22nd December, 2023
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the last few days. This will be our last What We’ve Been Playing of the year – of 2023 – which means when we come back in January, we’ll be able to talk about what we played, or what we did not manage to play, during the end of year break. That’s exciting isn’t it? Anyway! This week, it’s a mixture of Indonesian coming of age stories, retro remade Zeldas, and small lakeside towns.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
Link’s Awakening, Switch
I recently started playing Link’s Awakening on Nintendo Switch with my son, and something wonderful has happened. Even though we haven’t gotten very far through the game itself yet (we saved BowWow from the Moblin Cave and are now on our way to the Bottle Grotto), it has already sparked something in my son, and his imagination is on fire.
After we finished our first dungeon the other evening, I told him it was time to get ready for bed. I then did some general tidying up (it never ends), before heading upstairs to make sure he had brushed his teeth and what not. But what I saw when I made my way into his room was not what I was expecting. Rather than finding him tucked up in bed, my son had cleared a space on his desk and was carefully mapping out Koholint Island in gorgeous cartoony detail in his sketchbook. I beamed.
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The thing that I found truly remarkable was that he had also started to fill in bits of the map we had not got to yet, just with his own thoughts and ideas of what is still to come. And, bizarrely, he wasn’t actually all that far off.