The Best Games for Beginners on PS4
- 1
Journey
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- ravensong75
- flickr
- CC-BY-ND 2.0
Journey is an adventure game produced by thatgamecompany, also responsible for Flow and Flower. You play a mysterious hooded character traveling through a desert wasteland toward a mysterious light in the distance. Along the way, you solve simple puzzles, collect clues about your final destination, and (if you're online and playing in multiplayer mode) interact with other players who are doing the same thing.
Journey is a beautiful, atmospheric, and at times even calming game, and it's a great example of how games can inspire emotions and tell a story with subtlety.Is this a good beginner game?Purchase
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- Metaweb (FB)
- Fair use
This game's premise is silly, but it's a great introduction to Tower Defense games, which are games where you have to position soldiers and allocate resources in order to stop a hoard of slowly encroaching invaders from destroying your base.
In Plants vs. Zombies, the invaders are zombies, and the weapons you use to keep them out are...plants. You can select an array of different plants with different goofy crap they can do to fight the zombies, e.g. spitting fruit at them, exploding on impact, being really hard to chew, etc. Fun game. I have played it for over four hours in one sitting before, and I'm only a little bit ashamed of that.Is this a good beginner game?Purchase
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The Animal Crossing games have been popular for years, and New Leaf is the most current one. In this life simulation game, you play as a stranger who shows up in a new town and, due to some bureaucratic mismanagement, is immediately elected Mayor.
You get to plan the town, make friends with other citizens, and of course, buy lots of crazy furniture, toys, and clothes for yourself. Animal Crossing is a great, goofy, low-key introduction to multiplayer gaming, since the features of the game that are most popular involve traveling between towns and socializing with other players in real time.Is this a good beginner game?Purchase
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- Portal
Portal is one of the most popular puzzle games of all time, and definitely ranks high in fans-geeking-out-over-it category. If you've ever heard anyone make a joke involving some variation of "The cake is a lie!" this is the game they were referring to.
In Portal, you move through a series of rooms connected by glowing ovular portals, which, based on their location (on the walls, the ceiling, etc) become increasingly harder to pass through. Throughout the course of the game, you gradually come into conflict with a disembodied intelligence who appears to be controlling the environment's physical properties.Is this a good beginner game?Purchase
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- Metaweb (FB)
- Fair use
Made by the same company that produced Journey, Flower is a relaxing, low-pressure game where you direct wind currents through patches of wilting flowers in order to bring them back to life. This is a great game for getting comfortable with a controller, since the movements you're executing are just delicate enough to be mildly challenging.Is this a good beginner game?Purchase
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- 6
The Room
![The Room]()
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The Room is a downloadable puzzle-solving game for iOS, heavy on atmosphere and intensely creepy in some places. You explore and interpret clues and re-assemble artifacts in order to solve a mystery involving insanity, botched scientific experiments, and malefic supernatural forces. This game also has a sequel, The Room II, which is just as good.Is this a good beginner game?Purchase
