoom in using the standard controls. Instead, you have to select it from one of the ZR controls, at which point it’s stuck at that level until you change it again. This is especially aggravating during combat, when—at the default level—all you can see is a series of overlapping pixels representing the forces, with no idea how they’re doing until someone dies.

I understand that people like these dense, historical games. I also understand that people like games that have a dense variety of options. I came up playing Civ 2 on my Performa. But back when I was playing those games, I had a.) a keyboard and b.) a printed manual that was the thickness of a textbook.

I also appreciate that this is a game series that has been running for 40 years, and there’s probably a substantial audience that knows the game and has a great deal of nostalgia for it.

However, as a new player, I found it confusing rather than challenging, obtuse rather than detailed, and lacking a level of basic explanation necessary for someone who isn’t familiar with the series. Also, the controls are poorly-matched for the Switch, and the text was incredibly hard to read when I wasn’t playing the game docked on my HDTV. If this is a game you’re inclined to play, play it on the PC.

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Smile for Me takes place in “The Habitat,” a colony for unhappy people set up by Dr. Habit. Your goal? Make these people happy! And in this point-and-click adventure, your job is to walk around, find out what people need to overcome their sadness, and put a smile on that face! How sweet, right?

Uh… no.

Smile for Me manages to pull off a very difficult trick; it’s creepy without doing anything overtly scary. There are no monsters waiting to attack you in dark corners, no whispering children singing in the background, and no combat other than a game of Whack-A-Tooth. And even your main goal (making the other inhabitants happy) quickly causes the gear of The Habitat to shudder. Dr. Habit’s daily messages start to point out that it’s his job to make people happy, and his methods turn out to be very different from yours.

The game is, as I say, largely a point-and-click adventure. You run around the habitat, click on people to talk, and gather objects you’ll need to combine or alter to solve certain puzzles. Most of the solutions are straightforward (How do you get someone in another room to hear a confession? How do you convince a security camera that the guard is still there?), but others will require some of that old “well, let’s just offer every object to every person” magic to find the solution.

And you’d better move quickly because each day of the game has a time limit; you need to get into bed before it gets dark. If you don’t, Dr. Habit will take note and give you another kind of video.

Smile for Me has a ’90s pop culture feel. Sort of like something you’d see on Liquid Television. The disturbing parts are upsetting on the scale of a fairy tale, and almost all the parts (hand puppets, taped video, angular sticker-people) hark back to a younger perception of fantasy and reality. It has an unusual vision, and part of the creepiness isn’t that it’s random, but a just-out-of-reach sensation that somehow this all makes sense. That makes exploring, interacting, and understanding the path it’s taking, all the more engaging.

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Process of Elimination is one of these games. It’s a murder mystery that takes place on the island headquarters of a cadre of super-detectives who are being picked off by a sadistic criminal mastermind. You, as a rookie detective whom nobody trusts, must help the investigation, uncover moles within the group, and figure out how seemingly impossible deaths have happened.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now—the plot of this story is absolutely bonkers. Each of the detectives has a code name based on their personality, which can be, shall we say, extreme. One detective is a super-smart kid in a robotic wheelchair. Another is, himself, a serial killer who’s been dragooned into working with the law. Another wears a suit of medieval armor constantly. And then there’s the one detective who truly believes in you. She’s dead and is a ghost only you can see.

You wander around the mansion headquarters of this motley group—which is somehow filled with ridiculous death traps and hidden passages—leading to an even more bizarre plot about secret experiments on children and killer robot sentinels.

I loved it.

Because it’s a VN, there’s no need for you, the player, to try and understand this world, because it plays out in front of you and you just have to click “next.” There are decision points where you need to show off your detective skills (like who’s betraying the group). If you mess that up too many times, the game ends, but you can restart from a save point.

The other method of interaction is a turn-based strategy mini-game. In it, you’re presented with a grid map where you can move the detectives around to explore and uncover clues that will lead you to breakthroughs in your investigation.

In the mini-game, you’ll start with limited control of all the available detectives, but as you solve the initial points, you’ll gain the ability to direct others. Each one has different strengths, and by supporting each other they can solve high-level problems. But the mini-game has a turn limit! Fail to get all the answers before you run out of turns, and it’s back to the save file.

Process of Elimination is a fun game in the visual novel genre that requires the patience to sit through long stretches of text and a nonsensical world. If you’re looking for any sense of reality or interactivity, stay away. But, if you want a singular experience in a world you won’t find anywhere else, here it is.

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Arcade games were part of that, too, and now Kung Fury: Street Rage – Ultimate Edition comes to the Switch as a set of (very) simple brawlers that harken back to the days of plopping tokens into cabinets at Bally’s Aladdin’s Castle.

I say “very simple” because while you have a choice of four characters how have styles, the play is exactly the same for all; 8 bit enemies rush at you, and—using Left or Right—you have to time your attacks to take them down. There’s no jump, no power ups, no pieces of meat to eat to restore your health (yum!), just waves of thugs whom you can take down. Mistime your attack and you’ll lose a heart. Lose three hearts, and it’s game over.

Even though it resembles a Double Dragon type game, your movements in Kung Fury are literally limited to attacking left and right. You can move only by making an attack, which may briefly take you out of an enemy’s attack zone, but that’s it.

The Ultimate Edition is divided into four modes: a tutorial, then Kung Fury: Street Rage (an endless brawler), Kung Fury: the Arcade Strikes Back (a single player “story” mode with multiple levels) and Kung Fury: A Day at the Beach (story mode with a 2-player option).

Despite the simplicity of the gameplay, it is quite challenging, especially in the final waves where enemies swarm you and choosing which to attack is crucial to victory.

There’s no great deal of difference in the versions of the game, and the story consists simply of going to a different location and beating people up. But it’s an entertaining enough diversion, which is also how I’d review the original film.

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A hero from a small village meets a mismatched crew of three other characters: two cute girls—one of whom’s a healer, the other who’s a fighter—and a snooty guy who’s nowhere near as good at combat as the hero. Following an attack on (say it with me now) the small village where the hero grew up, knowing little about the outside world, they embark on a quest to visit the shrines of the elemental kings who died creating a shield to protect the world from dark forces.

Is the shield now fading unless a group of four mismatched but perfectly complementary characters manage to fix it? Yes, yes it is.

You fight monsters in random encounters, improve your weapons and armor, gain skills, and cast spells. And just when you start to wonder when the airship is going to show up, the airship shows up.

I’m not complaining; I cut my teeth on games like this back in the Game Boy/PlayStation days. Even with the massive graphic updates that are available now, there’s something to be said for pouring your imagination into 16 bit sprites marching their way across an overworld map.

And if the baseline of that experience is what you’re looking for, Heirs of the Kings has it. The skill tree, based on “Soul Maps,” is an interesting touch—a web of stat upgrades that you unlock, along with new skills tied either to the characters’ fighting style or their elemental affinity.

The problem is that while Heirs of the Kings has the form of a retro JRPG, it lacks the heart that made those games memorable. I found the relationships between the characters to be shallow, with very little interaction between them until they get into post boss-battle areas where the talking goes on for too long. We find out, abruptly, that the warrior woman is jealous of the cute healer, and apparently the snooty academic has an antagonistic flirtation going on.

The game also tries to hold onto a mystery about the hero’s heritage long after we’ve started to unlock his elemental affinity.

Even if you’re willing to put up with the underwritten story, combat (the other big draw of an RPG) is a muddle as well. While your characters have elemental attacks that might have strengths and weaknesses, the enemies you’ll be fighting are almost completely randomized, meaning you’ll get a mix of fairies, dragons, boars, and things which resemble muffins with kitty faces. Until you get to a boss fight, there seems to be no thought put into the arrangement of enemies.

The game features an auto-fight function you can turn on and off by pressing Y, and I was able to play the game for hours without having to strategize my attacks. On the first occasion when my party was completely wiped out, I was able to spend special experience points that I’d accumulated over hours of play to revive the party at full strength in the middle of the battle, with the enemy as weak as the point where it had ended.

KEMCO’s Heirs of the Kings works as a retro-throwback to the days when the limits of computing power had to be augmented by writing characters that caught in your head like a song that you can’t get out. Unfortunately, this game has the tempo, but not the heart.

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The back story is that you’re a historical dead person—starting with “Jeanne” (D’ Arc), later unlocking Vlad (Tepes) and (Hernan) Cortes—trying to build your own power base in the land of the damned. Putting Saint Joan in the same company as those two men, let alone Hell, is an odd choice, but here we are.

Each character has a small core deck of cards and hit points. Jeanne also starts with armor points, which the other two can acquire through play. There are four realms of Nadir you can travel through, though two are locked until you collect enough resources.

Each character and enemy realm has its own style. Jeanne is a straight-up combatant, using attacks to punch through enemy defenses. Vlad specializes in using debuffs to weaken his enemy. Cortes can call on servant wraiths to either attack or enhance his protection.

On the enemy side, depending on which kind of demon you fight (they’re sorted by four of the seven deadly sins), you can fight creatures that attempt to sap your strength, bleed you dry, or just straight-up crush you.

A key part of the battle is how you play your cards. The player and the enemy both (generally) have three cards each, divided into red and blue effects, with the enemy’s cards being either wholly red or blue. The player’s cards have a blue effect on top, and a red effect on bottom. In addition, these effects have a cost of 1-3, and can only be played if the enemy has the requisite number of that color showing. So, if you want to play a 2-point Blue attack, the enemy needs to have two blue cards showing.

Here’s where it gets tricky. The enemy doesn’t attack on its own. By playing a card, you charge up the enemy cards until they’re full, then they’re activated at the end of your turn. So, if an enemy red card has five dots on it (a powerful attack), you can play up to four dots worth of your own red attacks before it comes into play.

Another level of complexity is that when you play a card with multiple dots, they’re split evenly among the enemy cards. If you’re not careful, you can have two or three attacks coming back on you at once.

The player can also “delay,” which means he turns in all his cards to draw a fresh set, causing the enemy cards to flip sides and colors. This can be handy if you’re trying to avoid a massive attack, but the flipped cards don’t disappear; they’re just waiting until the reverse side gets filled or you delay again, then they return.

The game also features a number of buffs and debuffs that can affect both you and the demons. Rust causes armor to decay, bleed causes hit point damage every time you make an attack, counter gives you a free attack after the enemy attacks you as well as healing and armor improvement attacks.

Defeat an enemy, and you get resources. Then it’s down to a lower level of hell, where you fight more enemies, buy new card effects, and combine them with old cards. The enemies get tougher as you descend, but at certain points you’ll be given the option to return to your base with what you’ve gathered so far. Eventually you’ll come to the ruler of a particular realm for a boss fight.

Die and you lose most of your resources, so, especially when you first start to play, retreating is a sensible option. But even if you don’t die, when you return to base you’ll lose all but your core set of cards. When you descend again, you’ll only have your most basic attacks.

Building your base unlocks the other characters and realms, more card options to gather, and bonuses like the ability to heal between levels. 

The fun of the game is in repetition. In the first few playthroughs you’re so underpowered you’ll be killed quickly. But by accumulating resources, you become stronger. Then, you’ll learn an attack style and progress.

The big knock against the game is that it feels unfinished, with bugs getting corrected during updates, and others, well, not. Because there’s not a great deal of documentation online about it, I’m still not sure what resources I need to gather to unlock the final set of buildings. And even if you defeat a level’s Boss, the options are to return to base or to continue fighting for better resources.

That having been said, I did enjoy puzzling out the nuances of Nadir: A Grimdark Deck Builder. Once you unlock all the cards for a character you cannot only choose, but be forced to find a different play style due to the upgrade cards you’re offered. In one round, Vlad got a ton of bleed debuffs, on another, the bonus cards I was offered forced me to play a different way. But combining the active choices I make in combat with the consequences imposed on me offered a tantalizing puzzle to solve on every try.

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By manipulating your view of the cube you can cause a single element of the sides to line up, even though logically they have nothing to do with each other. For example, a cup full of coins on a desk in an office might match a broken steam pipe on a building ravaged by war. 

Once the two (or three) pieces line up, something magical happens; the items will fuse temporarily and interact—the steam pours into the cup, causing one of the coins to pop out, causing the office scene to change slightly. Now you have to find out which elements of the changed scene line up with a different side of the cube.

Moncage is both lyrical and confounding, abstract and exacting, as you try to make the connections between the scenes both in terms of the gameplay and how the scenes play out. Pressing the L2 button will cause the elements you can interact with to illuminate, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be useful in the immediate puzzle. Also, as the scenes interact and change, it’s hard to tell if there’s a single, coherent narrative. Is the spaceship you launch a rocket that destroys the town? You can pick up photos hidden throughout the game that could imply this is all the story of one person, but the illustrations are minimalist, and it’s hard to tell if the boy in one picture grows up to be the man in another.

In this sense, it reminds me of the original version of Myst, where the slowness of the game, and the constant checking and re-checking of actions against results (not always on the same screen) is part of the experience. Because once you understand the basics of how the cube’s faces work together, the designers start to have fun by challenging you to pay even closer attention. Yes, you can line up two sides of a road to move a car, but what happens when you need the moon to be out in a day scene? 

Once you let go of the rational representation of what you’re looking at—a handcart on a broken track that can’t go anywhere—and start looking at the image as an object itself, the game unfolds like a flower. Reflections of objects can interact. Seemingly meaningless actions on one screen can change the color of another screen, allowing objects to match exactly when they didn’t before. There’s also fun interplay between the sides in other puzzles, making you race to align pathways so a moving object can make it across several faces.

Another complication is that some scenes have areas you can zoom into, such as a medical tent where you can take a close up look at the check-in desk and a recovery area. Both areas are important, but are they both important to the same step you need to take to advance the game? 

The joy in this game is chewing on the puzzles, looking at each scene and comparing it to the other two sides of the cube that you can see at once. But it can also be confounding due to the lack of a clear goal and the fact that you have to look at every aspect of a scene to understand what you can do. For example, looking through an object in a scene might change what the object looks like normally. There’s also an element of timing to certain matches, as gauges and moving objects must be matched quickly with the other side.

Fortunately, the game has a very robust hint system that can give you a nudge in the right direction (and eventually a video showing how to solve the puzzle) if you get stuck. I used it frequently, but the game has a timer that keeps you from using it constantly; you can only access a new hint after about two minutes.

I recommend Moncage to puzzle lovers.

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The Dark Prophecy is a retro-RPG point-and-click adventure. You’re an ordinary boy in a medieval fantasy kingdom, you get a quest, you combine likely and unlikely things to solve puzzles. The whole thing, run adequately, takes about 45 minutes to solve.

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

To talk about the game’s story specifically is to spoil it generally, so just know you’re a young boy in a small village who gets a message that must be brought to the court wizard. There’s no violence, only a series of obstacles that must be discovered, explored, and overcome. Point-and-click veterans will know the drill; find objects and use them in only-slightly-unpredictable ways to beat the obstacle. Then find the next obstacle.

For example, you need to get into the castle to talk to the wizard. But! The guards won’t let a commoner in! But! There’s a rumor of a secret passage! But! Where is the passage?

This is all wrapped up in a delightfully retro package, with blocky, pixelated figures and a selection arrow that changes depending on what you can interact with (people, objects) and how you interact with them (look, search, talk). It’s a perfectly cozy feel for this perfectly cozy game. Even the scary parts look more spooky than horrifying.

I recommend The Dark Prophecy to those who love retro point-and-clicks with friendly storytelling who want to kill a little time.

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The game takes a turn as you slowly use your funds to buy more cabinets, and expand the arcade and push out the washers. A story about your estranged family plays out in AIM chat windows and calls left on your tape-based answering machine.

And best of all, as you convert your laundry-based hell into, well, an Arcade Paradise, you, as the arcade’s owner, get to live the dream of playing all the games you want, for free, for as long as you want…just so long as you remember to unclog the toilet.

Arcade Paradise is a very chill game. There’s no way to lose, only to make less money per day if you’re not able to keep on top of all your real-world obligations while you battle 8-bit aliens. Just pick up the trash, clear out the tokens, and build your empire, day by day.

But, of course, the big draw of AP is playing the games. They’re not the “real” versions of classic games, but they are remixes and mashups, along with more offbeat ideas for games, that are all, well, really good.

If you like Outrun, there’s Space Race Simulator, which replaces a sweet ‘80s convertible with a futuristic hover car but keeps the vaporware music and graphics. Racer Chaser is a Pac-Man clone mashed up with Grand Theft Auto: you drive your Lamborghini around, collecting cash while avoiding the four cop cars chasing you. Interesting takes on Tetris abound, and best of all is Stack Overflow, which challenges you to untangle masses of boxes in wonderfully addictive gameplay.

The big enemy in the game is time, which passes by at roughly one minute per real-world second and limits how much you can play the games, especially in the beginning when you use the laundry business to supplement your income.

You can tweak your income by 1) placing popular games next to less popular ones, 2) adjusting the individual difficulty settings, and 3) changing how much they cost to play. Also, the more often you play a game, it will make the game more popular, earning more money.

A secondary type of in-game currency (expressed in Pounds Sterling) is earned by completing daily tasks and can be spent to buy upgrades, such as making time pass slower and causing machines to break less often.

There is a bit of a grind to the game—make money to buy more expensive games to make more money to buy more games. The plot advances as you fill up spaces and renovate your store, but if you don’t feel like playing video air hockey, you simply have to pass the time while making money to advance the plot.

The only other gripe is that I ran into a persistent bug where on days when the shop was upgraded, the game would freeze. A restart fixed the problem, and no gameplay was lost.

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