17 Great Games Like Deep Time Walk

These games have an educational element to them, but also offer experiences that are good games in their own right. This isn't busywork to trick you into learning, but clever and innovative ways to encounter history, physics, engineering, maths, geography and language subjects without feeling like you are in school. They also teach softer, deeper skills like long term strategy, planning, balancing systems, emotional intelligence, compassion, team-work and self-care.

Some of these games are aimed at younger players to play on their own, but others (as indicated by their PEGI ratings) are better for teenagers or played together in a family. Find some games that pique your interest, read through the details and decide how your child might benefit from playing them.
 

Video games are sometimes criticised for pillaged historical cultural contexts as places to pitch their shooting battles. Many games do treat historic periods or military battles to embellish the visuals with a realism.

There are, however, all sorts of games that use history as more than window dressing. This might be something as simple as accurately creating period-appropriate weapons and uniforms, like in War Thunder or Enlisted. This might also be offering the player to experience battles not from the perspective of the victors. Or, like in This War of Mine, what is was like for those caught up in conflict as civilians.

Beyond warfare, games offer a wide array of accurate depictions of different civilisations and eras. Through the Darkest of Times is a strategy game that conveys the sombre mood of the dark period of history between January 1933 and May 1945. The Forgotten City is a mystery adventure set in the final days of a cursed Roman city. Treasures of the Aegean is a Tin Tin-style tomb raiding adventure game with a surprisingly accurate bronze age Aegean civilisation.

There are other games that introduce historical techniques and tools. In Heaven’s Vault you play an archaeologist translating an ancient alien language whose decrypting weaves through an unfolding drama. In Return of the Obra Dinn you revisit the moment of death of 60 sailors on an ancient ship and use evidence to piece together their identity and what happened.

Other game recreate a time periods' architecture and culture so you can explore it first hand. Discovery Tour is a special mode that uses the worlds created for the main Assassin’s Creed games to offer an historical exploration experience. Discovery Tour: Viking Age is set in Britain and Norway, around 870 AD. It sheds light on the Viking era and allows players to discover more about the history and traditions of the time. Raji: An Ancient Epic is a running and jumping puzzle game drawing on Hindu and Balinese history. Taking inspiration from tales like Mahabharata and Ramayana you play a young girl named Raji who is chosen by the gods to defend the human race.

There are even games that help players appreciate the scale of history and time. Deep Time Walk is a game where you go for a walk as you listen to a history of the earth that's tied to each step. The game calculates your speed and distance to match your real-world progress and translates it to a journey across 4.6bn years of time, taking in every key evolutionary event as they occur.
 

There are lots of games that help you exercise and stay fit. We've pulled together a list of the best of these; games that don't just incentivise activity with on-screen rewards but that integrated the workout into the gameplay. We all know about Wii Sports but there are so many other ways that video games can help you stay healthy and active while you can't get out as much.
 

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.”
 

There are many reasons, stages of life and circumstances that can leave us feeling isolated and lonely. Being unable to be in the same place as loved ones. Not understanding the modern world. Barriers of mobility or impairments. Social anxiety and other mental health issues.

Video games are one way that we can reconnect with each other, without needing to be in the same place. Finding games to play online with grandparents and carers is not only a good way to keep in touch but a lot of fun.

The games on this page are part of the Better Health: Every Mind Matters Loneliness campaign, to help protect and improve the nation’s mental health and wellbeing. There are lots of practical tips and advice on the Every Mind Matters website. It's part of National Loneliness Awareness Week, aims to reduce feelings of isolation by getting people to talk with friends or family safely online.

• Co-operative: Some of the games are good ways to connect and play co-operatively online (like Feather, Overcooked 2, Ibb and Obb, Skylanders Children of Light).
• Competitive: With some practice there are easy and fun online competitive games (like Tricky Towers, Videoball)
• Asynchronous: Other games are a way to connect and play without being online at the same time (like Horizon Chase Turbo, Worms, Words With Friends, Wargroove, Animal Crossing).
• Community: Then there are games that connect you with a wider player community in a gentle non-invasive way (like The First Tree, Journey, Lost Words, The Endless Forrest).

All the games have been select to be easy to play for new gamers and many of them have been used in a broad range of cultural settings, being incorporated into Cathedral services, arts festivals, well-being retreats and educational contexts.