All the games I finished this year
All thirty! Twenty-nine! A really good year for indie narrative games, gotta say. Roadwarden in particular has me churning about making a text RPG of my own in Ren’py ...
10 mg: Locked In Very short visual novel about COVID tensions. Man, gotta say, the simulated fight was too harsh and mean for me to really lean into it. Parenting is rough! Especially during a pandemic. AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative More of everything in the first game, hooray! More puzzles, more somniums, more AIs, more pipe-wielding teenagers! More musical numbers! Visual novel with puzzles and branching and a lot of gleeful oddness. Plus some horrific what-the-fuckery. It is Uchikoshi. As Dusk Falls Interactive movie about a hostage situation with Rippling Consequences. Not bad, really -- I know a lot of the devs are refugees from David Cage's nonsense, and this is certainly more coherent and affecting than Cage. The writers do seem to have ported Appalachian stereotypes into their rural Arizonan characters, and some chapters feel like one-offs, but it's not bad and makes some decent stabs toward depicting PTSD. I like the accelerated-comic visual style. Beacon Pines Visual novel with adventure elements. You get keywords in some branches that you can apply to other branches. You play a darling pre-teen deer, hanging out with his darling cat friends, in a not-so-darling setting with a Wicked Corporation and an Old Money Family with Secrets. Plays happily in the body horror (and general horror) space without ever being all that scary. It's a pleasant romp with breathless narration. Chinese Parents Raising sim. Growing Up, below, is so similar that it may be too polite to call it a clone, but Chinese Parents is the superior game. The translation is occasionally iffy, sometimes very iffy, but you feel the parental PRESSURE and how much they WANT you to succeed, for selfish and unselfish reasons. Ends up a kind of melancholy and funny family piece, a window into the struggle to get through childhood that feels much more real than Growing Up. And I kinda enjoy the haphazard art. Coffee Talk Visual novel with coffee-and-tea-making minigames that I almost always failed and had to look up. Embarrassing for a pure chill game! Otherwise, charming slice of life with gorgeous pixel art and interesting-enough discussions (although "earthlings are too stupid not to overbreed the earth!" was weirdly offensive). Consider It What even is this? Tiny minigames? Choices made based on tiny movements? A personality test? I laughed at the Grave of the Fireflies jokes. A lot. Excavation of Hob's Barrow Pixel point and click with some incredible cutscenes? Character-shots? And a wonderfully awful mood. It's horror that you see coming, but that doesn't decrease the effectiveness when it finally gets to you. Our heroine is incredibly plucky and incredibly doomed. Forgotten City First person time-loop puzzle-and-talk with a bit of sneaking and combat. And a lot of running. Funny and dark and thoughtful, with some delightful antiquities nerdery. You are in a pocket of the Roman empire, after all! I didn't ultimately love the final reveal, but the journey there is a really fun time and I always appreciate a philosophy battle. Growing Up Raising sim. So similar to Chinese Parents that it's, politely, a clone, but with much nicer art and cleaner writing. The game feels disjointed, though. The various visual-novelish arcs related to your friends and interests are pretty intensive, but your parents never cohere as people and their requests never make much sense. The pressures in Chinese Parents are made very explicit; you are your parents' hopes and dreams. The parents in Growing Up appear to expect nothing of you as a whole, which leaves their requests feeling completely arbitrary and random. Which they are! But it feels less intentional. Henry Stickman Impressively stupid and arbitrary choose your own adventure, and all the very best choose your own adventures are stupid and arbitrary! This 'un knows exactly what it is: a horrible death simulator. Her Story Clever, intricate film database about a murder and the gal who done that murder, maybe. Glad I got this in before Immortality - you can see the roots of the longer film clip game. Also has a great musical number. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist Another life sim! Comparisons with Chinese Parents and Growing Up are inevitable, but this is going a different direction. Like Growing Up, it has intensively developed friend-and-interest arcs. Like Chinese Parents, there is a tension between child and parents that fuels the story. But this has heavier adventure and RPG elements. There are quests (if usually unmarked) and extensive exploration. It's a little didactic, but the weird alienness of the planet plus harrowing turns in the plot plus a heady metanarrative keep the game far from being a screed. Very interesting and replayable. Immortality Less accessible film database than Her Story -- trying to click on points of interest to match-cut to different clips is interesting, but it's harder to go back and review. Much longer than Her Story. There are, after all, three films + commentary in this one. And a very clever trick/twist, although that trick basically requires you play with a controller. Also has great musical numbers. Lost Ember Beautiful game where you play a psychopomp wolf able to possess other animals. Bogged down by controls that never feel quite right and, for my tastes, a far-too-human-centric story. The story's not ineffective, but it runs on forever and its themes feel muddy. It's somewhere between the somewhat strange trope I've seen in other indie games of "revolution is good but violence is bad" and maybe a "all life, not only humans, is sacred" story, but it doesn't quite cohere. The inciting incident is also too arbitrary and the oppressive pre-industrial civilization is thinly drawn other than "they sure like monuments". and "they are wrecking the environment". Both the environmental and the revolutionary message lack enough specificity to really be compelling. It is really nice to play a fish or a hummingbird (some of the animals with freer movement), but the animals are vehicles and tools to the extent that the "we are all one" idea, if intended, doesn't hit maybe as it should. It's largely the typical walking sim frame of "go 'x' steps until you get the next commentary or cutscene", which I don't find too engaging. The landscapes sure are super nice though. Luck Be a Landlord Your landlord keeps increasing your rent and slot machines are yer only hope. That's the game! Monster Prom Finally got around to the Monster Prom visual-novel-dating-sim franchise this year. It's charming and silly! Monster Camp Monster Camp is Monster Prom! But more hyper-focused on one character at a time! Which has pros and cons - it's a bit less silly, but you do get to know the character better! Monster Road Trip Monster Road Trip feels INDEED like the game the previous two games were leading up to. We've established our cast, now let's do Oregon Trail! Less focus on dating (it's really a side activity), more focus on hijinks in random places! Very silly! Although because the characters are now so established, suddenly, I have moral questions in this amoral game! Should a good boy werewolf be murdering people at Knife World?? Did the rest of the cast fool him into thinking they aren't real murders? He's not so bright?? I don't know?? Norco Really amazing visual novel-adventure-lite game. I played this near the beginning of the year, read Ducks at the end of the year. Both of these are about the economic opportunities that OIL provides on paper, and the environmental and personal degradation it enacts in truth. While Ducks is autobiography and Norco is surreal and heightened, they are both incredibly personal and devastatingly sad. It is worth calling out Norco's sideways sardonic sense of humor and how glorious the surrealism is. Peachvale Extremely short little thing about being queer in a small town. Well-written, no conclusion, really, day-in-the-life. Pentiment Visual-novel-adventure, a historical fiction centered around a tumult of changes. Illuminated manuscripts in abbeys giving way to manuscripts created by secular craftsman (and here's, also, the printing press). Catholicism slowly threatened by Protestantism. Peasants losing what protections they have. People learning to READ. A very dense and interesting setting threaded through by a plotline that carries through several decades, involves a couple of murders, and a lot of THINKING. Art style is fantastic. So is the writing. Persona 5 Royale Some epic JRPG. You might have heard of it. It's immense, generous, incredibly stylish, big-hearted and thematically firm … ish. Persona sure runs into the trouble of wanting its grand, powerful statements about identity and exploitation and freedom, but also still wants to objectify women, be an adolescent boys’ fantasy, etc., etc.. But it does have a lot to say, and a lot of it well. The cast is delightful, and it takes quite a variety of gameplay and dungeon design to stay interesting for 120+ hours. Prose & Codes Fun letter substitution cyphers that highlight a bunch of cool old books on Project Gutenberg. Return of the Obra Dinn What a wonderfully nasty puzzle box of deaths. Absolutely compelling art and weirdly compelling sound. I'm not sure I wholly get the overarching narrative, but I'm not sure I need to. Sometimes you're just cursed, mate. Don't fuck with the ocean. Roadwarden Text RPG. A tight, tense experience of being some poor person trying to fix a neglected road and reconnect isolated, mistrustful communities. Great world and character building, fantastic mood. Strange Horticulture Puzzle game game with a shop management interface. Very tactile experience. Sorting your ever-growing collection of plants, messing with lenses, counting off squares on a map. Storytelling ladled out in drips while you go pluck plant 500 (which has, like all the others, its own name and a purpose). Fun and absorbing. ValiDate Gorgeous art, but incredibly didactic, and rooted in a morality system I don't quite understand. The gap of (little) judgement for the deadbeat dad character compared to (massive, interventional) judgement for the hot mom who goes to clubs to hook up baffled me. Is hooking up worse than ditching your kids? Is the idea that hot mom should know better? Is hooking up and/or dating bad if the other ladies' feelings get hurt? Are you supposed to be able to avoid feelings getting hurt if you are hot and mature? I don't know! Very confused. But man, that art. Zachtonics Solitaire Collection Played this collection of card games as far as I was able. I can one day conquer Shenzen Solitaire, I'm sure, but Fortune's Fool is beyond me. Tarot decks have tooooo many cards. You win, Zachtronics.
