Concrete Jungle is in These Lists
In addition to the similar games listed above, which have been linked to this game specifically in the database, you may find games with a similar theme to Concrete Jungle in the following lists:
We spend our lives in buildings every day. Our homes, offices, shopping malls, cathedrals, stations, bridges and even public toilets have all been designed. Video games mirror and magnify this built environment in different ways.
Some, like
Assassin's Creed,
Grand Theft Auto and
Forza Horizon recreate virtual versions of familiar places. Others, like
The Witcher,
Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess and
Eastshade, create their own cities and buildings. Then there are games like
The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild,
Biomutant,
Enslaved or
The Last Of Us that drop you in a once-great but now ruined architecture.
Along with these pre-built spaces, there are also games that invite you to affect and rebuilt the architecture of a world. Games like
Townscaper allow you to easily create series of buildings and consider how one structure relates to those around it -- like a street-scene generator. Then there are games like
Animal Crossing, that offer a social context in which to apply your architectural and landscaping skills.
Then there are games that build spaces that would be impossible in real life. From the Escher-like
Manifold Garden to the scale-confounding
Superliminal, these games can play with perspective and movement to not only confuse the player but open new possibilities in perceiving buildings.
Finally, there are games with breathtaking architecture. Whether it's the atmospheric lighting of
Control, the climbable buildings of the
Uncharted series or
Shadow of the Colossus vast cathedral-like structures, video games often create original spaces that stop you in your tracks.
The video games in this list create space to notice, reflect and try your hand at architecture. They are fun, but they are also important because the design of the spaces we spend time in have profound effects on how we feel, think and move.
The Digital Futures Commission's
A Vision of Free Play in a Digital World report that outlines the key qualities of "free play" for what "good" looks like in a digital world. The team from 5 Rights Foundation and Digital Futures LSE set out ambitious expectations for children’s free play in all contexts. To claim the label ‘Playful by Design’, digital products and services should adopt seven principles:
-
Be Welcoming: Prioritise digital features that are inclusive, sociable and welcoming to all, reducing hateful communication and forms of exclusion and reflecting multiple identities.
-
Enhance Imagination: Prioritise creative resources and imaginative, open ended play over pre-determined pathways built on popularity metrics or driven by advertising or other commercial pressures.
-
Enable Open-Ended Play: Provide and enhance features that offer easy-to use pathways, flexibility and variety as these support children’s agency and encourage their imaginative, stimulating and open-ended play.
-
No commercial exploitation: Reduce compulsive features designed to prolong user engagement or cultivate dependency on games, apps or platforms, so children’s immersive play is intrinsically motivated and freely chosen.
-
Ensure safety: Ensure children’s play in online spaces is safe, including by giving them control over who can contact them and supplying help when needed.
-
Allow for experimentation: Recognise that exploration, invention and a degree of risk taking is important in children’s play and that the burden should not fall on them always to be cautious or anxious, or to follow rules set by others.
-
Be age-appropriate: Respect the needs of children of different ages by providing age-appropriate opportunities for play, while also allowing for safe intergenerational play.
I asked Sonia Livingstone, lead researcher and report author, whether there were many games that already met this criteria. "Children bring a lot to their play that for them is imaginative and sociable. Where it's more difficult is in the voluntary and intrinsically motivated play. Games very rarely leave children to play at their own pace and rate. The freedom for risk taking is sometimes present but here, children themselves take on the safety burden from society at large and limit play themselves."
Inspired and challenged by the report, we searched our database to identify games that came closest to meeting these high standards. Like the report, this aims to concentrate energy on identifying opportunities for free play that should be enriched and expanded to make play online more child-centred.
In the report, children identify their need to play in ways that perhaps adults don’t understand or that some digital designs deny. They don't want a completely "whole-food experience", nor to turn back the clock to an offline world. They want digital products designed to enhance the qualities of play and at the same time want those aspects of design that are exploitative or invasive to be dialled down.
Examples on this list include playful offline video games. Games like
Lonely Mountains Downhill and
Microsoft Flight Simulator offer open-ended play where you can go where you want and make your own fun.
Spelunky 2,
Mini Metro and
Teardown enable free-play that is intrinsically and experimentally motivated without commercial exploitation. Then games like
A Short Hike and
Wilmot's Warehouse offer play that is welcoming for newcomers and specifically age appropriate. Risk taking and rule breaking play that doesn't become a burden on the child is found in games like
Untitled Goose Game and
The Longing.
Examples on this list also include playful online video games. Games like
Journey and
One Hour One Life offer a welcoming experience by encouraging (in some cases requiring) other players to help newcomers.
Phantom Abyss offers an unusual competitive play space that celebrates experimentation and is safe by design through minimal communication.
Sea of Thieves and
Valheim offer age appropriate play for older teenagers that is built around experimentation and discovery through risk taking that is lead by imagination.
Stormworks combines open ended play like
Minecraft, but offers a context more age appropriate to ambitious teenagers through its float-mechanics and boat design.
Sky Children of the Light combines many of the criteria, offering a welcoming experience for newcomers, imaginative play. It subverts the commercial feel of other app games by focusing purchases on items that are primarily to give away to other players.
In a world of technology, it’s easy to become disconnected or forgetful of the people we live with and the places we live in. Video games can be a part of this dislocation as screen time diminishes engagement with the real world. But they can also offer ways to reconnect with those around us and find a fresh (helpfully disruptive) perspective on our neighbourhoods.
This list has been created with the help of
Cormac Russell, Managing Director of Nurture Development. For 25 years Cormac has helped communities, agencies and governments solve urban and rural development problems not by focusing on the deficiencies of neighbourhoods, towns, villages but by understanding that people, their families and communities, have unique competencies in building community. As Cormac puts it. “Communities can’t know what they need from outside sources until they know what they have themselves internally. And we get this the wrong way round.”
The video games here offer a range of experiences that reshape and challenge our thinking in this direction:
-
Reimagine Space: Games like Eco and Terra Nil underline our relationship with the land. Not that we need to minimise harm, but that we need to understand our presence and impact so we can balance benefits ecologically.
-
Reimagine Community: Games like One Hour One Life invite us to contribute to a community for the benefit of future players. Others, like Pilgrims, invite us to understand the interrelated needs of a small community and then use their existing resources to meet these needs. Then there are games like Thousand Threads and Fable that shine a light on inter-related tensions in groups, where helping one person may negatively impact another.
-
Community Memory: Games like Heaven’s Vault, Treasures of the Aegean and Deep Time Walk illustrate the power of community memory and tradition, and how these things are lost (and recovered) through language.
-
Community Planning: Games like Mini Metro, Townscaper or Conduct Together put us in the role of planning transportation and provision as opposed to experts. Then there are games like Buildings Have Feelings Too, that disrupt the usual remote dispassionate planning of the lived environment by giving voice to it. Or games like Everything, that invite us to physically inhabit space in a massive range of bodies – from pollen to mountains, antelope to power pylons.
Another interesting voice on the intersection between play and place is Benjamin Stokes. His book, Locally Played, encourages us to “collaborate in the creation, deployment, and study of playful ways to build local connection and restore a critical sense of vitality and even possibility to our civic lives.”
Chess is a game that has stood the test of time. It's the ultimate test of strategy, forward planning and cunning. While there are some games that offer a computer chess experience, more interesting are games that use chess as inspiration.
These games use the familiar movement of the pieces, the ability to plan ahead and the standard grid layout as part of their video game challenge. Although this may sound like a bad idea (why not just play proper chess) many offer a nuanced and intriguing experience. They also have the benefit of being an on-ramp to the world of chess that can be unapproachable.
The games in this list all have chess-like elements, are turn-based and usually played in a grid playfield.
All games make you think in some way or other. However, some are designed to stretch your puzzle-knowhow more than others. There are games that don't lean on reactions or visuals to tell a story. Instead, they offer a conundrum to get you thinking.
I've worked with some people from the
Thinky Puzzle Game movement to track down the best little games that get you thinking. "The devotees of such games have been known to smile at all sorts of diverse puzzles and conundrums. Puzzle games, platformers, number games, word games, games with or without grids, games with or without secrets. Easy games. Hard games. But keep it thinky and save your FPS games and dexterity-intensive platformers for another day."
Many of the games in this list look simple and, well, a bit basic. But that is part of the charm. The clever bit is how their design draws you in and gets you thinking. If you want more like this, you can find helpful people on the
Thinky Puzzle Discord group.
Raucous, unbounded, exuberant, all-age competitive fun is something video games are known for. Find the right games for your family and you can create important and healthy ways to let off steam, excel and persevere as you sit next to each other on the sofa. These games can play a big part in raising children to be magnanimous in victory and generous in defeat. Kids love competing online, but the games here focus on battling in the same room. Played with multiple controllers and a shared screen, they offer challenges that require real skill and give everyone a chance to rise to the top of the family pile.
Video games and toys are two separate things in a child's life. Online and in stores they are sold separately. At home, however, children will move from toys to video games without such strong distinctions. This list draws together all the games that cross over with toys in this way.
Very young players are often drawn to games with toy-like play. Whether
Toca Boca or
Sago Mini offer video game interactions but without missions, tasks or scores. They are games that create space, characters, locations and items for children to make up their own fun.
Then there are games that import physical toys into the play-process of the game. Sometimes this is to have a figure unlock items and save progress like in
Skylanders or sometimes this is to create new ways to interact like
Tori, Hotwheels id or
Anki.
Video games are complicated. The era of a lone developer making a hit game in their bedrooms is long gone. Or is it? We have found a swath of amazing games that have been driven into existence by just one person.
These games often stand out because of their singular vision and focused scope. Although, as the
discussion surrounding this list has uncovered, almost all games have some contribution from other people. Coding, designing, creating art, writing music, recording dialogue.
Still, these are games where there has been a single driving force (auteur) willing their creation into existence. This list aims to highlight these games not to hold up the ideal of solo development (which can lead to unhealthy work-life balance) but to uncover this deep pool of fascinating games with a singular vision.
As Lewis Procter
tweeted, it's exciting to realise that "you can make a game without needing permission or support from a big company, and many great tools are readily available." But, as he continued, in reality "games are almost always at some level a collaborative effort."
The games we are including here are those that were created by a single person. Sometimes this is in a final form, sometimes a single developers vision was released and has subsequent versions that expands this with more people. This is our thank-you to all these tireless individuals who have created something singular and pure that we now enjoy.
Many games let you create your own items, object or levels. But some are specifically designed for you to do this in order to attract characters and visitors to your creation in the game.
Whether it's the perfect garden in
Viva Pinata, the ideal visitor island in
Animal Crossing or the most thrilling ride in
Planet Coaster, these games are fun because they combine creativity and management.
Then there are games where your attractions are more understated. The ideal home and live to keep your
Sims happy. Or maybe create something that doesn't impact the environment negatively like in
Eco.
Whatever you create, as well as attract characters in the game, the creations you make are ideal to share with other people (parents and carers maybe) to show them what you've been doing.
Fidget spinners burst into the hands of children a number of years ago. While that initial trend subsided, the interest and enjoyment of tactile objects to fiddle with are very much with us.
Fidget toys are like the yo-yo or Rubik's cube but without the focus on skill. The enjoyment comes from doing something that isn't learning or achieving anything. It's no surprise that there are a number of video games that have picked up on this style of play.
Some games, like
The Longing,
Animal Crossing and
Adopt Me, simple slow down the need to progress, so all you do is check-in, fiddle around with the game world and then leave. Then there are other games, like
Townscaper and
Pok Pok Playroom, that let you craft your own structures but with none of the usual video game emphasis on score and winning. Other games, like
Everything and
Proteus, offer a huge world to poke and prod without getting embroiled with progression.
Even games that do offer a strong sense of story and development often include post-game play or side-quest distractions that are simply there for you to spend time fiddling with rather than winning or losing. Games like
A Short Hike,
Alba A Wildlife Adventure or even
No Man's Sky.
Play is more fun when it’s shared. This is as true about video games as it is when building a massive sandcastle on the beach or playing hopscotch in the playground. Finding brilliant team games is a great way to involve more people in the fun and share the experience together as a family. More experienced players naturally help novices contribute to the team.
Along with teamwork, the games I’ve selected here use the fact that players are all sitting next to each other.
These are games where players take on different roles in order to complete unusual tasks. The fun is often as much about the conversations (and arguments) that happen in the room as what’s happening on the screen.
Start Here
