Why Eurogamer's Happy Places Are Portable Comfort Food
Eurogamer’s Optimism Week Big Question asked its team where they go to unwind in games, and the answers were predictable in the best way: Lottie smashing pots in Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule Castle Town, Bertie sinking into Hades 2 on Switch 2, Chris drifting through the quiet between FTL’s jump sequences. But read those picks as a handheld player and something sharper emerges: nearly every happy place on the list is either built from short, repeatable loops or beloved enough that you want to carry it around.
This isn’t a coincidence. Comfort gaming is defined by friction — how quickly you can return to a familiar world and how little you have to re-learn. Handhelds, with instant wake, suspend/resume, and a form factor that follows you to the couch, bed, or commute, are the best friction-reduction devices ever made. Eurogamer’s team calls these games happy places; the hardware is the travel bag.
Roguelites Are the Ultimate Sleep-Mode Games
Bertie says Hades 2 clicked because roguelites are designed to be replayable in “hour-ish chunks” and because the game keeps unspooling new layers. On a Steam Deck or Switch 2, that “one more run” compulsion becomes even more comfortable: a session with a natural beginning, middle, and end, followed by a single button press to suspend the whole thing. You don’t need to hunt for a save point or remember the story thread. The loop is already built around interruption, which is exactly what portable play is.
Supergiant’s game being played on Switch 2 is telling. The console’s portability plus the genre’s snackability means Hades 2 can function as a fallback ritual — during a lunch break, before sleep — rather than a sit-down commitment. The heavy lifting Bertie mentions is emotional too: once the build system is second nature, the game is a comfortable place to return to, and no hardware is better at making return visits effortless than a handheld.
Walking Around Gielinor Is a Five-Minute Ritual
Lottie logs into RuneScape just to walk the farmlands of Misthalin or the mountains of the Fremennik Province, and Chris describes FTL’s meditative silence between jumps, his crew at their stations. These aren’t setpieces; they’re ambient textures that make a game feel like home. Handhelds are uniquely suited to that kind of idle intention. The Steam Deck OLED’s screen and battery make a wander through Gielinor feel like a deliberate escape rather than a session, and Nintendo’s instant wake means you can visit for two minutes and leave without ceremony.
It’s also why the pot-smashing house in Hyrule Castle Town is such a perfect pick. That’s a micro-ritual: enter, smash, leave, return. You don’t need a long session for it; you need a device that respects short, recursive habits. Switch 2 and Steam Deck both do, and the same logic applies to any “I’m just going to wander” game running on a retro emulation handheld.
Nostalgia Doesn’t Need a Living Room
Kelsey calls Princess Peach’s Castle in Super Mario 64 home; Marie works through Spyro Reignited and Jak and Daxter every year; Connor still revisits Lost Odyssey and admits Too Human isn’t great but matters. These are games rooted in particular rooms and consoles, but their current portable incarnations — Switch releases, remasters, emulation — prove nostalgia travels. Even Bertie’s Quake 3 map, The Longest Yard, was learned from a free demo and tested in an office LAN, not tied to a desktop. On a handheld, what matters is the muscle memory, not the furniture.
That’s why the real takeaway from Eurogamer’s Big Question isn’t about any single game. It’s that the best happy place is the one you can actually pick up, suspend, and take with you — whether that’s a Switch 2, a Steam Deck OLED, or a cheap emulation handheld with a copy of your childhood on it.