Every player has their favorite genre, or genres of games. Some cannot get enough of RPGs, others only play online competitive FPS, and the Souls-like community is filled to the brim with people who adore those kinds of games. My favorite genre is, unsurprisingly, strategy. Strategy in all its aspects: turn-based strategy, real-time, city-builders, traditional wargames, less traditional wargames, stealth-tactics—you name it, and chances are I’m a fan.
No, I won’t try to discuss here what makes each sub-genre its very own sub-genre. We have had that conversation before about wargames, and that turned out to be fun. Of course, like every other person in the world, I do love some sub-genres more than others, with turn-based strategy possibly being my favorite, but that’s beside the point.
In this article, I want to briefly touch on the subject of Palate Cleanser games. What are those? Well, it’s complicated, because any game can become one in relation to the genre you love playing the most. They may not even be Palate Cleanser games at all if you’re constantly genre-hopping in search of new experiences.
For me, however, as someone who manages a website related to strategy games, it’s no great revelation that I spend a significant amount of my very limited free time playing strategy games—either to pen reviews, write first impressions, or just to keep up to date with what’s going on. Recently, I came to the realization that 2026 is nearly halfway through, and I have played a very small number of games aside from those I have reviewed for the website. I have been longing to pick up titles like Metal Garden, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and even the most recent 007: Last Light, but I have had little to no free time.
In the previous paragraph, I mentioned that I have a favorite sub-genre of strategy, and that’s true. What I didn’t mention is that I also love many other genres as well. Some have even made an appearance on the website, like first-person shooters and RPGs and platformers. So, a couple of weeks ago, Prince of Persia was on sale, and I decided to pick it up for less than 10 dollars. I was instantly hooked in a way no other game has managed to hook me this year—not even some strategy games.
While the game itself is rather good—and even the best Prince of Persia game ever made (if you ignore the bland and predictable story)—the biggest takeaway for me was that, after I finished it, I wanted to play more games, strategy games included. I finished it on a Friday night, and with the weekend ahead of me and a small training injury preventing me from doing bodybuilding for a couple of days, I was free to give any game a go. I don’t think I’ve had as much fun as I did starting up 007: First Light (which is an amazing game, by the way—I wasn’t expecting it to be this good), trying the Panzer Strike demo, and I’ll be finally launching Metal Garden, a small indie FPS I’ve been wanting to play for months after I’m done writing this article.
It was almost as if Prince of Persia, a metroidvania platformer with souls-like combat (because what isn’t a metroidvania platformer with souls-like combat these days?), acted as a palate cleanser after the last six months of constantly pushing through to cover as many strategy games as possible. Suddenly, my taciturn attitude toward gaming changed from “OK, let’s do another one because I have to” to genuine excitement about the experiences that lay ahead. All I needed was a game to break the monotony that can arise from covering the same genre over and over again, especially if you’re the kind of person who, like me, enjoys trying out new games with new mechanics and unique takes on a given subject or genre. We know that strategy games struggle when it comes to doing something new. Fortunately, we have seen some great new games in 2026, and those were the reasons why I was genuinely excited to cover VULTURES most recently, and MENACE when it released back in February.
This is not a one-time thing, either, which is why I wanted to talk about it. The same thing happened to me when I played Dark Souls a couple of years ago, and my love for games got a new spark. Playing Hades II at the end of 2025 also put me in a great mood to go back to the genre I enjoy most, which is strategy, in 2026.
I think these Palate Cleanser type of games work great for me because they’re a reminder that’s okay to have games without having to work on them, and because the type of titles I tend to enjoy outside of strategy games, are games that remind me of when gaming was just a fun hobby I had growing up, before gaming became this massive industry that’s plague with made-up controversies, unnecessary drama, and negativity. For a dozen hours or so, it allows me to turn off my brain from the outside noise and just focus on doing the thing I enjoy the most, which is to boot up a new experience, have fun with it, and then annoy my friends by telling them how amazing it was. You know, how gaming should be.
My choice of Palate Cleanser games is also so widely different from what I usually play for Strategy and Wargaming that the mechanical disconnect between the genres also forces me to engage with the titles on a more profound level, by relearning controls, absorbing new mechanics, testing my reflexes, puzzle-solving, and even coming up with different strategies. The emotional attachment is also different, as some of these games have fictional stories, instead of being set in Historical settings I’m extremely familiar with, so it becomes another level of “paying attention to” that I have to do.
To wrap this one up, going forward in 2026 I do plan to keep up a small backlog of Palate Cleanser games that I can boot up whenever I feel like I need a small injection of gaming enthusiasm, as these serve as very palpable reminders that there are a lot of amazing experiences out there, and most of those are cheap, easy to pick and play, and you’ll never know which one might rekindle your love for a genre you might have forgotten, or never even tried before. Keep yourself open to new things, keep experimenting, and don’t ever lose focus on what really matters in videogames: having fun.
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