Last night was the worst night of my life, but I feel that I can finally begin to heal. Can someone recommend a nice 15-30 hour game for someone healing from a 17 year abusive relationship? I just need a distraction for a week or two.
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Seems almost cliche to recommend Stardew Valley but it’s my go to relax and play at my pace game. Extremely low stakes gameplay
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Only way to be more relaxing would be a time mod so you don’t feel rushed through each day. Would mess up the balance of the game a bit, though.
Might I recommend Hades, a roguelight about killing your dad and becoming your own person. There’s a lot of progress to unlock over time, the story is very satisfying, you can pick it up on pretty much any platform, and I think the aspect of building up relationships with people over time is extremely well done.
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I see SG has their whole portfolio on sale. Transistor and Bastion are both beautiful games and while Pyre is a bit more niche (the game play is basically wizard basketball) they’re all really well done. Hades is definitely their golden child but I simp pretty hard for all SuperGiant offerings. The music is particularly special imo, Darren Korb and Ashley Barrett always knock it out of the park while giving each game a distinctive tone. The first time I played Transistor I’d frequently put the controller down to admire the backdrop and music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41tIUr_ex3g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3SZee4YZX8
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if you like roguelikes, it has a lot of depth. I have ~500 hrs in. enjoy if you pick it up, hope you feel better!
what’s your therapeutic category?
for example: doom eternal is therapeutic. so is stardew valley. but both in very different ways.
i will recommend against stardew valley actually, people forget that it’s a low-key dating sim, might not be what you want after a bad breakup. or maybe it is
the theme of being part of a community, learning about the people, and connecting with them never got advertised to me. I found it too easy to automate the animals and crops and I’m giga profitable. Therefore all I have left is to finish 4 items in the community center and collect 35 of each villager’s loved items if I were so compelled.
Great game, but the ratio was more people-centric than farming-centric for what I expected/hoped for.
Minecraft and Undertale are the first two I’d recommend, they’re classics for a reason.
Outside of that though? The new Wolfenstein series. Easily some of the greatest FPSes ever made. Killing Nazis is extremely satisfying, and the sequel gets into abuse pretty hard. BJ’s dad is abusive as fuck, and they show very accurate depictions of the abuse. The 2nd game has a lot of moments that are hard to get through, but ultimately work because of just how GREAT it feels to kill the shitheads.
The Outer Wilds. One of those games you should go into knowing as little as possible but trust me.
Tetris is known to be therapeutic for healing from a traumatic event.
- https://tetr.io/ (but disable chat)
- https://jstris.jezevec10.com/
- https://nuketris.com/
Gris is only about 4-6 hours to finish but it’s about dealing with loss and is under $4 on gog right now. Would definitely class it in the “games as art” category.
Dave the Diver has had a lot of critical acclaim.
It has a cute storyline, it isn’t high-pressure although it still has its peaks of action and tension in the game, and overall it’s a pretty relaxing game to play without being an office cubicle simulator.
There’s a nice mix of microgenres within the game so it’s got a bit of an old school RPG feel to it in that sense. If I could describe it in one sentence I’d say that it’s a series of different mini-games of varying scale stitched together in a nearly seamless way and wrapped in a narrative.
You’ll probably get 20 to 30 hours out of it, although the pacing is mostly self-directed so you could likely speedrun it in half that time or stretch it out to double or triple if you want to enjoy it at a leisurely pace or you want to keep on doing smaller stuff without advancing the narrative forward.
Here’s a good first-time play through from the start of the game if you want to get a feel for the style of the game but maybe just watch the first 10 or 15 mins I guess because if you go too far then you’ll encounter spoilers.
Good luck and make sure to congratulate yourself on getting out. You deserve to heal and you deserve happiness.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
You could try Death Stranding. it’s about walking around and scary ghosts, but it’s really about alienated people very deliberately rebuilding their connections with humanity after experiencing great and profound loss. it kept me going for a while during the early years of the Pandemic.
second Death Stranding. i’m not sure if it’s a uniformly soothing experience, but it is contemplative in much the same way a hike is, and the writing offers genuine catharsis.
Night in the Woods! Beautiful, very chill game overall about friendship and healing from trauma in a meaningless world.
Journey is only 2 hours long, but is probably the most relaxing game you’ll ever play.
Superliminal is a really good surreal game that forces you to think outside the box, though it’s short and you can easily complete it in one sitting.
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Play the game called Everything
Tetris has been found to reduce PTSD flashbacks in people who play it after a traumatic incident. Not sure what the parameters on that are, but I do know that Tetris rules regardless.
