At least for now, games are a purely audiovisual medium, which can be somewhat limiting. It’s difficult for studios to properly simulate less tangible effects… like, for instance, hitting the bar a little too hard during a night out in your favorite virtual city.
Most of the time, being drunk in games amounts to a visual filter, some mushier controls, and maybe a special voice line or two if you’re really lucky. As with any aspect of game-making, however, there are a few examples that manage to stand out and really place you in the shoes of someone who’s blown off saving the world to go get sloshed—although why you’d want to be there is anyone’s guess.
A recent Reddit thread on this very topic has amassed thousands of upvotes and sparked a contentious debate, with every gamer on the platform seeming to chime in with their own favorite game to be drunk in. One popular answer was the infamous “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy” level from Yoshi’s Island, which—to put it mildly—sees Yoshi make good on all those early-2010s “what if Mario actually got high on mushrooms?!” theories.
Another top contender was Kingdom Come Deliverance, which lets you build your long-suffering character, Henry, around being a functional alcoholic if you so choose in exchange for the significant bonus to speech and strength as long as you’re buzzed. Granted, if you lived in the war-torn Middle Ages, you might turn to drinking to get away from it all, too.
The undisputed king of drinking games, however, is still Disco Elysium, which gets bonus points for also being one of the best games ever made in general. The game starts with you waking up in a bleary, hungover haze, teetering on the edge of a heart attack and sneering lines like “I want to have fuck with you” at anyone who will so much as give you the time of day—and you don’t ever have to climb out of that deep, dark place if you don’t want to.
But of course, the winner by popular vote was Red Dead Redemption 2, in large part for its truly legendary “A Quiet Time” mission. Staggering around Valentine’s tavern and screaming for Lenny (or Ynnel, or Lemmy) served as one of the high points in the game’s absolutely massive story and provided a much-needed spot of levity in Rockstar’s otherwise quite dark and depressing modern classic.
Whether you favor Witcher 3 or Conker’s Bad Fur Day, however, the fact that so many games tackle this topic well enough to prompt this debate in the first place is admirable in the first place. You’ve certainly got no shortage of poisons to pick… just keep the binge drinking in the digital realm.
