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theresattrpgforthat · 9 months

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How do you know so many games to recommend? I feel like I’m always scrambling to find games on a certain topic, and itchio’s search function is tricky at best.

Hello friend! I have a few methods, and I think they all tie back to my pretty big obsession with games. Let's take a trip through my indie RPG journey, because this is kind of the result of approximately 5 years of interest.

DriveThru RPG

When I first got into TTRPGs, I didn't have a lot of money (let's be real, even right now I don't really have that much spending money) but I did have a little more time, so I combed the net for free tabletop games. I got acquainted with DriveThruRPG first, and I took everything I could that was free and put it into little folders on my computer. Since then I've realized that I can access my folders through the DriveThru App, so there's much less on my computer and more just waiting to be downloaded and perused.

I also get notifications from DriveThru about deals of the day, and occasionally I just browse the storefront to see if anything catches my eye. DriveThru's navigation system is not great either, but one of my friends does some of his own sifting and has directed me to some real gems. I learned about Pandora London, Swords of the Serpentine, and Savage Worlds this way.

Podcasts

I love TTRPG podcasts but I didn't want to listen to D&D podcasts. I found Fandible first, when I was looking for a play through of Changeling: The Lost. I walk to work and I also like to listen to podcasts when I clean my house, so I usually get through one episode a day. I usually look for podcasts that play in multiple systems, although you'll see a number of podcasts here that focus on just one non-D&D system. Here's a few that I recommend:

Fandible: Just a group of friends who love playing games together. All of them are GMs, and they all GM different games. Jesus is the most adventurous, and is constantly bringing new games to the table. I found Slugblaster, Numenera, and Unhallowed Metropolis through them!

Character Creation Cast: I started listening to CCC last year, thanks to a recommendation from a friend, but I fell in love quick. The hosts focus only on the character creation aspect of games, and they also spend time talking to other gamers about the parts of play that each guest feels is important. I found out about Descent into Midnight, Nova, and Blue Planet this way.

The Gauntlet Podcast: This Podcast no longer releases episodes but I learned so much about safe game play through this podcast. Once a month the hosts would sit down with guests and highlight a game of the month for each of them. Often they would talk about games that they adored even before those games made it to publication. I found out about Brinkwood, Apocalypse Keys, and Poutine through this podcast. I miss it so very much.

I would also recommend My First Dungeon, Party of One Podcast, The Eternity Archives, One Shot, and +1 Forward for exposure to many indie games.

Itch.io

I didn't interact much with Itch.io at first - I thought it was mostly for indie video games and generators - but when the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality came out I went feral. I sorted through each and every page of games in that bundle and put all of the TTRPGs into folders - which I am still refining to this day. As you can see, I get very excited whenever a big bundle comes out, as it gives me a lot of exposure to games that people have made.

I also sort through the most recent additions on Itch every one or two days. I usually categorize my folders via genre and rules system, but I'm currently in the process of curating folders for duet and epistolary games. If I think a tag will help me, I usually use https://itch.io/physical-games/tag-[tag] and then insert what I'm looking for in the [tag]. It doesn't get everything but it gets me started.

Often if a game was entered in a Game Jam, there's a tab that you can click to see other entries in that same Jam. So occasionally I'll browse Game Jams for other games that I might find interesting. And for games that I know that I'm personally passionate about, I have a Games that Intrigue Me folder to flip through for when I'm choosing which game to play, or if I want to spotlight a game that I've been itching to put on a rec post.

Other Avenues

I am actually subscribed to you on Youtube, along with a number of other great reviewers!

The Gaming Table is a wonderful Aussie creator who reviews copies of indie ttrpgs. She started a year ago and already has a truly delightful backlog. I recently listened to her review of Bluebeard's Bride and it was wonderful!

I found 11dragonkid when I was looking for Lancer content and was pleasantly surprised to find other ttrpg reviews for games such as ARC and Gubat Banwa.

I watch A.A. Voigt's and Talen Lee's (@talenlee) mini-essays about games and the pieces of those games that speak to them not just to learn about new games but also to learn about what makes those games matter. I found the videos on Capitalites and Girl By Moonlight very informative!

I also watch Dave Thaumvore for reviews for big-print games (Vaesen, Symbaroum), and Questing Beast for updates on what's happening in the OSR scene (Vaults of Vaarn, Mothership).

I'm also subscribed to a number of newsletters and RSS feeds! Bundle of Holding has a blog announcing new bundles, the Indie RPG Newsletter has some great indie rpg coverage in their monthly updates and associated links, and I have an RSS feed on Feedly for game musings on whatever blogs I can find.

In Conclusion...

Much of my TTRPG knowledge comes from constant osmosis. I talk to friends about games, spend a lot of time on Itch.io, and I'm also finding new games here on Tumblr. I have an RPG server where me and a bunch of my friends play pretty regularly, and I'm constantly introducing them to new games. We finished up our Monster Squad Arc a month or two ago, and we're currently getting geared up for a Galaxy Games arc - this time with games that other players are bringing to the table!

I started sorting games for my own enjoyment - I love having all of my little boxes that I can go back to when I am hankering for my own game. I started this blog because I found there were too many games that I was excited about and I was never going to get through all of them just gaming with my friends.

#asks #mint speaks #thanks for asking this question!#I love talking about my immersion in tabletop games #I also love recommending things

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ub4q · 11 months

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With Amarantus launching in one week this could be a good week to play my tragic interactive fiction anthology if not us, which you might already own (it was in the itch.io Racial Justice Bundle back in 2020).

It is about five heroes who die.

Features of if not us include:

When I wrote it I really wanted to write some intense tragedy about death and grief but I was in the middle of Amarantus and it wasn't quite the right tone, so I needed to get the tragedy out of my system

Odds are you will either love it or despise it those are the only 2 kinds of takes I have seen

Amarantus is kind of a spiritual successor to it in a lot of ways (except Amarantus is sexier) (and less about grief and loyalty and loss and death)

one reviewer called it Watchmen but for D&D

#interactive fiction #if not us #tragedy #indie games #twine if #if game

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totesmgoats01-published-author · 2 months

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Has anybody heard of or played a game called KBNR?

I was just cleaning out my downloads folder and realized I couldn't remember what "KBNRWIN.RAR" was, so I unzipped it and it was a very short, pixel graphics, semi-monochrome, top-down, indie horror game. The "readme" txt is very sparse, with some links to bandcamp (for the soundtrack) and itch.io (for other stuff by the creator?) both of which were dead ends.

The controls of the game were ONLY arrow keys to move. That's it. There's no "select" or "back" or even "exit game" buttons (the readme said exit was alt+F4). I looked up the name and the only thing I could find mentioning it was a "top 10" style list by "the casual gaymer" mentioning it without much detail.

The gameplay itself is controlling a little purple character, who climbs up some kind of tower or mountain, as you go text boxes pop up then go away after a few seconds. When you get to the top of the mountain/tower your character jumps off (you don't have control over this) and the game closes itself.

I buy a bunch of big itch.io bundles, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was from one of those but can anyone back up the claim that it is? In particular I've bought bundles in support of various charitable causes. These are the specific ones, with the dates they came out:

Games For Gaza Oct 29, 2023

Bundle for Ukraine Mar 09, 2022

Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid Jun 05, 2021

Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality Jun 07, 2020

Searching the bundles for "kbnr" has no results.

Has anybody else seen or played this little game? Am I crazy? Am I haunted? I've seen stories that start pretty similar to this on nexpo and I'm not thrilled about it lol.

#original post #kbnr #kbnr game #indie game #indie games #indie gaming #pc games #internet mysteries #nexpo #has anyone heard of this #what other tags can I use to reach people lol #itchio #itch.io #itchio games #itch.io games #cw sui mention #cw horror

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noeybodys · 10 months

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Hi, I just wanted to tell you that about 2 years ago I got Dungeons And Lesbians as part of the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io and I played it about 6 months later I was looking through what games I got in the bundle and I saw yours and figured I might as well play a lesbian dating sim for the laughs right? Because I was a cishet male? Anyway I played it and it had been turning around in my head for a long time since until about a year ago I realized I was a trans lesbian and sorry for rambling I just wanted to let you know your "silly little game" was one of a few factors that made me finally put together last year the fact that that I was trans. Anyway I'm starting HRT next week and im very excited about it and this game just means so much to me I thought I might let you know <3

omg. i'm only just replying to this now, but this is literally the best thing i've heard about that game?? omg omg. this makes me feel so many things... I'm sure I'm late to the party, but congrats on your new gender!!!!!

#just n talk #ahhh i have so many mails piled up while i was gone #but ahhh this makes me so many feelings

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lgdays · 7 months

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hiii congrats on the launch!!!! are you guys planning on updating your itch.io page with the full game? im wondering since it came in a bundle I got, or if I would have to buy it again? thanks ❤️

Hi there! The full game is available on itchio, you just have to download it again. And don't worry, if you got the game through any of the bundles (Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, Palestinian Aid, and/or Bundle for Ukraine), you don't need to pay anything extra!

#long gone days #longgonedays #asks

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dragonomatopoeia · 10 months

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Do you have any recommendations for zines?

I ended up writing a pretty long front-matter to this ask, so I've put it all under a Read More. If you only want the resources, feel free to skip to the end

So: I am always going to be a little too pedantic and autistic for a comprehensive, unambiguous rec list. Someone asked me what my favorite book was once, and it felt like my brain stalled and rebooted five times.

Don't get me wrong! I love putting specialized recommendations together, like puzzle-box mystery novels, or horror genre video games with thematic emphasis on grief, or documentaries on sewage treatment

But I am very, very bad at recommending general purpose Media full stop. alas I am a fussy and particular creature who hisses at five star rating systems on review websites because I think using the same Quality Metric regardless of genre and medium and purpose is Silly

Making recs gets even more difficult with things like zines, where they are small press by nature. A lot of my favorite zines are DIY projects with Very Small Distributions. One of my prized possessions is a small, hand-drawn zine of one hundred cats the artist drew with their eyes closed, which they gave to me for free because they liked my shirt. But that's a zine that means something to me because of circumstance and taste and my own ability to pick it up in person

Your mileage tends to vary with this stuff. If I found a Repo The Genetic Opera zine that ranks every organ in the human body, I have friends that would love that WAY more than I would, and I'd probably send it their way. If I found a zine about Gundam and gender and disability and idealized bodies that have been shaped into weapons, then I have dozens of friends I would need to send copies of it to, but that wouldn't make it any less niche. Zines are for VERY specific audiences. That's one of the best things about them!

That Being Said! There ARE popular, more-accessible, or more well-known zines and artists with broader appeal, and I mean that in an enthusiastic, complimentary manner.

I've even seen zines being advertised on my tumblr dashboard. Zines like:

Oh No! A kidpix zine by Louie Zong (Pay what you want- all proceeds donated to LA Foodbank)

Golem Zine is a publication by and for Jewish creatives living in areas where Jewish life is challenged. Their Out West issue sold out before I could grab a copy ($10 per issue, physical)

FYMA: A Lesser Key to the Appropriation of Jewish Magic & Mysticism goes hand in hand with the previous zine, I think (Pay what you want)

But you're more likely to get something that caters to your specific interests and artistic sensibilities by getting in touch with your community members, asking friends who have similar tastes, or checking out some of these resources:

Your Local Library (I'm being serious here-- your library likely has connections to local artists, galleries, resources, and e-resources that can set you on the path to zines you'll enjoy)

Any local art walk or small press events near you (your library can help you find these)

Itch.io's Zine Tag (Adding more tags will help you filter these)

Papercut Zine Library's Virtual Library

Internet Archive's Zine Collections

The DC Punk Archive Zine Library (Specific to punk and DIY interests, as you might imagine)

The Library of Congress Online Zine Web Archive Collection

QZAP (The Queer Zine Art Project)

POCZP (People of Color Zine Project-- and they're on tumblr!)

Hevelin Fanzine Collection (Literally a bunch of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy fanzines that were all collected by one guy which are now being digitized)

From Staple to Spine: A Compendium of Zine-Related Books (This doesn't have zines itself, but the books included can be a great starting point for where you should be looking and what will be of interest to you)

I also recommend making your own zine! It's fun to make things and put words and images on paper.

And if you downloaded the bundle for Racial Justice and Equality off itch.io, you already own the Electric Zine Maker (Warning for brightly colored, glitched, and moving visual elements that may cause eyestrain. I would also be wary if you're prone to migraines)

I know this has been a Lot and I got a bit carried away, but I hope that this helps you in your quest for finding cool, obscure art made by people who care deeply about niche topics. Personally, that's my favorite kind of art

#asks #anonymous #recs #resources #should i tag this as research aids. i feel like this is now a research aid

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dungeonmalcontent · 10 months

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Reminder: If you're looking for a non-d&d ttrpg to play and don't want to pay out the nose for a core rulebook and dot want to pirate one, think back a bit. 3 years ago, did you buy the $5 Bundle for Racial Equality and Justice on itch.io? Because there are ttrpgs in there. Most notable of them is probably Lancer (a battlemech rpg).

Was recently reminded that I'd bought that and still have access to all those games.

And there were a few other big bundles since then.

And even if you haven't bought a bundle with any ttrpgs, just browse there. There's some good ones.

#ttrpg #tabletop rpgs #itch.io

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mackerelphones · 1 year

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Review: PALACE OF WOE (Owch, 2019)

One of my favorite developers is Owch, a pseudonym of “arcanist” Chloe Taylor, creator of numerous challenging video games of varied genre but a consistent minimalist aesthetic, dark tone, and recurring symbology. Of these, the least cryptic is PALACE OF WOE, a 2019 “sort-em-up labyrinth” available on itch.io.

As with all of Owch’s video games, the story in PALACE OF WOE is more the player figuring out what to do than a conventional plot, so if you would prefer to play a delightful puzzle game “unspoiled,” click the link above and drop a few dollars to play it. Or download it right now if you bought the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality or the Bundle for Ukraine.

Per Owch tradition, PALACE OF WOE dumps the player into an eerie, supernatural world with zero exposition or instruction. The window of the game executable is entitled “LOOK at the PALACE OF WOE,” and instead of “Start” or another conventional option, the title screen begins the adventure when the player selects “ESCAPE.” A clear mission statement: ESCAPE the PALACE OF WOE.

From a top-down perspective and an aspect ratio suggestive of the Game Boy, the player controls a spiky-haired character in a hoodie, the back of which is emblazoned with a bug-like shape. As the first room forces the player to learn, this one-eyed tough can kick chairs, trees, coffins, and any other object Sokoban-style to clear rows of obstacles. Rather than scrolling, movement occurs on a screen-by-screen basis. Leaving a screen resets every obstacle and every enemy. Only bosses, rare unique encounters such as possible Beat the Art Breaker nod Sink (who knows the secret) or Chloe herself, do not respawn.

Screenshot: the southern coast.

In PALACE OF WOE, enemies and bosses are also more akin to obstacles, neither moving nor provoking combat. The majority not obstructing essential passages can be safely ignored. There is no gameplay benefit, such as EXP or money, to be derived from “fighting” each foe beyond the literal experience of practice.

The enemy, often something cute in the overworld but more disturbing up close, is angled to the spiky-haired protagonist like an opponent’s Pokémon. Brief flavor text and ominous, raspy droning (probably the battle theme slowed down) introduce our opponent: “LONGLEGS is hungry.” The action occurs in a box in the middle of the screen. On the right of this box is the player’s health bar, and on the left the opponent’s. Clusters of square tiles in different arrangements appear in the box, which can accommodate a five-by-five grid of these tiles and whose edges wrap in on themselves. The player must place the set of tiles before a time limit indicated at the top of the screen places the tiles for us. If a full row or column of the box is filled, this row or column of tiles vanishes, and the enemy takes one HP damage. However, if tiles overlap other squares already set into the box, these tiles vanish, each one lost sapping one HP from the player character. The “combat” system is splendid, simple in concept but allowing challenging permutations. Each enemy demands the player manage different tile layouts, many large and ungainly. The toughest enemy, Gutrot, I even thought impossible to beat until I saw a let’s play in which the player, Alex Diener, defeats one with no difficulty.

There is also a hold box that contains a single square tile. Once per battle, the player can swap the larger set of incoming tiles for this single one and a hopefully easier, lifesaving move. While this seems like an emergency measure, it is strategically valuable and proves essential for Gutrot and Look. The main menu also allows the player to fight enemies context-free to optimize our skills and maximize efficiency, a sure draw to those who thirst for mastery. The difficulty level is inconsistent, however. I struggled with Badmouth, a standard enemy, more than almost any of the bosses.

Badmouth’s extra difficulty may be some kind of statement about harassment.

If defeating enemies is not the objective, though, how does one escape the Palace of Woe? The answer is simply to find the Exit. Guarding it, however, is an amorphous glitch-entity, Swim, who appears throughout the Palace to tantalize the player from unreachable areas.

Screenshot: Swim. Her guardian is Sink. Get it?

To transmute Swim from a swarm of pixels to a solid being, the player must locate the twelve “keys” and then her lair behind several screens of pills. Not “keys” in a typical sense, these arcane miscellanea allude to other Owch games, such as an apple with a hole in it that might have been held by the player character’s blue neighbor in Long Live the Axe. PALACE OF WOE follows the time-honored video game collection structure.

The music loops, also by Owch, are short and usually spooky. After all, the Palace of Woe is not a place one wants to be. Most of the battle themes—“BOOT,” the four “DARKPUSHER” tracks, and the “boss theme”—while still ethereal, are surprisingly soothing and upbeat, music not for life-or-death struggles but forprogress.“Don’t give up!” they seem to say, welcome encouragement on my fifth try against the same tree.

The environments that the overworld Sokoban rooms constitute, rendered in tile-by-tile pixel minimalism, portray recognizable though abstracted spaces. The player begins inside a ghost-filled building, presumably the Palace of Woe itself. However, most of the map consists of this prison’s environs: shorelines, a graveyard, and apple tree forests. The northern reaches of the map, areas such as those the soundtrack identifies as hermit haus and ticks inn, plunge into surreality unrecognizable as physical places. For none of the Palace of Woe is a physical place, being instead, like the enemies encountered in it, representations of the hero’s psychology.

In PALACE OF WOE’s short length, Owch fully explores the game systems and achieves a work satisfying and unified in form and theme. Not only a compelling and fast-paced puzzle system, the “combat” frequently means accepting damage of our own, suggesting a dissociation between self and body. That overworld navigation and combat both revolve around different forms of “sorting” also plays into “sorting yourself out,” the central theme. Characters similar to the PALACE OF WOE player character appear in Owch’s earlier Beat the Art Breaker and Long Live the Axe, where their humanoid forms serve as modifiable avatars for pink bug-like beings resembling the creature on the PALACE OF WOE protagonist’s hoodie. The suggestion of minds capable of moving between different bodies here serves an explicit transgender metaphor. PALACE OF WOE is a model of brevity, completeness, and thematic coherency.

This spiky-haired tough is not so brutal as Owch’s previous bruisers, with whom she shares voice samples. Rather than dying or exploding into blood, her enemies, when trounced, merely “[step] aside” to let the player continue. This and the framing of the protagonist’s situation as escaping a prison instead of invading someone else’s territory make for a less morally ambiguous story. Where10S reaches a degree of difficulty that borders on the humanly impossible, PALACE OF WOE’s forgiving loss states drop the player back to the start of the screen. Instead of the limited checkpoint systems typical of Owch, PALACE OF WOE generously saves on every screen.

To miss the blunt but affirming allegory that the ending of PALACE OF WOE spells out would demand superhuman pigheadedness. It is not a coincidence that the default palette (except the black) matches the colors of the transgender flag. In contrast, exegesis of other Owch titles, like Long Live the Axe, is beyond me.

The cumulative result is something that, by Owch standards, feels kind and clear, more accessible. This (presumable) wider audience appeal suits what, despite first appearances, is a hopeful albeit simple message for those who need to escape the Palace of Woe in real life. However, the other manner in which PALACE OF WOE proves accessible is no different from the rest of Owch’s portfolio: complete excellence.

Check out this and other arcana from Owch at her itch.io page.

Originally published 6 May 2022 on mackerelphones.com.

#palace of woe #owch #indie games #puzzle games #transgender

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linuxgamenews · 2 years

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Psychroma psychedelic horror coming to Linux

Psychroma a non-binary horror side scroller game for Linux, Mac, and Windows PC. Due to the creative efforts of developer Rocket Adrift. Working to make its way onto Steam in 2023. Rocket Adrift shows off their new psychedelic horror side scroller, Psychroma. This story driven pixel art side scroller has already won second place in the Big Digital Indie Pitch. With an honorable mention in the Ubisoft Indie Series Presented by National Bank. Psychroma is a story driven psychological horror game. Where you play as a digital Medium who awakens in a haunted cyberpunk commune. While you take on haunts from the ghosts of the past residents. And at the same time, searching for an escape by exploring space and time. In Psychroma you will use a set of digital tarot cards with the memories of the ghosts. Then search the house and unlock trying new details about what happened there. As you play as a Non-binary, mixed race hero. Doing so as you uncover the bond between a trans woman and her disabled lesbian partner.

Psychroma Premier Trailer

youtube

The third game from Rocket Adrift's titles is an exercise in exploring. As you work through non-linear time, queerness, and empathy through horror. Psychroma will be Rocket Adrift's third game. In 2021, the three person Toronto-based team released their second game Raptor Boyfriend: A High School Romance on Steam and Itch.io. Following a nomination for Best Art Direction and Best Animation for the 2022 Canadian Indie Game Awards. In 2019, Rocket Adrift developed Order A Pizza: A Visual Novel. Doing so for Itch.io's Nan0Ren0 game jam within the month of March. It now stands at over 7,000 downloads and was a part of the Racial Justice and Equality bundle. The largest Itch.io bundle in history. Psychroma non-binary horror side scroller game is due to release in Q4 2023. Along with support for Linux, Mac, and Windows PC. Which is also available to Wishlist on Steam.

#psychroma #non-binary horror #side scroller #linux #gaming news #rocket adrift #ubuntu #mac #windows #pc

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was-it-really-worth-it · 1 year

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Game 238 - Death and Taxes by Placeholder Gameworks

I picked up this game through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. I chose to donate 10 dollars, and I found about 153 games in the bundle that I was actually interested in. So, the consideration for this game will be if it was worth the 7 cents (rounded up) that I paid for it and the hours that I played it for. The bundle has since ended, but I still encourage you to make a donation to the organizations listed here.

What did I think it was at first? The cartoony art style makes me think it'll be a cute Grim Reaper platformer maybe?

How was the character creator? You have some options to design your character, and you can unlock more as you play by buying them with your wages. There's no gender pronouns used throughout the game, really.

You create your character as you go by deciding who lives and who dies, as well as how deferentially you treat your boss and how stalwart of a rule follower you are.

How was the game? It's kind of like Papers, Please with a goofier tone. You're the great balancer of the afterlife and it's your job to make sure everything is in equilibrium by dooming the correct amount and type of people to death. You get to see everyone's little profile and decide if they're worthy of death. You can also buy hats.

I was a very good boy, suitably deferential and I followed all of the rules. It turns out that this unleashes the death of all humanity. I'm sure there's a lesson about how everyone can resist becoming part of an oppressive regime that destroys lives, even if you are a mere paper pusher.

There are other characters to interact with but I never really figured out their purpose.

What did I not love? The game is cute, and I enjoyed exploring it, but it is so clicky! I'd love to see keyboard shortcuts added or a controller mode. My wrist hurt after binging this.

At 2 hours and 7 cents, was it really worth it? Honestly pretty good! The only thing I've seen that's a great descendant to Papers, Please.

#c reviews #gaming #death and taxes #placeholder gameworks #itch.io racial justice bundle

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iloveabunchofgames · 1 year

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#JakeReviewsItch

AIdol

by ebi-hime

Price (US): $10.99

Included In: Bundle for Racial Equality and Justice

Genre: Visual Novel

Pitch: A Vocaloid fan is shocked when the virtual idol she adores sends her a DM—and says she's in trouble!

My expectations: Developer ebi-hime has published 39 anime-style visual novels to Itch in the past eight years. I can only see the date they were made available on Itch, so it's possible some were released somewhere else prior to 2015. Regardless, 39 games is a mind-boggling number of games for anyone to develop in one lifetime, and ebi does appear to be a one-woman developer. Okay, but anyone can throw something together at a weekend game jam and call it a game, right? Well, here's where it gets weirder. Many of the Itch listings include each visual novel's word count and estimated time to completion. Among the pages with this information, most hover around either 50,000 words (2-3 hours) or 100,000 words (4-6). At least one game is double that. And people are playing these. ebi has more than 3,000 followers on Steam. Three people I follow on Twitter also follow @ebihime, including one of my close, personal friends. AIdol was funded by a KickStarter campaign that raised $2,872. I'm not saying these are huge numbers, but these games have dedicated fans. I am beyond intrigued.

Review:

Hana is just a boring girl. She doesn’t have friends. Her hair is short. She doesn’t know anything about makeup. She can’t cook. She listens to music. And on top of all that, she can’t cook and she doesn’t have friends!

Maybe if Hana didn’t spend half of her time repeating this list of unremarkable characteristics to herself, she could develop a personality, but who needs to be a human when they could instead be a fan?

Her passion is “virtual idol” Aiko, a Vocaloid popstar who performs hologram shows and sells stomach-churning quantities of overpriced merch. She’s basically Hatsune Miku, except the Lyriq corporation has given her artificial sentience for some reason. But something sinister is happening at Lyriq. Aiko’s programmer has been fired. Her code has been changed, and her memory has been erased. Now Hana and Aiko must work together to solve the mystery.

This mostly involves oops-I-bumped-into-you-and-spilled-coffee meet-cutes and shirtless boys.

It all bores the heck out of me. After an hour of purple prose and static images of generic anime people, I started skipping dialogue, hoping to get to the end, but I couldn’t even put up with that. Not for me.

+ The intro sequence—lots of quick cuts and effects set to (I think) an original song. It's lively and well produced; not at all what I expect from a visual novel. + There are occasional typos and grammatical errors, but again, it surpasses my expectations for this type of game. + Professional-looking artwork. I don't know how much is original, but asset packs are made to be used. + Ditto, music.

– I brushed my hair away from my forehead. It's hot today, and I hoped it would help me to cool down. Mom thinks I should try a new style, but I don't know anything about hair. We disagree about hair, but I am lucky to have her. Sometimes when I look at her, I think she looks like she's the same age as me, except her hair is different than mine, and I don't know much about hair. Or makeup. I prefer Aiko figurines. I ordered one from AImazon, an online store that is very popular on the idol forms. Other people on the forums can be rude, which is why I'm thinking about cutting back to only posting for 14 hours a day. With my hair away from my face, cooling me on this hot afternoon, which feels as hot as yesterday, I leave the forum and turn my attention to Tumblr. "Now I understand how someone can write 39 visual novels," I write. – Aiko asks Hana to help her find her original programmer. Hana asks the idol forum if anyone knows anything. Then she hops on a train and visits Lyriq headquarters. She doesn't get any information there. She spends a few minutes commenting on every person she sees walking outside. (Throughout this scene, the only things onscreen are her internal monologue and a picture of a deserted city block.) She stops into a café and watches a young man order coffee, with all the pointless detail of that scene from The Room. The man bumps into her and almost spills the coffee. The game forgets about Hana and instead follows the man on his walk to his office, where he waits for an elevator, talks to a co-worker, goes up the elevator, and talks to another co-worker about his experience getting coffee. The perspective shifts again to this co-worker. We learn about her life for a few minutes, and then she sits down to do her work. Part of her job is moderating the idol forums. She sees Hana's post and closes the thread. Back at home, Hana reads every response to her question, until she finally sees that the thread has been closed. She texts Aiko to tell her the bad news. – No.

🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍 Bottom Line: Props for making a complete product with decent production value. Anime and visual novels with minimal interactivity don't usually do anything for me, but even if that is your scene, surely there are better options than AIdol.

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ixcaliber · 2 years

Text

At Least A Single Sentence On Every Game I Played In June 2022

A star (*) next to a game’s title indicates this game is available in the Queer Games Bundle on itch.io

1. Don’t Toy With Me *

What if Toy Story but every character was one slight away from losing their minds. It’s a short visual novel and it has a pretty neat conception of a world of sentient toys and the potential consequences thereof. It’s neat in that your interactions with the world are fairly hands off (choosing to tap on a dollhouse or not, deciding you like one toy or another) but these minor interactions have a major impact on the psyches of the toys. This is a horror/thriller narrative though, no happy endings to be found here.

Rating: Neat concept, not my genre.

2. Someone Stole My LUNCH *

Very lighthearted comedic visual novel about your efforts to eat your own damn lunch.

Rating: An hour’s worth of silly fun.

3. Full Service Shop *

NSFW visual novel about sapphic & kinky transhumanism. Nice variety of characters with their own quirks and preferences. Comes with a text file of content warnings so you can avoid anything you don’t like and every encounter has a safeword option to hit if you become uncomfortable. It's trans inclusive, letting you set your pronouns independantly from any genitalia. And the writing is pretty damn good.

Rating: Great.

4. WitchWay

(not on the Queer Bundle, but was included in the Bundle For Racial Justice and Equality, if you have access to that)

A fun little puzzle platformer where you’re a witch girl and you have the ability to move and control certain objects in the world. It’s a very focused game, a tightly connected series of rooms at the bottom of a well, where you can explore andeventually find your way out. Exploring is more rewarding than you’d expect with an optional objective hidden in every room and seven or eight cute bunnies to rescue.

Rating: Pretty damn good.

5. Parsnip

(was available in the Bundle For Racial Justice and Equality)

A little point and click adventure that’s trying to nail the unsettling line between cute and creepy. It’s one of those where the protagonist is cutesy and well meaning and the rest of the world is normal with some dark undertones and the protagonist is incapable of seeing that anything is wrong. It is a little rough. I play a couple more games in this shared world from the Queer Bundle which is why I sought this one out, but if this sounds like it won’t be your kind of thing then it probably won’t be. It’s not integral to understanding any of the following games anyway.

Rating: Rough but charming.

6. The Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith *

Set in the same world as Parsnip, this game has a much more approachable tone and gameplay structure. It follows trans disaster Trixie Glimmer Smith as she, at the behest of her extremely highly strung friend, attempts to get ahold of The King In Yellow and then attempts to deal with the consequences of these actions. You also have the option of spending time with a couple of different characters and becoming embroiled in their eldritch subplots. A neat little game that continues and improves on its use of eldritch horror from Parsnip, but brings it more into the spotlight and makes it the focus of the game as it deserves to be.

Rating: Pretty damn good.

7. Co-Open *

A game in which you are a kid, going shopping at the local store on your own for the first time. Explore the store, talk to people, find secrets and feed the incredible physics defying kitties. There’s a surprising amount of things to do and people to talk to in this one and it’s very gay.

Rating: Great.

8. Yuki’s Palpitating, Passionate, Phenomenal, and quite frankly Proficient quest for a (hot) girlfriend!!!

Short and silly lesbian romance visual novel. Yuki, a shy new girl at school, finds herself propositioned by three girls and must date all of them to decide who she wants to go out with. The girls are good, the art is cute, the tone is extremely lighthearted. The conclusion of the short story is pretty much spoiled by the title of its sequel.

Rating: An hour’s worth of silly lesbian fun.

9. Spica, Chinatsu and Haruka’s Enchanting, Marvelous and quite frankly Elaborate quest to save their (cute) girlfriend!!! *

The followup to Y4P; Yuki’s been kidnapped and its up to her girlfriends to rescue her. But don’t worry, despite the kidnapping it’s still as lighthearted if not more so than previously. This game develops the interactions between the rest of the polycule and, through the framing device of Yuki talking about her relationships to her kidnapper, discusses in simple terms the nature of a polycule.

Rating: An hour’s worth of silly lesbian fun.

10. TetrEscape *

(Has a publicly accessible in browser version)

A simple little puzzle game; push the tetris blocks and try to make rows or columns in order to clear your path to the exit. There’s about fifteen levels or so, and though there is some escalation of difficulty it never gets too tough.

Rating: A neat little thing.

11. Three Lesbians In A Barrow *

Another game in the Parsnip/Trixie Glimmer Smith series. This one stars Tabitha Knight as she and her friends Nikita and Trixie visit a mysterious barrow for an archeological studies project. When they get trapped inside it seems as though something else may be trapped in there with them. This is much more shortform than ttotgs, quickly setting up its conflict and then giving you a variety of actions each of which pass time. After a certain point events will have escalated and will unfold based on your decisions. This one is more regular horror than eldritch horror, though as much time is given to these girls trying to understand one another better.

Rating: Pretty good.

12. Symbiosis *

(Has a publicly accessible in browser version)

An RPGMaker horror game, where you are a witch protecting your son after a break-in to your house. This game has a nice little art style and an intriguing atmosphere.

Rating: Neat concept, not my genre.

13. A Normal Lost Phone *

In this game you find a stranger’s phone, and slowly learn about their lives. There is something of a level of discomfort playing a game like this, intentionally violating the privacy of this fictional character. If you can put that to one side there is something very compelling about this kind of game; the intertwining of puzzle and narrative as you work to find the clues that lead you to find the next peice of information that serves as a password to access the next section of the phone. It’s diagetic puzzle solving in a very satisfying way. It is in fact the diagetic...ness of the game that really makes it uncomfortable to look through their text conversations and emails etc. Especially if you’re already familiar with the game and it’s reveal.

Rating: Pretty good but with unintentional and difficult to remove unpleasantness.

14. Some Sword / Some Play *

(Has a publicly accessible in browser version)

A short piece of NSFW interactive fiction. This one has more plot and less kink than I was anticipating. It still has some nice moments and is very trans inclusive; all characters pronouns can be set as desired and genitalia is once again seperated from pronouns. There’s a little kink but it’s wholesome kink, softer than I was anticipating. You’ll probably enjoy this if you want a swashbuckling steampunk adventure with some interesting worldbuilding and a dash of lewdness.

Rating: Pretty good.

15. Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story

(was available in the bundle for Palestinian Aid)

My feelings on this one are pretty much identical to my feelings on A Normal Lost Phone. Though the premise runs a little thinner here at least in terms of puzzles. I did feel myself losing patience, especially when the diagetic nature of them means that they have minimal guidance. There was one I looked up tips for just because I wasn’t confident I was even looking for the right thing. In A Normal Lost Phone there was a point towards the beginning where I felt kind of bogged down with information, names of contacts and events that Sam had been to, learned long before I could provide context to any of it. There’s a little of that here but less front loaded. The game, in the end has a good positive message, but once again there’s that feeling of actively intruding on someone else’s personal information thats just sort of inescapable given the format.

Rating: Pretty good but with unintentional and difficult to remove unpleasantness.

16. Umurangi Generation

This is a pretty cool photography game with a neat artstyle and an unfolding narrative told through environmental detail as you explore and photograph the levels. Unfortunately I’m an incapabale of parsing a story unless it is explicitly told to me so if there’s anything deeper than ‘an alien war is happening’ it didn’t really manage to reach me. It is a pretty neat game to play though, it has sort of a Tony Hawk’s Pro War Photographer vibe to it, where you’re running around short little hub zones trying to check off tasks before the deadline (not actually enforced, you just can’t get the second unlockable object for a level if you don’t do everything in time). I had a good time with it.

Rating: Pretty damn good.

17. Disc Room

Explore a space station full of spinning blades. Survive as long as you can. Die quite a lot. Every room is like a little time trial to simply survive as long as you can, though with some interesting variables thrown in in the later stages of the game. It reminded me a lot of HyperDot but with HyperDot there was a very small number of different kind of projectiles that could come after you, allowing you to recognize them on sight and develop more of a familiarity with them. Almost every room in Disc Room has a new kind of disc that behaves in a new kind of way, more novelty less mastery. There are hidden rooms to find, secrets to uncover and a bestiary to fill in. It has more replayability than I was sort of expecting.

Rating: Pretty good.

18. Limbo Line *

This one comes upfront with a semi-diagetic warning about references to self-harm and suicide that i kind of feels undersells the severity of the scenes in question. The game is about being recruited to a sort of interdimensional crisis support line and taking calls from people. I don’t think that these scenes, which does not make up the main bulk of the game’s content, are tastelessly handled and i do feel that they have a point and purpose, but I’d have appreciated a stronger warning.

Most of the interactions you have in this game are fairly lighthearted and there are fun scenes with your extremely varied call centre colleagues. There’s probably a lot of content I didn’t see here based on who you decide to spend your breaktime with, but personally I don’t think I could replay the game and go through the more intense scenes in order to see this other stuff.

Rating: Fun in places, intense and emotional in other places. Be strongly warned if you have issues with suicidal thoughts or emotional manipulation.

19. Purrgatory *

(Has a publicly accessible in browser version)

This is a little point and click adventure with an extremely simple art style and a very silly sense of humour. You explore Purrgatory, make friends with its residents and maybe find a way out. The characters are great, it’s very fun to see them slowly open up to you and each other. Purrgatory, as in the afterlife in which you find yourself, despite its simple aesthetic, has such a unique chaotic vibe. From the name of the game I assumed that this was about a game where I was a cat going to the afterlife, in practice it feels more like a bunch of humans have been misfiled into an afterlife that was designed only for cats. It’s really neat.

In terms of gameplay it’s a point and click adventure but simplified. If you have an item you need for a puzzle you will use it when you interact with where its supposed to go, which cuts out the whole ‘use everything on everything’ mindset. It is semi-open world, sort of. You can progress individual storylines with each of Purrgatory’s residents in more or less whatever order you like. Sometimes they will move around after you have completed one part of their storyline. There is a guide with hints and solutions that I found invaluable for the spots where I got stuck. One of which was just realizing that a cupboard existed.

Rating: Great

20. What’s Your Gender *

This is a very short little experimental game that uses the shape of Antichamber to explore themes of gender. It didn’t super click with me, but I could see this being a good tool for introducing gender concepts to someone unfamiliar with them.

Rating: Neat little thing.

21. Stillwater *

Very short visual novel about a private investigator, his assistant and his dog looking into a seemingly supernatural mystery. It has a very nice presentation, a tense atmosphere and good chemistry between its characters.

Rating: Pretty good.

22. A Nightmare’s Trip *

In this game you play Adrien, a child’s nightmare made manifest as its own disconnected being, as they take a vacation to a bustling city and meet a wide cast of fun characters. This game is wildly inventive in ways I wasn’t expecting. A small detail alluded to but never really elaborated upon is how the world in which it is set seems to be some kind of merging of multiple realities. It allows it to do one of my favourite things which is to just have all kinds of weird entities from other worlds just coexisting and its not even a big deal. A flight attendant you speak to on the flight is just a venus fly trap lady and that’s perfectly normal. I love that kind of thing. This game has a great cast of characters and a tone that is sometimes chaotic, sometimes contemplatative.

Rating: Pretty damn good.

23. Freshly Frosted

A chill factory puzzle game. Place conveyers to move doughnuts through levels, add toppings and take them to the appropriate serving hatches. It’s a game that starts off simple and adds complexity over time, each batch of 12 levels adding some new element to contend with, though you are never given the ability to do more than place conveyers. It makes sense though in the way the game is designed, each new element added is more often more an obstacle to be worked around rather than a tool to be utilized.

It’s extremely chill. There’s something of a loose narrative. A narrator who tells you that they spend a lot of time imagining doughnut factories in the sky and each set of levels representing a season. Though maybe narrative isn’t exactly the right word. It’s more a slowly building feeling of companionship and familiarity, and in my experience it does succeed building this bond.

Rating: Nice chill time.

24. Null Event *

(Has a publicly accessible in browser version)

An NSFW smutgame where you are tasked with solving the mystery of disappearing drones in a cyberpunk world. Content is heavily focused around kinks of drones and identity loss. My experience of this game is a little tainted because I didn’t anticipate just how far the Supernaturalist storyline was going to go and it blew past my level of interest. But on subsequent playthroughs I stuck more closely to my areas of interest and had a much better time.

The only things I would really complain about is that, everyone has very cyberpunk names and with the blank character portraits that about 50% of the cast have it took me a couple of playthroughs to really parse each character as a seperate individual. Also, at the end of the first day you get invited to have a lewd time with your friend Em and get the opportunity to select from a small number of different scenes, and I sort of expected that this framework might be applied to other characters or other lewd situations, but it isn’t used again in the game, but from what I can tell the game is still being worked on and this may be implemented at some point.

Rating: Pretty good.

25. We Should Talk *

This is a game about being at a bar, talking with some of the people there and having a conversation with your girlfriend via text. It has a pretty neat conversational system where your response is split into three sections and you choose each of these from a selection independently, leading to some nuanced responses that you can say. I can’t say how robustly these different responses are recognized and responded to, as I only played through once.

But that said there was only one point in the game where it didn’t seem to parse correctly the statement that I was making. In response to Sam wondering whether something going wrong at her job was her fault, I tried to communicate that she seems to always blame herself and she responded as though I’d said a complete non-sequiteur.

There’s like nine different endings, but I was satisfied with my experience with a single ending. It certainly felt as though the ending I got was ‘you did a good job listening to and communicating with your girlfriend’ and it felt as though other endings would just be points on an axis of failure to success.

Rating: Neat little thing.

26. Making Friends *

A cute little visual novel where you guide a pair of witches, not through their actions but by picking their emotional responses. Its a cute little story of a friendship that can be neglected or could blossom into something more. I may have teared up a little on this one.

Rating: An hour’s worth of cute lesbian fun.

27. 2064: Read Only Memories *

(I talk some pretty big spoilers in this one, feel free to skip ahead if you don’t want to hear them)

I’ve been trying to play this game for years, but for one reason or another my attention span has never lasted long enough for me to get through it until now. It’s a cyberpunk point and click style adventure where your friend Hayden has been kidnapped and with the assistance of Turing, the world’s first truly sentient AI you must track him down. It’s got some really good characters that I love, and also Jess is in the game.

Jess is complicated. She’s a hybrid (undergone gene therapy that essentially means she’s part cat now) in a world that is bigoted against hybrids, and she doesn’t like you the player character. I can imagine all the discourse about the game is about this character and how awful she is for not liking you. I don’t dislike her for that, she’s valid and has valid reasons I just wish I could leave her alone like she wants. At one point you have to ask her for a favour and you get two conversation options. One is a cat pun (essentially a bigoted joke she’s going to hate) and the other is overfamiliarity (which she’s obviously going to hate). Either option will get her to angrily divulge her entire backstory at you, and I’d rather allow her the privacy. This game gives me social anxiety. It doesn’t help that if I pick the conversation options that feel most natural to me she insists I’m being a suck up and trying to be manipulative, and if I pick the more neutral conversational options that she’s fine with I feel like I’m actually being manipulative.

There’s also parts like where the obvious villain of the game shows up, looking obviously like a villain, being a fucking CEO, being extremely super coincidentally in the same hospital room as you but with a connection to your missing friend and while you do get to say that you don’t trust him, I felt like I was being chided by the game for noping out of that conversation as fast as possible. And another part where you’re preparing for the endgame you’re having a conversation with this guy and he invites himself along and there’s so many options you can click on like ‘i don’t trust this guy’ ‘this seems like a bad idea’ but Turing and the plot itself just keep saying ‘but you gotta’ ‘we need information this guy can provide’. And not to be nitpicky but he doesn’t actually provide any information we didn’t already have. All he does is fiddle with your zapper and then betray you. Granted that the villainous monologue he gets at the end is pretty interesting and a good moment but it’s so frustrating when it feels so contrived that he’s there. Like what if you turned him down but he followed you into the facility, ambushing you at the exact same point.

It’s a game that has some really good characters, humour (i especially like the game long running joke that is the spoiled milk), and some really great moments, but the bits that don’t click for me really rub me the wrong way.

Rating: High highs and major irritations. Pretty damn good with some big caveats.

28. Peyton’s Post-Op Visits *

A very short and cute visual novel that is very reminiscent of npckc’s A Year of Springs series. This game follows a pair of trans men as they rekindle their friendship. It talks about some trans masculine experiences in a very approachable way and is generally light in tone.

Rating: A nice little experience.

29. Touch Theory *

A short visual novel about a mad scientist and his new lab assistant, maybe, and the slow development of their relationship as they get to know one another and reassess their relationship.

Rating: An hour’s worth of fun.

30. One Just Night *

A short but sweet visual novel set in a world where everyone recieves a prophecy to guide them from a very young age. Our Lady of Possibility (Billie for short) resents her incredibly vague prophecy and is forced to spend time with the one person who might be able to provide her guidance; her arch rival Seeker of a Just Night. She has just one day to convince Just Night to help her and maybe build something new between them.

I love this one. Excellent worldbuilding, excellent character design. A short but engaging story that I got emotionally invested in.

Rating: Excellent, probably my favourite game of the month.

31. Please Touch The Artwork

Please, Touch The Artwork is a little puzzle game based on interacting with abstract artwork based on different art styles, or um maybe just different paintings by Piet Mondrian. Each of the styles has a different gameplay mechanic, and tells a different narrative with varying degrees of success.

Der Stijl (the style as depicted above) is the most effective in both narrative and mechanics. The narrative tells a seven days of creation story illustrated by adding new colours, new mechanics for you to play with. The puzzles are about trying to replicate the painting by adding colour and lines in the sequence they are given to you. As the elements increase it gets pretty challenging.

This is also the only style where, if you go to the gallery (i.e. the level select screen) you’ll be given information about the style. It’s kind of a shame the other galleries don’t have anything like that. It’s in trying to write the little synopsis about this game that I realized that I don’t know if the other galleries are based on art styles or individual paintings. I feel like there was a missed opportunity here to be a little bit more educational.

Boogie Woogie (based on the paintings Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie (maybe more? idk)) are still engaging puzzles but the narrative of this one lost me. It’s about two beings which fit perfectly together, Boogie and Woogie, and you guide them to each other. As the stages go by this becomes more and more difficult to do. The problems I have with this narrative, well one of them that I had was why the blue square that bounces you backwards was called Broadway and why the diamond shape that Boogie has an affair with was called Victory. I guess I now have the answer to that now at least.

The other thing was that by the end it seems as though the narrative was metaphorical and about racism, and I really struggle to make sense of it. It’s likely a problem on my end but I feel like someone just pointed at a beachball and said ‘thats a metaphor for pollution’ and they may be right but i don’t feel like I’ve been given enough context to parse this metaphor correctly. This game is already interpreting very abstract paintings, to then try to build an extra layer of metaphor on top of itself is a difficulty.

The last style is New York (based on the painting New York City (and maybe more?) and it’s a series of very slow mazes with a narrative about leaving a loved one behind and being lost in a big city. It was pretty rough.

Rating: Neat little thing, some good puzzles, skip the New York City gallery.

32. Hourglass

This is one of those puzzle games where you can make a time clone of yourself. That’s essentially an entire genre. The puzzles in this one are pretty good though. They are mostly logisitical puzzles, rather than explicitly timing puzzles. It has a nice slow ramp up of difficulty, and by the end some of the puzzles have become quite complex, or require some serious consideration as to how to the sequence of events you need to pull off. The story is that you play Aywa, who has come to these undiscovered ruins looking for her father who went missing, and as you go through you find environmental detail that tells you of the history of this place.

33. Destiny Fails Us: A New Life *

I wanted to date this girl, but the only dateable options were boys with names like Greg or Brian or Dave or something.

A couple of downsides upfront: this game is abusive parent apologia, and exclusively heteroromantic.

But there are some aspects I liked. It’s pretty neat that the protagonist is canonically ace and that’s just a fact of the story. And I liked the simple artstyle, though it doesn’t always work, most notably when your dog is levitating at waist height next to someone. And I liked the relationship the protagonist has with her friends. It’s also pretty nice that, should you end up not going to the big valentine’s day dance with anyone (like i did) it’s not treated as a failure, instead you get a pretty nice scene where a bunch of your friends all spend time with you and it’s good.

Rating: Has some good aspects, but not for me.

34. Pebble Witch *

A nice little game where you play as a witch, explore a little coastline and lend a listening ear to the rocks and stones, and have a crush on your teacher. A nice little chill experience. I really like the writing for the rocks, it does a really good job of communicating this strange other perspective. It’s a very simple game but it is all it needs to be.

Rating: A nice chill experience.

35. Saving You From Yourself *

(publically accessible in browser)

A very short interactive narrative about gatekeeping trans medicine. It’s a short snapshot of the hopelessness of waiting to transition. It is simple in aesthetic and writing, but that just aids it to feel more emotionally vulnerable.

Rating: Beautiful in its vulnerability, but deeply bleak.

36. A Potion For Chamomile *

A nice little visual novel with a playful tone. Chamomile has a special potion recipe that will permanently turn her into a girl, and she needs the help of Lavender, a reclusive witch, in order to make it. Together they go on an adventure, and maybe make friends along the way. It’s a cute little story with themes of trans identity and disability.

Rating: Half an hour’s worth of cute silly fun.

37. Passpartout: The Starving Artist

This is a neat little game about painting, and trying to support yourself in art. It’s actually kind of an interesting experience playing it as I went from painting whatever silly thing sprung into my mind to trying to discern the desires of the different potential buyers, to the point where I did start feeling like a sellout. The second painting I drew was of this big red abstract angel and everyone hated it so much that drawing representations of this angel became my most pervasive thematic motif. That, eggs and kermits.

Rating: Really neat little experience.

38. When Aster Falls *

A burnt out succubus is surprised to find her latest assigned target is asexual. This is the lesbian ace romance I wanted from Destiny Fails Us. The characters are really cute and their chemistry is great. Just a really good time.

Rating: Fun and sweet.

39. HONEYPOT *

(publicly accessible in browser version available)

Short erotic game about being stranded on a very horny alien planet. Transformation and erotic mind control themes. It can be a little difficult to discern the exact consequences of any given decision, but at the end you are given the option to select and see any of the other endings you wish.

Rating: Half an hour’s worth of kinky fun.

40. Good Morning Hon *

An extremely short and ambiguous narrative about a lesbian couple, pleasant domesticity and a feeling of something being wrong. There are horror implications but everything is very open to interpretation.

Rating: Neat but not really my genre.

41. The Looker

A free to play parody of The Witness (2016). I was a little hesitant with this one, primarily because it describes itself as “full of puzzles that will frustrate and annoy you” and i immediately got the vibe that this going to be a particularly snide game. I liked The Witness a lot. It is beautiful, it has interesting puzzles that teach you the core set of rules which the puzzles operate without ever telling you those rules outright. And it does a thing that i love where once you have learned the language of the puzzles you start seeing them everywhere. The whole world suddenly is constructed of puzzles you couldn’t see until you know how to look for them. It’s really cool.

The Looker is I think an affectionate parody. It is certainly a very well informed parody. It does very specific nods, from the yellow box that projects a beam of light to the live action cinematic ending that show that it gets its source material. It pokes fun at the pretension of the game, opting to be a much sillier even in its puzzle design. It too has some rules to learn, one primary rule and one rule that is taught in one set of puzzles and is used to unlock the final puzzle of the game. It’s a game that’s absolutely happy to just throw away the rules if it thinks it would make a puzzle funnier though and that’s consistent with its tone overall.

Rating: A good natured and enjoyable parody, with some interesting puzzle concepts of its own. Worth playing if you enjoyed The Witness.

42. Baise Lesbienne! *

A short game where you must explore your room and find the strapon harness and dildo for your Madame. Unfortunately it’s only available in french and I’m going to pretend I understand enough French naturally and didn’t painstaking type every sentence in this game into google translate. It’s very cute, with nice flirting and teasing between the characters.

Rating: Cute. Probably even better if you speak the language the game is in.

#itchio queer bundle #long post

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