Playing games with an emphasis on story.

I would warn for spoilers in this review but the spoiler is in the title, so I'm not going to bother.

Changeling is an otome game where the MCs is a changeling who doesn't know she's a changeling. She moves with her family back to her old hometown to be closer to an ailing grandfather, and on her second day back at school gets pushed into a magic clubhouse and told she's a "cryptic". It turns out that a large portion of the population in the little town where she grew up are also "cryptics," or supernatural beings of one sort of another. Most are either werewolves, vampires, fae or some sort of wizard/witch. Although the MC's friend immediately realizes that MC is a cryptic of some sort, exactly what sort of cryptic she is is uncertain to the characters through most of the game. The plot mostly revolves around the MC trying and failing to get a clue about herself, while also getting involved to various degrees with the story of the LI you've chosen to pursue.


 

I'm not really sure what to think about Changeling in the end. I sort of didn't have all that much fun with it, but it's also not significantly flawed outside of the tedium. I think if you want a long play where you can date guys and kind of like the supernatural but more as sprinkles on an otherwise mundane story this could actually be a game that goes down pretty well.

This is the third otome game I've played in the BLM bundle and I'm starting to see a trend. I go in, mildly apprehensive but willing to give the game a shot. Almost immediately a series of small moments is enough to squick me out and I think, ugh, ok, let's just get through this. Then, after playing for a little while those bad impressions tend to fall away, and the game becomes a little more interesting. Seduce Me fit that script closely, but it went a little further and I found myself actually enjoying my time with it once things got going, enough so that I started working towards completion without feeling obligated to do so. And the game is relatively large when you do this, so it's taken me some time to complete and move on from it. I'd say it's one of the largest games that I've played so far, with maybe Dry Drowning and Arcade Spirits beating it.

I'm not a huge fan of media that tries to say something but doesn't get much further than "X bad" The game has only got five minutes so it can't get much further than that. It also fails to hit the tension that Inglorious Basterds did with its longer, more drawn out scene. But hey, it's free and without bugs, so there's not much risk in giving it a quick run through.

Name: Order a Pizza
Status: Complete
Site: rocketadrift.itch.io/order-a-pizza
Pairing: M/F
Description: Groundhog day but the Pizza is fatal.


 

A linear psychological game in which you are a divorced father trying to order pizza for dinner. With your annoyed daughter on one side of you and your concerned girlfriend on the other, you must order the perfect pizza to create the perfect circumstances for them to get to know each other.

The game sets you up for failure immediately, and after your first fuck up you find yourself in a groundhog's day scenario where it is time to try again, and again, and again, until things start getting surreal. There are minor jump scares in this game, which makes it more of a horror game than most ostensibly horror games in the BLM bundle, but the ending is a hopeful one.

Gameplay involves chatting with the npcs, then poking around the room a little to find clues as to what should make the best pizza, or later what the fuck the problem is. There is no choice "choice" in the game. The correct pizza order is always obvious, and you need to either not be paying any attention or actively sabotaging the game to see what happens to get it wrong. There is also no skip feature and no option to save, so even though each round has a pass or fail scenario, looking for all the fail scenarios was tedious and I didn't bother after doing just one of them. There's also a single round where the ordering system changed from having you choose which ingredients you want, to having you choose which ones you don't want. This led to a fail state I intended to avoid. But other than that the game was straightforward and simple, with a similarly straightforward message. Show the people in your life a little real attention, communicate, and appreciate them. And don't use pizza as a way to dodge actual emotional maturity.

This was an short game, but it was well done and was heartfelt, so if you if you want to see a minor fuckup of a guy figuring things out by having a psychotic break over pizza this is your game.

This is a cute, meandering game that feels like it falls just short of being professional and polished. The story is a bit of an odd one. You're the manifestation of a nightmare going on a nice little vacation to Kumo City, which is described as a weird overlap of realities but is basically a fusion of Tokyo and Taipei. While there you do some tourist things, meet a collection of colorful characters, and finally run into the person who manifested you into the world through their nightmares. The very first scene of the game suggests that this might be some sort of horror, or involve a somewhat darker theme, as you terrorize some small kid as a nightmare, but the tone immediately shifts after that scene and the rest of the game is a cutsey, light romp full of shenanigans and politeness set in a psychedelic world that is full of strange creatures that come from other dimensions. It drops the nightmare theme quick. There are lines after involving some dreaming, but the bulk of the game has nothing to do with nightmares, other than the fact that you were born from one.

There are no diverging paths, and the little side scenes with each character are pretty short, as is the game overall. It took me about 2 hours to complete I think, though I got distracted at some point in between and my records aren't perfect. While A Nightmare's Trip has a few flaws, it's nowhere near the worst I've played, and makes for a conflictless, straightforward, feel-good game.

Name: Roll + Heart
Status: Complete
Site: https://owl-sanctuary-studios.itch.io/rollplusheart
Pairing: Any/M Any/F
Description: Meet some LIs around the DnD table



Roll + Heart is another game about playing tabletop while also dating your fellow players (or GM). It's longer and more involved than Dungeons and Lesbians, the other tabletop VN that I've played in the BLM bundle, with longer and more numerous scenes, a combat system, and a few mini games.

If you strip down all the extra mini games and simple combat system, what you reveal is a basic VN with poor pathing, that fails to make references to choices from scene to scene. Even though I liked the characters in this game, I can't say the story is well done because there are just too many errors in the scripting. If the fundamental question of what did or didn't happen in a certain run is something a game can't keep track of, I don't think I can call it a good game.

That said, I did play Roll+Heart through three times because I actually did want to romance some of the LIs, which is more than I can say for many VNs. Even though it's fucked up by the coding, the pacing of the game doesn't drag, and the LIs have fun personalities and are nice to get to know. It's a shame that the execution of everything is so sloppy. I'm not a Renpy evangelist, but games like this make me wish people would just use something that works and leave the gimmicks alone if they can't execute well.

This is a murder mystery VN where you're both the victim and the person tasked with solving the case. The main character is an expletive spitting Japanese school girl named Akagi Ai. After an unremarkable day at school she's stabbed in the back on her way home, and wakes up again at the top of the day. From then on she repeats her day over and over again, trying to figure out why she keeps dying, and why she keeps coming back to life.

The writing in the game is hyper otaku. It's set firmly in Japan with a strong American sense of humor and mindset, but it goes so hard on it I came to appreciate the dedication to the aesthetic. There are maybe a couple of moments, particularly in the end, where the transitions between scenes are not quite solid, but otherwise I found this to be a fun, relatively short little puzzle with a bunch of fun over the top supernatural themes.. It's a shame Malices doesn't have more polish, because mechanically it was fun to figure out. At a mere 1 dollar, I actually think this game is worth a buy, regardless of how it looks.

When you finish one run of Novinews a new NPC is unlocked that you will meet in subsequent runs, and you get a new game plus mode where the fact that you are playing again is referenced in meta fashion, which I'm tired of at this point. The fact that a new game will play differently is probably good for people who enjoyed this more than I did. I felt like the outcomes of my decisions made some sense and were interesting enough, but even the sequel doesn't quite manage to make me actually care about what's going on, and without that investment the game was interesting but not engaging. If you like these sorts of quick choice games with some wild and drastically different endings the sequel is solid enough. I would skip the first game though.

Football Drama is combo of a Football (soccer) simulator where you have to manage stats and direct play by play in a series of games, and a choice-based dialog game where as the general manager you have to deal with players, the press, and ownership. The two sides of the game interact with each other, but the majority of my time was spent playing a weird little soccer sim simply because the games are very long and the dialog moments are extremely short.


 

My main problem with this game is I can't tell if it's of any interest to someone who likes a lot of number crunching, because I couldn't determine if those numbers had any serious effect, and I can't say that it is worth it for anyone interested in any of the VN elements because they require such a long break in between. The simulated soccer game is at least mildly interesting, but a few hours in it didn't show any actual depth, so it lost me.