days ago On the Game Boy, the biggest fun in mobile gaming was portability. From a park bench to the back seat of a car, anywhere can be a place to mash buttons. This has become even more true over the past two years, when the ability to play while reintegrating with the outside world has become a way of dealing with Covid-19 anxiety. However, last week I discovered an entirely new aid: helping me keep calm while I’m stuck on a train for 35 hours — with a toddler.
This revelation came with the kind of disaster befitting the start of 2022. Like many other families, my family struggled with what to do this holiday season as cases of Omicron increased. Eventually, my husband and I decided to get out of the cold of Philadelphia and take our little one south to my parents’ house, and we got off and boarded the Amtrak train. We can isolate with my family, and on the trip home we try to stay Covid-safe in a private cabin. However, like many others, we got stuck when a massive snowstorm hit the Northeast last week, leaving cars stuck on I-95 in Virginia, and we got stuck in our cabin with little waiting.
The problem started around 5:30 AM, when I woke up to discover that the train wasn’t moving. There were trees on the rails between Richmond and Washington, DC, and we couldn’t move until they were cleared. In a surreal turn of events, we didn’t get any updates until around noon because the train conductor forgot to include our car in the ads. We had no idea when we would move again, but in many ways, we were lucky. We had heating, a private space, a bathroom, and as others on the train inquired about a diaper or formula, the extra packing ensured we weren’t hungry.
But what we needed was a way to prevent our little human being from turning into a crying mess. We had an iPhone 12 Pro with poor battery life, an iPad, and a Nintendo Switch. It was the latter, specifically Cozy Grovewho saved us all.
I like to describe Cozy Grove As a kind of search-based task animal crossing. You are a spirit scout and your job is to help the ghost bears around your island recover their memories so that they can move forward in peace. It’s a calm and serene game, and while playing it definitely helped me relieve my tension about the situation, my kid reaped the most benefits, ordering his mom around to show him different things on the island – whether it was a fish, Mr. Kate (“Mama, I want to see a fox!”), or a seashell. . He was especially fond of the various bears on the island, and asked me to guess which ones he wanted to see. (“Is it an atom or a flower?” was a common question during those long hours.) The part I was most grateful for was, thanks to my impulsive upgrade to the Nintendo Switch OLED, I was easily getting six gaming sessions hours, which made a huge difference to our trip.
At 1:30 the next morning we arrived at our destination with absent eyes – 35 hours after our departure. Fortunately my baby was already asleep when we got there, and he went to bed as soon as we got home. But even after he drifted away, she kept walking around me Cozy Grove Island. It’s still the perfect escape, even though I’m no longer trapped.
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