What's your deep-dive holiday game?

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

As I’ve noted frequently in this space—often while staring down the barrel of a 60-hour RPG that I was reviewing on deadline—few artistic mediums are less considerate of people’s time than video games. As someone who recently came to the end of Wicked a changed man—i.e., one nearly three hours older, and containing a great deal more popcorn—I was reminded that even the most long-running of movies can’t hold a candle to the teensiest of games when it comes to willfully devouring chunks of the human lifespan. (Hell, even Lego Horizon Adventures, a game so brain-agnostic that it manages to condense down one of the most complete and total apocalypses in all of gaming into a breezy kid-friendly format, is more demanding.) To play games as an adult is to live in constant fear of your hobby devouring your time, your sleep, your life. Who has the time?

Luckily (at least, for those of us who get it), we’re in the midst of a long holiday weekend in the United States, i.e., one of those rare stretches of life where you might be able to give multiple hours of your life over to the Great God Gaming without wrecking career/friendships/relationships. Which leads us back to the question I put in big letters at the top of this column: What’s your deep-dive game, now that you have a few minutes to actually play?

2024 certainly hasn’t been lacking for them; this is, after all, the year that kicked off with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, one of the most shamelessly time-snarfing games in recent memory. It’s not just that the maximalist RPG is massive, although it is; it’s the fact that it’s a 100-hour remake of one chunk of a 60-hour game, which has then been stuffed to the gills with minigames, bonus fights, card battles, those fucking Moogle houses, etc. It’s a game that assumes you have infinite time to play it, and if I hadn’t already driven myself nuts getting it as close to complete as I was going to, I can easily see it as a candidate for a long weekend of gaming madness.

Dragon’s Dogma 2, meanwhile, isn’t nearly as long, but it does have a similar demand for focus: Any game where you can accidentally nuke your main city because you weren’t paying enough attention to your hirelings’ back-talk is its own kind of demanding. DD2 is a good reminder that games aren’t just all-consuming because of time, but because of attention: It’s a game that assumes you’re willing to give over the mental run-time to learn its rules, whether it’s mastering various archetypes, managing how to take down boss monsters as quickly and efficiently as possible, or just remembering how the hell its convoluted fast travel systems work.

That’s to say nothing of games that contain multitudes of games within them: I’m planning on spending some serious time this weekend with UFO 50, Mossmouth’s tremendous collection of 50 alternate universe NES games. I’ve played a lot of UFO 50, and still feel like I’ve barely scratched its surface; maybe this Friday is the perfect time to finally do a deep-dive on obscure, fascinating puzzles like Barbuta, or challenge friends to a bout of the extremely addictive deck-builder Party House. UFO 50 embraces the kind of confidence that you only really get with indie game design: It’s a game perfectly content to let dozens of hours worth of hidden gems lay hidden behind literal layers of virtual dust, just waiting to be discovered. (My personal recommendation, if you’ve been staring at its list of titles and wondering where to start: Try Mortol 2. It’s better than Mortol 1!)

But while there are any number of games clamoring for my attention over this long weekend—the Dragon Quest III remake, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and, if I hadn’t already beaten the hell out of it, Metaphor: ReFantazio—the game I’ll probably be playing the most of is one I actually have pretty mixed feelings about: Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Yes, I’m still plugging along at BioWare’s latest from time to time, despite the issues I enumerated in my write-up of it—its hideous loot glut, the lack of personal stakes, the cast of characters so bland that I couldn’t name them for you right now despite having spent like 40 hours with them—still rankling. The honest truth, though, is that I find myself needing a game that doesn’t want much from me during this blessed downtime; sure, I could start S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and devote myself, mind and body, to learning the deadly rules of this latest trip to the Zone, or take another stab at the intentionally dispiriting mechanics of Frostpunk 2. But Veilguard—which has a combat system that’s it’s one major saving grace, high-energy but not too taxing—is, in a way, a holiday game to the hilt: Undemanding, smooth, the kind of game you can play through while getting just the gist of its dialogue. (Why am I killing this blood cultist? Quest marker told me to!) It’s not a good game, by any means but, hey: Taste needs a holiday, sometimes, too.