For many of us, the moment of crawling into bed can be the most highly anticipated (and, arguably, most important) part of a long day spent pretending to study in Blue 2. Rest, of course, can be achieved through things other than sleeping: bathing, going on a walk, reading, and indulging in hobbies that prioritise time and energy not spent working.
There’s multiple layers to this, too, for those of us interested in video games: it’s one of the more active means of consuming media, and many video games can be quite intense experiences (there’s nothing quite like the adrenaline of typing out disparaging comments to your teammates in Marvel Rivals). Accordingly, many video games feature time spent away from achieving your goals as an integral part of their game design. There’s a sort of weird layered feel to this: I’m relaxing through playing a video game, within which I also need to allocate time to rest.
It’s a strange feeling, but one that’s more than necessary. Video games, like any other medium, need to pace themselves, and all action 100% of the time can get one-note and even exhausting. The time spent checking the scoreboard and chatting with your teammates in between matches of online shooters provides some build-up that makes the experience all the more engaging and allows the electrifying moments of player-to-player engagement to shine.
This is true of single-player experiences, too. Nothing can really match the experience of reaching a new bonfire while exploring a new area in Dark Souls and feeling rewarded for trudging through god-knows-what to get there. The bonfire design of Dark Souls is, itself, a brilliant mirror of the game’s overall philosophy, seeming to remind players that, while the world out there can get hard, there’ll always be bright spots waiting for you to sit down at and take a break.
The same is true of the Resident Evil saferooms. Things can get pretty spooky out in the corrupted Spanish countryside of Resident Evil 4, but turning a corner and, upon hearing the cackle of the merchant, knowing you’re safe — even if but for a moment — is really cathartic. You can use them to rest up, organise your stuff, and save your game, demonstrating that time spent away from achieving your goals can genuinely be beneficial.
But they also manage to be liminal enough to remind you that you’re eventually gonna have to head back out again into the scary world. There’s also the saferooms of Resident Evil 3 which might stave off regular enemies but can be invaded by the Nemesis, reminding you that you’ll never be safe from it as long as it lives.
The liminality of rest sites is a design feature that isn’t exclusive to horror games; many roguelikes feature rest rooms as a means to recover some health, but are never large enough or detailed enough for you to really settle into. This isn’t an indictment of roguelike rest sites — coming across a rare fountain chamber in Hades can really be delightfully calm, like hiding in the eye of the storm of the underworld. Other rest sites in the underworld feature opportunities to meet and talk with some of Zagreus’ friends, allowing you to enjoy some fun dialogue and progress their stories.
My favourite of these was always finding Eurydice’s chamber and listening to her sing for a bit — a figurative oasis in the blistering desert of Asphodel. While progress is important, it’s never important enough in Hades to prevent me from taking all the rest I can get.
Rest is, indeed, often used as a means to progress your character’s personal relationships in video games. One of my favourite games released in recent memory is Obsidian’s Pentiment, a sort-of-murder-mystery set in 16th-century Bavaria. Much of Pentiment is time-based; you’ve only got a limited amount of time to gather your evidence and present your case to the magistrate, and the game tracks this through having an eternally-moving time scale.
The only exceptions to this are the mandatory mealtimes that are scheduled twice daily. These act as opportunities to interrogate people over a delicious bowl of pottage — but also to advance your own relationships with these characters, to get their thoughts on the local goings-on, and, implicitly, to deepen the game’s themes involving human history.
The fact that rest is mandatory in so many of these experiences allows them to remind you, the player, that rest is also mandatory in real life (hence, perhaps, why you’re playing a video game to begin with). It can be easy to get tunnel vision — but, as Nintendo famously suggested in their Wii popups, ‘Why not take a break?’.
