This week, I'm contemplating camping out at my nearest Best Buy to score a Nintendo Switch 2. Meanwhile, my kids have zero desire to encourage me in this pursuit, because the only gaming platform they truly care about is Roblox (my son also committed the sacrilege of calling Mario Kart "boring.")
If you've somehow never heard of Roblox, you probably don't have kids yourself (the first time my daughter asked me if she could try it out, sometime during the early part of the pandemic, I thought she was calling it "Road Blocks"). It's not a gaming system, or even a game, but an online platform/social hub that allows players to access any one of thousands of independently developed, (sort of) free-to-play games I'd mostly describe as both ugly and asinine. Kids, who famously have no taste, love it—40% of the platform's 85 million daily users are under 13.
My first impression of Roblox was that all the games look terrible (they're all built on the same blocky gaming engine, which doesn't foreground visual complexity, to put it nicely) and played worse. The controls tend to be laggy and cumbersome on both a laptop and a mobile device, and the gameplay is often barely that. Many games seem to be variations on the concept of a "skinner box," where the entire point is to play them long enough to level up and get better items to unlock harder challenges that will require you to play long enough to level up and get better items—which is fine if the gameplay is satisfying. But "games" like Sword Simulator don't require you to do anything but walk around and slash at enemies that can't hit back, building experience as you move. You can even set them to "AFK Mode" (that's "away from keyboard") and they will play themselves. Progressing in these games often involves taking shortcuts that cost "Robux," the in-game currency you buy with real-world dollars. Fun.
For a long time I found my kids' obsession with Roblox both mystifying and annoying—especially when they'd refuse to play real video games (Mario) with me instead. Finally, I decided to put in a good-faith effort to figure out why so many kids like Roblox, and not only because I was worried about reports that its a place where minors are often scammed and exploited, or worse; aside from those larger, and certainly pertinent, issues, I also just wanted to try to bond with them over something they liked instead of expecting them to share my own views about what games are fun (Mario).
After some trial and error (Roblox is hardly intuitive to anyone who didn't grow up fused to an iPad), I was heartened to discover that some Roblox games are...actually kind of fun to play with your kids, or even by yourself after they go to bed. They don't conform to my concept of what a video game should be, but they aren't universally terrible, and now I'm sometimes actually willing to say yes when the kids ask if we can play them together. Here are six Roblox games our family has enjoyed (and to be fair to my kids, they also have played a lot of Mario with me).
Grow a Garden
Credit: Screenshot / Joel Cunningham
You know a Roblox game has escaped containment once The New York Times starts writing about it—and Grow a Garden is one of the most popular Roblox games ever in terms of concurrent users, surpassing the daily average users of the likes of Fortnite. You can think of it as Roblox's answer to that old Facebook mainstay Farmville, and it's my family's current group obsession. The gameplay involves a pretty simple progression loop—you buy and plant seeds and sell the resulting fruits and veggies for cash to buy more seeds, eventually building up a bank account large enough to afford rarer seeds that yield yet more valuable produce—that quickly grows addictive: Once you have enough money to cultivate a good crop, you can set about spending your excess funds oh tools and upgrades to make your garden look cooler and enhance the value of your crops via "mutations" that can make them grow huge or multi-colored (random in-game weather events can also trigger mutations, which encourages you to keep playing, as you must be online to benefit).
New seeds are introduced periodically, and to keep things interesting in-between weekly moderator events, there are crafting, pet-raising, and pet mechanics. The best part of Grow a Garden is that it is satisfying to play even if you never spend a cent on Robux—you can use the in-game currency to skip quests and avoid waiting for plants to grow or pets to mature, but otherwise, they're mostly unnecessary. (This doesn't stop my son from asking for more Robux anyway.)
Play Grow a Garden
Toilet Tower Defense
Credit: Screenshot / Joel Cunningham
This is probably my son's (and my) favorite Roblox game, but it has a high barrier to entry, in that it's built on the back of the "Skibidi Toilet" phenomenon, which is probably too much to get into here. (Luckily, Lifehacker's Steven Johnson has digested it for you.) But once you've accepted the fact that your goal in the game is to build up an army of robots to defend your base against waves of attacking toilet monsters, it's actually a pretty fun twist on the "tower defense" genre of gaming. Gameplay is a mix of active battles in which you deploy your resources and upgrade them before your forces are overcome by toilets, and quests/commerce/trading, which is how you can obtain better battle units.
To really do well, you have to spend a lot of time playing, but you can also spend some real money on Robux or gems, two distinct types of in-game currency that can earn you stronger fighters. That said, you can also play it without spending any money at all, and it's a great co-op experience, as all players in a match work together toward the same goal.
Play Toilet Tower Defense
Dress to Impress
Credit: Screenshot / Joel Cunningham
My daughter would prefer she never have to hear about Toilet Tower Defense again, but she loves Dress to Impress, and everyone in the family gets a kick out of playing it together. It's a far simpler concept, not unlike playing dress up with Barbie dolls: Each round has a theme (from "Beach Day," to "First Date," to "Classic Goth"). You have a few minutes to navigate your avatar around a dressing room and select garments and colors and patterns that match the prompt, and modify your hair and makeup. It ends with a runway walk where you can rate other players' outfits, but in my experience, no one takes the judging very seriously, so it all feels very low stakes.
I do have a few nitpicks with this one: The standard wardrobe options are somewhat limited, and you'll need to pay about $7 in Robux to unlock "VIP Status" if you want more variety. You can choose a male or female avatar, but they can't share clothes, and the male options are pitiful. (There's also a weird bit of in-game lore about the NPC nail tech that creeped my son out, but that's neither here nor there.)
Play Dress to Impress
Mega Hide and Seek
Credit: Screenshot / Joel Cunningham
If your house is too small for a real game of hide and seek, this game takes it online. Players are shrunk down and thrown together into one of a dozen or so familiar environments, from a classroom to a child's bedroom, and assigned the role of either a hider or a seeker (duh). They must then navigate their mouse-sized avatar around the room, looking for or avoiding the other players, before the timer runs out. Different game modes spice things up, from a winter mode that makes everything slippery, to a "zombie" variation in which everyone the seeker tags is infected and becomes a seeker too.
That's basically it—I appreciate Mega Hide and Seek because you can do basically everything in the game without buying Robux, which only earn you the right to choose the map and game mode.
Play Mega Hide and Seek
Murder Mystery 2
Credit: Screenshot / Joel Cunningham
This one probably isn't the best choice for parents who feel iffy about their kids hunting one another down with knives, but the name implies more scares and graphic violence than the game actually delivers. In practice, it's actually not all that different from Mega Hide and Seek: Players are assigned a role—Innocent, Murderer, or Sheriff—and dropped into one of a handful of random maps and given a few minutes to survive. The Murderer has to hunt other players, the Sheriff has to kill the murderer, and everyone else just has to stay alive. Rounds are fun and fast, there's no blood or gore involved, and it all plays out like a simplified version of Among Us. (Incidentally, this is an update to a game called Murder Mystery—hence the "2"—but you can no longer go back and play the original.)
Play Murder Mystery 2
Epic Minigames
Credit: Screenshot / Joel Cunningham
We play a lot of Mario Party as a family, but given large age differences and varying emotional regulation skills, it doesn't always go well. A few rounds of Epic Minigames delivers the same flavor of gameplay—everyone competes frantically in a series of brief, simple challenges that last a minute or two each—with less of the board game trappings that can lead to hurt feelings. The challenges are usually pretty mindless (stand on a colored square and hope the floor doesn't drop out from under you, run away from giant spikes before they can slam into you, etc.), but they don't take much dexterity and are over before you have a chance to get bored. Plus, there's really no need to buy Robux to play it—though of course, the game developers are happy to let you spend them on stuff like in-game pets and special death animations if you really want to. (I do not.)
Play Epic Minigames
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