5 of the best family-friendly games for Evercade

The holiday season is upon us, and doubtless at least some of you reading this will be spending some time with close family. That’s no reason to leave your Evercade behind, though, because there’s a ton of great family-friendly games available on the platform that everyone can enjoy, regardless of age or experience with gaming! So today we’re going to pick out five of our favourite family-friendly titles that won’t upset Grandma if you have them up on the big TV while everyone is sleeping off Christmas dinner — or that you can safely give to your five year old nephew or niece (so long as they wash their hands before they touch your controller) without anyone worrying.

As always, these are just five of the many games available for Evercade, so if you have your own picks be sure to share them with us via our social channels! And if you’re after multiplayer party games to get everyone involved with, we’ve got a list for that, too. For now, though, let’s dive in.

Tanglewood

If your family is the kind that enjoys watching animated movies with an emotional side to them, Tanglewood, from the Xeno Crisis/Tanglewood dual cart, is a great pick to put up on the big TV. Featuring beautiful animation, an atmospheric soundtrack and a compelling story told without words, Tanglewood is one of the most gorgeous games on Evercade, and a great response to anyone who still thinks video games are all about guns, explosions and nothing else.

In Tanglewood, you play the fox-like creature Nymn and have a simple task: get home. Trouble is, home seems to be a long way off, night is falling and strange things seem to be happening in the forest that you’ve woken up in. Thankfully, you’re not entirely alone; small fuzzy creatures called Fuzzls are more than happy to help you out if you give them a hand getting back to their nests. Using their powers, Nymn can learn a number of different special abilities — but coming to understand what these are and how they can help you is core to the Tanglewood experience, so we won’t share too much!

Go! Dizzy Go!

Most of the games on The Oliver Twins Collection make for thoroughly family-friendly entertainment, with the Dizzy titles in particular priding themselves on being pretty wholesome — they were even marketed as “cartoon adventures” when they were originally released on home computers. Go! Dizzy Go! is a great pick to share with those who are less experienced with games, as its core gameplay is very simple to understand: all you need to do on each stage is collect all the fruit while avoiding the nasties.

The nice thing about Go! Dizzy Go! is that you can enjoy the game with just this understanding of the basics — or if you want to go a little deeper, you can take aim for bigger scores by collecting flashing fruits, taking advantage of the various power-ups and pushing blocks around. And with two-player action on Evercade VS it’s a great game to share with others, too.

Twin Dragons

This super-cute and family-friendly 8-bit platformer from Indie Heroes Collection 1 definitely deserves some playtime this holiday season if you’re yet to sit down and spend some time with it. Casting you in the role of Dinky and Minky the twin dragons, the game tasks you with rescuing your unhatched sibling Precious.

Along the way, you’ll need to make use of Dinky and Minky’s abilities to progress, grab collectibles and defeat enemies. The colourful visuals, catchy tunes and well-designed levels make this an exceedingly charming game to enjoy, and it’s one of numerous “modern retro” indie games that feels like it would have fit right in to its original host platform’s library had it been released back in the day.

Radikal Bikers

This colourful, cheerful isometric perspective racer was a very pleasant surprise for everyone who picked up Piko Interactive Collection 3. It’s actually a loose adaptation of a Gaelco arcade game, though since the original arcade machine was full polygonal 3D and this version is for 8-bit handheld, it’s more of an adaptation or spin-off than a “port” as such. That doesn’t make it any less worthwhile as a game, however; in fact, this is a great example of a developer being fully aware of the technical constraints of a platform and embracing them rather than attempting to hide them.

Radikal Bikers tasks you with delivering pizzas against the clock while riding your moped around a series of increasingly perilous courses. You’ll need to avoid numerous obstacles, take an efficient route through the corners and perhaps even find a sneaky shortcut or two along the way. Easy to understand mechanics make this a great pick-up-and-play, family-friendly game, and its multiple difficulty modes mean that everyone can have a good shot at making some progress.

Qwak

Another great family-friendly platformer, this time from our popular Team17 Collection 1 cartridge. Qwak is one of those games that passed a lot of people by largely unnoticed back on its original release — at least partly because home computer games were doing their best to move “beyond” arcade-style affairs — but returning to it today it’s fresh, breezy and a ton of fun to play either solo or with a friend.

If it feels even more old-school than its 16-bit Amiga visuals and sound might suggest, that’s because it actually has its origins on an even older home computer system: the Acorn BBC Micro, beloved of British schools in the 1980s thanks to a nationwide computer literacy initiative. The Amiga version found in Team17 Collection 1 is an enhanced and expanded version over its original incarnation, featuring more levels and a simultaneous two-player mode. It releasing as a straight-to-budget title fairly late in the Amiga’s lifespan on the market means a lot of people missed out on it first time around — so now’s a great time to discover (or rediscover!) its joyful gameplay for yourself on Evercade.

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These are just a few of the many games available now for Evercade. To discuss these or any of the other great games from our library, be sure to join us on our social channels.