Five Roblox Games You’ll Really Enjoy Playing With Your Kids
This week, adult video gamers were outraged by the incredible price of the new PlayStation 5 Pro and prayed that Nintendo wouldn’t follow suit with its long-rumored Switch sequel . Meanwhile, my kids have no opinion on either because the only gaming platform they really care about is Roblox.
If you’ve never heard of Roblox, you probably don’t have kids yourself (when my daughter first asked me if she could try it during the pandemic, I thought she called it “road blocks”). It’s not a gaming system or even a game, but an online platform/social hub that allows players to access any of the thousands of independently developed (sort of) free games that I would mostly describe as ugly and stupid. Children who are known to have no taste love it – half of them play it regularly . My first impression of the platform was that all the games looked terrible (they were all built on the same blocky game engine, which didn’t seem to highlight visual complexity, to say the least) and played worse. Controls tend to be slow and clunky on both laptop and mobile, and gameplay is often barely so. Most games are stripped-down versions of the “skinning box” concept, where the whole point is to play them long enough to level up, and get better items to unlock harder challenges that will require you to play enough long time to level up. and get better items – that’s fine if the gameplay is fun, but “games” like Sword Simulator don’t require you to do anything other than walk around and slash enemies who can’t hit back, gaining experience as you go movements. You can even set them to “AFK Mode” (i.e. “away from the keyboard”) and they will play themselves. Progressing in these games often involves using shortcuts, which cost Robux, the in-game currency you buy with real dollars. Fun.
For a long time, I found my kids’ obsession with Roblox both puzzling and annoying, especially when they refused to play actual video games (Mario) with me instead. Finally, I decided to make a good faith attempt to find out why so many kids love Roblox, and not just because I was bothered by reports that it is a place where minors are often deceived and exploited , or worse ; Aside from these larger and certainly relevant issues, I also just wanted to try to bond with them about what they like, rather than expecting them to share my own views on what games are fun (Mario).
After some trial and error (Roblox is hardly intuitive to anyone who didn’t grow up with an iPad), I was happy to discover that some Roblox games… are actually fun to play with your kids. They don’t fit my idea of what a video game should be, but they aren’t overall terrible, and now sometimes I’m actually willing to say yes when the kids ask if we can play them together. Here are five Roblox games that our family loved (and to be fair, my kids played a lot of Mario with me too).
Toilet tower defense
This is probably my son’s (and mine) favorite game on Roblox, but it has a high barrier to entry since it’s built around the Skibidi Toilet phenomenon, which is probably too complex to go into. (Thankfully, Lifehacker’s Steven Johnson has digested that for you .) But once you accept the fact that your goal in the game is to build an army of robots to defend your base from waves of attacking toilet monsters, it’s actually quite fun. A fun variationof the tower defense game genre . The gameplay is a mixture of active battles, where you place your resources and upgrade them before your forces are defeated by the toilets, and questing/trading/trading, through which you can obtain better combat units.
To truly succeed, you’ll have to spend a lot of time playing the game, but you can also spend some real money on Roboxes or Gems, two different types of in-game currency that can earn you stronger fighters. However, you can also play it without spending any money at all, and it’s a great co-op experience as all the players in the match work together to achieve the same goal.
Dress to impress
My daughter would prefer that she never have to hear about Toilet Tower Defense again, but she loves Dress to Impress and the whole family has fun playing it together. It’s a much simpler concept, not unlike playing dress-up with Barbie dolls: Each round has a theme (from “Beach Day” to “First Date” to “Classic Gothic”). You have a few minutes to guide your avatar through the fitting room, select clothes, colors and patterns that match the prompt, and change your hair and makeup. It ends with a catwalk walk where you can judge other players’ gear, but in my experience no one takes the judging very seriously so it feels like everyone’s stakes are very low.
I have a few quibbles with this: the standard wardrobe options are somewhat limited, and you’ll have to pay about $7 in Robux to unlock “VIP status” if you want more variety. You can choose a male or female avatar, but you can’t share clothes, and the male options are pathetic. (There’s also some weird information about NPC nail technology that scared my son, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Mega hide and seek
If your home is too small for a real game of hide and seek, this game brings it online. Players are shrunk and thrown together into one of a dozen or so familiar locations, from a classroom to a child’s bedroom, and assigned the role of either the hider or the seeker (duh). They must then move their mouse-sized avatar around the room, searching for or avoiding other players before the timer runs out. Various game modes bring the game to life, from a winter mode where everything gets slippery, to a zombie option where everyone tagged by a seeker gets infected and becomes a seeker too.
That’s it – I appreciate Mega Hide and Seek because you can do almost everything in the game without buying Robux, which only gives you the power to choose the map and game mode.
Murder Mystery 2
It’s probably not the best choice for parents who are unsure about their kids hunting each other with knives, but the title implies more scares and graphic violence than the game actually delivers. In practice, it’s not all that different from Mega Hide and Seek : players are assigned a role – Innocent, Murderer or Sheriff – and are dropped into one of several random maps and given a few minutes to survive. The killer has to hunt other players, the sheriff has to kill the killer, and everyone else just needs to stay alive. The rounds are fun and fast paced, there’s no blood or gore, and the whole thing feels like a simplified version of Among Us . (By the way, this is an update to a game called Murder Mystery (hence the “2”), but you can no longer go back and play the original.)
Epic mini games
We play a lot of Mario Party as a family, but given the big age difference and different emotional regulation skills, it doesn’t always work out well. Multiple rounds of Epic Minigames provide the same gameplay—everyone fiercely competing in a series of short, simple challenges, each lasting a minute or two—with fewer board game trappings that can lead to offense. The challenges are generally pretty pointless (stand on a colored square and hope the floor doesn’t fall out from under you, run away from giant spikes before they can crash into you, etc.), but they don’t require much dexterity and will end before you get bored. Plus, there’s actually no need to buy Robux to play it – although, of course, the game’s developers are happy to let you spend it on things like in-game pets and special death animations if that’s what you really want. (I don’t.)