OK - here's a puzzle that I'm pondering and would welcome any suggestions that might help solve it.

I have a dear friend to whom I showed a little bit of my Dragon Age Inquisition game - just because she was interested in what I was up to and asked.

Well, that was fine - however, two weeks later and she and I were chatting and she talked about maybe playing it herself because she was so attracted by the environments (which do look pretty nice). I think what she has in mind is that she would like moving through the environments, that she would become absorbed by the attractive locales and it would help her destress (she's prone to workplace stress). She's also pretty interested in stories which is a winner from a Bioware game point of view.

However, there are caveats here. First of all, she is not a gamer at all and I'm pretty sure she doesn't grasp just what sort of stuff is involved in Inquisition-type games. Not that I would discourage her with that but I don't think she necessarily realises about all the fighting and so on (though I have mentioned it). I mean it's not a game where you can just wander round looking at the trees is it? More significant though is that I had to say, 'well, you're not going to be able to run Inquisition on your laptop. The reason it works for me is because I've invested in this beast of a machine etc. etc.'

But I'd still like to help her if games can be bought to help her with stress and life and stuff (good cause see?). The next obvious thought to me is Skyrim but I'm not sure, despite it being an older game, that it would run on her machine either. Pluses to Skyrim (I've played a bit though not a huge amount) is that you can wander around quite a bit and not commit to any fighting in particular (though it's not entirely unavoidable right?) and it does look splendid. Similarly with games like The Witcher (great story but lots of fisticuffs).

Hmmm - I was thinking, smallish older machine but intriguing graphics and stories might indicate things like attractive point-and-click adventures - I know, not 3D and not as beautiful as Skyrim and Inquisition but I've played some really good ones. Or maybe some type of management game set in a natural environment. I was thinking - and I really have no idea myself about this because I don't play that sort of game (seen possible pictures) - whether there was some sort of game that doesn't involve so many fights but creating things like buildings or gardens?

So - the puzzle is, can you suggest something of that (above) nature - nice-looking natural environments with some sort of gameplay that involves a story a little fighting or preferably creating stuff or puzzle-solving (I think that might work too) - (Don't suggest TS3, I'm loathe to recommend that to anyone given the problems it has - she wouldn't be able to cope with fixing her game and as a TS2 player myself, I wouldn't have the knowledge to hand to help her) - which perhaps is another criteria, stability or relative stability.

Any and all suggestions welcome. And thanks in advance if you post.

Minecraft. I would totally recommend starting on peaceful difficulty if she does start playing Minecraft so she can get the hang of gaming, because Minecraft doesn't really have a point to it other than mining and building things and defeating monsters. Just have her start out slow and build up gradually from there.

You could recommend TS2 to her. She might like it. Though I would honestly say that she start playing with just one Sim at first.

I agree Minecraft has the gameplay but I don't think the graphics would pass muster. Thanks for the suggestion though. I'll put it in the list.

I had a look at her computer yesterday and it's not nearly as bad as I was expecting. It's an HP something or other and has an i3 CPU chip, 64 bit Win 7 plus 4GB of memory - I thought her machine was older than that. The downside is an integrated video chip - expected since the machine is a laptop. That actually might not work for TS2 since TS2 doesn't like integrated chips.

Exploration is one of my favorite parts to gaming--just looking around at the sights to snooping into houses. "Walking simulators" like Gone Home or
mild first person puzzles like Ether One or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter can provide low stress entertainment with fulfilling conclusions. Personally I can never find enough of these. (Too many venture too far into horror, and that's not my idea of fun.)

Skyrim is not a bad suggestion. With console commands you can cheat yourself to an almost conflict/gameplay free world to just explore in.

Oh great suggestions - especially the Ethan Carter story by the look of the videos. Those are actually the sort of thing I'd be interested in myself. I'm going to check that out and see if that will run on her machine (and probably buy it for myself) because it seems to hit the criteria of natural beauty and interesting story. Thanks. I was also thinking of a game called Dear Esther (?) which I read about a while back but never got round to playing. Do you know what that's like? Older games of this sort I've played would include something like Syberia which I enjoyed a lot and a game from a good while back called Barrow Hill which, while fairly primitive graphically, had a great story.

I don't know Skyrim well enough to know about the console commands - I could look it up though.