Nahdia's Indie Game Thread

[Nahdia]

hello i generally do not play many Big Studio games (i do sometimes still) and instead usually opt for indie titles bc i do not have a nice PC and my only console is a switch. i have thoughts and feelings on many of these games and would like to start logging them for posterity here!

if u have recommendations for free/inexpensive indie games i will also Take Them. there will be content in this thread Soon. i will probably to start retroactively highlight a few games i played awhile ago that i really wanna plug, but this will mostly be games that i am currently playing through.

games i have discussed in this thread

:

• Tacoma: a walking simulator masterclass in atmospheric storytelling. pls play it. pls.
  
• Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!: a perfectly servicable game to play while you listen to podcasts. buy the second game in the series if it's cheaper tho.
  
• Magical Diary: Wolf Hall: unremarkable but ultimately decent off-brand hogwarts dating sim. neat puzzles but bad stat mechanics. play it if u love the idea of wizard school but dont wanna support JKR.
  
• As We Know It: a bad dating sim with a setting that looks interesting, but is also bad. dont play it unless your standards for dating sims are quite low.
  
• WitchWay: a short and sweet puzzle platformer. takes an hour or two to play. not much else to say.
  
• Dogs Throwing Swords II: Three Barks to the Wind: woof woof lol
  
• Death and Taxes: it's like Papers Please but leaning more on the moral choice aspect. also like, actually fun and interesting instead of just oppressively bleak.
  
• Golf Peaks: a movement puzzle game straight out of mid-aughts flash era. except now it's $5 and you can play it on the nintendo switch, apparently.
  
• Coffee Talk: VA-11 HALL-A, but modern fantasy, and also not as good. but still fine, i guess.
  
• OneShot: a fascinating narrative exploration into the concept of video game immersion. a good example of how video games can tell excellent stories that would never be possible in any other genre.
  
• Sign of the Sojourner: an extremely clever but ultimately frustrating to the point of being unfun card game rpg.
  
• Fortune 499: one of the best games ive played in recent memory. rock paper scissors rpg. v good and funny.
  
• Neo Cab:a cyberpunk game about being an uber driver. well-executed twists on conversation based gameplay.

[Nahdia]

the first game i would like to discuss in my New Thread is Tacoma. i played it a long time ago, but i go back to it frequently. it is a masterpiece of story telling, imo.

one might call it a walking simulator. if u remember "Gone Home" that game that got a lot of buzz and caused a lot of arguments over what is and isn't a game, this is by the same people and is very much in a similar tradition. though in this case it's a much longer and, imo, more interesting story (not that I disliked Gone Home mind you).

it is expressly narrative-based game though. you can run through it very swiftly if you like absorbing none of the story and get to the end rather quickly, that's fine. so if you aren't into games that are basically just a vehicle for interesting story telling, this isn't a game for you.

in Tacoma, you're an investigator going aboard a recently abandoned space station to determine what caused its catastrophic failure which necessitated the crew's evacuation. the story takes you through a series of wings of the station, first a living/recreation space, then later residential areas, etc. there's only 7 characters in the game not including the player, so you get to know them pretty well. you learn their story through recordings: the station makes not only audio logs of everything that happens, but also positional logs. so you actually see rough holograms moving around the space of each wing as the recording plays. they have conversations, interact with objects (which often arent present anymore), and the like.
the really special thing about this mechanically is how often times you'll have one big recording with 2 or 3 different conversations happening. so you'll pick one character and follow them around, then at the end of the recording rewind and follow another character, and you'll get to see the same scene unfold from a bunch of different angles. it's really cool and also incredibly impressive from scriptwriting perspective: often times two characters wont meet up until like, 1 minute into the recording, so they need to make sure whatever they're doing BEFORE that, whether it's talking to someone else or exercising or baking a cake, is exactly 1 minute long.

i think the fine people at Fullbright are probably some of the best atmospheric storytellers in the business, largely bc of this game. by that i mean a lot of the story and the world building isnt in the things you're explicitly told but instead in the objections you find left around. there are a lot of things you learn about the characters that are never actually said, but by seeing the things they leave around you can figure out. and again, this is never vital to the game itself. you don't HAVE to learn anything, you can just waltz through the levels. the game lets you discover things at your own pace, and i really love that. it also makes it so on a replay ill often notice things i didnt catch before, or that make more sense with later context.

as with their earlier game Gone Home, Tacoma has a big twist at the end. i wont spoil it, but it's such a fucking awesome moment. i had to like, load my last save and play it through a few times just because of how goddamn cool it was. maybe some people will be able to guess it, i certainly didn't because im just not the sort to try and solve things ahead of time, but man oh man was my mind blown in all the best ways.

5/5 pls play this game. god i want Fullbright to come out with a new game.

[Nahdia]

and now a game i am actually currently playing: Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!


in stark contrast to Tacoma, this is a game with basically no story. actually, there is kind of a story i guess, but it's entirely unnecessary and the game knows that and spends an appropriate amount of time on it. it does a good job making the 3 characters in the game fun and endearing without distracting from the actual reason you're playing Cook, Serve, Delicious.

the actual reason you're playing Cook, Serve, Delicious is because you want to listen to a podcast but you never drive anymore because coronavirus and your attention span is too shitty to listen to a podcast without some other task to occupy your mind.
and it does that job well. the core mechanic behind CSD if you've never played it is basically a rapid button pushing game. people come to your food truck and place orders, and you cook their orders by pressing specific buttons particular to that food, and if you push the wrong buttons or take too long to get to all the orders, they get angry. very simple, can get quite complex though when you're dealing with foods that have dozens of potential variations like pizza or gourmet burgers or whatnot.

the only mark against CSD 3 is that it's basically the same game as CSD 2 with a couple minor innovations. this is a criticism i don't generally like because sometimes the correct move for a franchise is more of the same. but in the case of this game the only reason you play is the mechanics so like, if you're thinking about buying this game, well, you may as well buy CSD 1 or 2 instead. they'll probably be on sale for less. also it's not vegan friendly but lol i dont actually care about that tbh.

it's like, fine. i have gotten my money's worth out of it because it's my podcast game. so if you need one of those, go play it.

[Nahdia]

i also recently played Magical Diary: Wolf Hall and had thoughts on it so


idk how i

should

feel about this game. i feel like my assessment is too harsh but i dont know where i should cut it some slack? i played the original Magical Diary back in 2011 and liked it a lot, and have occasionally enjoyed Hanako Games (the dev) since. but lately her games just feel a bit... eh to me. maybe im harder to impress than i was back in the day?

Magical Diary: Wolf Hall is a visual novel dating sim set in a wizard school in Vermont (woo!). you are a first-year student and the game takes you through your first year as you learn magic, get in hijinks, and maybe kiss a cute demon boy who is probably evil. you attend classes to raise one of your five magic stats or your smartness (mana) or toughness (hp). the magic stats let u learn spells which u will use in exams which are dungeon puzzles.

and like, it's alright i guess? big appeal of the game is meant to be the narrative i think, which is also generally the game's strong suit. but it's certainly nothing special either. there is some neat intrigue and world-building that happens in a couple of the routes, but those moments are unfortunately scattered through a mishmash of having to go to class and events that happen in every playthrough that feel like filler. the characters are fun i suppose, but again, none of them are really anything special? i guess that's kind of my general thoughts on the story: none of it really stuck with me after playing. compare tacoma where i still regularly think about it and gush about the story to this day. magical diary's story is just like, whatever.

the big problem with magical diary is everything else though. the magic system looks cool at first glance, but the exams never change and there's no reward really for finding different ways of solving them. lots of spells are basically just useless or only ever have one significant use in exams. the best parts of the game are when the spells you learn actually impact the story, but these are few and far between. not to mention the game usually gives u alternative ways around these just in case u dont know the spell required to trigger that flag. the way the classes work also seriously encourages savescumming: each class you get either 0, 1, or 2 points in the magic skill (or 3 if u have the special charm for that magic type). you'll like, probably be fine never savescumming. but you're punished if you dont savescum to get the most out of your classes: and it makes it so easy too, you can save right before the roll and just load over and over until you get the max points. maybe this is a failing on me but i just wish it wasnt designed so it feels like im losing if i dont roll well on an RNG table.

idk that i'd recommend this game. it's all around unremarkable, but it's also good enough that i did play through a few of the routes. there are much better games out there tho. would only recommend if you're like, super into wizards but are trying to avoid the harry potter IP for reasons.

[Nahdia]

today i played As We Know It


dont judge a book by its cover! this game may look like an interesting take on classic dating sims by being set in an interesting post-apocalyptic setting with a diverse cast. but actually, it's very boring and trite and formulaic!

u play Ashlynn, new arrival at Camden, an underground society and safe haven in a post-apocalyptic world. u have to get a job and contribute and also date ppl. and there's like, a plot about ppl not liking the creepy mayor bc he wouldnt shelter outsiders during a big storm. never heard that one before oh wait.

this game apparently has 30 endings, but i only got to 1 and then just decided to set it down. the entire game, including the romance, felt like hastily written filler leading up to the story i assumed the writer actually wanted to tell. but then the game just fucking ended like, really damn suddenly.

bog standard dating sim. bad game. luckily this was in the itch.io racial equality bundle so i did not directly pay money for it.

[Nahdia]

i played WitchWay this morning while listening to the news and then a podcast.


it's a short and sweet puzzle platformer. you play a Witch who has fallen down a well and needs to get out by using her magic to move blocks around and rotate them. at some point the game starts to heavily feature LASERS which you must also manipulate via said blocks.

it has cute pixel art and the mechanics were simple but they got a decent amount of complexity out of them. i like how when you screw up and hurt yourself, the game rewinds just a couple seconds rather than to the beginning of the level (though you can also reset if you like). there was one instance where this resulted in me just watching myself die over and over and needed to reset, but that only happened once and the reset function worked fine. the whole game only takes like, an hour or two.

i like how the title of the game works on three levels:
1) you're a witch, finding your way through the well.
2) you need to figure out which way to move/rotate the blocks to solve the level
3) there were multiple times where i had no idea which fucking way i was supposed to go next after solving a level

good game overall. i got it in the itch.io racial justice bundle. so if u have that, u should give it a play.

[Nahdia]

Dogs Throwing Swords II: Three Barks To The Wind

i tried to play this while having a serious conversation with someone only to find it doesnt have a pause button. or any sort of menu. the escape key just completely quits.

it's a bullet hell shoot 'em up game, but with dogs.

that's the game.

[Nahdia]

so cloud9 decided to continue being Clown9 today so i spent the rest of the day playing Death and Taxes instead of watching dumb bad league of legends


another itch.io racial justice bundle game. i liked it a lot! it's like Papers Please except instead of an attention to detail puzzle game with occasional moral choices, it's a moral choice game with occasional attention to detail puzzle elements.

you play Grim (Reaper), an office worker who is given a list of people each day that are encountering near-death situations. you get their name, age, profession, a picture, and a small blurb on them. then you choose who lives and who dies in. each day you get told a number of people who need to die, as well as some additional rules based on age or profession or something to that effect. your choices not only impact the lives (or lackthereof) of the people on the dossiers, but also society at large. you need to keep things in balance by killing the right people or society could collapse!

the game is mostly narrative-driven and you can always break the rules if you want (though you might not last long). the great art, witty writing, and interesting worldbuilding bring this together with a great cohesive experience.

i could say more about the game but i think it's better to go in without too much information. suffice to say, i ended up liking the game enough to do two full playthroughs. the first time i followed the rules to a T, the second time i was a bit more... rebellious.

[Nahdia]

A Mortician's Tale is just an edutainment game about the mortician profession tbh. it was interesting and fun but yeah.

uhhh i mean the game centers very much around death, though it is a little abstracted. you decide who dies based on the little blurbs and then the next day you get like, a little newsfeed style headline about that character's death. but you never like, look at corpses or anything like that. it's (purposefully) made very clinical and businesslike.

[Nahdia]

i have never played Cave Story

[Nahdia]

Golf Peaks

this game, again, was in the racial justice bundle so i paid no money for it. not with the intent to buy this game anyway.

Golf Peaks is a movement puzzle. It sneakily uses the word "cards" in its description to make you think it's a card game and ride the hype there, but it's not. The cards only exist as a UI element. The core gameplay loop is that you have a ball and you need to get to the hole, and you have a limited amount of moves which are detailed in cards, and you can initiate movement with one of those cards in any direction. Different block types and movement styles add complexity. Blah blah. Very simple game.

I'm not talking about this game because of the actual game itself. It's a very simple, albeit finely polished and I suppose satisfying game. But this game more than any other exemplifies for me a shift in the culture & expectations of game development. Sometimes while playing an indie game I'll have the thought "huh, this feels like the kind of game I would have played on Kongregate or Armor Games or Miniclip or what have you ~15 years ago." but in most cases i find something that at least somewhat distinguishes this fine wheat from the flash game ocean's chaff.

Not Golf Peaks though. Golf Peaks is 100% unquestionably just a 2005 era flash game. The simple, cube-based copy-and-paste visuals that get a recolor every 10 levels or so. The ambient quick-loop music. Even the way levels are separated into worlds and how you navigate through them. It's seriously uncanny. It feels like I stepped back in time, and now I'm 11 again. I'm playing the latest game to rise to the top of the hot list in the puzzle category while I wait for a lobby to fill in Platform Racing 2.

The only way I would be able to tell this game was released in 2018 and not 2005 is the price tag and the platforms. This game costs $5 on PC (steam, itch.io), Nintendo Switch, & Mobile. This isn't to say that I think that's an unreasonable price tag. The early internet, in general, had a bit more difficulty with the idea that creators should be compensated for their work (this is still a problem in some areas). But the shift between these two eras is fascinating to me.

Back in my day

, these sorts of games generally were generally labors of love. A really good developer might get a publishing deal with one of the big flash sites like Armor or Kongregate in order to drive traffic to their site, but that was rare. And like youtube, you MIGHT get some cut of the ad revenue, but only if you reached a minimum payout threshold which few games did. And even then, the totals were low.

But that was fine because I don't think money was the point back then? Most of these were one-person projects, start to finish. Occasionally you'd get a separate artist, but oftentimes devs would just make do with what they could manage, or just use free assets. There's a reason I called out the copy-paste art style of Golf Peaks; that was a practical decision most devs of that era made so they could focus on the actual part of the game development they wanted to focus on. The games mostly weren't intended to be big dramatic knock-out hits. They were learning experiences for fledgling creators, many of whom would go on to find success in the industry. And we tended to judge them on that standard. That was the symbiotic relationship: devs upload their learning project games for free, and players give them attention and feedback. Obviously not a sustainable model for people wanting to make a living! But again, that wasn't the point. Money was, if anything, secondary to the value of having made a game and having actual people play it and enjoy it.

That's my core issue with Golf Peaks. It feels like a game someone made in order to learn how to create games, and then they polished it up a little afterwards. And that's fine. In fact, I think that's fantastic. But they went on to enter it into (and apparently win) some indie game contests, and now they're selling it for $5 and I'm left wondering if I'm out of touch. I know we should be compensating people for their creative labor, but in this case I'm just left scratching my head trying to figure out what I should be paying for a work that feels like a stepping stone to better things.

Golf Peaks is like, fine. I don't think it's worth $5. Certainly not in 2005, and probably not in 2020 either. But I suppose nowadays you're a fool if you give anything away for free.

[Nahdia]

Makes sense. In fairness to Afterburn Games (the developer team, and yes apparently it is a team... which shocked me) there is a decent amount of polish here. I don't feel like the polish elevates the experience in any way though.

I suppose it's reminiscent of how Angry Birds got huge in like, 2010/2011. Everyone familiar with the flash game scene was scratching their heads like "uh, this is literally just a Crush the Castle reskin?" but the rest of the world was going crazy for this new hotness.

[Nahdia]

SPEAKING OF RESKINS OF POPULAR GAMES:


(im just adding the link into the actual image now)



Coffee Talk is a game *ahem*

inspired

by VA-11 HALL-A.

It is not subtle. Instead of a bar it's a coffee shop, and instead of mixing drinks you're brewing coffee (through an extremely similar UI). Just like VA-11 HALL-A, it is mostly a narrative-based game where instead of making dialog choices, you can hit a few different branches by brewing different drinks. Just like VA-11 HALL-A, the game is mostly interested in developing characters as a way to explore the world built around your sleepy little establishment. Just like VA-11 HALL-A, there are a lot of both interpersonal dynamics between your patrons as well as larger social issues they grapple with in te world that you get to know all from behind the counter. Just like VA-11 HALL-A blah blah blah blah blah.

They even attempted to recreate the art style. It is

not subtle

.

The problem is... it's just not as good! Coffee Talk differentiates itself first by being a coffee shop instead of a bar. Which is fine but it completely loses the neat mechanic of VA-11 HALL-A where you would see different conversations if you got the characters drunk. The other big difference is where VA-11 HALL-A was a near-future dystopian cyberpunk world where you met lilim (synthetic people) and cyborgs and discussed nanomachines and corporate dominion, in Coffee Talk it's a modern fantasy where you meet orcs and kitsune and discuss racism allegories.

The whole money mechanic where you buy things and pay rent and such is scrapped, which is fine, but those little sections where Jill just chilled out in her apartment were nice breaks between the drama. In its place, you read the paper each day before starting work, including a short story section written by one of your regulars. I ended up just skimming it at some point.

It's a somewhat shorter game. The characters and narrative arcs aren't as well made, though that's personal preference I suppose. I'm more interested in sci-fi than fantasy anyway, so grain of salt I guess. And honestly, the trope of using modern fantasy to talk about racism has its own slew of problems I'm not qualified to discuss at length.

I guess to some extent I admire the devs here. They saw a game they loved, they decided they wanted to do something like that, and so they did. It's not as good, but it doesn't feel like a half-hearted attempt to cash in on a fad (there is no fad really, VA-11 HALL-A was a one of a kind game that now is two of a kind, I suppose). It has some actual heart to it.

Anyway, if you haven't yet, just play VA-11 HALL-A instead of this. Coffee Talk is an unabashed attempt to capture that same magic. While they did fail, they still succeeded in making something charming enough to make it worth a play if you're willing to give it the time.

[Nahdia]

Comparing it to art commissions did pop into my head, yeah. The difference I think is that with art commissions, you're usually paying someone for their talent and at least in part giving direction to the creative process. Like when someone commissions an artist to draw their OC or provide art for their own public projects.

[Nahdia]

I think Isis hit the nail on the head pretty well. If I'm gonna pay for a game, I want to be delighted somehow. That can be through beautiful audio &/or visuals, or through interesting narrative, or through innovative mechanics, or through challenging but rewarding content, or just purely through occupying a large amount of my time and feeling satisfying while doing it.

Golf Peaks accomplished none of those. Maybe for someone who didn't play dozens if not hundreds of movement puzzles in the halcyon days of free flash games, it might feel more worth a few bucks.

[Nahdia]

OneShot is also in the bundle. i will play it.
Timelie looks neat. adding that to my wishlist.

[Nahdia]

so i played OneShot


i had a long writeup about this but it got rambly and i got distracted and now it's gone. suffice to say, i liked OneShot! the big interesting thing they do (well, the one that isn't a spoiler) is that instead of trying to immerse you in the viewpoint of a Player Character, they make the player into a character! Very clever. It's not so much a game where the fourth wall is broken so much as the fourth wall never existed in the first place: you yourself are very explicitly part of the experience. i would have imagined it hard to pull that off without leaning into humor about the absurdity of the idea, but they manage to execute on the concept while also making a tonally very serious (if occasionally funny) game.

OneShot also represents a very successful marriage of game mechanics/concepts with narrative themes. bringing the player in as a character is clever in its own right, but combining that with a game that wants to talk about the nature of reality and what really counts as "real" on a few different levels is good, if perhaps obvious. but it's not just surface level either, the whole concept of "taming" in-universe (spoiler:

in game, it means making a robot sentient by talking to it and treating it as if it were already sentient for a long time)

acts as a metaphor for immersion in games which again is like, super clever.

on an actual gameplay level it was like, fine. there were a couple times i had to look up a guide because i had just straight up gotten lost and needed to be told which way to go to get to the place i was trying to find, but besides those hiccups, it flowed nicely.

good game, would highly recommend to anyone interested in exploring some of the ways video games can tell unique stories that aren't really possible in other mediums.

[Nahdia]

addendum to the above: there are like, so many undertale parallels in OneShot. But it looks like the games were, at least in their initial forms, developed concurrently with no overlap in the people working on them? either way they both obviously differentiate themselves and stand up tall on their own merits. but seriously, it's a bit uncanny how similar they are, particularly in the opening acts of both games.

[Nahdia]

well the art is a bit prettier i guess.

[Nahdia]

OneShot? I did! I did a Solstice run, if that's what you're hinting at. Really enjoyed it, thanks for the rec!

[Nahdia]

Sign of the Sojourner is a great example of a game i believe is bad probably but still worth playing if you got it in a bundle or something (this one is also in the racial justice bundle). It does a very very

very

good job of using mechanics to make a point. The problem is that the developers failed to juggle crafting brilliant narrative mechanics with... good game mechanics. The art is great. The writing is funny when it wants to be and touching when it needs to be. The scenarios and worldbuilding and characters are all excellent! It's just... not fun

Sign of the Sojourner is a deck-building game in which you play cards in order to facilitate conversations with people as you travel around the region as a merchant, collecting items to sell back in your struggling shop back home. It's kind of like dominoes where you have to match the symbols at the end of the other player's card to the beginning of your card (hard to explain with words but very easy to understand when you try it). If you don't have a valid match, the conversation starts souring.

After each conversation, you replace one of your cards with a new card the person you were talking to used. And in this way, you start being able to relate more and more to people further away from home. There are like, half a dozen different symbols (which represent different emotions and conversational styles), but you only start with 2 in your deck. So inevitably, you're going to start talking to some people that you simply cannot connect with unless you have some really lucky RNG. But every time you finish a conversation, you have to replace one of your cards with a card they played, so eventually you'll start collecting more of these new symbols and be able to carry conversations with these people! But then you go back and try to talk to your friends in your home town, only to find you struggle to talk to them since they can't relate to all these new symbols you're carrying around.

The experience of going home again and feeling like you don't really understand anyone anymore (and they don't understand you) is a fairly common experience, and this game does a great job capturing it. You can hold tight to your original symbols but because finding new and routes to further and further towns requires successful conversations, you'll never get far from home. You can keep absorbing the culture of the new places you find, but your old friends will find you strange and be upset with you every time you come home to rest. You can try to stick somewhere in the middle, but you'll struggle to relate to anyone that way.

Again this is like, really cool and excellent and I love it from a narrative perspective! But in practice it just ends up being... not fun to struggle like this and feel like you're failing so often. Maybe this game demands a different kind of player than me, someone willing to struggle and fail their way through a story. The game doesn't really let you savescum, but even if you could there are plenty of conversations where I was doomed from the start, either by RNG or just because there was no possible way I could succeed. The game presents so many different paths to go down, but it's hard and often you're punished by poor luck or just needing to fail over and over to collect enough symbols to move forward. There might be some people who find this fun but... I just don't.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe the developers WANTED to make me feel that frustration in order to make their point. Because that's what it feels like in real life. If that's the case, bravo. But I have to imagine they still wanted to make their game fun while also harnassing that deeply upsetting experience. Or maybe they knew from the start it would take a certain kind of person to trudge through this game. I'm not that person. Ah well.

[Nahdia]

Hello gamer have you played disco elysium or what remains of edith finch?

I haven't played Disco Elysium though I've seen the hype. TBH I'm a little intimidated by it... I tend more towards more bite-sized experiences that I can pick up and experience in a day. How long would you say one should play Disco Elysium to get the full experience? What Remains of Edith Finch I haven't played either... it rings a bell though?

Also which game out of the games you reviewed herd you'd recommend

Tacoma, Death and Taxes, OneShot

also I just played Neo Cab which I'll probably make a post on soon. would recommend that. very clever way of innovating on the narrative-based model.

[Nahdia]

i have been wanting to play disco elysium. i have a 3 day weekend coming up bc of labor day, maybe ill try to sink my teeth into it then!

[Nahdia]

Fortune-499, a deck-manipulator RPG puzzle combat game (genres are hard! especially in indie projects) it takes ~4 hours to play and you should get the full experience in a single playthrough.

i didn't expect to adore Fortune-499 as much as I did! If you bought the racial justice bundle, it's in that, and I recommend you give it a playthrough immediately! anyway...

Fortune-499 is an extremely charming and witty game that also succeeds in creating puzzle mechanics that are abstract enough to feel totally new without feeling frustrating. in the game, you play Cassie, a witch that uses her magic to see (and manipulate) the future. you are a corporate drone who helps the company she works for find small advantages here and there. but at the games' onset, monsters attack! and although you're not a fighter, you can use your powers to manipulate what your opponents are going to do act accordingly.

most of the game is about abstracting combat into rock paper scissors. except, you also draw cards in order to tell the future and manipulate the probability of what your opponent is going to draw, thus giving you a better chance to win the round. sound simple? well it gets whacky. but that's the basic idea! that they can squeeze some much complexity and interesting gameplay out of rock paper scissors is really an impressive feat. there was one part of the game i was stuck on for like, 30 minutes, but i could feel myself getting closer to the solution with each attempt and it was honestly one of the most satisfying video game victories ive had in a long time when i finally got through it.

where the game shines though is its narrative. Fortune-499 isn't necessarily a game with a big important message that'll stick with you well after playing. but does succeed in telling a compelling story about a character who puts way too much of herself into her work for not nearly enough appreciation. it has some neat storytelling tricks up its sleeve with how it incorporates the mechanics into the narrative at a few parts. the writing is really funny at times (the monster networking party gave me light undertale vibes in all the best ways), gripping at others, and ends on a wholesome note that landed really well for me.

Fortune-499 isn't like, a landmark game or anything. but it's a game that manages to get pretty much everything it tries to do right, and then wraps it all up in a neat 4-hour, single playthrough package.

[Nahdia]

Neo Cab is a....... narrative simulation game? Genres hard.

The premise of Neo Cab is that you are a cab driver in a cyberpunk era when almost all cars are self-driving. You can choose which riders you want to pick up and thus talk to. Your conversations are highly branching, think an RPG where you have your list of dialog options during conversations. There's a larger plot about a conflict with a megacorp in the game, but the real charm is in meeting the various characters, deciding who you want to give a ride three times a night.

95% of Neo Cab's gameplay is through these dialog options. And that's nothing groundbreaking, but where Neo Cab really shines is in finding a way to make these conversations engaging beyond just what's being literally said and who is saying it.

Just like today's rideshare services, your star rating is everything. After every ride, your client gives you a rating out of five stars, and if you're too low for too long, you're fired. So often times even if you want to tell off your customers like when they puke in your vehicle and claim it was there when they arrived, you just have to play nice for the sake of your stars. And sometimes your ass-kissing doesn't pay off anyway and you get hit with a low rating! This simple feature adds an interesting source of tension on top of the usual "nice option, neutral option, jerk option" dialog decisions and made roleplaying as your character a lot more engaging to me.

The other mechanic worth noting is the mood system. Early in the game you're given what amounts to a high-tech mood ring where you can see your emotions and their intensity (and so can everyone, since it's on your wrist). Basically everything that happens in the game can affect your mood, but the way you have of influencing it is your own dialog choices (and where you sleep each night, though that's a much rarer decision). Your mood can open different dialog options as well (or block them off), so pretty quickly you start viewing the game from a lens of "how is this going to affect how I'm feeling, and how will that change this conversation?"

These two mechanics are where Neo Cab sets itself apart. I'm not 100% certain, but I expect neither is entirely novel to the video game scene, but the execution and scale of the mechanics layered directly on top of the traditional dialog-based game really impressed me. If I were to give one critique, I wish they had taken the emotions thing further and motivated you to try and reach certain emotional states at certain times. They do this a bit, but a lot of the time the emotions just became background information as opposed to something at the forefront of my mind.

[Nahdia]

i played forarger for like 12 hours (it's a multitask game thankfully) and now i hate myself.

it's a hell of a time sink but once i finally mustered the will power to exit out, i realized i hadnt really enjoyed it much.
i dont think u should play it.

that is my review. thank u. please clap.

[Nahdia]

help im playing it again and i still dont like it buti cant stop!!!!!

[Nahdia]

Skinner has trapped me inside his insidious box!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Nahdia]

i had to uninstall the game. lowkey kinda frustrated how much of my three day weekend i sunk into this crap. i have an addictive personality.

[Nahdia]

i mean presumably, some people enjoy that kind of thing? people who are more disciplined and can enjoy a game in bite-sized doses. that's not me tho

[Nahdia]

anyway ill write up more thoughts on them later but over the long weekend i got xbox game pass and played:
-Tell Me Why, DONTNOD's new narrative adventure game. good, and it's interesting how far they've come since Life is Strange
-CrossCode, which at this point (I'm like... 1/3 the way through?) I'm pretty sure is gonna go down as one of my favorite games of all time.

i've been informed i am legally required to try Ori next. but if anyone has recs that are included with game pass that my laptop can run, i welcome them.

[Nahdia]

ofc ofc, different strokes for different folks. animal crossing has a lot of things which appeal to me. collecting things, a sense of achievement from purely aesthetics, etc. the nice thing about animal crossing though for me at least is that it's a game that gives you permission to put it down. forarger prides itself as being (this is a quote from their blurb in the steam store) an "idle game that you want to actively keep playing". frankly, i don't think that's a good thing. i think that's a very bad thing. it has the pacing of an idle game with the urgency of an RPG.

[Nahdia]

Basically Netflix for video games. I highly recommend it.

[Nahdia]

Despite being branded xbox it's for pc

[Nahdia]

I also played an hour of crusader kings 3 on it and remembered I why I don't like that game.

[Nahdia]

I know right? I felt a little silly not getting it sooner.

[Nahdia]

-CrossCode, which at this point (I'm like... 1/3 the way through?) I'm pretty sure is gonna go down as one of my favorite games of all time.

okay, so after spending all my evenings this week and all day today, i have finished CrossCode (what's out now anyway... apparently there is future content still planned). it is 3am, i really should just go to bed, but i have lots of thoughts about this game and i want to get them out NOW before i risk losing some of them

Okay so I'll talk briefly about the gameplay first, because most of my strong feelings are on the story. CrossCode is an isometric RPG with a simple but deep and satisfying real-time combat system and a heavy focus on puzzles. Lots and lots of puzzles. Sometimes puzzles that, when you enter a room, make you want to just close the game. Or look up a tutorial on Youtube... not that I would ever do that .

honestly, the gameplay is a big part of what impressed me and kept me playing this game. i rarely sink my teeth into a game this large (i clocked ~40 hours at completion, including a healthy amount of sidequests and grinding for good loot before i battled the final boss). i've had a bit of a falling out with RPGs in general because i find they just ask more investment than i'm willing to give, but CrossCode certainly earned my engagement via its mechanics in addition to its story... with an asterisk on both of those areas. the game does occasionally stumble when introducing a new enemy or puzzle element and failing to explain how to interact with it in a non-obvious way. but for the most part, mechanics are CrossCode's strong point. which makes it all the more surprising to me that I invested so much time into this game and left feeling satisfied. usually what keeps me invested in a game is its story, and excellent mechanics are just a nice bonus. but in this case... well, it's complicated.

i'll just say right off the bat that i did overall like the story of CrossCode. I loved the setting, but this was kind of a gimmie. CrossCode is set in a fictional MMORPG (which is itself located on an in-universe real far off planet and uses "instant matter" to create enemies and puzzles). My first MMORPG was World of Warcraft, when I was

eleven

, and I played it basically every second I could when I wasn't at school or when my brother wasn't having his turn on the communal computer. So I am deeply nostalgic for MMORPGs, not as a genre of video game itself, but for the setting and the social interactions that come from that. this is also why I unironically enjoyed Sword Art Online... I know, I know. So CrossCode had a pretty hefty bonus right out of the gate.

The main cast was also strong! Main character Lea is a mostly silent protagonist (there are in-game reasons for this) with a surprising amount of character. The deuteragonist Sergey Asimov (a bit on the nose there but alright) is a bit flat, but still a perfectly likable character with consistent motivations and the like. The rest of the core cast are all varying degrees of charming. Emilia, the third most prominent character in the game, is a great character imo. Her relationship with Lea is one half of the emotional core of the game, and it mostly works if being a bit saccharine. Her lines are also far and away the funniest in the game.

The larger supporting cast on the other hand is... fine at best. And the antaognists/villains feel like they were written by Marvel. Which is to say they're super generic guys doing evil things because... business? Or whatever? The main antagonist narratively is never even a major threat in the actual gameplay. Instead, the real big-bad who you do face down at the end of the game, has his duties as final-boss taken by... someone else.

And the core plot is also a success and generally well-executed on... for the first 95% of the game anyway. Then the ending comes. I'll discuss the ending in a moment. Suffice to say, the call to action, the big mid-story twist, the actual events driving the story forward? All good.

Okay, but the ending though. And uh, spoiler warning obviously. I won't ruin the best reveals (there's only one major twist, and it comes less than half-way through the game).

Trigger Warning:

suicide

The ending of CrossCode is bad for two reasons. The first reason is that the two major villains, Gautham and Sidwell, have really... weird endings that just don't work or satisfy. Gautham has been a strange character throughout, to the point where even the other characters react with confusion to his actions in-game. But he is complicit and even a participant in the big bad (Sidwell)'s morally awful acts, so he's certainly a villain. We only know bits and pieces of his character through fuzzy flashback memories and stuff we learn from Sergey, who loosely knew him years ago. So like, in essence, he's never fleshed out until the very end. In the very last levels of the game we finally learn about his motivations: Gautham is obsessed with the pure creative process and wants a player worthy to interact with the levels he's created. He stops Sidwell from thwarting the heroes' plan just to get you to do his puzzles and fight his big boss at the end. Which is... weird, but whatever.

But then something wild happens. Gautham, the REAL PERSON (not the player character in the game) shows up. And jumps to his death. It's played as this huge emotional moment and I could tell I was supposed to be sad but really I was just shocked and confused. Sergey explains that Gautham must have been consumed the burden of the terrible things he's done, but the way it's stated seems to be an effort to absolve him which just... didn't work for me. Ultimately the character was kind of inscrutable from beginning to end. He needed a lot more clear development. SPEAKING OF NEEDING MORE DEVELOPMENT...

Sidwell, the actual big bad... less "strange" and more "literally who?" Again you see and hear bits and pieces about him. But overall he's just a nothing character. which makes the confrontation at the end that much less satisfying. I enjoyed seeing Lea clock him in the face and Sergey yell at him, but it wasn't this huge satisfying moment of the villain finally being defeated. It was more the cheap satisfaction of watching a Nazi get punched. Because I felt nothing for this man. Which made it all the more weird when, in his very last lines, the game suggests that there's a weird Father/Daughter dynamic between him and Lea which............

WHAT?!

.

This is CrossCode's core failing more than anything. It is a story with no coherent message. And yeah, maybe games don't always have to say something, but there are moments like this where it feels like it's TRYING to say something. Gautham's death is another of these big emotional moments, but it just doesn't work. Lea's grappling with her identity and her friendship with Emilia are all well and good, but the game's narrative is absent of actual themes besides like... friendship I guess? But even then it doesn't totally stick the landing. One of Lea's closest friends, C'tron, is just not present at all for the final act. There are multiple moments in this act where Lea has heartfelt conversations with her friends (including a couple she barely ever interacted with... but okay) and there are tearful goodbyes in the last scene... but C'tron just isn't there! He announced a couple of days earlier he was taking a break from the game for "personal reasons" and that was it! Maybe it's realistic, but it's also bad writing. If the writers were trying to make a point about the fickleness of online relationships or something, examine that further! There is one conspiracy theory explanation for C'tron's disappearance which technically makes sense, but it's not a satisfying idea so much as fridge logic bait.

It's now past 4am and I've written way too much. Ultimately, CrossCode's writing is fun at times but deeply flawed. Still, a mixture of nostalgia and great mechanics will indeed make this game go down as one of my favorites.

[Nahdia]

if you that whole thing, you are the sort of person i often wish i was.

ill finish Tell Me Why tomorow, probably.

[Nahdia]

does this game even really count as Indie? i guess im using the term in a fairly loose way to just mean "not massive budget AAA experience" which is maybe wrong but meh

Tell Me Why is DONTNOD's latest narrative... "adventure" game (I'll explain those quotes in due time). Since their first game, DONTNOD has had the same problem many creators of breakout hits; people keep comparing their new stuff to the thing that originally put them on the map (Life is Strange). I'll go ahead and get that out of the way here, with the caveat that I'm in the minority that thinks Life is Strange is... not that good, actually. But suffice it to say, Tell Me Why is better than Life is Strange. There, that's out of the way. Now I don't have to juxtapose the two games anymore... except I'm still gonna. Tell Me Why

is

better on the whole, but it's also really different from Life is Strange. And it's the ways the two games, separated by half a decade, differ from one another that interests me.

But first I have to make a tangent to talk about a different game.

Gone Home and Life is Strange are similar not only in content and mechanics (albeit on a different scale, certainly), but also in that both games were breakout hits (again, different scales) by studios previously unknown. For anyone who wasn't involved in the, er,

gamer discourse

in the halcyon days of 2013, Gone Home was a controversial game because people raised a fuss over whether it really is a game at all (it is). People said it wasn't a game because it was just about walking around and picking stuff up and listening to audio files. People said it wasn't a game because you never really interact with and change the game world so much as witness it as you explore. But the most prevalent and least helpful argument was that it wasn't a game because Gone Home wasn't fun. I'm not going to take the time to dismantle all those arguments. There are responses if you care to find them.

To an outside observer, it might have been surprising just how passionate the discourse around this seemingly niche topic was. And certainly there were many people who really did feel strongly about the debate over what makes a game a game! But in actuality, the debate around Gone Home was actually just like the game itself in that it was wasn't really about what it seemed like on the surface. From its store page blurb to its banner and art style, Gone Home is made to

look

like a mystery game, potentially even with horror elements. And the beginning of the game plays this straight: you show up at your home finding it totally abandoned in the middle of a spooky lightning with no indication of where anyone has disappeared to, and you need to figure out what has happened to your family by exploring.

But Gone Home isn't

really

a spooky story about finding your missing family. And the debate around the game wasn't

really

about what makes a game a game. Gone Home is a queer love story, specifically a love story between two teenage girls. And the debate was really sourced from anger that people got "tricked" into playing a game that peddled "SJW ideology". Some people gave these takes outright, but most would intersperse the "stop putting gay shit in muh vidya games" within the more acceptable, legitimate discussion people were having about whether Gone Home was really a game. It's not a coincidence that Gamergate began barely a year after Gone Home's release. The Gone Home debate was proof of concept for tactics that hate groups and individuals used to frankly unsettling effectiveness in that whole upsetting saga.

Another year passes, and along comes....

Like Gone Home, Life is Strange much more concerned with the story its telling than gameplay. Like Gone Home, it doesn't fully show its hand at the start with regard to it being a young adult lesbian love story. Life is Strange was... well, I already said earlier that I think it's not great. I could write at length about my thoughts on the game, but the gist is that I think it was overhyped and its fandom got wildly bloated because of a counter backlash against the anti-SJW atmosphere of Gamergate which was still fresh in the memories of many gamers. Basically, Life is Strange was in the right place at the right time. But in fairness to the game, it came out in five episodes over the course of an entire year and the fandom inertia started before it was known it was gonna Get Gay (though there were subtle indications from the start. And like, a loooooot of shipping.) And a big part of the reason they collected that inertia is because UNLIKE Gone Home, Life is Strange was... wait for it... fun!

Unlike Gone Home, Life is Strange isn't just an environmental exploration (less charitably: walking simulator) game, it's an adventure game! And it has time travel which you can use in all sorts of fun ways! Want to impress some cool scatter bros but don't know the lingo? Just keep rewinding until you learn the right things to say! Want to see the consequences of a big important choice? Pick one and then rewind time and pick the other! Want to save that nice girl from getting splashed by an oncoming truck hitting a puddle? It's rewind time! The tone of the game goes back and forth between silly antics and intense melodrama, but for all the stuff I felt didn't work or just weren't good about the game, Life is Strange at least tried lots of things to make the player feel like they were playing a game beyond the dialog wheel.

Remember when this post was about Tell Me Why? Well it was, and now it is again. The evolution of DONTNOD's development philosophy between Life is Strange and Tell Me Why is fascinating given all this history. Maybe it's just that they really wanted to differentiate themselves from their original work. Maybe it's that they didn't know how to do what they did with Life is Strange with Tell Me Why's subject matter. But whatever the case, the most striking thing about Tell Me Why is that... the fun is gone. There are still supernatural elements; that much has become a staple of DONTNOD's work. But save for a brief sequence or two, there is no joy in this game.

Life is Strange got

awkward

around when developing its relationships and discussing its themes. Tell Me Why is excellently written but just... so heavy and heartbreaking. The drama here is more intense and present from the very start. The cutscenes are longer and more cinematic. The puzzles and quicktime gameplay sections are more simplified and more sparse so you can keep getting to more of the actual story. The adventure game elements of finding items and using them is still technically present but feels more like a series of fetchquests. It is not a fun game. But what was true in 2013 is true now: games don't

need

to be fun anymore than movies need to be comedic or art needs to be realistic. Games that focus on mechanics probably should be fun, but narrative games can strive to make you feel all kinds of things... and boy does Tell Me Why do that.

It's striking to me that the studio that got itself on the map by making a queer romance that was also a fun game has now eschewed the fun for a more cinematic, dramatic experience. Tell Me Why would probably have still been judged more of a game by the proto-gamergate anti-Gone Home mob of 2013, but it's arguably on thin ice by their standards (and there are still queer characters and themes, so they'd find some reason to hate it anyway).

[Nahdia]

oh jeeze i just got that.

[Nahdia]

looking back my CrossCode rant is a bit 3AM incoherent so i wanna clarify where i think the game falls flat:

When a game (or a story of any medium) sticks with you, it's usually not just a function if its plot or setting or characters, but the

themes

it hit you with and how it made you think about those themes via a thesis.

Themes are the broad stroke elements woven throughout a story, oftentimes in more than one form, and the thesis is how the author asks you to grapple with these themes. Sometimes this is in the form of just a question, but frequently it's both a question and an answer. Take Undertale. Pretty much anyone who played and seriously engaged with that game can tell you the themes and likely the thesis as well. Undertale is a game about morality in a situation where there are no consequences, at least not permanent ones. And uh, vague spoilers for Undertale I guess, but its thesis is that yes, morality still matters in these cases because a) you still have to live with the weigh of your own actions and b) sometimes there

are

permanent consequences that you don't foresee.

Now, putting aside the whole discussion about all media being inherently political, a game does not NEED to have themes or thesis even if it has a story. Sometimes they accidentally end up with one anyway (looking at you, Call of Duty: War is Good and Super Cool Actually), and sometimes the themes of media are more subtle or light, and don't need to be engaged with to actually enjoy the media.

CrossCode's problem is that there are moments where this game very much feels like it thinks it has themes and/or a thesis... but it doesn't. Not to any successful extent, anyway. Big moments like Gautham jumping to his death or Lea sucker-punching the big bad and then his subsequent... weird ass response... feel like they were supposed to be emotional climaxes that brought lots of elements of the story together... but they weren't and they didn't. They just felt out of place. I'm not saying these moments SHOULDN'T have happened. They could have been made to work, but they just didn't. If I had to guess, I would say the writers of this game made the unfortunate mistake that even veteran writers do of forgetting how much of a character is actually in the official text and how much exists in your head or on peripheral notes. Gautham's suicide felt out of nowhere and the emotional reaction was only as powerful as our empathy for Sergey, a character we DO know and love, being sad at the death of his friend. But for the writers who created Gautham, who probably know him better than even the most dedicated fan ever could, it may well have been a really powerful moment on its own. But... we can't read the minds of the authors. This is why it's really important not just to have people beta read your work, but to have people with no prior involvement whatsoever in your project read it.

Okay, but I have neglected to mention that CrossCode does in fact have on theme! And that is... wait for it... friendship. At least, I think? Whereas the big moments in the final scene really didn't work, there are some effective, if a bit saccharine, midpoint moments where the friendship between Lea and Emilia is tested. And this is another point where this maybe worked better for me than most because of my immense nostalgia for the social community of my medium population classic World of Warcraft server circa 2005. I

adore

the idea of a story that explores the kinds of relationships that form in these games. We seriously need more of them that aren't Ready Player One because that book was a fucking dumpster fire. CrossCode... kind of does this. Sometimes. The problem is, if this is its core theme (and there are a couple points like Sergey's ending dialog that suggest it is) well... there's still no thesis, and the game seriously fails to incorporate friendship as a theme in all but the most surface ways.

This is best exemplified by one thread of the plot that starts in the middle climax and is resolved right before the last dungeon of the game. Light spoilers, but o keep it simple, Lea (that's you) is captured at one point in the game and tries to escape with her friend who is also captured. But ultimately that friend must be left behind in order for Lea to escape, so a big part of the final chapter where you storm the evil base is rescuing this friend. And you do that but... there's no payoff. There's no heartfelt reunion. You just get him and he's safe and you never interact with him again. Maybe it'll be in the postgame DLC when it finally comes out? There's also the fact that your band of friends literally waits at the bottom of the tower which is the last dungeon while you go and save the day. There's in-universe reasons for this but... yeah, it feels pretty bad if you've been hyped up on this friendship theme. They could have found a way to work around this plot barrier, but instead they just drop the whole thread and you finish the game alone, with none of your precious friends... woo.

Was Gautham's death supposed to tie into this friendship theme? Maybe, Sergey is briefly distraught at the loss of his friend... but it's not really expounded upon and it really isn't like, a satisfying conclusion if that was the intent. The weird shit with Sidwell certainly isn't related as far as I can see. The final pre-credits scene of CrossCode is Lea saying a heartfelt goodbye to all her friends (except the one who had to disappear for no satisfactory stated reason... that's still a thing) but it feels more like a curtain call than an actual message.

Again, it's okay to not have a message, particularly in games. Games often can stand up on the merits of their mechanics. CrossCode certainly could have, and does! But CrossCode seems to think its saying more than it does, and that makes the ending that much more of a let-down, thinking of what could have been.

[Nahdia]

Can I say both? I think those weird moments at the end could have worked but... it would have been quite difficult with the way the game was set up. Gautham at least does get some development in the final dungeon before his sudden death. Though it is delivered in a somewhat hamfisted way and it makes him end up looking like a fucking lunatic, so that the game then tells you to feel bad for him and that he's a tragic villain is... odd. Sidwell on the other hand really needed more development somewhere along the line but again his final scene just... I don't see how you could make that make sense unless you add another chapter or something, I dunno.

[Nahdia]

Yes! I love and all of Supergiant's games. Doing a replay through Pyre rn. Also Hades just had its official release and I never got it on early axes so I probably will pick that up soon.

[Nahdia]

lolphone posting

[Nahdia]

this weekend while in exile, i played Hades and the new Highway Blossoms DLC. The latter (it's another visual novel) I have clever thoughts on I will write about at some point.

Hades I don't really think I have anything special to add to the wider conversation going on. It's an

extremely

good game, very likely a top contender for GOTY 2020. Supergiant has never made a game that isn't very good (their other works are Bastion, Transition, and Pyre), but while I loved their previous works, this is undoubtedly their crowning achievement. There are plenty of gameplay videos out there so I won't go at length to try to explain that aspect, but I will say ever if you haven't been a fan of roguelites in the past, try Hades anyway. It's one of those games that I think transcends the usually boundaries of a genre's audience by how much of a joy it is to play. Not to mention any lover of games can appreciate the incredible craftsmanship that went into this game, even moreso than Supergiant's previous titles. It's both the little details and the broad strokes that make this game so great. Also, you can pet a dog!!!

Seriously, go play Hades. I've been playng it on my Switch, but it's also on Steam!

[Nahdia]

I'll go ahead and recommend Terra Nil. It's a small freeware game expanding on a Ludum Dare entry, that I really loved and would enjoy seeing more people's thoughts on.

gave it a quick try. may play some more tomorrow. my initial impression though is that it's very zen...i like that they have a mode where you can just turn the score off, because i feel like it's not the game where I would really want to be worrying about the maximizing my score aspect and more just want to enjoy my greening up everything.

[Nahdia]

Actually huh it's almost October, wow. GOTY season is coming up.

In the Conversation: (* indicates a game I haven't played)

Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Crusader Kings III?
Death Stranding*
Final Fantasy 7: Remake*
Ghost of Tsushima*
Hades
Half-Life: Alyx*
The Last of Us Part II*
Ori and the Will of the Wisp* (but I plan to play it soonish)
Persona 5 Royal*
Resident Evil 3*
Spelunky 2
Valorant

haven't come out yet come out yet but the rest of the year in releases has:
the new Watchdogs game, Cyberpunk 2077, a new Assassins Creed

my own pick would be between Animal Crossing and Hades. I have hard recency bias rn so I'd have to get some distance before I confidantly choose between them, but dang is Hades good.

My guess for the most prevelent industry pick is The Last of Us Part II or maybe Cyberpunk 2077 depending on how its release goes. Some publications will also throw Animal Crossing: New Leaf in there for its cultural impact in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

[Nahdia]

happy christmas i'm bumping this thread today:



Murder by Numbers is half visual novel (on the slightly more interactive side of things), half picross. Both of these halves are well made and are supported by loving crafted visual and music. There's even a really impressive animated intro sequence! And yet I struggle with whether I would recommend this game to anyone. The reviews are mostly positive so maybe the issue I take with it is a

me

thing.

As I said, the individual elements of this game are good. The best way I can sum up the game is that it's all the investigation portions of an Ace Attorney game, but instead of just clicking on stuff to find it, you need to solve a picross puzzle too. Fun! And really, the writers do deserve a lot of credit here. I'm not done yet though the mysteries I've solved have been a bit simpler than an Ace Attorney game (to be fair, there's no equivalent to the trials so they really only have half the space to deliver). That said, the flow and pacing of the writing is nice. The characters are charming. And there's a great balance of humor, mystery, and tension throughout. And the picross element... well, you'd have to try to mess that up, really. It's a perfectly serviceable picross game.

Here's the problem though. These two halves really don't fit together. And that's not for lack of trying! It's not like they just slapped two separate games on top of each other. The developers clearly did put some thought into how they could make picross part of the narrative and how they could make the narrative lend itself to... well, more picross puzzles. But despite that it just doesn't work. And I hate to say it, but the problem is actually at the very base level. The very core conceit of this game is, for me at least, fundamentally an unworkable one. Combining a detailed visual novel and a puzzle game that isn't really related to that narrative (I mean, the pictures you draw are of usually of clues... but if you've ever played picross, you know the pictures tend to be a bit of a stretch) just does not work.

It would be one thing if the visual novel aspects were like, waaaaaaaay toned down. And I

like

visual novels. Heck, I like

this

visual novel. But constantly having to go back and forth between having to be thinking about the mystery ("okay, where am I going to look for clues now? what evidence should I present here to get my next lead?") and having to play picross is jarring no matter how much they try to mesh them together. I also like picross, but both visual novels and picross are things I have to be in the mood for. And this game demonstrates to me that it is decidedly not the same mood. I tend to like putting on a podcast or something while I play picross, but I can't do that, because as soon as I finish the puzzle I'm now straight back to reading. It's like having a pint of Ben & Jerry's and a bowl of spaghetti aglio e olio, and having to alternate between a spoonful of the ice cream and a bite of the pasta. Both are good, and it's not like you're making them gross by mixing them together in the same dish, but consuming them at the same sitting is unpleasant.

The reviews are favorable, so I guess not everyone has this problem. But it really is too bad because I can see this game was crafting with a lot of love and it is a really polished final indie product. And for a very fair price too; it's on sale on both PC and Switch right now! But as it stands... I'm not sure I'm gonna finish Murder by Numbers. Part of me wants to struggle through it to see what happens in the game since I have started to get attached to these characters. But I just find myself disengaging so rapidly.

[Nahdia]

i'd stop short of calling it lazy because it's obvious they put a looot of work into this game. it just doesn't work despite all that work