I think I’m afraid of commitment. When I was a child, it was a small matter to sit in front of the Nintendo 64 for hours. Time meant nothing to me; now, it’s all I think about. I look at upcoming games, at the hundreds of hours of playtime required, and I cannot fathom where to find time to actually videogames.
It’s ironic, then, that my solution to the resulting crippling inertia is to sink over a hundred hours in Islanders. This is a game that makes no demands on my time, in which the only aim is to slide buildings, Tetris-like, against each other to create dense and tranquil cities.
It’s part of a growing trend in casual games. While blockbuster titles become bigger, brighter, and more bombastic, these games – appropriately – gently slide into the mainstream to offer a less demanding alternative. It was an ascendency cemented when Unpacking beat games like Deathloop and Metroid Dread to be named BAFTA game of the year back in April.
To find out more about the genre – and, perhaps, discover why I love it so much – I spoke to Paul Schnepf. One third of Islanders developer, Grizzly Games.
Grizzly Games first rose to prominence with 2017’s Superflight, a casual gliding sim in which the inception of the aesthetic style found in all of Schnepf’s games can be seen. But the beginning of this new trend reaches back further. Schnepf recalls playing Settlers 2 and Age of Empires when he was younger and we chat about how we both found the warfare of Age of Empires overwhelming, preferring to hide in a corner of the map and build cities.