Chicken Soup Games

While I had been deeply interested in computer gaming as a youth, even designing and creating many of my own, I regained the interest and passion for playing games over the last few years. I found myself initially drawn to some of the older point and click adventures – essentially an interactive story experience. Unfortunately, point and click adventures aren’t great with respect to replay value unless you haven’t played it in some time. After playing through many of my old favourites, I found that I thoroughly enjoy other genres like rogue-like deckbuilders, tower defense, and builder games. Recently though I heard the term “chicken soup games” and this reallly made a ton of sense.

I am not really into first person shooters or high adrenaline types of games like Halo, Call of Duty, or similar, tending to prefer strategy and puzzle games.

When I ran out of point and click adventure games along with some other RPGs and survival games to play on Nintendo Switch, I ended up buying an Xbox Series X. I love the Xbox because it is fast as hell and games run incredibly smooth on it, but Xbox even began to fail me with respect to finding enough games to play. I found myself buying something, not being particularly impressed, and moving on too often.

While a controller is great in many situations, when it comes to builders and resource management, a keyboard and mouse is just preferred. I wasn’t really happy with using a keyboard and mouse with the Xbox and decided to try out Steam and running games on my MacBook Pro M1.

One of the games that I have on literally every platform is Slay the Spire, a rogue-like deckbuilder. The term rogue-like is a reference to an old game called Rogue which offered players an arcade-like experience where you start from the beginning everytime and play until you die. You can save your “run,” but when the game ends, you must begin from the beginning – you can’t re-spawn further along. The other component of these types of games is “dungeon crawling,” which is essentially where the player will go through some sort of randomly generated map. If we think about this a graph-type of structure, the rooms of the “dungeon” are the nodes. The edges are also one-way, driving from a starting point to some end location.

Recently I’ve been playing a game called Peglin which is basically Slay the Spire with pin ball. It follows the same ideas where your “deck” are pinballs. But the basic idea behind a chicken soup game is that you can be sort of mindless. It’s a game where you are definitely applying strategy and puzzle solving skills, but you can sort of just play and be able to sort of “let go.” All the bad feelings we are experiencing sort of just go away for a while as we get into something of a trance.