I’ve talked about the Gaming Dread Spiral before. That happens when you can’t find a game that really clicks with you and your brain starts to shut down, probably as a result of some kind of core mental deficiency or essential lack of spirit. Sometimes, though, it’s not happening for no reason, but as a result of extremely stressful real-life trauma that you don’t know how to deal with and so fully envelops your consciousness that the only thing you can actively seek in a game is its ability to distract you from any and all of your other thoughts. In that case, it's a whole new beast.

For me, it's a Gaming Distraction Spiral.

That was my situation for a few months not very long ago, as detailed here. In that period, I played a lot of games. I couldn’t bring myself to do much else. All I wanted was for each game to fully occupy my brain, to push everything out, and some served that purpose better than others. With that in mind, I present 15 short reviews focused on my Small Gray Games-patented rating system known as the DPS (Distraction Potential Score).

1. DAVE THE DIVER (DPS 9)

I didn’t intentionally choose Dave the Diver as my first game in the Gaming Distraction Spiral. It was just there, free, at the top of the PS Store, so I started. It’s a game about fishing, then selling the fish at your restaurant, in an endless cycle of fairly mundane routine. You incrementally improve your ability to fish, as well as the quality of your dishes. You make friends with the locals. Day and night cycle. You experience the rhythm of seaside life.

It’s easy to disappear into a game like Dave the Diver, because you can expend near-limitless effort on it, but it asks very little of you. It’s grind purified. Plenty of things bothered me about it, like the slightly “epic bacon” quality to some of the writing and characters, or the environmentalist villains portrayed as hypocritical outside agitators, but none of that was a big concern to me. I was diving and selling fish. That was all there was.

2. TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: THE COWABUNGA COLLECTION (DPS 3)

After Dave, I decided some panicked age regression might be just the ticket. I turned to the Cowabunga Collection because I spent most of my childhood playing Turtles in Time on Super Nintendo over and over again. I had memorized every stage, and the weird tinny sound of Shredder’s voice, and the familiar bosses pulled straight from cartoons I didn’t even watch. “Tonight I dine on turtle soup,” I thought. Turtle soup indeed.

The problem with this kind of age regression is that it harkens back to a time when you perhaps were not so stressed. As a child, the future is a thing full of possibility, not dread and worry. You recall sitting in front of that Super Nintendo not yet crushed by the normalizing process of adolescence, eyes melting into a 20-inch CRT TV, feeling a way you know now that you’re never going to feel again, and you can’t understand why so much of gaming is centered on basking in the nostalgia of that childhood, because it’s not joyful to remember. It’s painful. You don’t want to go back. You want the present to be different. You want to feel it now.

The other problem is that these games are short. You play through it, each boss muscle memory, the only valuable thing you learned as a child, and you’re done in an hour or two. The game is over. Your consciousness is released back into the wild.

3. RISE OF THE THIRD POWER (DPS 6)

RPGs always work, I thought, so next I moved to an RPG. I had already played Ara Fell, the previous game from this developer, and found it pretty entertaining, so I was prepared for what to expect with this one. Fortunately, it delivered. Rise of the Third Power improved in basically all elements on Ara Fell, especially with the characterization of the main cast. A former alcoholic sadsack pirate? Sure. A princess who doesn’t want to do princess stuff and who inexplicably fights with a ship’s cannon? Yeah, okay. This is JRPG stuff. I’ll take it.

This isn’t just a review of the game itself, though, and as much as I enjoyed playing, it couldn’t serve as a complete distraction. It’s hard for a narrative to do that, I think, because as engrossing as a narrative may be, it’s usually going to have you reflecting on the world you live in, and the people around you, and the way your own life fits into it. That’s not good for a Distraction Potential Score. I am not here to reflect.

4. CULT OF THE LAMB (DPS 8)

Cult of the Lamb, on the other hand, doesn’t have you do a whole lot of reflection. You’re a weird little lamb starting a weird little cult, which in practice looks like a whole lot of gathering resources and building up your little cult camp: Stardew Valley by way of Nyarlathotep. The dungeon crawl element was a satisfying romp, and the base-building element was a pleasing grind, and even if the juxtaposition of Cute Little Guys and Abject Brutality felt a little too on the nose to me at times, I ultimately enjoyed it from beginning to end. I treated my cult pretty well, all in all. More of a friend than a boss, one might say.

Running a cult is micromanagement, I found, and micromanagement doesn’t leave a lot of room for wandering thoughts. “What’s going to happen,” I might think, but before my thoughts can escape from lockdown, one of my cultists starts talking bad about me. That little bastard needs to go in the stockade for reeducation. There’s no time to think.

5. SECRET OF MANA REMAKE (DPS 5)

Next I played the Secret of Mana remake. Refer back to the Cowabunga Collection review. It’s basically the same as that. Remember Super Nintendo? I do.

This game was longer, though, so that’s something.

6. TEARDOWN (DPS 2)

After the second failure of nostalgia, I decided to head in a brand new direction and just smash things up. This game was, I believe, a miscalculation on my part. I think that for the right person, it could easily reach a Distraction Potential Score of 10 and be both beloved and powerful. For me, however, that was not the case.

I went into Teardown expecting to do chaotic stuff in a physics engine and break everything apart. That is, in fact, a lot of what I did, but what I didn’t anticipate was how much of the game consists of carefully planning the most efficient way of breaking everything. It’s almost like a Hitman game, and my experience was similar, as I quickly realized that it was not so much a chaos simulator as it was a puzzle game. Something I’ve had to accept in my gaming life is that I just don’t like puzzle games. I have a lot of patience for a lot of things, but not that.

I am constantly puzzled. My brain is already twisted. I do not want this.

7. DREDGE (DPS 9)

Remember fishing, though? That’s something I can get behind. I wasn’t sure what Dredge was going into it, but I knew it involved fishing, and indeed, that’s the whole game. You take your dinky little boat on the water and catch some fish, and some of the fish are weird and mutated, because we’re also doing a Lovecraftian thing here. If you take your boat out too late at night, you might get a little haunted. What’s in the unknowable inky deep? Words can’t describe it.

Like Dave the Diver, this game also basks in routine, sending you out during the day to catch the same fish again and again and raise money for your stupid boat, then sending you back to shore at night to hide out from Grotesque Unknowable Other, which, unlike in Lovecraft, is probably not just a metaphor for the last non-white person the developers saw. You get to buy upgrades for your boat. You Metroid your way into areas you couldn’t previously access. You talk to weird fishermen who don’t seem quite right. It’s all the good stuff.

8. STREETS OF RAGE 4 (DPS 5)

Not everything can be fishing, though. A beat-em-up sounded like just the distraction I needed, full of mindless stimuli and forward progression, and despite being a game that nostalgically calls back to older titles, I didn’t know anything about Streets of Rage, so the nostalgia aspect meant nothing to me. It was just pure, punching action.

Unfortunately, I almost felt like this game needed me to know its callbacks. It acted like I should know these characters, like they should mean something to me. I felt slightly alienated, like I wasn’t quite welcome on these Streets of Rage, like they weren’t my Streets at all. Once I hit a difficulty spike toward the end, my frustration grew rapidly. I didn’t have the patience.

9. MOTHER RUSSIA BLEEDS (DPS 8)

I still wanted to beat ‘em up, though, so I turned instead to this strange game I’d never heard a word about. It had a melodramatic name, and appeared steeped in grittiness in a way I didn’t quite understand. Upon starting, I was immediately faced with inexplicable hyper-violence alongside a bizarrely novel setting (Roma characters in the 1980s Soviet Union?) that drew me in immediately. What was this game? Why was it like this?

Beat-em-up feels like an understatement, because everybody you punch crumbles into a screaming red slop of Eastern European gore. Not only that, but you spend most of the game furiously injecting yourself with some kind of necrotic mutagen ultra-drug straight out of a Max Payne hallucination just to stay alive. There’s a grim, frantic energy to the game that pretty successfully waylaid all of my senses exactly the way I wanted it to. I loved to beat them up.

Unfortunately, the unavoidable reality of the genre is that it can only go so long. It was a fairly brief encounter, over as soon as it started. Mother Russia fully bled out.

10. KILLING FLOOR 2 (DPS 0)

Let’s keep the gore-hound streak going, I thought. Killing Floor, I thought. That sounds like gore.

I don’t know what this game is. It wanted me to make an account or something, I don’t even remember. There were a million options for online lobbies without a hint of what kind of game it was. I didn’t make it past the title screen. Don’t ask so much of me, game. I’m tired, game.

11. RUINER (DPS 5)

The next moves are blurry to me. How did I arrive at Ruiner? I’m not sure. I don’t remember what real-life events were happening at the time I was playing this game, but they created a mental state where I remember almost nothing about it. The game was cyberpunk; that much I recall. I played as some kind of guy with a video face, or something. Or maybe that was not me. I had guns and a sword, I think, and I killed a lot of other guys for reasons I don’t remember. Maybe there was dialogue. Perhaps there was not?

Don’t take this to mean that I didn’t enjoy the game. As I recall, I did enjoy it, and I think I found it fairly distracting. I have no choice but to give it a middling Distraction Potential Score, however, because I don’t really remember what is and is not true here. What I do know is that such a haze of burdened memory could only be created if I was truly not present during gameplay, which means that this game must have succeeded to some degree.

12. IDOL MANAGER (DPS 9)

Maybe things were looking up by the time I got to Idol Manager, because this game I do remember. It had been sitting in my wishlist for quite some time, taunting me with its Idol/Idle title pun, quietly whispering in my ear that it just might be a whole idle game version of the truly inspired and still-never-topped Haruka section of Yakuza 5. It’s not quite that, of course, but it honestly ended up being much closer to it than I actually expected.

The game is grind incarnate, walking you through not just a day cycle but full calendar years as you hire and train J-pop idols for your fictional groups. You name the groups yourself, and you even name the singles they release, piecing together their genres and dance styles until you gradually become so cynical and systematic about doing appropriate market research to ensure their success that you start to believe you may be playing an accurate industry simulation.

You feel a real sense of loss when your favorite idols announce their retirement. We’re not just a business, you think. We’re a family. We’re a family chasing our dreams – our yume, if you will – until the very end. You’re all Platinum Rank Idols to me.

13. FINAL FANTASY V (DPS 7)

Eventually you wake from every dream, though, and as Idol Manager came to an end, I decided to return to something generally familiar: Final Fantasy.

As a lifelong player of the Final Fantasy series, this was the last of the main numbered games I had not played. Why I waited until a catastrophically emotionally turbulent and fundamentally distracted period to play it for the first time, I could not tell you. Perhaps I thought of it as a sure thing that would bring joy when needed. After all, I’ve enjoyed some of the early Final Fantasy games more than others, but they’ve all ultimately been pretty good experiences.

Final Fantasy V was no different. It felt like a mix of the second and third in the series, and in turn I liked it more than both of them, but at the same time, it had most of the flaws of both. The characters were thin, forgotten in real time as I played, and the job system, while entertaining for grinding purposes, only heightened the lack of characterization. It began to turn to mush in my mind, melding together with other similar entries.

While that might sound exclusively like a critique, it was functional in terms of distraction. I didn’t reflect on the plight of these characters; I pondered their job combinations. I looked at numbers and made them go up. Crystals were involved somehow. I considered nothing.

14. DEAD AHEAD: ZOMBIE WARFARE (DPS 5)

By the end of Final Fantasy V, I wanted to keep the grind going, so I turned to something that looked, from a distance, like it would be nothing but grind. Dead Ahead seemed to promise just that: endless barely-differentiated levels of post-apocalyptic zombie tower defense. A million stupid little upgrades for a million stupid little guys. Multiple abstract currencies. Game Stuff.

Unfortunately, it mostly felt like a port of a mobile game that nobody fully thought about while porting. The controls are counter-intuitive. At times, it would ask me if I was enjoying the game and to rate it, despite the fact that I was playing on Playstation. I hit a difficulty wall only to look it up and learn that it was a mobile port that was no longer being updated. It promised the limitless grind I sought, but abandoned me partway through. Perhaps we are the walking dead.

That said, it was kind of fun. It was a mobile game. It was that kind of thing.

15. ELDEN RING: SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE (DPS 10)

And just as I began to feel myself becoming too aware of my surroundings, Elden Ring’s eagerly-awaited DLC Shadow of the Erdtree was released. I was somewhat on the fence about whether to play it, concerned it might be forever spoiled by my mental state at the time, but things were already looking a bit more positive at that point. With that in mind, I decided to approach it by first restarting the game with a new build, giving myself time to feel things out before I made it to brand new DLC content. That way, I could back out if it started feeling bad.

It did not start feeling bad. Quite the opposite, in fact, because Elden Ring is, in many ways, a much more grind-heavy game than any of its Fromsoft predecessors. That’s not to say you have to grind, but that it gives you ample opportunity to do so, with a million weird little caves for you to find, each one full of repeat bosses tucked into their darkened crevices.

Not only is it inherently a grinder’s paradise, but I was playing the pre-DLC portion for the second time. I remembered enough that quite a bit of the playthrough, especially the early portions, had an almost autopilot quality to it: I knew what build I wanted to create, and I knew what gear I needed to create it, and for a lot of that gear, I either already knew where to find it, or wasn’t concerned about spoilers from looking it up. I plowed through the early game, effortlessly mowing down idiot soldiers and their grafted bosses, emptying out castles and rubbing all their smithing stones all over my matching uchigatanas. I was unstoppable.

By the time I reached the actual DLC content, I was so immersed in the project of my Elden Ring playthrough that I could hardly consider anything else. I was Torrent the horse, blinders secured to my rotten face, feed bag strapped onto my decrepit mouth. Real life circumstances improved as the game progressed, and a transcendent synergy of mundane conditions and digital point-collection took place. No longer was I the loathsome Dung Eater.

I don’t think I would’ve had the same experience had I started with the DLC content. In fact, I think it was essential to my enjoyment of the playthrough that it be an experience so familiar and potentially repetitive that some might find it almost boring. It was in many ways a rehash, but in that moment, I believe a rehash was exactly what I needed.

FREE AT LAST

By the time I reached the end of Shadow of the Erdtree, real life circumstances had changed substantially. The Spiral likely would have continued if not for that, but fortunately, things coalesced into what felt almost like a positive ending, a thoughtful send-off from the Gaming Distraction Spiral. I didn't need to simply occupy my brain anymore; I could start paying attention.

The more games I play, the more I come to understand my own idiosyncrasies and the degree to which my enjoyment is often based on arbitrary criteria like the patented Gaming Distraction Spiral Distraction Potential Score (GDSPDS), which is so immersed in the personal experience of a particular moment that it perhaps can't be applied to the lives and experiences of other people. That’s never been more apparent than it was during the past few months. We can debate the creative merit of games and the utility of reviews until the end of time, but as with any art form, there’s an inevitable subjectivity that can’t be ignored, not just from person to person, but even from day to day for any given person.

That said, all of the DPS listed here are rigorous, objective determinations and should be used to influence buying decisions. With any luck, they will be uploaded to Metacritic and layoffs will be performed accordingly.