Playing games with an emphasis on story.

This game is about a young lady who is looking for direction in life. She is a big fan of yuri manga and an aspiring artist in her own right, but she doesn't think she can really jump into the industry until she literally runs into another women who sees her art, loves it, and offers to giver her a job at her studio. Once the MC is there your choices are basically picking who among the rest of the staff to have a conversation with during the break. You can speak to the writer, who speaks in non-sequitors and seems to have her head somewhere on another planet, the secondary artist, who dresses a little like she's five years old even though she's older than the protagonist and is not doing a great job at making sexy art because she wants to draw magical girl stuff, and the owner, who is trying to get the studio off the ground and sort of deflects about her own sexuality by talking about how her bigwig father is letting her have this project but doesn't think she can do it.

I don't know if I should recommend this game or not. The gameplay is just short of being Kinetic and the routes are ok but nothing special, but if you're looking for explicit f/f that doesn't seem tailored to the male gaze, maybe it's worth a look.
 

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.

The tl;dr of this one is: The story was alright. Maybe a bit disjointed and linear at times but it was interesting. There's more filler than I would prefer but skipping was easy. The characters were interesting and I liked the LI in the route I took, but I wasn't really feeling it overall.

Name: AIdol
Status: Complete
Site: https://ebihime.itch.io/aidol
Pairing: Gen with m/m and m/f side pairings
Description: A scattered plot largely about an AI Idol



AIdol is an odd little game with a main plot that feels relatively straight forward. The MC, Hana, is a high schooler so shy she is basically a shut in. She is obsessed with an AI idol named Aiko, and by chance is contacted by Aiko on a fan board. Aiko is dealing with some glitches, has lost her memory of her primary programmer, and is now desperately seeking him out. She enlists Hana's help for this, and the rest of the game is Hana trying to figure out what to do about the problem.

Name: Pyre
Status: Complete
Site: https://supergiant-games.itch.io/pyre
Pairing: Gen-ish, possible M/F
Description: Cry over fantasy basketball.
 

Of all the games in the BLM Visual Novel category, Pyre is hands down the most prestigious. It's a game that the general gaming public is aware of, thanks to the strong track record of its developer, Supergiant Games, and it's one of the few, maybe only games in this group that that not only has coverage but mainstream coverage. It's also somewhat tangentially a VN, but its choice mechanics actually do feel more VN-like than many of the other games in the batch, so I think it's worthy of inclusion.

While the ultimate outcome of your choices are moderately binary, either someone is free or not, the text modifies itself to describe their lives after with others depending on who else escaped with them, and while there isn't much time in the game to delve into the lore or the personal stories of the characters more than is necessary to provide a hook for the game play, this is still well done enough that as a player I felt the stakes and had an emotional investment in the outcome. So while there are mechanics in Pyre similar to that of VNs, and while those particular mechanics are not notably complex, this still manages to be a game that has choice systems more interesting than many of the other games in the bundle, and is a game that manages to marry two genres successfully in a way I've never seen done before.

Name: Headspun
Status: Complete
Site: https://svperstring.itch.io/headspun-dazed-edition
Pairing: None
Description: A stuck up braincell suffers.
Controller score: B


 

Headspun describes itself as an FMV/Adventure hybrid. So most of the mechanisms of the game are a sidescrolling point and clicker, with some resource management, a little bit of quicktime type minigames, and then some narrative detail is layered on top of that with live action, where you, a little worker inside the brain of a guy named Theo, look out through his eyes as he interacts with people from his hospital bed. Theo has been in some sort of car accident, and has experienced major head trauma, as illustrated by the fact that your workplace is in complete disarray. Your job is to drive Theo like Ratatouille during the day, doing mini games that will get you mental points you can then spend on shaping things up, and then interact with some of the workers after he sleeps, as well as dig in a little on what happened and why.

While I liked the premise of this game and the way that live action was integrated into the whole thing, the major mechanics were nothing to write home about, there were a whole lot of bugs, and in the end the game felt unpolished. It's hard to recommend for that reason.

This is a point and click adventure game in which you tumble into an underground cult bunker populated by a family of skeletons that give out strong WASP energy, and you need to find your way out. You can move around the many rooms in the bunker, clicking on everything, and trying to figure out the puzzle of getting out, in typical point and click adventure style. I found out the hard way that there are also death fail states, and didn't realize that the game let you just rewind to right before you did this, because the option could not be reached via controller, so I restarted completely when it happened. But since everything is in renpy there is the option to fast forward text you've already seen and it wasn't too bad a hiccup.

For a point and click adventure game, this isn't the worst. It's actually very simple and hides that fact in a lot of noise. And the writing is a little better than a lot of adventure games. I'm willing to think that my experience is a bit of an outlier and say if you like these sorts of games it might be worth playing.