That, and the series’ most irritating sidekick. The touch controls were cool, but what everyone remembers about Phantom Hourglass is being sent back to the same dungeon again and again every time you threatened to make some small amount of progress.

Long considered the worst game in the Zelda series, it hasn’t improved with age. I maintain that hardly anyone has actually finished this needlessly opaque side-scrolling follow-up to 1986’s The Legend of Zelda, because: a) it’s incredibly hard to figure out what the game wants you to do and b) the final dungeon has TWO bosses, and if you can’t finish it then you’re turfed out to attempt the whole thing again. Its weird, camp send-up of Hyrule and three-player puzzles have slipped almost entirely from my mind in the years since I played it, and what I do remember mostly involved shouting impotently at the screen as some online playmate entirely failed to see the solution to a puzzle that was staring them in the face.

In some ways the resurgence of retro games could be seen in a similar light, although here the sentimental nostalgia is for virtual entertainment rather than rural lifestyle.The 3DS’s multiplayer Zelda game wasn’t so much bad (unless you tried to play it by yourself, laboriously switching between all three characters) as eminently forgettable.

Unsurprisingly this has become more popular on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. These games emphasize simplicity and the slow pace of pastoral life as an escape from the modern world in favour of the bucolic. The Guardian called it a 'visual and lifestyle movement designed to fetishize the wholesome purity of the outdoors.' The New York Times described it as a reaction to hustle culture and the advent of personal branding. However it plays out in the game, Cottagecore aims to satisfy a desire for aspirational nostalgia and an escape from stress or trauma. Others use Cottagecore as a guide to how they look and feel, like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, The Stillness of the Wind and Mutazione. Games sometimes use these rural pursuits as play mechanics, like Stardew Valley, Potion Craft, Terraria and Fantasy Life. Although games are usually considered to be hard, harsh and technological, many of them play to this aesthetic that is sentimental about traditional skills and crafts such as foraging, baking, and pottery. In video games, we step into other bodies so we can better understand our own and those of the people around us.Ĭottagecore is an online term celebrating an idealised rural life. In travel, as Andrew Soloman says, we go somewhere else to see properly the place where we have come from. More specifically, to use body therapy language, games offer us a chance to discover the inviolability of our bodies, personal autonomy, self-ownership, and self-determination. Whether this is into the awkward teenage years of Mord and Ben in Wide Ocean Big Jacket, the grandparent-escaping Tiger and Bee in Kissy Kissy, the fractured heartbroken body in Gris or the haphazard movement of Octodad we have a chance to reassess our own physicality and how we respond to and treat other people's physicality. Stepping into the shoes of a vulnerable, small or endangered character can help us understand for a short while some of what it is like to be someone else.

This is not only an enjoyable way to escape the reality of daily life but a chance to reflect on and understand ourselves, and our bodies, better. Whether we step into the powerful frame of a trained marksman or brave adventurer, while we play we have a different sense of our physicality. Video games offer an opportunity to inhabit another body.

Link between worlds running challenge