Gamer Games for Non-Gamers

It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about the 3400-year history of the name “Daniel”. This year I wrote about one of my hobbies in hopes it would take less time.

It didn’t.

The video game industry is the biggest entertainment industry in the world. In 2024, it produced almost half a trillion dollars in revenue, compared to the film industry’s “mere” 90 billion. For all the money in it, it feels like gaming is a very niche pastime. It would surprise me if a friend has never watched a movie or listened to music, but it’s pretty normal for a friend to have never played a video game.

The problem is that games are highly inaccessible. To most people, games are “big budget games”, which are targeted at people who already have played lots of games. They assume the player has a basic “vocabulary” of how games work: conventional keyboard layouts, how to parse information on a screen, etc. If you don’t already know these, it’s a huge barrier and highly demotivating.

This sucks! I love games. My earliest memory is playing Crystal Caves on my dad’s computer. I’d call myself a gamer, in the same way I’d call some of my friends cinephiles. I want to make gaming more accessible to my non-gamer friends.

That means finding good entry points. Here are my criteria for a good introductory game:

1. Does not require any special hardware to play. This automatically rules out any consoles or high-end PC games. It should either run on a low-end laptop or a mobile phone.
2. Does not expect the player to already know the vocabulary or gaming culture, and does not require a lot of investment to get started. Is Inscryption a good game? Yeah. Does it make any goddamn sense if you’re not familiar with “haunted cartridge” creepypasta? Hell no.
3. Is culturally meaningful as a game. At the very least, it’s critically acclaimed, and also shows something about what’s possible in the medium.
4. Most of all, I have personally seen a non-gamer enjoy the game.

So here are four games that I know that fit these criteria. I also included a tiny bit about each game’s historical context because I’m a history nerd.

Caveats: I’m a PC gamer, and my favorite genre is puzzle games. This ends up working out here because lots of popular genres need motor skills or investment before they get fun. This is also based on just my own experience. Other enthusiasts might know other good introductory games.

Note: where to play the games

All of the games listed below are available on mobile and PC. Mobile is more convenient, PC is generally a better experience. Bigger screen, you can sync saves to the cloud, you get to use a keyboard, etc.

By far the most common way to get PC games is via Steam, an app for purchasing, managing, and automatically updating computer games. You need to make an account first, though. For three of the four games I also included a link to purchase it directly from the developer.

The Games

Baba is You (direct/steam/android/ios)

Genre: Puzzle (Sokoban)

Description: Move the baba to the flag. That’s it, that’s the whole game.

So what do you do when the flag is completely blocked by walls?

You change the rules, of course! Walls only stop you because there is a line of three tiles that spell out [WALL][IS][STOP]. If you break the sentence then you can move through walls. Every other rule, down to the win condition and what you control, works the same way. If you make [FLAG][IS][YOU], then you control the flag.

As the game progresses, it introduces new rules, objects, and interactions. You use conveyor belts as keys to open doors, melt lava with flowers, and turn bees into teleporters.

Why it’s fun: It’s mentally challenging and makes you feel smart. A good puzzle game is designed around the “insights”, where you realize that something you never considered is possible within the game rules. Baba is You is a very good puzzle game.

One clever thing that the game does is Extra Levels. After you beat certain levels, it opens up an optional level with a very slight difference to the puzzle layout… a slight difference that leads to a wildly different solution.

Why it’s good: Well first of all, like all the other games here, it’s good because I’ve shown it to a non-gamer and watched them fall in love. Any rambling about the nature of games is secondary to that reason.

On top of that, it also shows just how much creativity is possible in a game. The rules of Baba is You are about how you change the rules. It’s “thinking outside the box”, the game. I just find that people are very surprised to realize that this is a real thing a game can make happen, and that games can get even stranger than this.

More on the genre: Baba is You is a “Sokoban”-style game. This category is named after… Sokoban, a puzzle game from 1982 where you push blocks around on a grid.

Early Sokoban-style games were all about long chains of exacting moves. Modern Sokobans instead prioritize short solutions based on an insight: levels should feel impossible until they suddenly become trivial. One of the best examples of this philosophy is Stephen’s Sausage Roll, which profoundly influenced modern puzzle games. It is also ludicrously difficult and impossible to recommend to puzzling beginners.¹ But if you enjoy other Sokobans, this one’s sublime.

I bought this game because I thought it had to be a joke. Turns out, it was a joke. The punchline is that I am stupid. — SSR Review

If you liked Baba is You, the next game I’d recommend is Patrick’s Parabox. It starts with regular block-pushing and rapidly descends into recursive infinities.

Stardew Valley (direct/steam/android/ios)

Genre: Farm sim (cozy game)

Description: You just inherited your grandfather’s farm in a small rural town. Raise crops, keep animals, build relationships with the townsfolk, explore the world.

Gameplay is broken up into days. You might start a day by watering and harvesting crops, move to chopping wood and setting crab pots, then close out by exploring a cave for gems. You might spend the next day just fishing at the beach. Seasons change, holidays come and go, and townsfolk keep their own schedules. A large part of the game is tied up with the in-game characters: most of them have personal stories that can only be gradually learned by befriending them.

There are a few “milestones” in the game but you are not required to complete them and can play the game in the way that is most fun for you.

Why it’s fun: You get to reap the rewards of investing time into something. The game does a great job of giving you a list of short-term and long-term goals, so it always feels like you are making progress without falling behind on anything. It’s also fun to explore the open world and discover new things.

Why it’s good: It shows that games don’t have to be violent or intense to be good. Exceptional games can be slow-paced, relaxing, and ground themselves in everyday concerns.

It’s also the most intricate game on this list, but introduces the complexity in an easy-to-understand way. Lots of games I play that others say are “too complicated” are significantly less complex than Stardew, but they do a bad job of making the complexity accessible.

More on the genre: Stardew Valley is the reason that farming simulations are a genre. There were a handful of farming sims around before but Stardew made them a thing.² It’s like comparing a telegraph machine to an iphone.

Stardew is also a cozy game. Cozy games have been around for a while, but the term itself is fairly new and there’s no consensus on what exactly it means yet. My very rough criteria is 1) there’s no consequences of failure, and 2) intensity and frustration aren’t part of the game, even in a positive way. Action games are intense when you’re in the thick of a fight, puzzle games are frustrating when you hit an unsolvable puzzle, Stardew is neither.³ I think the two most famous cozy games are Animal Crossing and The Sims.

(I couldn’t tell you what other farming sims to play. At least one game reviewer I respect seems to think none yet measure up to Stardew.)

The Case of the Golden Idol (direct/steam/android/ios)

Genre: Puzzle (deduction)

Description: You are presented with the aftermath of a death and have to figure out exactly what happened. To do this, you can zoom in on details in the scene, like inspect people’s pockets, read letters, stuff like that. This gives you keywords, which you put into a giant fill-in-the-blanks prompt to complete the level. There are no penalties for guessing wrong. Early levels are simple, but things get convoluted very quickly.

Sound confusing? Well guess what, you can try a demo right now in your own browser. See for yourself what it’s like!

Why it’s fun: The game makes you feel smart. Like Baba, every case here relies in triggering that moment of insight. Except instead of the insight being “making both this rule and this rule might make this move possible”, you have insights like “the knife is *copper*… this is insurance fraud made to look like a murder-suicide.”⁴ It’s even better when you’re in a group and you race to blurt out the insight first.

Why this game: For one, it showcases that games can tell good stories. And not just good stories, but good stories that are good because they are told through the medium of games. Mr Invincible works because it plays with the medium of comic books. Golden Idol works because of its interactivity. You learn the story by opening drawers and rifling through purses.

It also shows how games can be an rewarding social experience.⁵ I played through the whole game with two other friends across several sessions. First dinner, then a few hours of play, rotating who took notes each level. I can’t imagine playing it any other way, and recommend you play it collaboratively, too.

More on the genre: “Deduction games” are a relatively new style of puzzle. In my experience, they’re the closest a game gets to making you feel like a detective, as opposed to merely detective-themed set dressing. Return of the Obra Dinn was the first game to really nail the concept. It uses a similar mechanic of “viewing the scene of death” but gives you different goals and emphasizes different kinds of clues. Some passing knowledge of 1800’s maritime cliches can be helpful.

The newest critical darling in the genre is The Roottrees are Dead, where you use the power of the 90’s internet to trace the convoluted family free of a candy dynasty. Originally a free online game, a deluxe version is available on Steam. If it’s half as good as the free online version I can heartily recommend it.

(Also Golden Idol has a sequel. But play the original game first!)

Balatro (steam/android/ios)

Genre: Roguelike (spirelike balatrolike)

A game of Balatro is played in 24 rounds. In each round, you have to assemble a poker hand from a deck of playing cards. Playing a hand gives you points, with rarer hands (like straight flush) giving more points. In between rounds, you get a chance to buy “Jokers”, which change the gameplay in your favor. A joker might give you extra points for playing aces, or let you make flushes with only four cards, or let you remove one card from your deck per round. The jokers you can buy are random, and you will only see a subset in a given game.

The strategy, then, is to figure out which combination of jokers to buy in order to beat the growing score requirements of the rounds. A single game (or “run”) takes about 40-60 minutes total.

Why it’s fun: It’s deeply satisfying to pull off a combo that gives you a trillion trillion trillion points. It’s even more satisfying to win a run by the skin of your teeth, and then brag about it to all your Balatro friends.

Why it’s good: Same reason.

Also it swept every 2024 “game of the year” award and is videogame history in the making, so there’s that.

More on the genre: Baba is You and Golden Idol are organized into handcrafted levels while Stardew Valley is a lovingly-designed open world. Balatro, by contrast, is a roguelike. Each run is a little bit random: you will get slightly different challenges, draw different cards, and get different jokers. It’s kind like Solitaire. Instead of learning how to beat specific levels, you learn how to better adapt to different circumstances. This randomness makes roguelikes popular for their replayability, where you can win a game several times and still find it fun to start over.

There are many different subcategories of roguelikes, some which look more like traditional “gamer games” and some that are more exotic. Many modern roguelikes were profoundly influenced by the 2017 game Slay the Spire, so much so that “Spirelike” is often used as a term for the subcategory. Play a few and you quickly get a feel for what they all share in common. One of these Spirelikes is Luck be a Landlord, which asks “what if slots took actual strategy?” Balatro draws from both these games, but in an innovative way that makes it feel almost like a piece of outsider art.

The legion of imitators it [Balatro] already spawned are testament to its rightful place in the PC gaming canon. — PC Gamer

We know Balatro is going to inspire a new generation of roguelikes but we don’t entirely know what they’ll look like. And that’s really exciting to me! We are watching a tiny piece of gaming history happen right now.

Thanks to Predrag Gruevski for feedback. If you enjoyed this, check out the April Cools website for all the other pieces this year!