RECOMMENDATIONS

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Floating Point

Floating Point is a little free game about momentum and flow. Since 2014, I've been visiting this game to help me relax on nights I couldn't sleep. It's peaceful, the music is hypnotic, and there's a grappling hook. The gameplay is simple: touch all the bars on the level. The faster you move, the more points the bars give and the taller they grow (making them easier to hit).

Made by Tom Francis - the indie creator of Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. It's a good time! And free, so you have nothing to lose.

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Before Your Eyes

Whenever I'm in a conversation with someone who's skeptical that video games can be art, this game is my go-to example. The only controls for this game are looking around with your mouse and blinking. The entire story is told from the first person perspective, and time jumps forward every time your camera detects that you blink.

The runtime is about 2 hours, but you'll be thinking about it for years. Bring tissues.

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Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

I'm one to dramatically eyeroll when an age-old media franchise is resurrected for a movie or sequel to cash in on a beloved IP. I was even more cynical about this happening to a silly viral video from the early days of YouTube, which I used to quote incessantly with my sister when we were kids. So imagine my shock when I watched the Marcel The Shell With Shoes On movie and it turned out to be a complete and utter bop.

Heartwarming, pleasant, beautifully shot and stop-motion animated. The whole movie has this soft, gentle quality to it, like a sunbeam on a lazy morning. And we could all learn to be a little more like Marcel.

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The Wind Rises

Whaddya want me to say? They made a Ghibli movie about an aeronautical engineer. It's wonderful. You should watch it.

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This Is How You Lose the Time War

The last time I read a romance novel was in middleschool, when I read Twilight thinking it would impress girls. It didn't. The movie is infinitely better than the book, anyway, so I gave up on the genre forevermore.

Until this book was recommended to me. Written by two authors, TIHYLTTW alternates perspective between two enemy combatants in a sci-fi war across time and space. You can tell the two authors are constantly trying to one-up each other, and this competition makes yields some incredible prose. This book is like the free market capitalist ideal of a novel.

It's short in length - only about 200 pages - but the writing style is so dense and artistic that it'll give you a lot to chew on and it'll leave you satisfied. You'll want to reread it as soon as it ends.