12 Brilliant Games To Play With Your Family This Holiday Season

PC, Xbox, PS4, PS5, Switch

TT Games’ Lego games began with the fabulous Lego Star Wars almost two decades ago, and kept generating the goods. However, it’s fair to say the quality slumped somewhat in the last few years—that is, until The Skywalker Saga.

Looping back around, this most recent Lego game from the studio returns to the same six films they originally recreated, in an all-new game, and this time around has the final three Star Wars movies to poke fun at too. Nine movies’ worth of game, with an almost infinite amount of stuff to do, collect, and battle, alongside the more direct route of its story mode.

These Lego games have always been perfect for families, and this is no different: you can play alongside your kids, in co-op, both playing different characters in the same level. And perhaps even more importantly, you’ll want to play. Not only is it just a superb game, but it’s also incredibly funny, weaving in all sorts of humor for you to get while your kids blast Stormtroopers.

PC

Catapulting the genius developers of Holy Wow from indie obscurity into worldwide fame, Trombone Champ thankfully maintains all the nonsense and childishness that made their previous games such a pleasure to play. In this, your goal is to play the trombone along to various tunes, except it’s deliberately too hard, and the results most often sound awful.

Which makes it absolutely perfect fun to play as a family, given how it encourages you to laugh at yourself, and everyone else, for the ghastly noises you’re all making. If you ever played Guitar Hero, think that, but on a PC where the mouse controls are inverted to confuse you further. To make things even more fun, between levels you can unlock completely nonsensical “facts” about music history.

Most importantly, this isn’t just a joke. The game is seriously well put together, meaning its fun outlasts the initial silliness.

PC, Mac, Linux

If you’ve ever played an escape room in real life, you’ll know the thrill of attempting to solve clues and puzzles as a clock counts down. Escape Simulator does, well, exactly that. It’s a superb recreation of such rooms, played from a first-person perspective, where you’re charged with ransacking every room for the codes, clues and keys that’ll get you out the locked door.

It’s worth noting that there’s also Escape Academy on Xbox (included in Game Pass), which offers something similar, albeit with a lot more clunky storyline and faffing about in between the escapes. Escape Simulator is much more direct, and I think, much more like real-world escape rooms. Although, to be fair, there is that one level set in space...

This can be played in co-op, where you can see the other player in the room with you. But it works just as well with a group of family around the one screen, all yelling out ideas as a team.

PC, XB1, PS4, Switch

A game in which you win battles by listening and conversation? Is this COMMUNISM?

Think Paper Mario meets Epic Mickey, a 2.5D RPG in which you return color to the world through your encounters.

It describes itself as “a universal coming of age story about dealing with changes in the world and accepting ourselves and the others around us!” Which sounds like exactly the conversation I want to have with my narcissistic 7-year-old right now. “Sometimes,” they add, “it only takes a conversation, empathy, and a new point of view to make a world of a difference.”

PC, XB1, PS4, Switch

It’s about riding a mountain bike down a hill. Simple as that. Except of course, so much more. This beautiful game is about exploring, jumping, resting and racing, seeking the fastest route to the finish line.

It might be trickier for the youngest players to get to grips with the controls, but that so often leads to the best moments of sharing a controller, and those wonderful breakthrough moments when they realize they’ve got it.

And best of all, it’s already on your Game Pass if you’re a subscriber.

PC, XB1, PS4, Switch

One of the slightly more obvious inclusions on the list, but I feel like it gets overlooked because of the assumption it’s something to do with Minecraft. OK, yes, it is something to do with it, but only aesthetically. This is, instead, a top-down Diablo-ish brawler, and one of the best co-op games to play as adult and kid.

Played two-player, it’s an amazingly adept game at equalizing ability, letting younger kids keep up while they learn the game, then inevitably get far better at it than you. Plus, crucially, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. I’ve carried on playing long after my boy moved on.

There’s a good chunk of the game on GamePass, while the add-ons can be bought individually, so you can manage spending on new content for your child’s personal attention span. Worry not if Minecraft proper’s bloat and scale is off-putting to your brats, this is a whole other, contained, superb thing.

PC, XB1, PS4, Switch, iOS

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a game about protecting wildlife, rather than gaming’s more usual deadly approach to the matter. Alba is a small girl who visits her grandparents in the Mediterranean one summer, and discovers an animal in danger. In response she starts a wildlife conservation club! Yay Alba!

The game is about improving the island, photographing animals, and helping those in trouble, like a more hands-on Pokémon Snap. It’s by the team behind Monument Valley, which gives you an idea how pretty it is. And more significantly, it’s a game about making the environment around you a better place to be, for both you and the wildlife.

It’s single-player, but designed to be accessible to much younger kids, meaning you can fling the controller back and forth between you.

PC, Switch, Android, iOS

By narrative gaming masters Inkle, Overboard is a murder mystery game in which you attempt to get away with killing your husband. So no, this isn’t one for the younger players, but quite a brilliant choice for playing alongside teenagers, especially the bookish ones.

This is a game many might not have considered for family play, given its peculiar age ratings. In the US it has a “Teen” rating, while in the UK it’s got an astonishing “18" certificate. The reason, it seems, is because there’s a scene depicting a game of blackjack, despite this being played with in-game money. So if that’s a no-no for you, fine, but for everyone else, you can relax.

You can also toggle off curse words, really leaving murrrrrder as the main sticking point for some parents. But if you’re after something to play with older kids, where you can work together to make decisions, see how a story unfolds given your agreed actions, this could be a real surprise hit for your holiday.

PC, iOS, Android

If there’s one game from this list I implore you to play with any kids in the vicinity, it’s this one. It’s a collection of vignette levels, in which the strange, fluffy orange Chuchel attempts to get his mitts on a delicious-looking cherry. And fails.

Think of those classic early 20th-century Looney Tunes cartoons for the vibe, each level playing out like it’s own “episode.” It takes developer Aminita’s (Machinarium, Botanicula) incredible puzzle adventure sensibilities, and turns them toward a manic, delightful, and frequently hilarious game.

This is a rare joy to play with a kid, with its experimental clicking accessible to younger children, while its silliness generates squeals of laughter.

PC, PS4

Not everything played with kids needs to be bright colors and cheerful faces. Vane’s sombre tone and possibly post-apocalyptic desert setting certainly make for a darker beginning. However, it’s a game about hope, and indeed about swooping through the sky as a magic bird that can turn into a child.

Your interaction with the world changes how it appears, essentially bringing life back to a barren location, but with far more nuance than that suggests. It’s a game about history, about the importance of communication, and indeed sacrifice.

There are some potential scary images in here for the youngest children, but 7-year-olds and upward shouldn’t have any issues. It’ll certainly spark conversation.

PC, XB1, PS4, Switch, iOS

It’s a game for people who love to organize things! Which, if you’ve got children, might at first seem an odd choice. But actually, while bedrooms may rarely be included in such a mentality, think about all that time spent lining up toys, rather than playing with them.

Creating a sense of order in a chaotic world is an incredibly therapeutic act for kids, and Wilmot’s Warehouse allows this. It’s also strange enough that it doesn’t feel like work, and by the time customers start arriving asking for your peculiarly arranged items, it develops into a more involved challenge.

It can be played two-player, and this allows for discussions about tactics, systems, and so on, which can make for a lovely time between adult and child.

PC, Switch, iOS

Another one aimed at older kids, Nuts is the bonkers combination of Firewatch and...squirrel conspiracy theories?

In this one, you set up cameras to observe the behavior of squirrels in Melmoth Forest, and start discovering some very odd stuff. This develops into a story about the effect corporations have on the environment, and doesn’t wrap things up with a neat bow and happy ending. It’s obviously a great conversation starter, as well as a fun, sometimes unsettling game to play.

The reason it’s rated Teen is because of the presence of one curse word, “bullshit,” so there’s a good chance that’ll breeze past the more innocent, or not really bother the less so. But obviously the subject matter won’t quite match the “cute squirrels!” expectations of younger players.

There are more suggestions over at the Family Video Game Database, and you can curate your own lists based on your own kids’ proclivities.

Hopefully there’s something here that’ll help pass some of the yawning stretch of Sundays that makes up Christmas to New Year, and you might even end up not entirely resenting it.

Updated 12/21/22: We’ve removed Boomerang X, and added on Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Trombone Champ, and Escape Simulator.