Time to relax: the best relaxation games for winter vacation
After the stresses of the New Year, you should have a good rest and relaxation. Calm and meditative games are a great solution for a tired gamer. Top of the best projects of recent years for PC with high ratings, which will help to unload your head and tune in to the right start of the year - in the material "Izvestia".
Leaf Blower Revolution
What to play on: PC, Android
The mechanics of this casual game is simple and ingenious: you need to walk and remove leaves. The user starts with a regular rake, then switches to a blower. The more garbage is removed, the better the character earns. Capitals can be used to buy advanced tools, as well as planting trees - so that new leaves fall from them.
Dorfromantik
What to play on: PC, Nintendo Switch
A cozy building simulator with a simple goal: fill the tile grid with picturesque villages, fairy-tale mills, and dense forests in colorful biomes. There's none of the complex resource management that characterizes most city-building projectshere. There is no need to worry about population happiness, budget balance or energy supply, the main gameplay focus is on the interaction of procedurally generated tiles. The player creates combinations that earn extra points and strategically places objects to complete tasks - such as building a village with a certain number of houses.
Abzu
What to play on: PC, Play Station 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
A game from the creators of the legendary Journey that lets you enjoy the beauty of the ocean at your own pace. Gamers will have to explore hypnotic underwater worlds, find mysterious ruins and solve easy puzzles. Interacting with and learning about sea creatures is a special pleasure.
House Flipper
What to play on: PC, Play Station 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
House Flipper combines elements of the transformation TV show to transform a dirty, cockroach-infested shack into a stylish home that can be sold for a good profit. In the role of a novice entrepreneur, the player starts with a barn-base and a laptop to search for orders. The newcomer will have to settle for small contracts for cleaning up after unkempt tenants or repainting walls, but then you can save up to buy and remodel serious real estate.
Donut County
What to play on: PC, Play Station 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android
In Ben Esposito's slightly surreal indie game, you have to control a hole in the ground. With each object that falls into the abyss, it gets bigger and bigger. At first the space will swallow small objects like bricks or animals, but soon the abyss will swallow whole skyscrapers. Like many relaxation games, Donut County doesn't have a deep plot or complex explanation of what's going on, the main thing is the process. The simple puzzles and amusing descriptions in Garbage Pedia make it more varied.
Tiny Glade
What to play on: PC
Tiny Glade turns every player into an artist and offers intuitive tools that make creating scenic dioramas simple and fun. The project makes it both incredibly easy to reproduce iconic scenes from games and movies and to realize your own ideas. Even complex architectural changes, such as increasing the height of a building, are calibrated almost automatically here. This helps to keep the composition flawless and not to ruin the beauty of the idea without thinking about technical subtleties.
Wattam
What to play on: PC, Play Station 4
Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi has come up with a project about making friends with everything in the world. In Wattam, players will have to try on the role of a lonely mayor who, after an unknown disaster, embarks on a colorful adventure through a world where almost all objects are alive. Over the course of three hours, players will encounter over 100 different strange characters, from an anthropomorphic nose to a telephone and even a toilet bowl. Each of them is endowed with its own functions and offers to solve certain puzzles. The sandbox game can also be played in co-op.
Gris
What to play on: PC, Play Station 4, Nintendo Switch, Android
Any screenshot from the Gris walkthrough looks worthy of a place in an art gallery. Nomada Studios' breathtaking visual style turns this game into a meditative journey through watercolor paintings come to life. The protagonist brings vibrant colors back to her monochrome world, and gamers will learn a touching story of experiencing grief and loss.
Teardown
What to play on: PC, Play Station 5, Xbox Series X|S
Like House Flipper, Teardown also involves tearing down walls, but on a much larger scale. The goal of the game is to plan the perfect heist, and all means are good. Slam trucks into buildings, use floating objects, unleash dinosaurs - you can interact with your surroundings in a myriad of crazy ways. You can play online or in solo mode.
Everything
What to play on: PC, Play Station 4, Nintendo Switch
Everything was created under the influence of Alan Watts' philosophy, promoting the idea of the unity of man and the universe. It's a simulation of everything, a huge sandbox game where you can control anything: wind, animals, or rocks. The gameplay here is endless exploration for exploration's sake, illustrating the complexity and diversity of the world.
Mini Metro
What to play on: PC, Play Station 4, Nintendo Switch, Android
Mini Metro combines complex mechanics with minimalistic design, allowing for a realistic but unmanageable game of transportation system building. In the role of managing a growing metropolis, the user starts with three stations, connecting them with subway lines.
Over time, new stops appear, passenger traffic grows, and the tasks that have to be solved with limited resources become more complex. The game has three modes: standard for quick sessions, endless for quiet play, and the most challenging - extreme, for confident gamers.
Mini Metro offers you to get creative and create subways for more than twenty real world cities: London, New York, Paris, Osaka, St. Petersburg and many others.
