Fantasy isn't the escape — it's the rebellion
I played two role-playing games this year that have stuck to me more than most things I've read: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Metaphor: ReFantazio. On the surface they're escapism — painted Belle Époque dreamscapes, sword-and-sorcery kingdoms, the usual machinery for not thinking about your inbox. But both turn out to be arguments against escapism, made in the language of fantasy itself.
Metaphor is the more direct about it. Its hero carries a novel describing a world without the prejudice and fear that define his own, and the entire game is about that imagined world doing real work — fantasy as the thing that gives people the nerve to change what's actually in front of them. The enemies are literally anxieties; the antidote is the ability to picture something better and want it badly enough to act. It's a game with the confidence to say that imagining a fairer world isn't childish — it's the precondition for building one.
Expedition 33 comes at the same idea through grief. A world where a distant figure paints a number each year, and everyone of that age simply dies — and a doomed expedition that sets out anyway. Without spoiling it, the game keeps asking what art and invention are even for when the ending is fixed, and lands somewhere uncomfortable: a made-up world can be a place to hide from loss or a place to finally face it, and the same brushstroke is either one depending on why you're painting.
That's the line both games walk — between escapism and rebellion, which are closer than they look. Fantasy used to flee reality leaves you exactly where you started. The same fantasy, pointed back at reality, is how people find the nerve to refuse it. Rebellion just needs you to imagine that things could be otherwise; escapism is imagining it and stopping there.
I think about this more than is strictly reasonable for a man whose hobby is, on paper, "video games." But the good ones aren't a break from the questions I actually care about — value, systems, what people do with finite time and bad odds. They're those same questions, wearing much better art.