But the standard display certainly makes it easier to find the objects that you’re supposed to interact with inside the game. This approach removes a number of on-screen hints that, to me, break the immersion of an interactive story. The touch interface on the iPhone or iPad might be the best choice for newcomers, though I preferred the more involving exploration that came from the “minimal” display style available in the gameplay options on a laptop.
You can check it out on a PlayStation 3, an Xbox 360 or on a computer, but I also tried it out on an iPhone 5s, and it played beautifully on it. It lasts two or three hours, depending on how you play, and can be had for $5, which is “the cost of a Starbucks latte and roughly one-hundredth the cost of a PlayStation 4,” as Joseph Bernstein put it at Buzzfeed. “All That Remains,” the season’s first episode, was released last week. But right now, I’d nominate The Walking Dead: Season Two from Telltale Games. It’s not easy to think of a good “gateway game,” one that’s sufficiently approachable for the gaming illiterate while also demonstrating the promise of video games as something more than a vehicle for fast-twitch excitement. The failure of that marital experiment leaps to my mind whenever people, intrigued by the excitement over games as a creative medium, ask me what to play if they haven’t touched a joystick since Pac-Man.
Gaynor’s podcast as an accessible game for newcomers (in part because of a brilliant comedic performance by Stephen Merchant), and she quit after an hour or so because she found it unforgivably hard to navigate a virtual three-dimensional space using her thumbs. I once tried to persuade my wife to play Portal 2, which has been nominated on Mr. It’s an interesting and difficult query that highlights how forbidding many games can be to inexperienced players. How should you get started? That’s a question that Steve Gaynor, the writer and director of the independent game Gone Home, has taken to asking guests on his podcast ( Tone Control: Conversations with Video Game Developers): What would they recommend to someone who is entirely new to the medium? You don’t play video games, but you’re curious about them.