Playing games with an emphasis on story.

This is a simple game with a simple premise. You're taking over for a devil guy who decides who burns in hell and who doesn't. You then have to deal with a small parade of people, helpfully color coded, who represent the stereotypes of their particular quadrant and either condemn or spare them. If you are not familiar with the political compass, it's a essentially model of political categorization which posits that everyone's political position falls on a grid for which there are two spectra, Social liberalism-conservatism, and economic totalitarianism-liberalism. The compass itself is popular among a particular population of people who tend to be about as far right as you can get and is thus sometimes associated more with bad faith memes than it is dispassionate sociology, but imo it's ultimately something or a Rorschach test where it's sometimes more enlightening to see where people think a given position lands on the spectrum than where that given position might actually land in an objective sense.

Anyway, I digress. If you don't really like the premise of the compass itself this is going to be an annoying game because it's essentially a casual personality quiz that places you on the compass in the end. The characters, being cliches of any given quadrant, are by necessity flat and just sort of unreal. It's hard for me to even say just how even handed the game might be because, like I said, ones reaction to categorization usually has more to say about you than it does about the thing you're reacting to. What I can say is that the game largely shies away from some of the more political extremes that each quadrant is scapegoated into representing. The pedos don't show up, nor do tankies, though Authrights do get an Antisemite for their representative. And the devs literally break the fourth wall to admit that their depiction of Libright is overly sympathetic.

Like the compass, this game is not going to go very deep into politics for real and like most compass fans, is largely facetious about the whole idea and in fact feels a little afraid to take politics seriously as something that's real and not just a map of how different people can be annoying. So if you're already a fan of compass humor this is basically that. If you don't like the compass, its memes, or don't think comparing the sins hippies and Nazis is in any way productive probably skip this.

This game is a bit of a weird one. I honestly don't know if it's complete or not. The full title is Some Like it Hot: Chapter 0, suggesting that there is supposed to be more, but the story part of this game doesn't set up anything resembling a plot. The game as it is looks to be divided into two sections: A choiceless little story about the PC working their last day at a cafe before going to college, and a "Rush" mode that is just serving up orders within a time limit. The more arcade like bits are essentially the same thing as all the food service games that came before this. You move the right stuff in the right places and then serve up the order. I need to be in a very particular type of mood to enjoy those sorts of games, because otherwise they feel like "soulsucking grind sims" so I wasn't going to spend much time in the Rush mode, making fake lattes over and over. And the story is again kind of non existent. You chat with your boss and two customers about superficial  small talk like things, and then the game is over.

Ultimately I'd call this game a nothingburger. My understanding is that there are a couple games like VA-11 Hall-A and Coffee Talk that basically have the exact same premise but maybe saw their projects through to real completion, so even without having played them I'd probably suggest them over this.

This game grew on me a little. It's set in what appears to be some sort of dystopia, somewhere in the US, where it's nothing but desert and large mechs made out of flesh. The story follows four young people who come together as part of a Meatpunks group, which is not particularly explained but appears to basically be antifa with mechs. Comically evil Fash show up and act stupid and bigoted. You're obligated to play a little mech fighting mini game, and then go on the run from the cops, who are also Fash, of course.
 

Given that the twitch part of the game is straight bad, and the story without it is actually short, I don't know how I feel about doling out money for a sequel, especially since I don't know that the sequel is the end of the story either. If it were more traditional VN and I could mess with the routes a little to explore its narrative possibilities I would feel more positive about it, but since it's narratively locked off I find my curiosity has been successfully extinguished.

This is a twine game in which the author (co-opting the player) has an imaginary conversation with Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist from the early 20th century. Emma asks you what's up. You explain Amazon to her, and she goes away, deeply disappointed in your subscription box addiction. There aren't really any choices in this game. In fact, you can opt out of clicking on the words in the dialog that suggest a choice entirely and click on parts of the background half the time to progress to the next scene. The only moment where it looked like I had an option (deciding whether or not Emma would want to hear you explain "subscription boxes") I clicked no only to have the game tell me that it was going to tell me anyway. That's a pet peeve for me in choice based games. If I didn't have a choice don't give me a choice, or at least hide that fact better.

The game is very short and is basically what I just described without much more to it. Considering its subject it is probably best approached in terms of its political argument, which I wasn't particularly taken with. Basically, once you admit that you order everything from Amazon and subscribe to five subscription boxes, Emma expresses disappointment and disgust over the state of the world and goes away. My two major problems with this are - I don't buy off Amazon and don't subscribe to shit, personally, and, more importantly, I don't think that such a simple thing would cause someone like Emma Goldman to just give up on the state of things and go away. The sentiment being expressed here is one grounded in a modern sort of guilt, that our effort is futile, that the corpos have won, that it's over. This seems to not take into consideration the fact that the time in which Goldman was active was also an extremely capitalistic society, one in which suppression of activists was just as if not more brutal than it is today, and there were people who still tried to make change. Nor does it take any consideration of the fact that Goldman was considered radical in her time, and that there are radicals now who are still trying hard to make change. Whether I agree with their approach or not, I thought the aw shucks, we failed and Amazon won tone of this game to not do much justice to Goldman or to modern reformers.

It's barely a five minute game so there's no harm in giving it a go. I was kind of hoping for something a little deeper though.

Name: Baked:Magic
Status: Complete
Site: https://red-baby.itch.io/bakedmagic
Pairing: F/F
Description: A short game of witches, baked goods, and sometimes love triangles.
Controller Score: D. Gimmick elements were not optimized.


 

This is a short, largely linear game. It's about 30 minutes. You're a witch who used to be a member of the army, but now that the war is over you're a baker, and have recently picked up an apprentice who is just recently also learning the witchy arts. Your old army buddy, Jane, is a palace guard and in close with the Princess. When an event is held to give the princess's hand in marriage to the warrior who can defeat her champion, your friend comes to you asking for a potion to turn her into a man so she can compete.

This isn't a trans game or anything. There's some discussion about how Jane is at a disadvantage for being both female and an elf but it's not the focal point of the game, neither is any sort of gender bending, which without spoiling too much I'll say doesn't end up figuring into anything. Also without spoiling anything, while there are about  4 or so choices, you have limited control over the narrative. It's mostly a short love story that can be a short love triangle, if you chose certain options.

There are a couple of small additional gameplay elements around choosing ingredients in a kitchen and mixing a bowl by clicking on the targets. These were simple but only marginally functional on a controller, and didn't add all that much to the game.

Given the nice art, short playtime, and straightforward story, this is a nice, free little VN to spend a sitting on. Because there's little in the way of choice or narrative complexity, it barely squeaks out of the kinetic novel category. The art is very cute though.

Name: As long as we're together
Status: Complete
Site: https://cloverfirefly.itch.io/as-long-as-were-together
Pairing: Gen between two girls
Description: You get maybe 4 scenes, randomly chosen.
Controller Score: F (Can't skip, options have no "selected" state)

This is a tiny little game, both visually, as it's barely a quarter the size of my screen, and in length. It's also kind of vague. In the first scene a magical girl comes rushing to the rescue of another magical girl, only to find that the girl she is rescuing has been corrupted some how and is attacking her now. The game then gives you a series of opaque choices, represented as three cards with pictures on them, and the card you pick will determine the scene you get to answer each of the prompts: "You're fighting to protect someone," "Once we went to the amusement park together," and "Remember how we met." Each selection gives you a short slice of life scene. They are not connected in any way and never refer to any of the other options. In other words, the "how we met" cards are all different ways the two characters could have met. The park scene are three completely different scenarios at a park, etc. After you get your three very short scenes, these recollections break your friend out of her spell and she's all better, the end.

The art in the game is cute, and there are technically a lot of routes, though no tracking, and they are all kind of samey so I felt no desire to exhaust all possible options. While the content is sort of fluffy and calorie light it's still a cute, free game so I have no complaints.

Starlight Shores is a straight forward Bishoujo game, where you and some friends are going to a vacation house to watch a meteor shower on the beech. The party consists of you, an old childhood friend, someone she wants you to meet, and a couple that causes all the problems. There are no gimmicks or new complicated technical elements to the game, just a few scattered choices in what is generally a linear story that takes place around a bonfire as you all settle down to watch a star shower and play drinking games. The choices are sometimes straightforward about whether or not you want to lean towards the best friend or the person you just met, but some are also a little more ambiguous. I was sloppy about my choices on my first run, picking either or just based on how I felt at the moment and I still got a good end with the old friend, so it doesn't seem to be that demanding of a game.

I enjoyed my time with this, as short as it was. It's a straight forward little dating sim, with a simple premise well executed.

Name: Destiny Fails Us
Status: Complete
Site: https://sbds.itch.io/dfu-otome
Pairing: f/m, the MC is canonically aro according to the dev
Description: Otome high school game with a fucked up undercurrent.



In some ways this game is a super typical high school Otome, where you're going through each and every tedious school day between the beginning and the end date, dealing with high school bullshit over and over again. In some ways it goes a little off script, particularly in the beginning, where it gives the player an entire opening music video, and then introduces in quick succession, stalking, some kid stabbing another kid with a fork over you, a single instance of child abuse, a missing person's case, possible homelessness... and then mostly goes back to the boring every day classwork. The tonal weirdness between clicking through actual math lectures and constantly being reminded that there's some girl missing in the neighborhood so don't stay out late or you could get murdered was kind of odd, because in both of the playthroughs I hit there was no real closure on the peripheral weird stuff. In every run at the very end the MC ran into a bloody person on the road, gets a little scared, and then goes home without anyone contacting the police or anything, the end. In another throwaway scene the principal gets too handsy with people and everyone feels gross.  In another run the MC notices some shadowy figure looking up at her room window and this is never mentioned again. There's just a lot of weird serious shit that just sort of happens, and then the game moves on to mean girl stuff and going to basketball games.

Because it appears that some of the elements of the story, maybe the weird dark stuff, and the side stories that all of your girl friends are going through, get no closure and the devs have said that there were sequels planned, Destiny feels almost incomplete. But the romance tracks are all there at least. I don't know how I feel about the whole thing. On the one hand the more out there elements were what kept me interested, but since in four playthroughs none of them ever came to anything, I can't say I was very satisfied in the end.