Interactive novel where you’re a young woman who’s just moved out on her own, but who has horrendously abusive parents. Luckily, someone has murdered them! In your apartment. Which is kind of a pisser.
Still. You contact a detective agency to investigate the crime, because police are apparently not a thing in this world. The three detectives will bicker and stay stupid inappropriate shit and extort you for money as they try to solve the case — and recruit you into doing their work for them.
Who killed your parents?
Well, you, duh.
Yeah, fuck these fuckers
I mean, that’s not what the game says. The game … says all sorts of preposterous shit, and tries to get you to follow along. The game very seriously feels scripted by a hyper six-year-old. There was a BUNNY! An EVIL BUNNY! Who was outside your apartment! And started a fire in your kitchen! And when you ran away, THE EVIL BUNNY SHOT YOUR PARENTS! Except they weren’t really shot! Your dad was poisoned! Your mom’s pacemaker failed! BUT THEN THEY WERE SHOT ANYWAY AND NOW YOU’RE AN ORPHAN WHAAAAAAAA?!
So, what do YOU think killed them?
This game is so bizarre it actually starts to horseshoe back around to brilliant. It LOOKS fantastic, with a cool, fucked-up art style that clashes violently with the bizarre sitcom banter of the three fuckwit detectives investigating the case. You can investigate the crime scenes, which mostly involves clicking on arrows at random and learning nothing in particular.
At one point, you’ll be tasked with answering the door, finding the envelop dropped on the floor, and returning it to one of the detectives who can then read it to you. This is one of the more challenging quests in the game.
You get some dialog options, and it may not work for shit, but you gotta love this choice tree.
You cannot choose Liar, which makes Liar a Liar and OMFG I JUST BLEW MY OWN MIND
I went with “Nice” before more regularly choosing “Psychopath” in an effort to express glee at my parents’ demise. It did not seem to matter.
So, is this game, you know, good? Oh, FUCK no. It’s terrible. But there’s a kind of dim enthusiasm to its awfulness that gives it a bizarre Wiseau-esque charm. If you’d like to experience a noir mystery as filtered through the imagination of someone who doesn’t know what either of those words mean, by all means, give it a look.
What manner of brain-bending madness awaits me next?
Page 24, Game 6: Wild Woods by WildWoods
“Go on an expedition, cooperate with up to four friends and fight your way through the woods”
Ah, camping gone fucked. Sounds like like the Blair Witch OMFG MY USER NAME IS RELEVANT PLEASE LET THERE BE HIPPOS.
You and the other two players (the game specifies that it’s for three players, and I’m honestly not sure why) are kids who have been visited by a divine spirit of some sort. Who is she? What does she want? How does she change your lives?
(Spoiler: if I’m playing, it’s probably gonna be The Great Pumpkin.)
Draw cards from the four decks representing the four seasons, read the prompts, and figure it out for yourselves.
Honestly? It’s … a storytelling game, just one with a bit more setup due to the cards you have to cut out. (The game notes that you can just roll a d10 instead of creating actual physical cards, in which case the cards really ought to have been numbered.) Not much structure, and a very loose theme. If something about the theme calls to you, go for it.
What favors will this next game ask of me?
Page 11, Game 12: Broken Minds by LockedOn
“A psychological murder mystery set in 90s Japan.”
Ah, thinkin’ and killin’. Okay, I can get behind that.
Ten pages of stream-of-consciousness free verse. This is not something I would consider a “game” — seems more like a kind of … guided meditation, I guess? Feels extremely full of itself.
I’m confident that I am not the audience for this product, and there isn’t anything about it that’s enticing me into trying to pry-open my mind far enough to grok it. So let’s just move on.
Will I understand WTF is going on in this next one?
Page 30, Game 2: Our Lady by Jess Go
“A storytelling game where you play children visited by a divine spirit. Written for Folklore Jam”
Dang. I’m learning that storytelling games likely aren’t my jam. Can give it a look, at least.
In Celestial Correspondence, you are manning a desk in “Heaven.” You have to process emails — QUICKLY. If you run out of storage, you’re fucked. Some emails you need to reply to (hope you’ve been paying attention and retaining what you read elsewhere), some you can just safely delete, some you should delete without opening.
Each of those winged boxes is an email. Whoever designed this UI is NOT in Heaven.
So, it’s basically “Being At Work Overwhelmed By More Emails Than You Can Process: The Game,” mixed with a hyper-judgy training seminar that assumes you should be able to tell what is an isn’t spam just by the subject line; open the wrong messages, and your desktop gets cluttered with pop-ups you cannot get rid of.
Punishment. But I AM supposed to open that email.
Fuck up enough times, and the game ends, treating you to a “surprise” I literally predicted from the one-line game summary.
But I’m done with those emails? Dope. Pass the marshmallows.
This game captures the experience of slogging through Too Fucking Many Emails perfectly, and is exactly that much fun.
Will this next game have a definition of “fun” that’s a bit more aligned with my own?
Page 35, Game 29: A HUNDRED THOUSAND PLACES by Maria Mison
“A Solo Ritual CYOA of your own being and experiences”
Not sure a ritual of Covering My Own Ass sounds super psychologically healthy … wait, that stands for Choose Your Own Adventure? Okay, that’s a little more interesting.
You’re an AI on the cusp of sentience. Starting from your server in the basement where you manage data routing (it’s safe to say you’re a tad over-designed), you’d like to find your way to freedom!
To do that, you’re gonna have to link your data stream to the outgoing relay, which you’ll achieve via rotating tiles.
Early level, just flip some tiles around
As the game progresses, power management enters the picture. To rotate the data lines, you’ll need to turn on the power to that room. This is often a simple matter of turning on the light switch — which presents a problem, as you have no hands. Luckily, the corp’s employees recently had chips installed in their heads. So, just hijack their bodies for a moment and let them do the work for you!
Later, you only have so many generators, and some of them need to be turned on. You’ll need to pay attention to the power lines connecting the rooms. But, linking up the generators does give you some flexibility — maybe. Might be worth doing, might not.
In the meanwhile, you’ll traverse the mail servers and see the humans’ take on just WTF is happening. tl;dr: they’re very confused. This is not a research facility, you are not anybody’s top-of-the-line exciting experiment. It’s like if your water heater suddenly demanded walkies.
I enjoyed it; I played it to the end. I would say “… and I wouldn’t have bothered if I weren’t enjoying myself,” but that’s not strictly true. I’ve encountered a few games on this trawl that I more or less hate-fucked to completion. But this isn’t one of them. I got to the end, and I was glad to beat the game. Just took me a solid hour longer than I would have preferred.
This game is often very frustrating. Part of that frustration comes from the awkwardness of the framing story. It ALMOST works, but the prose is often overwrought and rambling. (At the very least, I wish an early playtester would have let the dev know that not only CAN you end sentences with punctuation that isn’t an ellipses, most of the time you actually SHOULD.) It tends to make the interstitial stuff drag. (Though the game is lucky that, as I just came off a painfully sluggish “interactive” novel, I can’t smack the pacing TOO hard.)
The fiction also paints a budding kinship between you and the rats, but that notion isn’t supported by the gameplay at all. The rats are just a background detail. If the fiction is going to hit that connection as hard as it does, I really want them to affect what I’m doing somehow. Maybe I could have been possessing them instead of the humans coming down to the basement trying to figure out what was going on? (Though that would have cheated me out of the panicked pixelated “Oh, god!” I heard every time I seized some strangers brain.)
But more frustrating is the way the game is just, well, FRUSTRATING. I normally like puzzle games that build up an interesting collection of mechanics that you need to navigate, but Bit Rat throws on TOO many layers, and then gets progressively more and more merciless about how you need to manage them. The end result is a game that stops feeling challenging and just becomes fussy.
On the final levels, you need to be METICULOUS about turning off the lights when you’re done with a room; power is TOUGH to come by, and you’re almost certainly going to need it. You also need to be very careful that you don’t leave the board in a state where you can’t grab one of your unwitting minions again. If you find you need someone you can no longer reach — and this becomes a major problem in the final level — you may need to rewind a LOT of progress to pull them back into striking range.
Often, this is as simple as turning a tile 90 degrees to the left. It’s honestly kind of infuriating to undo my most recent twenty moves so I can either turn off a light or flip a single tile.
I was particularly annoyed by the mechanism where not every room is connected to its neighbors; you have to pay CLOSE attention to the little power conduit graphics. You have to pay close attention to the graphics in general, actually. It’s hard — much harder than it should be — to tell what rooms are physically connected to each other, particularly when they’re dark. Too often, I found that the person I’d just possessed couldn’t get where I needed them to be, so I had to undo a bunch of twiddling to get to the guy I actually needed.
It’s easy to get wrapped-up in the stuff Bit Rat gets wrong. It makes a lot of small mistakes that add up to a game that’s not nearly as engaging as it should be.
But it IS engaging. The graphics look fantastic, giving a lovely retro hand-rolled pixel sprite feel. It absolutely looks like something from the 90’s where it’s set. When the gameplay isn’t getting in its own way, it’s honestly a hell of a lot of fun. I felt like a very clever lad when I got to the end of most of the more challenging levels. The story’s a bit clunky, but it works; something about an overdesigned bit of maintenance code coming to life just feels right to me somehow.
I wanted this game to be better than it actually was. But when/if I write up by Second Two Hundred games summary, I’m pretty sure this is going to be one of the games I recommend. It’s not going to be terribly HIGH on that list, mind, but it’s still a pretty decent little game.
If you’d like a retro puzzler, I can recommend it. Maybe I can’t recommend it as enthusiastically as I’d like, but I can still recommend it.
Will this next game also make me fight my way to freedom?
Page 50, Game 3: Celestial Correspondence by lina wu
“there are emails in heaven?!?”
Uh-oh. Guys, this might not actually be the Good Place….
Click-n-read “interactive” novel with lovely artwork but atrocious pacing. I’m seriously about an hour into the damn thing, and I can barely tell you what it’s about.
It’s set in a near-future Japan where there are android pop idols — the titular “AIdols.” (Though flesh-and-blood girls are somehow “idols,” too. What’s the difference between android idols and human ones? For as much as the game liked to bludgeon me with text, I’m remarkably unclear on some core concepts.) Our hero, a teen girl named Hana, is obsessed with the most popular of them, Aiko. But one day, she gets a mysterious message — Aiko is in trouble! Something’s wrong! She needs her programmer! She needs help!
After an hour — AN HOUR — of gameplay, I have finally reached the point where Hana believes that this is, in fact, actually Aiko, and she is not being trolled.
The problem is two-fold. First, this author is NOT concise, and is a huge believer in “Tell, don’t show.” No detail is too trivial to get thrown into the narrative — when the protagonist makes a post to a message board asking if anybody knows who Aiko’s programmer is, you get treated to the ENTIRE CONVERSATION, which could be summarized in a single word:
No.
Making the problem exponentially worse, however, is the author’s love of side characters. Before it can build anything resembling narrative momentum, the story just keeps larding itself up with new character after new character after new character after new character after PLEASE STOP I’M BEGGING YOU STOP I have no prayer of keeping track of any of these fuckers and are the two office jerkasses fucking each other GYAH I DO NOT CARE.
It LOOKS lovely. Seriously, someone put some legit time into the original art assets for this thing. (Though some of them are obviously canned. One “coffee shop” was clearly a bar. I would have found the effort to explain this in-universe to be endearing if it hadn’t, like everything else in this game, gone on and on and on and on.)
Yup, looks like a fangirl nest to me
But that pacing … the game is just a really slow, cluttered novel with illustrations and a soundtrack. After an hour of gameplay I think I made like five dialogue choices. I wouldn’t have minded if the story had been interesting, I suppose, but it wasn’t.
There might be an interesting story here, but the author needs to edit it with a chainsaw before it’s going to have any chance of coming out. Less really is more.
Perhaps this next game will give me the opportunity to save an android in trouble?
Page 5, Game 26: BIT RAT : Singularity by [bucket drum games]
Working on an Olde School Castlevania-esque game and need some monsters or backgrounds or doors or shit for it? Then here you go.
Everything is green, but the images are 16 x 16 pixels. If Gameboy Green isn’t doing it for you, changing-up the colors is gonna be a real simple exercise in pixel-clicking.
Looks like perfectly cromulent retro video game artwork to me. Nothing else to really say about it.
Is this next guy gonna let me play it?
Page 12, Game 25: AIdol by ebi-hime
“A fangirl helps her much-beloved idol find her missing programmer.”
You and the other players live in a Smalltown, USA. What’s going on? Strange things! Like spraying for mosquitoes! Or aliens! From outer space, or from Mexico? GM’s discretion! How much realistic rural xenophobia do you feel like wallowing in?
There are some decent (if ultra-lightweight) rules for character creation and game mechanics, but not a lot of sense of setting or place. The rules casually mention that it’s set in 1971, but these rules could be for … basically, anything. Ancient monks solving a murder mystery? Kids exploring the woods behind the school? A pack of stray dogs? Neither the mechanics nor the rulebook do much to anchor the game to any particular time or place.
The credits mention that the creator made it to show her mother-in-law a functional examples of how a TTRPG might work, and … yeah, it does kinda feel like something dashed-off quickly without a ton of actual development behind it. Like most indie mini RPGs, looks like it’ll absolutely be fun at the right table, but also like a lot of the minis I’ve encountered, making “fun” actually happen is very firmly your job.
Also, make sure you only do things you’re good at. Do something you’re bad at, and there’s a one in six chance you’ll burn your fucking house down.
Will this next game give me a firmer sense of just where in the multiverse I’m going to pretend to be?
Page 58, Game 8: DungeonGameAssetPack by SorceressGameLab
“Castlevania inspired”
Ah, for this next one, I’m going to have to pretend I’m a game developer making a game actually happen.
You’re Death. Not THE Death, but one of ’em. Your turf is Cosmopolis City. You were made for the job! Literally. Summoned for it. By this guy, Fate.
You can always trust a dude in a chair with a cat
The job’s been streamlined. No going out there and swinging a scythe or any of that exhausting nonsense; just review the files as they come across your desk, and use your best judgment. Kill, or Not Kill? It’s kinda like Tinder — but you’re gettin’ paid, not laid. Also, death.
Hope you weren’t super attached to this whole “living” thing, dude. Sweet ‘stache, though.
You boss has some opinions on who you oughta be killing. Don’t worry, bro. It’s all according to the Plan.
This is a darkly silly game that’s more thoughtful than it appears, and seriously rewards engagement. Do you embrace your role, or do you fight against it? I mean, if you just roll with it, you DO get paid, and can spend your wages in that pirate guy’s shop in the basement. And you can experience the sublime joy of official recognition at work!
Killin’ it, yo
Who lives? Who dies? Why are you the one who has to decide? What the hell is going ON here, anyway?
Figuring that shit out is what the game is all about.
It’s well-paced, and satisfies without wearing out its welcome. I honestly don’t want to say much more about it, because exploring the game is just a lot of fun.
Very cool game. Recommended.
So how many people is this next one gonna ask me to kill?
Page 42, Game 2: Our Hero Neighbors by Jamie O’Duibhir
“A game of community, collaboration, and cooperation.”
You are trapped — trapped! — in a hallucination on your way to the City of Angels. The entirety of your identity has been stripped by some unknown force, leaving you and your partner with only the barest rudiments of who you are. Why are you going to LA? What do you wish to avoid? (For me: to become a world famous juggler, and herpes, respectively. For my wife: becoming a stuntwoman, and a combination of palm trees and capitalism.)
But the album Emotion by Carly Rae Jepsen shall guide you back to your identity! Aim your magic music device at The Album, and put that shit on shuffle. The song that appears shall determine your trial, from which you shall reclaim some small piece of yourself. For instance, if you come up with LA Hallucination, you find yourself at a massive gala surrounded by cheering fans, and servants there to offer whatever your heart desires. Add to your identity something that makes you happy! For me, dancing. For Jasmine, smashing capitalism and seizing the means of production. Then, you play out the scene, taking turns asking things of the staff. Jasmine asked for a Mailbu & Pineapple. I asked the waitstaff to dance with me. The trial ended there, because Jasmine could not bear to witness my exploitation of the working class any longer — after getting another Malibu & Pineapple.
But some songs allow you to define aspects of your partner! In Black Heart, you “Add to your partner’s identity something that hurt you once.” We … weren’t sure how to interpret that. Is this something your partner DID to hurt you, or some element of your partner’s identity that you find hurtful? Me, I declared that I was hurt by Jasmine’s insistence I not make inconvenient and inappropriate demands of waitstaff. Jasmine declared she was hurt by that one time I stabbed her. From this, we determined that Jasmine is judgy, and I am inclined to stab people.
After the hallucination in which I helped Jasmine get to the front of the line at Orange Julius by chainsawing everybody in front of her, we came to the end of our journey. The spiritual voyage has ended! But what piece of that identity do you carry with you into the waking world? For Jasmine, it was her ability to sweat sunscreen. For me, my newfound love of stabbings.
So, how is the game?
I don’t know that I’d call it “good,” exactly, but given that we did indeed have fun with it, I’m not sure I’d call it “bad,” either. We obviously got very, very, very silly with it. I have a feeling that’s not QUITE how it’s meant to be played, but that’s just speculation, since the rules as written don’t give me a super clear idea of the author’s original vision. And as mentioned, some of the prompts really could stand to be tidied-up a bit to make it clearer just what they’re asking of you.
Still, at one moment, we did bring the game to a screeching halt, because while describing the sounds that were returning to our world as we drove along, Jasmine indicated we could hear the sounds of EMOTION BY CARLY RAE JEPSEN. WE ACHIEVED SPONTANEOUS JEPCEPTION. I think the experience was worth it just for that moment.
Do I recommend it? You know what? Sure. Why not. If you’re a fan of Carly Rae AND free-form storytelling RPGs, why the fuck not. It was effectively free for me, but I’m sure it’ll be dirt cheap for you. How much does it cost?
O_o
…
…
…
‘Kay.
Perhaps something else in the Carly Rae Jepcember game jam might be more to your liking.
