Video games can transport you anywhere that you can imagine. From a land filled with corrupted undead to one inhabited by platforming meat cubes, their only limit is a game developer’s imagination and budget. More often than not, though, these worlds seem to be dark reflections of our own, allowing them to tell stories of desperation and violence.
And we’re sick of it. The world is dark enough as it is, and sometimes you don’t want a game that reminds you of endless conflicts. You want to go to a place made of candy. You want whimsy and marshmallows. Never fear, though. These are areas of true escape.
9 Moss Blanket: Slime Rancher
Imagine a lush forest filled with trees and flowers. Now, imagine that same forest, only with slimes. Not the kind of slimes that will get you all sticky or envelop you with digestive juices. Cute slimes. Slimes that smile and bounce around with more joy than a toddler who has just smashed her face into a piece of cake. Now imagine a few of them have cat ears.
That's the kind of environment you'll come across in Slime Rancher's Moss Blanket area. It's with unbridled joy that you'll go waltzing through the daisies to tame these wild, pathologically happy slimes. And while they'll be just as jazzed when you take them back to your farm as they are hopping around the forest, seeing them in a pen just isn't the same.
8 Port Calm: Ape Escape 2
So, you're an anime-haired kid named Spike tasked with retrieving hundreds of hyper-intelligent apes who've escaped from a laboratory. Is this the plot of the new Planet of the Apes film? No, it's just Ape Escape, Sony's short-lived series that asks the important questions. Questions like: If an ape could travel to a place like Venice, what would it wear, and what job would it take?
If your answer included a striped shirt, a fake mustache, and a career as a gondolier, you're using Ape Escape logic. The entire game has a whimsical charm to it, but Port Calm takes the cake by being home to a mustachioed monkey gondolier who you, sadly, have to shove into a net.
7 The Super Happy Tree: Super Smash Bros.
The premise of Super Smash Bros. is actually kind of dark. Set in a strange, Nintendo-adjacent multiverse, the game pits friend against friend, lover against lover, in a tournament to see who's most powerful. And your reward for this emotionally grueling combat gauntlet? The privilege of beating up a couple of disembodied hands. Why can't we all just go back to playing minigames or racing karts around a track?
It's difficult to feel the deep despair at all of this senseless bloodshed when you're fighting on the Super Happy Tree level, though. Inspired by Yoshi's Island, the smiling heart dancing at the center of the stage makes it seem like everything will be alright. And, the jaunty tune pumped in from offscreen makes you almost forget that Donkey Kong just jumped off the edge of a precipice with Link in a steel embrace.
6 The Village: Burly Men At Sea
When three burly fishermen set out on an adventure into a pastel-colored landscape, you know that things are going to get good. Though set in the twentieth century, this self-styled Scandinavian folk tale soon steps off the pages of the ordinary and into myth. And, like in all myths, the place where you start is very important. It has to be nice so that the adventurers have somewhere to go back to.
In line with that trope, the starting Village of Burly Men at Sea has all the rustic charm you'd expect from the people who invented Hygge. Encountering its rosy-faced villagers and cheerful smokestacks feels like pulling a warm blanket over your head. If you didn't have such a fantastic adventure to go on, you might just stay there.
5 Band Land: Rayman
As a series, Rayman isn't known for taking itself too seriously, which isn't surprising, considering the most enduring enemy in the series is a race of giant, plunger-wielding rabbits. Though it has its sterner moments, Rayman is more comfortable on the side of whimsy than the rough and tumble protagonists we've grown to know over the years.
The place that reflects this whimsy most of all, however, is Band Land. A series of areas composed - pun intended - of musical instruments, Band Land has some of the most whacked-out obstacles in the game. Giant cymbals try to crush you, trumpets blow you out of the sky, and wrong notes lay in wait at every turn. Even the menacing Mr. Sax is difficult to take as a villain. Sure, he's hard, but the entire time you fight him you'll be wondering when he's going to bust out the solo from Careless Whisper.
4 Jenny's Room: Chibi-Robo's Plug-In Adventure
Chibi-Robo has only one purpose in life: to make people happy. Partially, they do this by helping around the house, partially by just being cute as hell. Like a whimsical Roomba that's useful, they plod around their owner's homes, make them dinner, and occasionally make friends with a bird.
It makes sense, then, that when the Sandersons purchase their Chibi-Robo in Chibi-Robo's Plug-In Adventure, it fits right into their daughter's Room. Swathed in pink and inhabited by living toys, the room is the perfect place to go to assuage your inner child.
3 Cowbear Planet: Katamari Forever
Sometimes, a robot copy of the Lord of all Cosmos goes haywire and destroys most celestial bodies in existence. We've all been there, it happens. But while you might think the priority might be to remake the moon, so that earth can get its tides back, you obviously haven't been studying your celestial charts. The most important thing to do is to send your five-centimeter-tall protagonist out to the one planet where cows and bears live in harmony.
Unfortunately for anyone eager to see the sites, Katamari Forever doesn't let you visit Cowbear Plane, so its existence leaves more questions than answers. How did the bears overcome their natural predatory instincts? What does a cow/ bear crossbreed look like? And, more importantly, how can we achieve the same comradeship between humans as between omnivorous wildlife and creatures we use to make cheese?
2 ARY-26: Journey To The Savage Planet
Kindred Aerospace wants you to know that you are not stranded on an unknown planet filled with horrifying monsters. You are stranded on an unknown planet filled with horrifying monsters, but also some really cute ones. That thing that just killed you is called a Floopsnoot. Isn't it adorable?
Nearly everywhere on ARY-26 is filled with vibrant colors, big-eyed birds, and precious natural resources. The entire planet is packed full of whimsy, which is why you, an employee of a company that does not know what fun is, must subjugate and ruthlessly exploit it. Though its temples may hold more than you bargained for, there will always be a friendly puffball somewhere for you to drop-kick over a cliff.
1 Treat Land: Kirby's Epic Yarn
It's difficult to get more whimsical than notorious glutton and living black hole Kirby's homeworld, Popstar. And yet, when the evil sorcerer Yin-Yarn banishes you to the two-dimensional realm of Patch Land in Kirby's Epic Yarn, that's exactly what you get: a living world of fabric that would make even the most hardened veteran melt.
Though all of Patch Land's areas have their merits, there's no area quite as squee-inducing as Treat Land. Its castles are made of cookies and gingerbread. Its train tracks are populated by toy ducks. The place is so delicious-looking that you're at once thankful that Kirby has lost his ability to inhale enemies. He would have probably inhaled the whole thing in one go.