Prior to last week, only one game ever had made me feel physically sick: Dead Island: Riptide.

Back in the day, my friend Grunts and I decided to play Riptide together. At some point during our first session, I mentioned I wasn’t feeling too well. He said he also wasn’t feeling too well. After another hour or so, we realized the game was making us both feel ill. We took a break for the day and eventually the gross subsided.

The next day, I decided to take some motion sickness medicine (I don’t get motion sickness, but I occasionally take it for nausea) prior to our game session, and it helped tremendously.

Dead Island: Riptide made me sick.

Weird.

I wound up looking online to see if the same thing had happened to others, and it had. I still don’t know exactly what it was about Riptide. There was a bit of camera bounce, but no more than usual.

Fast forward to last week when I decided to finally play What Remains of Edith Finch.

I started the game and was immediately a bit wary of the controls. Something felt cumbersome, but I wanted to play the game so badly, I decided to just push on.

At some point during the first story, I started to feel physically awful. I paused the game for a while, drank some water, and got up to walk around. It helped. I went back to the game and immediately started to feel sick again. Something about the control scheme and the camera was making me feel like I was going to vomit. That’s not even an exaggeration; I seriously felt like I was going to be sick. I had to turn the game off and take some motion sickness medicine (which helped).

I still very much want to go back and finish the game, but I have a feeling I’m going to need to take motion sickness meds prior. It’s bizarre to me that throughout my gaming life, only two games have ever had this effect on me: a shooter and a first-person exploration game.

Thank goodness it’s only been those two.

Over the weekend I started another Borderlands 2 run with a friend. I also went back in to Destiny 2 with a couple friends to do the weekly activities. We are all at the same level of displeased with Destiny 2 generally, and Bungie, specifically. Our feelings are unanimous: we preferred the first game over the sequel, no question.

This week, I’m going to head back to Dead Rising 4 (I wasn’t feeling it, but hopefully once I make more progress, I will), and I will try to make my way through the rest of What Remains of Edith Finch without hurling all over my coffee table. I’d also like to try playing a couple of smaller titles like Shred It (SNOWBOARDING DOG), and Frisky Business. I’m really looking to play some ridiculous titles right now. Oh! And I wouldn’t mind going back to Ghost Recon: Wildlands to keep working through it; I’ll finish it one day!

With that I ask: what are you hoping to play this week? Do you have any suggestions for small, bizarre titles I can look into? My preference would be on PS4, as my laptop isn’t a gaming laptop by any stretch of the imagination.

Cheers, friends!