Cities: Skylines is easily the pinnacle of the city-builder, city-sim genre, having dethroned Sim City. It has its issues, for sure. The lack of mixed-use zoning and the overreliance on car-based travel are disappointing in particular. But, working around that and with the help of a few (hundred) mods, Cities offers an unparalleled canvas for painting a city.

Moments of intense concentration, placing things just right, are interspersed with blissful periods of sitting back and just watching the city work. Immensely satisfying, gratifyingly creative and endlessly mesmerising, Cities has spent half the decade as one of my most successful tools for relaxation.

— My Ten Games of the Decade, Dom Ford

As many users pointed out online, the much lower interest rate means that the most effective way of making money is now to gamble on the game’s internal ‘stalk’ market - a bourse in which the only commodity is turnips, sold to investors during a single session on Sundays. The root vegetables rot and their value drops to zero after a week.

— Virtual rate cut forces Nintendo gamers into riskier assets, Leo Lewis in FT

But with coronavirus deaths soaring and the real economy tanking, Animal Crossing might inspire Americans to reclaim structure and routine, and to motivate it toward modest rather than remarkable ends. Nobody really wants to live a pastoral-capitalist equilibrium of humdrum labor-unless that’s what everyone wants, actually, and not even so secretly. Civic life, after all, coheres not in abstract fantasies about politician-heroes, but in habitual practices that take place in real communities. All video games aestheticize busywork. But few make it feel like freedom.

— Animal Crossing Isn’t Escapist; It’s Political - The Atlantic, Ian Bogost in The Atlantic