Videoverse

Videoverse takes place almost entirely in the fictional, early-2000s online social space of the same name, a place where owners of the Kinmoku Shark gather to discuss their favorite games, as well as share tips and fan art and sometimes talk about their lives. It feels something like an amalgamation of the message boards that dominated online discourse of the era—places like the forums you’d find at GameSpot and IGN—and Nintendo’s Miiverse, the now-defunct social space that was built into the Wii U.

Read more: This New Game Is A Great Tribute To Early Online Gaming Communities

You engage with this space and the people who inhabit it as Emmett, a young Shark owner with aspirations of being a game artist someday. Videoverse takes place in the final days of the service, as console-maker Kinmoku is shutting down the boards to focus its efforts on its brand new console, and the spiffier, more profitable online service it offers, and the impending end of this era casts your interactions in a poignant light. What’s remarkable about Videoverse is how it gets the human details of these spaces just right, keenly observing the patterns of human behavior and interaction that became so familiar to so many of us who frequented such spaces back then, and how it recognizes that these online connections can and do have real meaning in our lives. The internet, and how we interact with others on it, is always evolving, and not always for the better. Videoverse is a great game about the way we once were, what we’ve lost, and how games can make real meaning in our lives. —Carolyn Petit

Playable on: PC

Rough average playtime: Five hours