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  "path": "/posts/when-games-ask-too-much/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-06T14:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://unmappedworlds.com",
  "textContent": "Last month I bought Cairn - a game I’d been waiting for. It’s a rock climbing game. It’s got a novel, unforgiving climbing mechanic, and a story that’s set up to explore some complex themes. I booted it up, played through a few hours. I enjoyed the rock climbing - it was cool. I did some bouldering here and there in the past, and it was fun translating some knowledge into a video game. I enjoyed tactile inventory management as stuff swished around in my backpack.\n\nAnd I understood that this game would be about perseverance, about overcoming a towering mountain ahead of you, one tiny step at a time. I could tell the game’s narrative would match the mechanical gameplay - I could see it in the setup and the care the developer put into some of the early dialog.\n\nBut I just don’t have the energy. I can’t persevere. I’m tired. So I give myself permission to abandon the game early on, and do so with much respect for the title.\n\n_I love everything about Cairn - the climbing mechanics, the tactility, the protagonist Aava… And yet, I just can’t play it today._\n\nThis experience is not limited to Cairn. Lots of great, highly acclaimed, love-filled titles - titles which I want to enjoy - are not meeting me where I am in life.\n\nI could see the storytelling potential of Unpacking - a game about navigating a person’s life from teenage years into adulthood through unpacking their belongings - but I just didn’t have the patience to sit through its flavor of slow-paced gameplay. I’ve read incredible things about Pathologic 2 - which seems like my type of weird, attrition-driven, survival-ish narrative game. It’s a game which should be made for me - but every time I tried booting it up, I just couldn’t push through.\n\nUnpacking asked for my patience when I didn’t have it. Pathologic 2 asked me to suffer at a time in my life where I didn’t want to. Cairn asked for perseverance - and I’m somewhat at my limit at the moment.\n\nAt first I thought this was a “I have a kid, so I don’t have energy” issue. I have a toddler with whom I want to spend more time, and same goes for my wife - with whom I haven’t connected as much since my kiddo was born. I have a job, too, and that takes up energy. But Pathologic 2 and Unpacking were both before my kid was born.\n\n_Pathologic 2 is tense, depressing, thoughtful, messy… There are hard, meaningful choices at every step. That’s everything I love, and yet - it wasn’t the right time in my life._\n\nNow you might think my thesis is that games shouldn’t be asking for too much. And that’s not true at all. I love when games ask me to invest - these truly are the best, most impactful games I’ve ever played. The fault doesn’t lie with the games.\n\nI can guess that without pushing through every step in Cairn, I wouldn’t get the deep satisfaction of conquering the mountain - and overcoming or coming to terms with whatever haunts the protagonist Aava. Without patiently sorting through every sock in Unpacking, you wouldn’t get fantastic narrative moments - like finding out that there’s nowhere to put your university diploma after moving in with a boyfriend. I’m sure there was more to come. And Pathologic 2… Well, I don’t quite understand what it’s about, and I’m pretty sure people who played it don’t understand much either - but I’m sure suffering and attrition is instrumental to exploring whichever themes Pathologic explores.\n\nI have my own attrition war going. My toddler licks shoes sometimes. And then shares her food with me. That she already chewed. While I’m not paying attention. My daughter’s winning: I don’t exactly have the perseverance or patience to spare, and I have plenty of suffering thank you very much. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a torture of my own choosing - and I have the cutest toddler on the block (sorry, Katie), and I wouldn’t trade this for anything else - but the energy I have for engaging with games is… different.\n\n_Unpacking’s flavor of environmental storytelling was so clever - not a single word of exposition, not a line of dialogue. Yet, because you unpack the protagonist’s every possession, every time they move - you learn everything about them._\n\nSo what did I do instead of playing Cairn? I went through a few runs of Barony - a first-person roguelike dungeon crawler - all of which ended by me getting crushed by a boulder. It was familiar, simple, and demanded nothing from me other than acceptance of the impermanence of each run. I booted up my old favorite Risen - an older RPG from the studio behind Gothic. I played through the opening hours of a Total Warhammer campaign. Comfort - I went to my comfort titles.\n\nAnd that’s fine, and I’m pretty damn proud of myself for not forcing these games upon myself, despite how much I want to experience all the genre-defining and pop-culture-driving goodness. Barony didn’t redefine dungeon crawlers. Risen didn’t push the RPG genre forward. Total Warhammer is pretty awesome, but I did play it for hundreds and hundreds of hours. These are good games, and these games don’t ask much from me - and they’re meeting me where I am - without much to give.",
  "title": "When games ask for too much",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-06T14:00:00.000Z"
}