Job satisfaction

If the last few months have proved anything, it’s that there’s pleasure to be taken from the ordinary. Focusing on even the most mundane tasks has proved strangely calming, and Edge’s gardens have never looked so tidy as a result. This month’s Hype features a number of games that celebrate the satisfaction of a job well done, the pleasing grind of everyday chores.

Ooblets (p38) is part farming sim, part creature-collecting RPG, and soothes with simple pleasures. Planting and growing critters and watching your farm thrive promises to be the most meditative way possible to pass the hours – all the while surrounded by some oddly sarcastic and disaffected neighbours. A bit too close to home, perhaps; we’d up sticks and move, but the process is way too stressful.

At least it usually is. Unpacking (p44) turns out to be an unexpectedly relaxing house-moving sim, with a narrative that follows a single character’s life through all the significant moves they have made. Consequently, the careful unboxing and placing of items in each new home proves both zeninducing and illuminating, as we learn more about our absent hero.

Taking pride in our jobs has also been something that’s helping us through. It’s a sentiment that’s echoed in Hardspace: Shipbreaker (p42), where it’s your vocation to carefully dismantle spaceships. It’s an occasionally dangerous salvage job that nevertheless requires fastidious care. Still out in space, although there’s nothing quite so ordinary here, our lead Hype puts you in one of eight cockpits of spacecraft from George Lucas’ sci-fi universe. Despite the obvious dogfighting thrills it offers, however, there are strategic elements to Star Wars: Squadrons (p30) that require teamwork and following orders. So perhaps it is like having a job after all – albeit one that may well ask you to log on a spreadsheet just how many TIE fighters you destroyed before lunch.