JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A few times a year, we ask some of our staff here at NPR to tell us about their favorite video games. Today, we start with NPR gaming editor and Here & Now producer James Mastromarino. He recommends a challenging but rewarding action game. It's called Saros.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "SAROS")
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As character) It always comes back to this.
JAMES MASTROMARINO, BYLINE: You crash land with a bunch of corporate survivors on this incredibly hostile planet named Carcosa, and the world is constantly resetting around you. For some reason, you can come back death after death and fight these H. R. Giger monsters, yet the rest of your team back at the base is just slowly spiraling into madness.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "SAROS")
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As character) Every time the sun dies, madness reigns.
MASTROMARINO: What I love about Saros is that it is like a high-octane, action thriller, but it is also very committed to an intimate tragedy and a cosmic horror. And it unites all of those things in a really satisfying package that rewards deep investment. So if you're the gamer that really wants to pry into something and master its systems and understand its world, Saros is so rewarding.
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ANGELIQUE SILVA, BYLINE: My name is Angelique Silva, and I'm operations manager for the New York bureau. I chose Splatoon Raiders. I'm a longtime Splatoon fan, and this was the game I was most looking forward to all year. So in Splatoon, it's a third-person shooter. And you're not shooting bullets, you're shooting ink. You're shooting paint. You can splash the floor with ink, and then you change from your kid mode into your squid mode, and you can travel through the ink to go up walls or, you know, avoid enemies.
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SILVA: Splatoon is super stylish. Like, it has this sort of punk, street, edgy sort of thing going for it. There's really quite nothing like it.
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SILVA: Each game, they sort of started to make the single-player campaign, which was a minor thing, a little bit more interesting. And I feel like this game is a combination of all those, like, little experiments coming together to create this, like, really amazing single-player experience. They just really, like, knocked it out the park.
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SUZANNE NUYEN, BYLINE: My name is Suzanne Nuyen, and I'm the Up First newsletter editor. I chose a game called Esoteric Ebb.
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NUYEN: You play as, like, a hapless cleric who must investigate the bombing of a tea house five days before your fantasy city's first democratic election. And as you're trying to solve this mystery, you're also forming your own political opinions. So at the end of the game, you get to cast a vote in the first democratic election in your city, and you can choose to be a capitalist or a socialist. You can try to become like a mad dictator and try to get people to vote for yourself. And all the parties have their own fantasy names, but they somewhat correspond with real-world politics, as well.
I am not a person who plays video games all the time. I would say I can't press more than two buttons at the same time playing a video game, and I even find it difficult to have to move my head and my body separately, which are, like, very basic controls for most video games. For someone who might get stressed out playing real-time action video games like me, this is perfect because you can take your time. So I would say it's for the person who might not like real-time action and for people who love puzzles and mysteries.
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SUMMERS: That was NPR's Suzanne Nuyen speaking about Esoteric Ebb. We also heard from NPR's James Mastromarino about the game Saros, and NPR's Angelique Silva, who told us about Splatoon Raiders.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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