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The 9 best games to play with a notepadPen and paper games
Pen and paper games
A niche genre. Games that are best enjoyed with a notepad often involve some mystery, or require drawing strange symbols or shapes that can’t be quickly or easily replicated on your PC. They might involve hurried arithmetic, amateurish maps, doodled floorplans, scatter-brained lists. In these cases it transpires that the giant machine whirring three inches from your nose just won’t cut it. Sometimes you gotta use a pencil. Here are the 9 best games to play with a notepad.
Tunic
7 Reasons Why You’ll Fall In Love With TunicWatch on YouTube
7 Reasons Why You’ll Fall In Love With Tunic
There is a joyful way to summon nostalgia and there is a cynical way. Cynical is McDonalds resurrecting some cursed Happy Meal toys you vaguely remember and advertising them with a multigenerational inspo-ad that flashes back to the 90s, when Gran was still alive. Tunic does it the nice way. It offers you a world in which not all rules or abilities are immediately explained, and then drip-feeds you the pages of a SNES-like game manual. If you’re like me, your note-taking instinct will kick in. You will scrawl theories and ideas, the names of items you need, the places you must go next. Maybe even try to translate a few of the game’s mysterious hieroglyphs. You think this is unnecessary? Try leaving Tunic unplayed for a week and coming back to it. Even the profound sense of being lost is period accurate.
Her Story
It’s fitting that a murder mystery built on an aging police search engine sees you gurn at the old computer interface and grab a pen and paper to note things down the old fashioned way. As you sift through suspicious interview clips of a nervous woman, you take on the role of detective, jotting down key words to enter into the dusty British police database, circling the names of unseen characters, drawing lines between them like red threads. “Window,” you write, trying to understand basic facts. “Palindrome?” you scratch down, confused and curious in equal measure. “Hair,” you scribble, with a terrifying realisation, underlining it twice. “HAIR,” you write again at the top of the page. “IT’S ALL ABOUT HAIR.” You push yourself back in your swivel seat. Oh my god. You pick up the pen one final time. “HAIR STORY.”
Stardew Valley
Crusader Kings 3
I keep a “to do” list inCrusader Kings 3as well. “Don’t die,” it says. “Evaporate the English into nothing,” it says. “Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” Wow. Calm down, me.
Fez
To children of a certain age (35) it is a rosy memory to use a notepad to record the whereabouts of certain objects in a game, or jot down SN34KY PA55W0RD5 that would unlock later levels.Fezhacks into that memory with retro visuals and then adds an extra layer. Look, here are some strange symbols. And some more, but these ones look… different? Oh ho, look at your little eyes glimmer. I think someone wants a Bic and an A4 sheet stolen from the printer paper tray.
Any Zachtronics game
Hollow Knight
Image credit:Team Cherry
Another case of not knowing what the hell you’re doing and thoroughly noting every area you’ve been to and every boss you’ve defeated. No? You don’t do that? Okay, I admit it, I have the memory of a teabag membrane.
Heaven’s Vault
Elden Ring
One Off The List from… the best plot twists in games
Last time we stumbled upon a terrible secret and revealedthe 9 best plot twists in PC games. But one of these was no surprise. It’s…Spec Ops: The Line. Because I say so.
