Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: a strange map, a reminder of arcade brilliance, falling blocks, and a trip to the Hoenn region.
I've recently spent a lot of time in my local town for some reason and found there's something rather comforting about getting to know an area very well. The routes I can walk down with my eyes closed, the same faces at the same times, all walking the same dogs. A friend of mine and I recently started sending each other obscurely-angled phone snaps of somewhere in town for the other to guess. Usually we do. We make our own fun.
There's something of that to Carto, too, the brilliant top-down adventure game whose map you construct yourself. I started playing it on Xbox Game Pass this week, though it's available from other good platform stores also. About an hour in, finding myself hooked and unexpectedly engrossed in its story, I sat back and looked at the world map I'd created so far. The handful of tiles I'd been given made up a tiny space – I'd barely gone anywhere! – but I had swapped and rearranged and watched as new tiles appeared as if made out of hidden origami. And I knew each of those map tiles in detail.
