Nahdia's Indie Game Thread

[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.

[tn5421]

I'm very disappointed that Wolf Hall doesn't seem to be an actual improvement over the original Magical Diary.

[Nahdia]

well the art is a bit prettier i guess.

[Tatsuya Kaname]

Did you play it...twice...though?

[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.

[Saudade]

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

[Saudade]

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

[Papa Zito]

egoing, I'm a big fan of indie games

[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.

[Porochaz]

Hey can you put the genre of the game at the top? I love an indie game but I have to be in a certain mood for certain types

[Saudade]

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.

2~3 days for disco elysium , edith finch is is a 2~3 hour walking simulator =]

[Saudade]

I think you'd like both of these games to be honest but I could be wrong

[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.

[Isis]

Clapclapclapclapclapclap!!!!

[Vi]

<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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Vi]

READ <clap> YOUR <clap> PREVIOUS <clap> POST

[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.

[Vi]

Games are meant to amplify that sort of thing, so there's no need to get too upset.

The problem with a game like this (from the game's point of view) is that after you stop playing, the last thing you remember will be etc. (although tbh I've wondered if from the dev's point of view that's a problem; they already have your money)

[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