Though I've never played this one before I discovered it on Steam some time ago, this one's another throwback to a time of truly casual gaming. It also happens to be a "fringe case", so to speak, as I was totally expecting a HOG, and didn't even stop to consider that it's actually just a point-and-click with minigames until I was done with it. As for the story, Ashley Reeves (the store description and reviews seem to be calling her Jessica and Rachel, I don't know where that came from) sees a mysterious house in a dream, then seeks it out in real life. After entering, she's faced with a mysterious man named Nathan who essentially tasks her with appeasing six ghosts that are trapped around the house. These represent a handful of delightfully stereotypical characters representing different places around the world and ages of the past. The gameplay is a mix of easy point-and-clicking and minigames (ranging from stupidly easy to "no achievements mean I can skip this right away"). The only aspect that holds this game back from measuring up to its contemporaries, in my opinion, is the lack of a definitive hint system. There is a written guide with partial hints for each and every single task, but no universal hint button that points you where to go or what to click on next. That being said, it's still a really short and simple game, even more so considering you're free to skip the minigames you don't want to play through (or simplify them first… what is this, The Cube?) Judging from the ending, I guess they could have been trying to imply there might be a sequel…? As far as I know, though, there isn't one.

I'm hoping to slowly but surely start picking up more GameHouse games… this one found its way into my library first. It's like any other Dash-style game, albeit with no minigames, which streamlines the gameplay while also making it mindnumbingly easy. (I only had to replay two levels to get a perfect score before doing the achievement for replays, and that's because I got confused about serving new items, so you'd have to slip a lot to fail.) The story is serviceable, not as dramatic as Heart's Medicine from what I remember of those games, but the comedy is nose exhale-level at best. Some characters switch between a setting-appropriate vocabulary and joking about things like going out shopping (women be shoppin', amirite) or expecting a Yelp reviewer to come (just one?) There's a bunch of sexual innuendo, which to me is in stark contrast with what these games present themselves as. While it's not that "colorful and cartoonish" = "for kids", if those jokes weren't present, this game would be suitable for kids. But as they are, they're being skirted by with a wink and a smile, which just makes me wonder who the target audience is supposed to be. In one of the locations, the last few pieces of gear that show up for sale are essentially leather items for S&M play! It's uncomfortable! …oh, and also there's a painfully outdated Justin Bieber joke… this game came out in 2020. Give the guy some slack, he hasn't performed "Baby" on stage in, like, twelve years, if not more! I do feel apologetic for these blunders, though, as I noticed in the credits that SQRT3, the studio behind this one, is Polish… as a Pole, I do not claim their terrible sense of humor.

It's hard to appropriately gauge my thoughts on the first game, but all in all, I think I liked this one better, somehow. The two new characters brought in a whole new plot thread and the two new coffee-making ingredients, along with two lists of new drinks you can make. The short stories you can read on the side were pretty great, I was looking forward to each and every next one. The OST is pure lo-fi paradise and the art is gorgeous in every regard. I guess what seems off to me about this game is… it's all just so perfect. I get that as the barista, we're only let in on a fraction of the characters' lives, but even if they're supposed to be going through some kind of hardship, everything reaches a positive conclusion at some point (and even if it's not "positive" per se, there's not much at stake emotionally). The narrative is full of life advice you might have heard before, everyone's got some sort of advice for the character that's going through something… it's not that the writing doesn't have character; it's more like the writing is giving "devs speaking through their characters", which takes me out of it at times. …or maybe life could look like this and I'm just used to people being shitty to me. Oh well! Either way, the coffee was great - both in-game and in real life.

Austin Lewis is a poor college student with a weed-smoking habit, barely keeping up a relationship with his girlfriend and a job at a diner she got him so he can pay off student loans. One day, his girlfriend breaks up with him and fires him from his job, but then… a mysterious woman shows up and offers him a deal: if he can help his high school ex-turned-popstar, Jacqueline, out of a slump that led her to quit performing, he'll get paid handsomely. This is easily one of the better VNs from Sapphire Dragon Productions, possibly because it's not trying to be set in Japan or Korea like some others. The character art is great, the voice acting is mostly good (Natalie steals the show, Erik sounds a bit too much like "guy putting on a voice"), the music and background art are serviceable… I just wish someone was around to help tighten up the writing. Occasional spelling mistakes or forgotten periods aside, there's quite a handful of dumb repetitions that could have been omitted if anyone would have cared to look at the script some time after it was originally written. I'm merely paraphrasing/manufacturing examples, but sentences like "It's a serious issue that needs to be taken seriously" or "I really need her to do this because I'm really frustrated right now" are painful to parse, especially moreso given that everyone except the main character is voiced.

Utterly confusing. I was under the impression that this would be about struggling with porn addiction, and to some degree, it was. For the most part, though, anything one could potentially have taken away from it was buried under a mix of amateur poetry/purple prose and awkward wording that makes it seem like the author is not a native English speaker. Some of the visuals are good, the music is… different… but at the end of the day, don't expect to learn anything substantial about what it's like to live with an addiction or work on getting out of it. If you're struggling with any kind of mental health issues, just put that buck towards self-help instead. And while you're at it, enjoy this look into what the dev's other forays looked like.

Now removed from Steam, Postmen of Horizon is set in a futuristic world, where people can send letters to friends and family members that have already passed. It's quite an expensive service, as it's not easy to find a postman for each letter - after all, a postman needs to be willing to travel to the afterlife to deliver the message. This premise is great and I feel like it could go so much further, but as it is, all that exists is a half an hour long VN that was originally written in Russian and then poorly translated into English. I'd say "avoid it", but Steam caught on to the level of quality of this one a few years ago.

Possibly the best one of these yet. It's upfront about the fact that finding some of the cats will require interacting with the surroundings and there's a bunch of achievements for doing so. Every cat has a thought bubble that lets you in on what they're doing or planning/attempting to do. I'm not a cat lover, but I will gladly take anything that makes a game like this last longer than 5 minutes.

More Sakura slop, aye aye! This one is about a guy, Seiji, going on a week-long trip to the beach with his two childhood friends, Ayumi and Momoko. Thing is, he loves space; so much so that he will zone out frequently, pondering something in relation to it. That by itself would have been fine, if it weren't for Ayumi and Momoko always snapping him out of it, acting like it's the worst thing he could be doing. He mentions that he wants to become an astrophysicist after graduating high school, and that they'll have time to hang out once they're done with some exams that are coming up, but they're constantly huffing and complaining about… well, seemingly about the fact that he's so driven. But when they're not constantly calling him an idiot (hello, tsundere archetype) or making him out to be a pervert even if he hasn't done anything indecent (hello, anime tropes from the past decade), they're very clearly perving on each other and putting him in an uncomfortable position. Then, near the end, it's randomly revealed that he's only this determined to make something of himself because he's trying to run away from thinking about his estranged parents. Say whaaat? That's just so… dumb. It feels shoehorned in for… I don't know what reason. An attempt to make the story seem more dramatic than it is? A truly pathetic one, if so. From my perspective, he just earnestly loves space, yet those girls do nothing but go around claiming that he should know what they're thinking without them voicing their thoughts (you know, that thing all women say?) and acting like he's planning for the worst series of decisions in his life by choosing to study diligently and aim towards getting the job of his dreams instead of… I dunno, dating either of them. As dumb as this sounds… I want justice for the guy, seriously. I'm just glad this wasn't as long as the current VNDB average suggests. And hey, at least this one thanked me for playing!

I definitely need to start catching up with HOGs from Alawar. In this one, you're… uh… some woman… who's tasked with investigating an abandoned summer camp and finding a missing boy that was attending it. Despite the good sound design, the game is just not that creepy. In comparison, as campy as it is, in Artifex Mundi games you'll get to watch the villain trying to act all scary (and failing due to the mediocre voice acting and uncanny sprite animations), but here you don't get anything. Shtriga barely appears, and when she does, she hardly does anything scary. In horror, the anticipation of the scare is more powerful than the scare itself… but implying this to be a horror story is a stretch when most of the time you're not even thinking about Shtriga or anything pertaining to her backstory or origin. (You don't even get anything substantial about that, either.) For achievements' sake, playing without using hints even outside of HO scenes and minigames was a new kind of challenge; while there weren't any random HO scenes appearing across the map unprompted, some pixel hunting had to be done. When I got stuck, I'd be wandering around recent locations, mousing over every inch of the scene in hopes of finding something I had missed. It also felt a little jarring to see close-ups locking up immediately, as soon as you got what you needed from them; maybe some kind of slower fade-out would have been a nice addition? I noticed in the forum that someone got locked out of progressing when they didn't notice an item that needs to be picked up before tinkering around with a close-up in a way where it was impossible to do so later. I also have to praise some of the minigames for either not being something that crops up often (like the 4x4 sliding puzzle, as dumb as it may sound) or just outright clever, though not impossible (like the moon sorting). Overall though, this one is definitely a skip.

I was positively surprised by the animated sprites and (nearly) full voice acting. Unfortunately, that alone does not a good game make. You play as Kai, a guy who gets bullied at school on a daily basis. His childhood friend, Yuka, is also a target. Initially, Kai suspects he's being bullied because the popular girl, Akemi, is constantly trying to get him to hang out with her, but that doesn't make sense when Yuka becomes part of the equation. After a more severe "prank" is pulled on Akemi, because she's not the one ordering the bullies around, Kai tries investigating… This just was not good. It seems to have been made in Ren'Py, yet doesn't include basic options, such as rollback, a backlog, a "text speed" slider or even a gallery menu. Some of the sprite animations are smooth, other ones seem sluggish. Scene transitions are awkward, with a blank textbox or the sprite of a character present in the previous scene often tagging along for the ride. Sprites of characters supposed to be present sometimes don't show up during skipping with no rhyme or reason. Skipping itself works well (toggling between skipping read/unread lines is possible), but there's no UI element to indicate that skipping is in progress. Some lines that are supposed to be voiced get forgotten, others are shown twice, first unvoiced, then voiced. (Somehow, Minori seems to be the most consistent victim of this, which is sad, 'cause I ended up liking her the most.) And perhaps most importantly, as far as strictly technical aspects go, there is no automatic return to the main menu after completing the game, making having reached the ending anticlimactic and unsatisfying. And the story… oh boy, the story. Some of it might not have been saved either way, given how the game was translated from Russian to English (badly, that's how). Still… this forced Japanese setting is annoying as all hell, and you would have thought we left that in the last decade. But for Russian VNs specifically, it's usually either this or a depressingly realistic vision of living in Russia that eventually also stops making sense because of a shoddy translation, so… lesser of two evils? The bullying that drives most of the plot seems like it could have been resolved by having a serious conversation with a teacher, but for the story's sake it's as if there's only one teacher present at all times who doesn't care all that much about their students. Without spoiling much of anything, characters set up as "the good ones" do some awful shit and "the bad ones" are actually victims of the system, and it all culminates in the most ridiculous sequence of events, especially considering that the endings are about being happily in love with either Yuka or Akemi. Also important to mention that I had to check the forum for this game to find the dev's walkthrough to get to the actual endings; half the choices that need to be picked make no sense to me, even now, and the ones that differ between "routes" don't add all that much flavor to the story at large. Maybe if the dev wasn't busy with trying to sell this game under two different titles, it could have gotten some more love.