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.

[Isis]

How well could I play Death and Taxes if I'm uncomfortable with my own mortality? I've been refusing to try Mortician's Tale for that reason.

[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.

[Ythan]

Pre-hype Cave Story is still free, still the best indie game imo.

[Nahdia]

i have never played Cave Story

[Ythan]

Hype hype hype.

[AGar]

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.

This has been added to the Wishlist.

[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.

[Isis]

I like Nahdia posts.

I think about how, a lot of simple games like what that one appears to be, it probably feels less and less overpriced the less exposed you are to games that are very similar. Whoever happens to be the creative who presents you some inherently fun thing, like <movement puzzles>, <parabolic trajectory game>, <match3>, gets the gratitude for that core fun element, and that gratitude might not be scaled very well for how much additional decoration and enhancement there was or wasn't. Kind of like a ticket to see MacBeth seems fair at 10$ for amateur actors because it has a good story in it. Am I making sense?

With steam's generous refund policy you can play a game for a few hours, after the psychological experience of paying, proportional to the cost, and make a decision about much it feels right to pay for it (well, if it feels like less but not so much less you want a full refund you're out of luck, but if you feel it's going to be a fair purchase you can keep the game and if you feel like the developer must surely deserve blessings it's probably not hard to search engine for a patreon somewhere nowadays?). So I'm optimistic people will be paying what they ought to be paying for games, on the average.

[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.

[Vi]

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.

Would it be helpful to compare it to art commissions? That's an area where people, and especially beginners, frequently underprice themselves.

[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.

[Tatsuya Kaname]

Some of the games I want to hear reviews about are OneShot (I love this) and Timelie (apparently it's a Thai game and I'm curious, looks really cool though).

[Isis]

My PC crashed while I had OneShot running and I assumed it was because it has 4th wall break stuff going on in its code, so I did not complete the game I don't have money for a new PC right now and I've heard of PCs getting degraded after crashing too many times

[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.