A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
If you have outgrown toy trucks and stuffed animals, how about a video game to help fill some idle hours this summer? You could pick a game from a huge company or from an independent studio.
REBEKAH VALENTINE: Indie games are consistently just the most exciting stuff out there.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at IGN Entertainment.
VALENTINE: They're doing experimental stuff. They're telling stories that aren't getting told elsewhere.
MARTIN: With so many new games out there, where do you start? Valentine's favorite is called Blue Prince.
MARTÍNEZ: Perfect for a player who likes escape rooms.
VALENTINE: So it's a puzzle game. You play as this young man named Simon, this teenager who has inherited a fantastically large and well-maintained mansion from his great-uncle Herbert.
MARTÍNEZ: With one condition, you have to go through all the rooms of the mansion to find a secret 46th room, solving puzzles and piecing together clues along the way.
MARTIN: We also asked Ash Parrish. She's a video game journalist at The Verge, and one of her new favorites is called Date Everything!
ASH PARRISH: You have these special glasses, and you turn your glasses on any, like, inanimate object in your house, and it turns into a person.
MARTIN: Perfect, say, if you liked "Beauty And The Beast" and thought your clock might be pretty cute if it were human.
PARRISH: And it sounds like a cotton candy good time, but it's actually, like, really deep in terms of, like, learning about different people's, like, mental health and emotional states and, you know, relationship styles.
MARTÍNEZ: Another of her favorites is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In a fictional version of Paris, a godlike figure called the Paintress invades their world, and every year, kills everyone who's reached a certain age.
PARRISH: So year 100, you kill everybody that's 100 years old, and then every year it goes down. So 99, 98.
MARTÍNEZ: At the start of the game, time's up for anyone who is 33 years old. So people a year away from death go on an expedition to try to stop the Paintress.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) We'll break the cycle so she can't steal anyone else's future.
PARRISH: It's this very beautiful, like, meditation on death and the things we do for the generations that come after us. And while also still managing to have all of these, like, fun, quirky moments.
MARTIN: So whether you're looking for a mystery, a laugh or maybe even a few tears, there are lots of new indie games to spend some time with this summer.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAELLE")
ALICE DUPORT-PERCIER: (Singing in French). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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