Author: Chris

Well, that didn’t last long.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about finally finishing Fantasy Life i and moving on to Donkey Kong Bananza. I had only played for about an hour at the time, so I wasn’t ready to say much beyond the fact that I was enjoying it.

I’ve played more since then, and I still don’t really have anything bad to say about it.

I also don’t particularly want to play it right now.

Maybe I’ll come back to Bananza in a few months and wonder why I ever stopped. I hope I do. But I’ve never really liked the idea that starting a game means I’ve entered into some kind of legally binding agreement to finish it. If I’m sitting down at the end of the day with a couple of hours to play something and repeatedly choosing not to play a particular game, I’m probably trying to tell myself something.

Apparently, what I’m trying to tell myself right now is that I want something cozy.

Maybe it’s because I’m already getting into my fall mood. Maybe it’s because I just spent well over a hundred hours with Fantasy Life i. Whatever the reason, instead of a big new adventure, I’ve been craving something comfortable. Something I can settle into.

That left me considering two obvious choices: Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Stardew Valley.

If you know me, Animal Crossing should win this fight pretty easily.

I absolutely love Animal Crossing. I’ve played every entry in the series since the GameCube. I have Animal Crossing merch scattered around, and I’ve even bought Japanese copies of some of the games just because I wanted them sitting on my shelf.

And then there’s New Horizons.

Like a lot of people, I played an enormous amount of it during the COVID lockdown. At a time when the real world suddenly became very small, my little island gave me somewhere else to go every day. I spent hundreds of hours there, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that game helped get me through a very strange period of my life.

Animal Crossing isn’t just one of my favorite cozy games. It’s one of my favorite game series, period.

So naturally, I restarted Stardew Valley.

The deciding factor was simple.

I’ve played Stardew before, and I loved it. I love the farming, the town, the characters, fishing, mining and the little routines. But for whatever reason, I never dug into it nearly as deeply as I did New Horizons. There are entire parts of Stardew I barely explored and things I know exist but never really experienced.

That’s what tipped the scales.

I realized I didn’t want something completely new, but I didn’t want something completely familiar either. I wanted a familiar place with unexplored corners.

Starting a new Animal Crossing island would certainly be comforting. I’d enjoy meeting the villagers again, slowly building up the island and inevitably spending far too much time deciding where a virtual park bench should go. But I’ve already spent hundreds of hours discovering what New Horizons has to offer. Right now, going back would mostly be about revisiting something I already love.

Stardew gives me something slightly different.

I know I like it there. I know how the basic rhythms work. I can plant some crops, go fishing, wander into town, poke around the mines and somehow exhaust myself by noon because I watered twelve vegetables.

But I don’t know everything that’s waiting for me.

There’s still that little element of discovery mixed in with all the comfort, and apparently that’s exactly the combination I’m looking for right now.

I’m also perfectly content to leave Animal Crossing alone for a while. At some point Nintendo will announce the next installment, and I already know I’ll be there. I don’t need to manufacture a reason to go back to New Horizons while I wait. I have a ridiculous number of wonderful memories from that island, and I’m happy to leave them there.

As for Donkey Kong Bananza, I’m not declaring that one finished either. It’s just going back on the shelf for now. Maybe someday I’ll be in exactly the mood for what it offers.

Right now, though, I want something slower. Something comfortable. Something I already know I enjoy, but that can still surprise me.

So I started a new farm.

I already know I like it there.

I just don’t know everything that’s waiting for me yet.

I finally finished Fantasy Life i.

After well over a hundred hours, countless quests, a whole bunch of Lives, and more time spent gathering random materials than I’d probably like to admit, I reached the point where I was ready to move on.

Not because I had done everything. I definitely hadn’t. There were still challenges I could complete, things I could collect, and probably entire corners of the game I could continue poking around in. But like I wrote about recently, I didn’t feel like I needed to check every box. I had gotten everything I wanted out of the experience, and it felt like the right time to say goodbye.

So I did something I haven’t done in a couple of months.

I started a new game.

My next stop is Donkey Kong Bananza, and after spending so much time in Fantasy Life i, it’s strange being completely clueless again.

I’ve only played for about an hour, which isn’t nearly enough time for me to tell you whether the game is great, good, or something I’ll still be playing a month from now. I can tell you that I’m enjoying it so far, but that’s about as close to a review as I’m willing to get.

What I can say is that I’d forgotten how much fun it is to start from zero.

By the end of Fantasy Life i, I knew how everything worked. I knew where to go, which tools to use, what materials I needed, and how all of the game’s different systems fit together. There was comfort in that familiarity, and it’s probably one of the reasons I kept playing for as long as I did.

Now I’m back to figuring out what buttons do.

I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what’s important yet. I don’t know which things I’ll eventually spend way too much time obsessing over. I’m still learning the rules of the world, and there’s something refreshing about that.

It’s one of my favorite parts of playing a new game, although I don’t think I appreciate it enough while it’s happening. There’s a relatively short period at the beginning where everything is a discovery. Every new area is actually new. Every mechanic is something you’re seeing for the first time. You haven’t looked anything up yet, you don’t have a routine, and you certainly haven’t developed strong opinions about the best way to do anything.

You’re just playing.

That’s where I am with Donkey Kong Bananza right now.

Maybe a few weeks from now I’ll have plenty to say about it. Maybe I’ll love it. Maybe I’ll finish it and immediately move on to something else. For now, I don’t really need to know.

I spent the last couple of months in a game that became incredibly familiar and comfortable. Now I get to experience the exact opposite.

I don’t know if Donkey Kong Bananza will become another hundred hour game. After an hour, I don’t even know if it will become a twenty hour game.

But right now everything is new, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, and there’s an entire game in front of me waiting to be discovered.

That’s a pretty fun place to be.

I have a habit of telling myself, “Just one more thing.”

If you’ve ever fallen in love with a game, you probably know exactly what I mean. You sit down planning to finish one quest before bed, and suddenly you’ve crafted a new weapon, reorganized your inventory, wandered into an area you hadn’t explored before, and before you know it another hour has disappeared.

Lately, for me, that game has been Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time.

What I expected to be a fun distraction for a few weekends quietly turned into well over a hundred hours. Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about finishing the game and simply started enjoying spending time in its world.

The funny thing is, I probably could have rolled the credits much sooner. Every time I thought I was getting close to the end, I’d notice another Life that needed a little more attention, another crafting recipe I wanted to unlock, or another quest that looked interesting. None of it felt like busy work. The game never made me feel rushed.

As adults, our relationship with games changes. There are jobs, projects around the house, errands, and responsibilities competing for our free time, so it’s easy to feel like every game should be completed as efficiently as possible. The backlog is always waiting, quietly reminding us there’s something else we “should” be playing.

Fantasy Life never made me think about my backlog.

Instead, it encouraged me to slow down.

Some days I’d make real progress. Other nights I’d spend an hour gathering materials, crafting equipment, or simply wandering around because I enjoyed being there. I wasn’t chasing an achievement or trying to check another box. I was just relaxing.

That realization caught me by surprise.

At some point, I stopped playing to finish the game. I started playing because it had become part of my routine, the same way you might revisit a favorite TV show or reread a book you’ve loved for years. It became a comfortable place to spend an hour without feeling like I needed to accomplish anything.

That’s a rare compliment for a game.

Even now, I know there are still quests I haven’t completed and goals I could keep chasing. A younger version of me probably would have insisted on squeezing every last achievement out of the experience before moving on.

These days, I’m happy leaving a few things unfinished.

Not because I couldn’t complete them, but because I don’t need to. I experienced everything I wanted to experience, and somehow that feels more satisfying than obsessing over one last checklist.

I’ll always remember Fantasy Life i as one of those games that quietly became part of my everyday life for a while. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t competitive. It didn’t ask me to log in every day or convince me I was missing out if I skipped a week.

It simply gave me a world I enjoyed coming back to.

That’s probably the highest compliment I can give any game.

It made me look forward to coming back tomorrow.

I picked up a few more Atari cartridges for the shelf in my office last weekend.

None of them were especially rare, and none of them set me back thirty-two dollars like Miner 2049er did a few weeks ago. They were simply a few more pieces of a project that’s slowly coming together. As I was adding them to the shelf, though, I realized something.

The games weren’t really the reason I bought them.

I’ve always enjoyed the hunt just as much as the thing I was hunting for.

Looking back, I think I’ve been doing some version of this my entire life.

One of my favorite things as a kid was sitting on the floor with the Sears Wish Book. I’d spend hours flipping through the pages, discovering toys, video games, and gadgets I didn’t even know existed. Long before Christmas arrived, I’d already built an entire world in my head around the things I hoped might end up under the tree. Half the fun wasn’t making a list, it was discovering something that made me stop and think, “Whoa… I didn’t know that existed.”

Then there were the toy stores.

Everyone remembers Toys “R” Us, and I certainly do, but I probably have just as many memories of Children’s Palace. Walking into either one felt like stepping into another world. Every aisle promised something different, and even if I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was always hoping to stumble across something that would become my next obsession. Before the internet, that’s how discovery worked. You didn’t search for things. You found them because you happened to turn down the right aisle.

As I got older, the hunt simply changed locations.

We had three comic book stores nearby, and each one had its own personality. One was absolutely packed with comics, collectibles, games, and just about everything else you could imagine. It was almost difficult to walk through, but somehow that only made it more interesting. It’s still around today, and I’m happy to see it’s doing just as well as ever.

Another shop was in our local outlet mall. It was bright, spacious, and organized, and if someone asked me where MY comic shop was growing up, that’s the one I’d point to. I spent countless hours there flipping through the new releases and seeing what had come in that week.

The third shop was unlike anything else.

It was tucked away in the basement of a church.

Most of the store was made up of quarter bins and dollar bins, and I could spend what felt like hours digging through them. I loved that you never really knew what you’d find. Some trips I’d leave with a stack of comics I hadn’t planned on buying at all. Other times I’d leave empty handed and still feel like I’d had a great afternoon.

Even as a kid, I thought the place was hilarious. Downstairs, people would be gathered around folding tables playing Dungeons & Dragons while, through the floor above us, you could hear the church service in progress. Somehow it all worked.

Summer weekends weren’t much different.

My dad had a few classic cars back when they were still affordable enough for regular people to own, so we spent a lot of weekends at car shows. Every car show seemed to come with a swap meet, and after we’d looked at the cars, my brother and I would disappear with a friend or two to explore the rows of vendors. We weren’t looking for anything specific. We just wanted to see what treasures we could find.

Once a year we’d also make a trip to a massive flea market that felt like it went on forever. There was no way to see the whole thing in a single day, which somehow made it even better. At twelve or thirteen years old, being turned loose in a place like that felt like an adventure. Every aisle held another possibility.

And don’t even get me started on yard sales.

To this day, I can’t drive past a handwritten cardboard sign with an arrow pointing down a neighborhood street without wondering if there’s something interesting waiting at the end of it.

When I think about it now, I realize the Atari shelf isn’t really about Atari. It’s just the latest excuse to keep exploring.

I’ve realized I’m not really a collector. I’m an explorer who occasionally brings a few treasures home.

These days the comic shops have been joined by retro game stores and flea markets. Instead of digging through quarter bins, I’m looking through rows of cartridges with faded labels, hoping one of them is something I haven’t seen before. More often than not, I leave without buying anything, and honestly, that’s perfectly fine.

The hunt has always been the fun part.

When I look at the Atari shelf in my office, I don’t just see cartridges. I see flea markets with Sherri, afternoons wandering retro game stores, and all the little stops we’ve made along the way. Every game reminds me where I found it, who I was with, or what made me decide to bring it home.

Maybe that’s why I don’t feel any urgency to finish the collection.

Once every empty space on the shelf is filled, I’ll probably just find another reason to wander through a flea market on a Saturday morning.

After all, that’s what I’ve really been doing ever since I was a kid.

The things I’m searching for have changed.

The feeling never has.