Yet another one of these. Rather melancholic BGM in this one, though apparently you can change it. There's also a brightness slider, which is nice. Achievement pop-ups block the remaining cat counter… which is not nice.

An updated NaNoRenO submission, Layover Lovers is almost Exactly What It Says On The Tin™️; two people meet for the first time and fall in love in just a few hours during a layover at an airport. It's a cute idea, but as it turns out, not compelling enough to play out twice in a row. Neither character has an interesting personality and the writing is painfully bland as well. My eyes ended up glazing over really fast.
The only takeaways from this one are that I wish I could be as kind as Dan, when Lucia notes how helpful it was that he stuck around for as long as necessary and that I would appreciate my own love interest stopping me from throwing away all my plans just to be with them.
That's supposed to be the bittersweet aspect of this story, but really, so far I've noticed I end up sacrificing everything I am if I think I've fallen in love.

A bit of an oldschool-style point-and-click accompanied by a colorful, psychedelic art style, Love Alone Death tells the… horribly mangled (somewhat ironically) story of four girls: Beth, Annette, Lilith and Dana. In some sort of a post-apocalyptic scenario where the world is practically devoid of people, you (as Beth) meet Annette, Lilith and Dana at some kind of a mall. After patching Annette up, you all take a rest, which leads to you learning that the girls live out their worst nightmares while sleeping. You have to help them wake up (either by solving the problem or killing the girl). Lastly, you all go to Dana's house, after she invites you to eat soup together. Here, you get the last chance to try and appeal to the girls (or not) before the soup is cooked and after you sit down to eat… well, that's when your level of affection with the girls comes into play, ultimately deciding your fate.
There are five different endings to arrive at here, which is a little much considering that the requirements for three of them are near identical. The art style is amazing, but perhaps a tad ill-fitted for a game - some interactable objects blend in with the backgrounds, possibly leaving players confused as for what to do next. Still, the worst offender is the writing. The story is surely meant to be cryptic, but on top of that, the awkward English translation is hard to read, making the game far more obtuse to players who aren't experiencing it in its original language. As much as I hated doing it, I ended up speeding through this game. On the bright side, the ending songs are surprisingly nice.

Up until now, I may have been the most zealous Sonic fan out there that hasn't actually engaged with any installment of the franchise. My friend Saku decided to fix that by challenging me to play a Sonic game this month, so I tricked her into playing The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog alongside me.
Being what I can only assume is a fully authorized fangame, it's nothing like any of the other games you've seen so far from the franchise, but that doesn't stop it from being an enjoyable experience throughout. Given its popularity, everything I want to say has likely already been said, so I'll only note that everything about its presentation is wonderful, from the art style, through the soundtrack, all the way down to the characterization. I haven't played a VN this good for years (but considering I'm sort of a bad game connoisseur, this checks out.)
The only faults I can find with this one are the inability to advance text with the Enter key and the lack of a backlog; these are presumably side effects of the game being made with an engine not designed purely for VN creation.
Looking forward to playing a mainline Sonic game one of these days!

Originally made for the "Unexpected Outcomes" game jam, WeightWare is a collection of minigames involving fat fetishism/feederism. Once again, not my kind of thing, but the minigames were decently challenging. There's only one more free game from this dev left to play… hopefully I'll still be able to escape the allegations after I do.