Family video games are better than ever. These are the ones to give this year

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It's rare to have so many family games released at once. 'Bugsnax,' 'Sackboy,' even a repackaged 'Super Mario Bros.' leave the storytelling to the player, providing a space for us to ask, 'I wonder if I can do this?'

Nintendo celebrates 35 years of Mario with the rerelease of the first ‘Mario’ games to feature 3-D worlds, including the transformational “Super Mario 64,” the criminally underappreciated “Super Mario Sunshine” and the starry-eyed wonder of “Super Mario Galaxy.”While playing the PS5’s “Sackboy: A Big Adventure,” another bright, approachable game where silliness takes prominence over plot, I had a revelation. It was one that seemed to explain why I was bringing Nintendo’s “Super Mario Bros.

That’s all fun, but the game actually provides four fully fleshed out sections designed to mimic the innards of a powerful game console, complete with ridiculous music to match . The titular character Astro, a rather corporate-looking toy robot, doesn’t have the inviting personality of Mario, but Astro certainly has versatility.

Such a frame of mind comes in handy when Astro dons ice skates and triple-axel-like jumps become more important than knocking out foes, or when rolling along pink poppy fields, where every bump in the garden brings an unexpected sound or reaction. It invites replays — and replay I have — because it encourages us to imagine how such a universe came into being.

Likewise “Sackboy: A Big Adventure,” starring the handcrafted character first introduced in the “LittleBigPlanet” series, a pivotal franchise in establishing and furthering games that encourage player creation, a genre dominated today by “Minecraft.” There’s no player creation mode here, and “A Big Adventure” simplifies things a bit with a vague villain and quests to collect orbs, but I didn’t mind the abstraction, at least not when it’s this artfully drawn.

 

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