Parents' Guide to Ever Oasis

This cute and charming game manages to balance action-heavy role-playing gameplay and town building to create an enjoyable, unique adventure. Rather than simply beating up enemies and collecting items, this game's town building mechanic gives you something bigger to work towards. It's fun to earn enough currency to plant a building on the grid, and begin to expand your town as you race against an evil force that wants to destroy it all. You'll start off with simple tasks, such as "talk to so and so" or "pick berries for this person" on a linear path that might feel restrictive at first. But if you stick with the game a little longer, you'll start to unlock new characters, partner with them in dungeons by swapping between each one during combat, solving some environmental puzzles, and evolve your Seedling over time like most RPGs. The pacing is good, and the combat and puzzles get increasingly challenging over time and experience.

This third-person game is quite attractive, too, especially when played in 3D, and the orchestral soundtrack is also worth noting. There's no speech in the game, so be prepared to read a lot of subtitled text. Thankfully, it doesn't detract much from the overall immersion. But frequent load times might. You'll eventually zip around locations using portals, but it seems you can't walk more than a few feet without the game loading up the next patch of land. But overall, Ever Oasis is a fun and accessible game that successfully fuses combat and puzzle-solving with exploration and town-building.