This one caught my eye a long time ago. A VN about becoming an idol? And it's free? Sign me up!
Well… I should have known what was in store when I opened it up and there wasn't even any BGM in the main menu.
Alice is working as an intern for a broadcaster that's about to launch their new talent show. It's a tried and true trope - one of the contestants fails to show up and when the producer spots Alice, it's go time. Lucky for her, the first episode is but an introduction, so nobody gets eliminated yet.
Right after that, the producers help Alice and her new rivals - Mary, Cherry and Taylor - move into a huge mansion complex for the duration of the show. Mary is rich and seemingly stuck-up, Cherry is a cute airhead and Taylor seems like she doesn't give a shit about anything, though she's always equipped with a good comeback if anyone were to point it out to her. After moving in, you get a day (a metaphor for the whole week) to go somewhere and possibly spend time with whoever's there at the same time. After that's done, the next week's episode airs, rinse and repeat until the show ends.
The problem is in how disjointed everything feels right from the start. My very first choice was to hang out with Taylor and the narration seemed to imply that Alice did nothing for most of the day just so she could go to Taylor's room in the evening. For a second I thought that because this option is last in line, maybe I skipped out on all the other things I could have done, making most of the day go to waste. Nope! Next time, some of the choices carried over, but I couldn't explain why if I tried. There's also only four weeks until the show is over, so whatever character development could be happening between the episodes just doesn't get enough time.
As for the show, the three middle episodes are themed, with the themes being Summer, Winter and Darkness, in this exact order. (One of these things is not like the other!)
This is where I continue my observations about music (or lack thereof); I could be wrong, but it felt like for the first hour, I was just listening to the same BGM. Bland and inoffensive, sure, but this is supposed to be a story about idols!
…yet nobody cared to change it up even for the show performances.
The lame but entertaining option would be to use an instrumental to some popular idol song, 'cause then at least you'd surprise the people who know and love it; the cooler but paid option would be to get some tracks from Nash Music Library, as they've got some great idol-like bops. But alas, random stock BGM instead.
And the writing… oh boy, the writing. Everyone keeps reiterating how often "show, don't tell" spells out disaster for so many pieces of media that fail to adhere to this simple piece of advice and Alice in Stardom is no different. During every performance, without fail, you get to read paragraphs upon paragraphs about how much the characters have changed, their progress, how amazing they are, how they must feel, how they've captivated the audience… it's almost as if the writer was contracted to provide textbook examples of waffling.
Mindblowingly enough, this could hold some weight if you got to see any of that work, change or feeling for yourself… but the game absolutely lacks any kind of middle part. No matter what you choose to do to hang out, you don't get to see any CGs or hear any particular musical cues to indicate training or any kind of feelings or emotions welling up.
And to the point of CGs, there's only maybe three of them in total and they're all of Alice performing… she doesn't even look consistent between them. They're introduced to the scene with specific camera effects, which I guess were supposed to look flashy or exciting, but keeping in mind that you're listening to the same basic piece of BGM and reading about her love for her fans, they're just annoying.
After Alice wins the show (because of course she does, she's the main character!), you get a scene where she and her new lover (?!) warm up to each other. All that middle that was already missing? Now you should also know that it was meant to make the game yuri.
This is especially ridiculous, because in no interactions with any of the characters that I got to read was there anything romantic (and if it was meant to be, then sorry, it was all written so poorly I did not perceive it as such). I don't remember hanging out with Mary even once in my first playthrough, and yet I got her scene at the end? America, explain!
I tried putting in some additional time to see how much optional stuff I could see in the hangouts, and just when I got to one with Cherry that seemed like it would lead me to get her final scene, the game threw an error because it couldn't find one of her sprites. In a flash of brilliance, instead of simply rolling back and changing my choice, I closed the game and called it quits right then and there.
This game is in dire need of varied character designs (Alice, Cherry and Taylor are all blonde, with Alice and Cherry both having blue eyes), BGM (literally the most important thing in any story about idols!) and an actual story (hangouts with CGs! vocal training that sounds like what it is! any kind of respectful flirting!), but at the same time, it came out 5 years ago and the devs have long since moved on, so I don't suppose it's trying to attract any kind of attention anymore.

Alice in Stardom is Verified on Steam Deck, which matches my experience as of 25/11/2024. Touchscreen, A, R2, R3 to advance text, R1 to rollback, L2 or Menu to bring up save menu; B to bring up accessibility options, View to skip text. Right touchpad is also active.

At first glance, this game's presentation is reminiscent of The Witness, which made me wonder if I should play it in the first place. Now that I've completed it, I'm glad I decided to pick it up.
It's 1890 and you're Lady Arabella Greene, a botanist residing at the titular Botany Manor in England. You have just been given a chance to publish your own herbarium, so you get to work right away.
Botany Manor is a formulaic yet consistently exciting combination of a walking simulator and puzzle game; in each chapter, you'll be uncovering a set of locations in and around the manor, finding new seeds and gathering clues about how to grow them, and after you do, you'll be able to move on to the next one seamlessly. Besides the clues, just about each and every room will have some sort of environmental storytelling - notes and letters about Arabella's attempts to study botany being (mostly) ridiculed by men and (mostly) supported by women. I found the puzzling aspect delightfully simple in that even before you show your work (fill in a whole set of clues correctly), you can very clearly see it for yourself; I truly can't remember ever getting that sense of satisfaction from a puzzle game so consistently. (I only really "skipped" through one puzzle, because I couldn't connect the dots right on my own, and it felt like trying out random solutions would take too much time.)
Speaking of consistency, I remained amused by all the different things necessary for each and every plant to bloom successfully; some of those plants seem outright fantastical, but I'm too afraid to say anything more in case I sound like an idiot. The way new areas open up with the start of each new chapter makes you want to keep going, too; entering every other area for the first time triggers the background music to swell…
If I had to talk about something I didn't like, I'd choose what seems to be a universal complaint amongst players: the lack of a menu for the clues to carry over in. While countless other games that feature interactable letters, articles, notes etc. will save them to a separate menu for future use (or tracking, at least), Botany Manor doesn't do that. Instead, it only saves info about what kind of clue it is (e.g. "Article on luminescence", "Elizabeth's letter") and the place you found it in, so if you need to take another look at a certain clue, you're going to have to run back to the room it's in instead of just being able to flip open a separate notebook. Still, this experience was wonderful; that's about the only thing holding it off from having been perfect.

Imagine playing the last scene of Doki Doki Literature Club!… but that's all there is to it. No story leading up to it, no emotional attachment, no weight. That's HeartWare. All you can get out of this is having a 2D girl you don't know a single thing about talk at you about how badly she wants to be real. The implications of what she says are weird too; why has she seen Rick and Morty, but not a single anime? How come she loves the Phoenix Wright series, but hasn't played Portal? She also references DDLC and Monika, because of course she does. At a certain point, the game accesses info about what device you're playing on, and even though I used the Deck, it said I'm on a PC; can the game not recognize the Deck or is the Deck not considered anything else than a portable computer? It also returned my current time as "20 PM", so it clearly can't account for 24-hour clocks. It's been 7 years since DDLC first came out, so I wish the dev of HeartWare a Happy Read-Another-VN-Please.

HeartWare is Verified on Steam Deck, which matches my experience as of 21/11/2024. Touchscreen or A to advance text, Menu or B (I forgot which…) should bring up the save menu. Right touchpad is active. All standard Ren'Py options are also available at the bottom of the screen.

Lilith may be a demon, but her power level is considerably lower than those of her peers. Opening this game entails being open to the idea of selling your soul to her. There's just one problem… she's lost the memo on how much your soul is worth. To find out anew, she decides to ask you twenty questions ("like the kids' game") from the forms she found in her documents instead. After that's done, you get a certificate proving your soul's worth, which you can print out and boast about to people in real life.
For the record, my soul turned out to be worth as much as a gym membership, so about $77.
After announcing the result, Lilith does ask if you find the compensation worthy enough to exchange your soul for, and even though it's not that much money or even remotely useful to me personally, I liked Lilith enough that I couldn't say no to the transaction.
In spite of its simplicity (and perhaps because it's programmed to be played only once per device by default), this game was charming for what it was. Based on what Lilith says near the end, I hope there will be another game featuring her at some point in the future.

Lilith wants to buy your soul is Verified on Steam Deck, which matches my experience as of 28/11/2024. Touchscreen, A or R2 to advance text, R1 to rollback, View to skip, L2 or Menu to quit.

Los' mom just signed them up for a course designed to help boost self-esteem and confidence. They're convinced they feel comfortable being on their own and aren't willing to let people in due to past disappointments. The course period goes by in a flash and all they've retained is their interest in one of the other attendees, Hazel. Will they find the courage to talk to her before parting for good?
Thanks to this one, I can now officially say that I've played a VN made in Godot. While it's not a long game, I can only assume that this is about as far as the functionality of the engine goes when it comes to creating VNs, making it more akin to Unity than Ren'Py. The art is adorable and the BGM, albeit sparse, doesn't feel all that repetitive. I'm unclear on whether or not it would be possible to build in a regular skip function, but if not, the devs have found a way around this limitation.

Lost Connections is Playable on Steam Deck. Touchscreen, A, R2 or R3 to advance text, Menu to bring up the menu. Right touchpad is also active. A backlog is supposed to be available, but none of the inputs I tried seemed to bring it up.

Originally released in 2012 and now available on Steam, Loving Life is an autobiographical story written by Zhenghua ("Z") Yang, the founder of Serenity Forge, about his near-death experience back in 2008.
One day after class, he felt really tired and in spite of thinking about studying for the midterm next day, he went to sleep at 11 PM, which was unusual for him at the time. At 1 AM, he woke up to his nose bleeding. After taking some time to try (and fail) to stop it, Z decided to go to sleep, wake up whenever it was time to change the tissue, then go back to sleep again.
As one might imagine, that was not a good night's sleep and only around 3 PM, one of Z's friends decided to take him to the college medical center. The nosebleed had stopped only then, 14 hours after it first started (for the record, you should be worried if your nose is bleeding for more than 20 minutes, which I would not have known otherwise). His blood test results are worrying, but he's told to come in next morning. After a considerably better night, Z wakes up and records himself talking about his situation right before going in for the checkup.
At the doctor's office, he's told to go to the hospital immediately, so he does just that. Turns out his results are even worse than the college doctor thought, but Z's not even done answering all the questions before he gets another nosebleed and loses consciousness.
His condition is so bad, in fact, that a nurse comes by and gives him a will to sign. This causes him to ponder whether or not his life was good and how it contributed to the world, if it did at all, among other things.
This is where the story fades out into then-current times, with Z fully recovered and back in college, only with a different major this time around. Interestingly enough, he claims he really got better only after he stopped the experimentative treatments he was offered. At the very end, you get to watch the clip he recorded before going to his second checkup.
It's tough to judge this story, on account of it being based in reality; there's not really a place to discuss it being "better" or "more exciting". I would have really liked to read about Z's recovery from a state considered fatal by medical professionals, as I don't think it's as easy as "loving life and having it love you back". Then again, if that was too confusing or technical, I understand that it might not have made for good reading. The part that's meant to make you feel inspired to make changes in your own life is not too long or overly preachy, although the optics of Z saying that playing video games didn't make a positive impact on his life when he's since become the CEO of his own video game developing and publishing company are… hm.

Loving Life is Playable on Steam Deck, likely only because tapping the touchscreen makes a mouse cursor show up. Touchscreen, A, R2 or R3 to advance text and L2 or Menu to bring up the menu.

In a world where the human race is on the decline due to becoming prey for monsters and demons, Max and Celeste live together as roommates in a village where nobody really likes them.
During the day, Max is training himself in combat, aiming to one day measure up to all the other villagers, while Celeste is one of the few magic users in the village (and a damn good one at that), so she spends her time studying in the library. Every few days, they also have regular class together.
However, Max keeps getting bullied in combat training and Celeste feels her exceptional magic skills are being ignored in lieu of her teacher's seniority. Whenever they regroup after their individual studies, the mood is sour, with Celeste talking about her desire to destroy the whole village and not have to put up with that treatment anymore.
At night, Max starts having spicy dreams about Celeste, but they make him feel wrong since he's had feelings for Celeste for a long time now.
Will these dreams get more daring or stop entirely? And will Max and Celeste find a way to gain the villagers' respect, or will they end up bringing the whole village down?
I found this one… just mediocre. I've played a few VNs with character designs from the same artist and so far, I liked none of them, so I suppose it tracks. Their style is very clean, however, to the point that it's hard to believe these characters are what the writing claims they are. You're telling me pretty privilege doesn't exist in that village?
I did like the inclusion of more rare technical options, such as the choice of input prompts or the option to save on quit (as seen in Humanity Must Perish, from the same dev).

Max Massacre is Verified on Steam Deck, matching my experience as of 27/11/2024. Touchscreen, A, L2 (?) or R2 to advance text, B or Menu to bring up the save menu, L1 or View to rollback, R1 to undo rollback (not to be confused with advancing text), Y to hide textbox.

A seemingly simple puzzle game about putting together various flowers, which gets pretty hard as time goes on. It's absolutely beautiful and I can't believe Steam has kept it secret from me until now.

The unnamed (according to the store description, his name is supposed to be Harold, but it doesn't seem to function as the default) protagonist has never had any friends, so his parents helped him enroll at a college designed specifically for people like him. Before he can even get to the opening assembly, he meets three rather eccentric girls: Scout, Vivian and Anima. (Why does only one of them have an actual name? Your guess is as good as mine.)
At the assembly, it is explained that based on a simple questionnaire they're about to fill out and the way they behave throughout the first day of class, people are going to be paired up to share dorm rooms. The questionnaire includes a few questions that are simple yet don't seem to relate to each other at all; for example, I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that you can answer the gender question with "female" or "other" despite knowing that MC is male and it actively influences which girl's route you'll get on. If your answers don't match up with the girls and you say too much weird stuff on your first day, MC will be paired up with a guy he remembers from high school and it's assumed that they don't end up bonding at all, so you get a bad end.
Otherwise, the plot between the routes is identical; it's more the case of the girl of choice fitting into it. Comedy scene at the cafeteria here, working on a school project there and before you realize, the game is over. If you don't bond with the girl at all, you also get a bad end; those are completely unprompted and too much for what the rest of the game is like.
No shade towards Vivian and Anima; compelling as their backstories are, Scout was easily my favorite. At first, she looked like the mature one, of sorts, but soon enough, it turned out that she's actually very gullible, obsessed with ghost hunting and a comically big eater. Her ghost hunting obsession in particular feels very neurodivergent-coded and I wish I could hug her.
As for the technical side of things: the UI is mostly basic, although the text being aligned to the middle was a nice touch… whenever the dev didn't forget to do it, that is. There were a bit more grammar mistakes than I'd expect to see from someone who I can only assume is a native English speaker. The sprite art looks rather basic, but I learned afterwards it's because it was royalty-free and therefore not commissioned for this game specifically. I really liked the photographic backgrounds in this one and I don't know why. Royalty-free character art and photographic backgrounds instead of background art mean there's no CGs in the game, which is a shame.
However, one thing that School for the Friendless did right - unlike most VNs I've played this month - is the BGM variety. Despite the game taking only about 3 hours to fully complete, almost every time the scene changes, a different track comes on, so even if I've already been through the same even on another route, it made me feel like something completely new was going to happen. I wonder if the dev has a particular interest in music or simply found looking for all those tracks enjoyable.
I've seen the negative reviews for this game saying that the humor is cringy and bad, but surprisingly enough, I liked it. I'm not a fan of being a pervert for the sake of it (which made Vivian rather unlikeable in my eyes), but as long as the guy doesn't blindly go along with all the lewd jokes or advances that a girl is making, I find it much more bearable. That, and in spite of the sense of humor clearly taking inspiration from anime, this game isn't trying to pretend like it's set in Japan, which is extremely cringy if done poorly. By all accounts, it was a mediocre game that wasn't nearly as bad as people think, in my opinion. I'll forget it soon enough, but I don't feel like I wasted my time playing it.

School for the Friendless is Playable on Steam Deck. Touchscreen, A or R2 to advance text, R1 to rollback, L1 to undo rollback, L2 or Menu to bring up save menu, View to skip, left stick left to open accessibility options, left stick down to take screenshots. Right touchpad active; right stick also acts as a mouse.

Quite a peculiar prologue to Siren's Call: Escape Velocity, Sunflower Pie is a nightmare about Oliver's bleak family situation. Considering that the premise of Siren's Call: Escape Velocity is "escaping Florida", I'd say Sunflower Pie felt like a good enough setup that made me want to learn more. That being said, it's hard to say anything more about this… maybe except the fact that the very obviously anime-styled sprites under the object heads looked a bit funny. I don't think I find object heads all that scary unless the objects themselves are meant to appear grotesque. The moment the nightmare transforms into reality is nice, but I guess that's not a particularly grand observation. Two of the characters are said to have disabilities, so I'm definitely interested in seeing more of how they are portrayed. I think despite being able to relate at some base level, the narrative of Oliver's mom being abusive towards him getting toned down/nullified as soon as the nightmare ends seems kind of… weird? I assume it's one of those things that the full game will explain/straighten out.

Sunflower Pie is Playable on Steam Deck. Touchscreen, A or R2 to advance text. Right touchpad is also active. Watch out for Menu, as it's mapped to the Esc key and the game has no save system.

In an alternate universe with a touch of sci-fi, the world is continuously tormented by superstorms. They show up every few months and destroy everything in their path, forcing people to hide in their shelters, sometimes for weeks at a time. There's never enough time to fix everything before the next storm, so repairs are an eternal money sink. It's become far too expensive to even have human children, so as a cheaper alternative, people have genetically engineered half-human, half-melon hybrids (referred to as simply "melos") to adopt as children.
Enter Y/N, a human who's ready to experience the outside world again, now that a superstorm has just ended. The first thing that comes to mind is going on a date, and sure enough, they create a profile and find a match - a melo named Melonais (call them Mel, for short).
Your job is to help Y/N navigate their first date with Mel. Every branch has two options to choose from and most (if not all of them) contribute to an overall rating; they can be either friendly or flirtatious.
Based on the ratio of friendly to flirtatious answers you have chosen throughout the date, you'll get one of the five possible endings. I did my best to stick to round values (0%/25%/50%/75%/100%), but according to the dev's comment, the requirements are a bit more relaxed.
I'm glad it was that easy to get all the endings, but not sure it was worth it in the end. All the endings have some positive note to them, but they all present the same way: one and the same image with second-person narration over it. I would have liked to see separate visuals, maybe even different BGM for the endings, so that it feels like discovering something new.
I think the worldbuilding was more interesting than the date, in the end. What is up with the superstorms? Why melons? How long has all of this been going for? I'd really like to see a bigger, more fleshed out story about the superstorm melon dystopia next.

Superstorm Melon Date is Playable, probably because it's missing half of the basic features provided by the Ren'Py engine, not to mention mapping them to controls on the Deck. Touchscreen, A or R2 to advance text, Y to hide textbox, Menu to bring up save menu.

A short story about an unnamed protagonist (Y/N, if you will) grieving after the loss of their online friend to an accident. They first met when Y/N decided to check out a certain VR game, but didn't mean to stick around after their trial was up. Then, Ji-min approached them and helped them with learning the basics. Eventually, they've both created a world to hang out in together… and the rest is history.
Y/N notes that Ji-min's influence on them was largely positive, save for the fact that they royally messed up their sleep schedule just so they could talk to her more. And now that she's gone, Y/N doesn't care to go back to their regular life. Their parents, real-life friends, their boss, they're all reaching out, hoping to get some sort of sign about Y/N, but they're ignoring all calls and emails, instead opting to lay on their bed, staring up at the ceiling as time passes idly by. Every once in a while, they log into the VR world they shared with Ji-min, only to encounter CH35H1R3, a seemingly brand new bot, made by VirtueTech to annoy new players… or is she?
This was originally written for NaNoRenO, so like with most other VN event submissions, expectations should be kept low. I liked the visual contrast between the dull browns and greys of the real world and the explosion of bright colors in the VR world (including, but not limited to, CH35H1R3's absolutely garish design) and the fact that, in spite of its duration, it features voice acting.
The one part I don't get is the choice at the very ending: as the last thing they do before moving on, should Y/N keep Ji-min's last voice mail or delete it? No matter what you choose, the credits pop in so quickly that there's no way to sit with the choice or even just the fact that the game is over. If you choose to keep it, it will play again after the credits, which I suppose is a nice bookend, considering the game also starts with Y/N listening to it, but it felt oddly weightless to me. I think it's only normal to keep a memento tied to someone who's passed away if they meant a lot to you, so the idea of deleting Ji-min's voicemail is just weird to me. If it were a material thing, you could at least look for something similar in the future if you find it still matters to you, but you can't retrieve immaterial things after they're gone…

this was for you. is Playable on Steam Deck because you need to bring up the keyboard to input your name at the start. If your keyboard placement of choice is at the bottom, keep in mind that it will obscure the input completely. I misspelled my name and couldn't fix it afterwards. Touchscreen, A, R1, R2 or R3 to advance text, L1 or Menu to bring up the save menu, L2 to rollback (I may have remembered L1/2 the other way around) and View to skip text.

I can only assume this dark fantasy yuri about Cassidy, the exiled princess of the Veromere family, now living alone in a forest and Elowen, the mysterious stranger who suddenly appears in her life, had been on my wishlist for years at this point, considering it first released on Steam back in 2020. What deserves continuous praise, however, is just how much care this game has been given ever since it first came to life. It had two demo versions (in 2016 and 2018), then a full, unvoiced release on Steam in 2020, and then a full voice acting update, released this April. Personally, I'm utterly in love with the UI design; everything just looks so nice and clean. From a gameplay standpoint, Cassidy and Elowen both having their own textbox design is a great touch; not to mention that the previous speaker's last words stay on screen as their textbox becomes more opaque. From a technical standpoint, despite the game never coming out on consoles as of now, it lets you choose which button style prompts you want to see if you're playing with a controller. Besides a CG gallery and a music room, there is also an unlockable short story, an achievement menu and most importantly, a completion tracker, which is something that's hardly ever seen in VNs (at least to my recollection) and to me, at least, implies a deeper degree of investment on the devs' part. I closed the game after having seen about 97.5% of all text, I believe? By that time, I had already gotten all the available endings twice over and I couldn't imagine what other combination of choices could lead to new textboxes… but to be fair, at that point, it's all just flavor text. Oh yeah, there's a whopping total of eight (!) endings you can get. I realize I'm not talking about the story at all, but I'm really just too shocked by how much care has been put into all the other aspects (not to say that the story isn't good). Girls' love stories aren't something I'd usually read, but this one was really good. If a fantasy story about girls falling in love with each other, with just a twinge of horror sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can't miss out on this one. Just know that even if you end up loving it, you're never going to love it more than the devs.

Without a Voice is Verified on Steam Deck, which matches my experience as of 20/11/2024. It's got to be the best mapped control scheme for a VN on the Deck I've seen yet. (You'd think it had a console release already!) Touchscreen or A to advance text, X to toggle auto mode, B to hide textbox, L1 to rollback, R1 to skip, Menu to open menu. A control guide is also available within the game.

Y'all thought we were saving the cats by finding them, but they actually explode into confetti after you click on them. Also, these cats have crazy, sci-fi adjacent names. Imagine naming your real life cat "Ravager" or "Sentinel."

Basically an owlyboi kind of game without the futanari/femboy kink. Between the AI-generated CG art and the spirit in question having no real personality of her own, everything about this one is one big skip. Ran incredibly poorly in the menus, too, for some reason.

I first watched a playthrough of this game a few months ago and was hooked on the creepy atmosphere with none of the ever-present time-limited or survival-adjacent sequences, so when my friend Saku had a key on hand, I knew I wanted to play it for myself. VHS was already a dying medium by the time I was born, but my grandma still had a player and a sizable collection of tapes, so this was a relatable enough premise (even if obscure local TV channels like the one Amanda would air on aren't a thing to begin with over here). This is a rather simple puzzle game that has you interact with various episodes of the show to progress. My opinion is unfairly biased, because I did use a guide while playing, but I don't agree that all or most puzzles in the whole game are obtuse; just about every solution that comes to mind is featured somewhere within the relevant tape. Sadly, this game seems to be considered by some as "YouTuber bait", as it is just a step away from being merely "Chapter 1" or "Episode 1" rather than a standalone, considering how little information there is to digest regarding the lore. The sequel came out a little over a week ago (a year and a half after the first game), so I may reserve my judgment for when, if ever, I play that (and the inevitable further sequels).

This short adventure game has an absolutely gorgeous pixel art style and a great atmospheric soundtrack; it's hard to believe that it was originally made in just one month for a game jam. The story element, however, feels rather obscure - while some of it is right there and obvious enough, the rest is (to me at least) just kind of confusing. Recommended only if you don't suffer from thalassophobia.

As per the store page, this is just a spin-off story, released to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bloody Painter franchise (?), which I don't know at all, so forgive me if I've missed anything. You play as a nameless girl, who wakes up in a mysterious room underground. You have been kidnapped by a mysterious, mask-wearing man and soon enough, you learn from him that you have to behave for at least seven days if you don't want your corpse to be left to rot after he kills you. It's a rather simple horror VN with a twist: if you make all the right choices, you'll get the guy to warm up to you ever so slightly, which is the prerequisite for all the good endings. You can't die later than on day three, which I found a tad disappointing; I love horror VNs that go crazy with it and let you die at pretty much every opportunity, but here this was underutilized and almost all deaths were identical. The character art is solid, same for the backgrounds. The music is generic, royalty-free stuff. The translation is okay (but still, bonus points for misspelling "hungry" as "hungary", I never thought I'd encounter that out in the wild). Interestingly enough, Bloody Painter is fully voiced, though only in English. Unexpected, considering it's a Chinese franchise? I'm not big on serial killers and other openly dangerous character types as love interests, but I don't mind a creepy rendezvous like this once in a while. If you played this one already, you might be able to guess that my favorite ending was the one where two years after making her escape, MC starts receiving roses from Bloody Painter every Halloween.

It was supposed to be another normal, boring night for Amy: come home from work, eat dinner, watch a movie or play some games until her friend Liv wakes up, chat with Liv, then go to sleep. However, she received a weird email from Blaise, whom she recognized as an old friend from school. Blaise claims to have sent out emails to all school friends, asking to join his new group chat and reconnect, hoping for a reunion in the near future. Soon enough, Amy will learn that the weirdest thing about the group chat isn't everyone being online after 2 AM…

This one has a simple setup and throws you right in. Amy's at her computer, listening to some chill, lo-fi-adjacent music and getting to know her new-old, old-new friends. Something I noticed people who reviewed the game didn't like was being forced to type out Amy's messages perfectly before they can be sent. At some point later, an option to have them typed out automatically was added. Personally, I didn't mind that one bit. In fact, that's the one thing I was really interested in; it's much more satisfying to type out an actual sentence than keysmash continuously for the message to show up, like in the Emily is Away series. That being said, Amy is quickly faced with an explanation for what's going on, and that's when the game quickly fizzles out. I noticed a review entertaining the thought that it would be more interesting if the people in the group chat were just regular people who lost their minds as opposed to ghosts that decided to target Amy in particular. This may have ended up much more chilling, especially because at least one of the three ghosts should have no desire to target Amy (she's currently lacking direction in her life and she doesn't seem to have any specific dreams). Still, this was more my speed than the other VNs I've played this month.

In this short horror puzzle game, you play as Lin Lixun, a newbie policeman who stumbles his way into a re-investigation of a peculiar murder case. I guess I could say that this gameplay style is easily one of my preferred for horror games specifically; exploring locations to piece clues together, interspersed with simple puzzles every once in a while. There was only one puzzle I couldn't figure out right away and I only solved it by chance. That being said, I think I was mostly out of it while playing, as it took me an embarrassing amount of time to associate the names with characters they belonged to. Because most of them don't have sprites, however, and are hardly shown otherwise anyway, I think it would be a good call if each speaker name had its own color, as opposed to the three or four colors being used at all times. I also made it worse for myself by pausing the game halfway and accidentally picking it back up a whole week after I initially started it. The first half is very loaded, the second one not so much. The translation is good, but every once in a while, some stilted or unnatural phrasing turns up, as it goes with Chinese to English translation. In the end, I wasn't really into it, but if you feel like a 2D sidescrolling horror puzzle game set in China with supernatural elements, feel free to try it. And because it's only about 3-4 hours long, do yourself a favor and set aside enough time to play it in one sitting.

It should have been a Halloween like any other, but ever since her father passed away four years ago, Elle has never been the same. Today, she tries talking to him for the first time and then, her fate brings her and a mysterious girl, Lucia, together. This was a wonderfully heartrending story of two strangers bonding over their grief, asking hard questions and giving painful answers. It's not overlong or preachy by any means, but if you happen to be coping with grief at the moment, you may want to wait until you feel comfortable reading. I hate to admit it, but I have recently been thinking about mortality to a degree that scares me, so I think this "fit the mood" somehow, so to speak. As per the credits, this story seems to have been inspired by real events and feelings of one of the devs, so I would like to thank them for putting such a vulnerable part of themselves out there. It's not often that a story acknowledges just how closed off we are from each other past the usual pleasantries without swaying too hard in the other direction and coming off entirely unrealistic.

What can I say? I noticed there was a Halloween-themed one and I bought it.

Already played one of these earlier in the month, but I figured there's no reason to keep it unplayed in my library until next year. This was big enough that it kept me looking. You can zoom in quite a lot, too. The capybaras are spread out enough and there's a few other things to find, which I also like. The BGM is a full on, upbeat, Halloween-esque track that doesn't loop every few seconds like the simple ditties this subgenre started out with.

Thanks to Inversed, for just 15 minutes, you too can assist a 19th century poet as she writes supposedly the most important work of her life. Although this VN was made for a jam with strict limitations, the main character is fully voiced, which I would never neglect to notice. The word choice minigame is likely not as robust as it seems on the surface, but that's not a big deal. The UI design is simply gorgeous. On its own, this didn't really wow me (been there, done that), but it's important to acknowledge that this is just a small part in a bigger puzzle ("The Purgatoryverse", a shared universe for all of Tymedust Games' works), which I suppose I've only just started piecing together.

This one did an okay job of setting up a dark and moody atmosphere. Half an hour wasn't enough to learn a substantial amount about the characters' circumstances, however, so it didn't do much for me.

A simple RPGMaker game where you have to help Jake find all the pieces of his Halloween costume before he can go to the party. To get all three endings: 1) complete the outfit and leave, 2) complete the outfit, collect all candy and leave, 3) complete the outfit, collect all candy and unlock the trunk in the bedroom. Both the environment art and character art are great, but the game is far too short to be paid (and judging by some reviews, it used to be), so I'm glad to have found it after it was changed to F2P. The dev claimed Jake's story would continue, but it's almost been a year and it doesn't seem like anything is in the works. Oh well.

A short kinetic novel about a witch who lives in the forest just outside a city (or was it a town?) and makes an unexpected friend. Inoffensive and rather bland. The choice between ADV and NVL-style presentation at the start was a nice touch, but I found myself wishing for more BGM variety.

Ever since I started playing Coloring Pixels, I've been hungry for more while they're busy working on new packs. I wanted to recommend this one, but even though it has its own aesthetic and a robust options menu, it's got to be running on spaghetti code. During every session, it would crash multiple times for unknown reasons (there was an info window for it, but it's not like I could have done anything to warrant the crash). The best I got was a suggestion from someone on the forum to turn off the particle effect, but in the end that was more of a placebo effect. To add insult to injury, if you barely started an image when the game crashed, it may not have saved at all. Some of the options wouldn't save either, I had to turn down the ambience SFX every time I opened the game up again. Play this one only if you're crazy for pixel coloring.

This is a cop-out "write-up", just here to show that I completed the game. I took five months from when I first started to getting the missable toilet achievement, so I don't remember the story well enough to comment on it anymore. If I replay the game at some point in the future, I'll talk more about it.
For now, I will say that every frame is a painting, but this would have worked so much better as a movie. Nearly all the interactivity in this game simply feels shoe-horned in.

Funny how the devs claim they reworked the free level to make it harder, considering it took me four minutes to complete. I guess their hands slipped on the keyboard.

I've never played Paw Patrol: Grand Prix (and likely never will), but I think this might be the best Paw Patrol game yet. While in the end it is still repetitive, I cannot rightfully complain about it, as it is aimed at kids and therefore meant to be played in shorter sessions (or so I would assume.)
Ryder and the team are busy preparing for Paw Patrol Day when Mayor Humdinger shows up and starts being a nuisance. The story will take you through four open worlds based on locations seen in previous games (Barkingsburg being new to me), which is an improvement over randomly getting boxed into a location and forced to complete it perfectly. I collected all the pup treats I could find in each and every location due to force of habit, but in this game, for once, there is no need to do that. Once you've gathered a set amount of treats, you'll get a new unlockable and the progress bar will reset, but between the mission rewards and all the treats that are just laying around, there's enough for about a dozen more unlocks than there actually are.
Most notably, this may be the least broken Outright Games title I'm aware of yet; it ran flawlessly. (Okay, no, it did crash on me once, but I prefer to chalk it up to a freak accident and it did save right before the next objective, so it's all good.) Maybe they found a good studio to develop this one, maybe Nickelodeon insisted that it be good or maybe there just wasn't any crunch, who knows. I'm a low-spec player, but I bet it looks great if you can run it on a more capable device, too. I was positively surprised Xbox didn't force me to play in Polish as it did with previous games, even though the option is there.
I only have a few petty nitpicks:

• The previous games have conditioned me to mash the action button when performing an action, but here, this yields a broken-sounding SFX. As it turns out, you're actually supposed to hold the action button until the bar fills up to hear the SFX properly… but who's got the time for that?
• Citizen help requests refresh almost immediately after you complete them, instead of disappearing to indicate completion. If you weren't completing them as you went, have fun backtracking!
• You can't move the camera while driving. I think the fact that you're only able to control your vehicle with the left stick is supposed to feel like playing a racing game? Maybe? I don't know, I don't play racing games. Either way, I'm not a fan. I'd like to see where I'm going and adjust accordingly instead of having to stop and turn before I can change direction.
• Some of the things they do are just ridiculous. Since when can you repair anything with a jackhammer? A few tasks were easy enough that I'm convinced Ryder could have done them himself instead of making the team do them.

And a word of advice to anyone planning to play this in the future: do yourself a favor and toggle the option to auto-select characters on. With eight characters, each having their own vehicle, it gets annoying fast.

I like subscribing to Game Pass, because it lets me play new games on release day, and Rolling Hills was one of those games. As Sushi Bot, you move into Rolling Hills and open your very own sushi place, which the locals hope will bring new life to the village… and it very quickly does! …you just don't see much of it. The tourists must just be coming over for sushi and leaving, 'cause there aren't that many of them standing around outside, not to mention there's no inn or any other place to stay in.
Randos aside, there's a cast of specific characters, such as the mayor and the local shopkeeper, but also multiple new additions as the story progresses. Some of them provide some kind of service (at the grocery store, the furniture store, the cafe), but besides that, they're all terribly forgettable (when put together, the new residents are an extremely random bunch of people, too.) Still, you can treat them to coffee or a meal to level up your friendship for bonuses, which would be a great mechanic if the characters were more than their signature traits.
As for the main part of the gameplay, it's a Diner Dash-adjacent restaurant management deal, except you don't have to worry about finding the right table for everyone. Instead, you need to match the type of the dish (vegetable, fish, meat, dessert - not actual in-game names) and its numeric value (quality, I believe?) to what each customer wants (for a perfect rating, both variables have to match - it doesn't work like UNO).
This could have been fun if Sushi Bot wasn't so dummy thicc. It's a struggle to even point at the dish you want to pick up, sometimes. This also extends to serving the dishes; I've given the dish I was holding to the customer on the wrong side of the table more times than I can count. A dash is available, but it's very limited and has a cooldown, and I couldn't explain why it's not permanent if I tried. That only meant I was using the time freeze mechanic much more often.
While in Diner Dash, customers annoyed by businessmen yapping on their phones would eventually get frustrated and leave (a punishment for poor seating choices, or just for being too slow), customers in Rolling Hills don't seem to care as much, even though they are visibly annoyed. Instead, a customer might fall asleep at the table, and if you don't wake them up in time, they'll wake up on their own and leave with a smile before ordering any more dishes. Okay? Your loss, I guess?
At the end of the day, your progress is summed up and you can watch a replay of how much XP you got throughout the day. Earning both XP and money quickly becomes a slow process, but you can speed it up somewhat by furnishing your restaurant with the right kinds of furniture. I may have liked this more if there was any kind of floor grid to help with placing decor symmetrically. As it is, you can't actually do that and not for a lack of trying; for some reason, I just couldn't put two of the same item next to or against each other and have it line up perfectly.
You'll also have to level recipes up by adding matching ingredients to them. Maybe this was just a side effect of the order in which I leveled up my recipes, but in the late game, the lack of new veggie recipes was clear as day. Being forced to serve rainbow (universal) recipes instead just feels like a cop-out. If you level up your friendship with the shopkeeper, you'll get the option to restock the store for a set price, for as long as you can afford it. I looked at negative reviews a few times while I was playing the game and one complaint was a lack of a button to buy out the store all at once. I don't know if that's hard to implement or not, but after an update, there is now an option to skip the confirmation for buying each and every product, as well as a new way to level up recipes (whereas originally you could only use ingredients one by one, now, if you mouse over a recipe and you own enough fitting ingredients, you can choose to level it up from there.) This… is an okay alternative, I guess? (Imagine me shaking my head vehemently right after saying that.)
There are also daily challenges to provide a sort of baseline for the day - spend a thousand coins, talk to three characters, wake up a sleeping customer, etc. These are rewarded with a set amount of points, which you can then redeem for recipes and hats. Yes, hats. There's an absolutely crazy amount of hats Sushi Bot can wear, if only you so please. That being said, the further you progress, the easier these are to complete without even keeping track, and so you'll rack up the points, but have nothing to spend them on (I must have had a little over a thousand by the end; if I'm not mistaken, the sole most expensive item costs 250 points), which is just unfortunate. Besides buying recipes with challenge points and getting them as the restaurant levels up, you can also buy a few from the traveling sushi chef, who only shows up on Sundays (Animal Crossing, anyone?), which feels off, considering there is no other measure of time besides that.
After you finish the story, there are still five more recipes to unlock, so you have to get your restaurant up to level 20. I'm really glad I stopped there until the game was updated: now, you can play special challenge services, and if you do well, these yield a lot more XP in a much shorter time than the usual slog at the regular restaurant. I can't deny that these are creative, but some of the ideas - huge Sushi Bot vs tiny customers, underwater level, an impossible maze - make me feel like the devs genuinely don't know what's a bug and what's a feature. But hey, besides the XP, you can also get a different skin or a new horn sound for Sushi Bot! That's something, right?
All in all, I'm glad to finally be done with this game. The art style is to die for and I've been craving a time management game similar to Diner Dash, but everything else about this one falls so flat, it's insane. Maybe the devs should take writing and/or game design classes next time, I don't know. And make your next game shorter, while you're at it.

The BGM in this one is just too intense, especially considering how short the loop is.

I first got the chance to try this one out during the June 2022 Next Fest (cough the one that gave you badges cough) and fell in love with it right away. Well… after about 70 hours of playing it on my Deck (as a formal welcome), I don't know that I enjoy it as much anymore. First and foremost, a big plus of the game is that it has a dedicated protagonist as opposed to a customizable one. The plot allows for little to no player input on Tara's feelings (so little, in fact, that I ended up accidentally clicking through the choices that did come up about 75% of the time), but on the flipside, after each major event, every character on the island will have something relevant to say. If the other reality was having to read things like "Nice weather today, right, [Player]?" and "I felt so good today, I cleaned all around the house!" over and over again, what we got is definitely better. Add to that the game having full voice acting for all the characters and I'm sold. Another praise-worthy aspect is the diversity. It's not my place to speak about characters of color, but I am pleasantly surprised that the white characters aren't all American by default. This also somewhat relates to everyone's favorite foods; none of them are shared between characters and just about everyone seems to have positive memories tied to their favorites, which is great when considering the length of the recipe list. I feel like if the devs wanted to, they could work even more unique conversations about everyone's origins into the game with enough time. It's nice to have a nonbinary character, too, and I think it would be even more interesting if there was a bachelor(ette) who's openly asexual. The main story lasts for a year in-game; I just completed it and started my second Spring. There's a good enough balance of quests: if nothing is happening in town or you've just completed a major event, chances are there will be something new to do at the coven, but there are also more casual quests, which you can get by just talking to some of the characters. Still, these are tied to the current season and there are only a handful of them sprinkled in throughout. In general, the first half of the year is chock-full of new and shiny things, but as everything progresses, there's less and less stuff to do and everything slows down, or so I've felt. Initially, turning the seasons is stressful when it feels like you haven't grown enough produce, but near the end of the year, you unlock the ability to build (then expand) a greenhouse… but by that point, I've long since forgotten about that stress and if it weren't for tasks related to growing flowers, I think I would have almost found it useless. Also, as realistic, lively and varied all the characters are, when they start repeating themselves and wishing the season was already over, you know you gotta turn the season. Still, I feel like it's a good thing that you can choose not to progress until all your plants have grown, so you don't end up losing time and money. Speaking of which, the economy in this game is absolutely terrible. People have found a way to exploit the game by fishing, then cooking and selling fish sticks, to the point that there is a separate option in the settings to "embargo fish sticks". Yeah, someone decided that would be better than making the prices make sense. Initially, I found it kind of fun that some of the stores require a certain amount of items to be sold to them before their whole stock is unlocked, but Bruno's store took so much time and so many fish, it's not even funny. And on top of that, most fish are worth virtually nothing! I guess I see the appeal of continuously making fish sticks, but I didn't enjoy fishing at all, so I chose an alternative route. At a certain point, the mine right near Tara's farm is unlocked, and it's got 20 whole levels of mining goodness. I enjoyed mining right away, even if the energy bar is rather short at the very start (judging from negative reviews, this is what made a lot of people quit the game, which is sad; at the same time, though, I realize I can't just say "no, no, it gets better after 30 hours!") and there is an achievement for discovering everything on each and every level, so I just went for it. Eventually, between having nothing to do but mine after everyone goes home and owning whirligigs (at this point I can't tell when I first started seeing good enough profits, to be honest), I've started making more than enough money solely by crafting ingots of all kinds and selling them back to Natalia and Francis. (It may not be hundreds of thousands like the fish fingers exploit, but it works for me!) Cooking and fishing feel like afterthoughts; I like cooking because it gives my brain the good juice to tick boxes on a checklist, but fishing is a mistake. Don't get me wrong, fishing as a mechanic (in farm sims or otherwise) gets a bad rep, because it's absolutely not enjoyable in some games, but here, it's just boring. I wouldn't want to play some minigame I can't even get right most of the time, but here, you're just staring at a pool of 1-4 fish/crustaceans until the thing you think you want is hooked, then reel it in. You might as well be fishing for unrecognizable shadows at this point. I'm glad there's at least a section dedicated to fish by source, but other than that, you won't be able to tell which model they're represented by or which kind of bait they're most likely to nibble on. Just make like Animal Crossing and subject me to completely blind RNG instead of making me choose what I think I want and giving me something that's not even remotely close. (One way to avoid this song and dance is shapeshifting into Tara's cat and going fishing that way. You don't get a conscious choice or the whole fishing animation, but it's so much faster.) Last, but certainly not least, though I've complimented how alive the world feels through character interactions, the romance aspect is woefully underdeveloped. After the wedding, you can talk to your partner every day (but there's no choice for sweet talk, so they'll always talk about what's been going on, as if nothing has changed between you two), give them gifts and engage in some light PDA (and I do mean light, it's things like putting a hand on their cheek or booping them on the nose.) The gifting becomes a vital mechanic at this stage; whereas at first I was able to make friends with everyone at a decent speed just by talking to them every day, by the point you're married, your partner will get little to no relationship progress, so you have to give them one of their favorite foods. From there, after their relationship marker is full, they'll ask you out on a date, with a choice of six different locations (all but one are locked at first, though), which would be fine and interesting… if it didn't turn out that not only is the date just a few snapshots with Tara and her partner silently having fun, the date itself lasts all day (ending at 11 PM specifically, iirc, so you still have a little time to take care of your farm, even if you didn't know beforehand). Even though you're not forced to go to bed right after the date, my jaw dropped when I realized that just happened and there wasn't any warning before committing. (Seems like a no-brainer to me!) After that, you have to keep giving your partner their favorite foods again, rinse and repeat. Besides this, the only special thing I'm aware of when it comes to romance is that your partner will have a petname for Tara and everyone has a different one. Based on all this, I'm shocked that there are separate achievements for marrying each possible partner. Also, if you're not married to Amira or Kim by Summer of second year, they apparently start dating, with no way to reverse it or break them up. As much as I will gladly keep reiterating that I enjoy all the characters having rich lives of their own, that's just anti-player design. I'm still on my first romance path, but if this is really as boring as it is for every partner, I'll just use my backup save to get the other marriage achievements without further commitment. Other than that, I'm waiting on the few recipes that are scattered between various quests for Year 2, as well as a bunch of other unlockables… but for now, I think I'm happy with taking a break.

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.

This game should be used as a supplement for neurodivergency tests. I was expecting a nice little game of putting stuff away neatly, in order of size or color, and it's not that I was completely bamboozled, but other solutions range from elaborate to "why the hell would you be doing this in the first place". Straightening photos, sorting documents, even organising your seashell collection is par for the course, but you can't convince me that there are people out there aligning their clocks' handles with the shadow of the tree outside their house or arranging the flies on their beloved spider's web in a symmetrical pattern. But if there are… please, seek help, and I do mean that genuinely. Go to therapy, hang out with your family or friends, take up a new hobby. Life doesn't have to be this suffocating. It's also beyond me that the main character has a cat. How on earth can you be this married to the idea of keeping every little aspect of your life this tidy, and yet have a pet that will come and ruin all of your work just for fun? Anyway, this one goes out to all the people who still think cats are getting a bad rep in media; there are so many games out there that treat cats like four-legged gods, and this is definitely one of them. Also, the only reason I haven't finished this game yet is the stupid "daily tidy" - a selection of 20 (or so) levels from the main game with some slight visual changes here and there that rotates daily. That by itself would be okay, but the achievements want you to do these for a hundred days… I'll take "PADDING" for $200, Alex. At first, these were frustrating because I didn't get into the main game, now they're just frustrating because it's all the same stuff, every day.

I haven't seen a lot of the show, but I've heard that it's gotten popular for being all about having fun and enjoying life with your family and friends organically, no electronics involved, so I'm intrigued. I can't afford to subscribe to the service that offers the show in its entirety, though, so I figured I might as well play the game first. There are four short episodes to play through as sort of a story mode, each of which unlocks a new location to run around and play at, plus a fifth one for completing all episodes. Each location has an assortment of collectibles to find, as well as stickers for your sticker book. Finding those collectibles and playing minigames (unlocked during the story) leads to unlocking various hats for the Heeler family, and there's a load of them! And oh yeah, you can choose to play as any member of the Heeler family, at pretty much any time, which is fun. Also, don't forget about watering the plants! That was a thing introduced during the story mode, but I somehow blanked it out until right near the end of my hunt for all the collectibles and that became a pain in the butt. I also found the achievements for completing the minigames five times in a row rather redundant, it's not like anything in the game changes after you do that, and if you've done enough other stuff before that, you won't even get any new hats for it. All in all, though, I can't judge it too harshly - Bluey is made with kids in mind and I feel like - however ironic it may be - this game will keep all the little fans (and their parents) busy for a lot longer. It may also be worth mentioning that even though it's published by Outright Games (because of course it is), this game isn't broken. Or, well, it's just a bit borked, but that only gives it charm and doesn't actually impede the gameplay in any way.

This game absolutely owns my baby bitch ass. Since I got myself a Game Pass sub again recently, picking it up from where I left off two years ago was very much on the table, and so I assumed I could just pop in for two hours a day… boy, how wrong I was. There was so much to catch up on that it became a timesink right away. I opened it up for the first time and ever since then, April has become a black hole. I can finally write about it, though, as I have officially completed all story quests, and in turn, beaten the game. (That was, like, 25 hours ago…) From now on, it's pretty much all cosmetic - critter feeding, crafting, buying out Scrooge's store for the day - and slowly, but surely, I'll be working my way towards the rest of the achievements. I will say, though, I caught up just in time for the new update that came out today… and I'm ready to get into it right after I post this.

This is one of those games that's been somewhere at the back of my mind since I learned of it before its release. Now that it's out and on Game Pass since day one, and it's really short (1-2 hours, according to HLTB), I knew I had to play it ASAP. Well… it's a walking simulator, which is a-okay with me, but looking at the gorgeous character art, I was expecting something more than a few short animation loops during conversations. In any case, you play as 16 year-old Tess Devine, and along with your mom, Opal, you're cleaning and packing up to move out of your grandma's house after her recent passing. After getting prompted to check out the attic, however, you uncover a secret that grandma Helen has kept for decades. Exploration is great, there's a lot of stuff you can pick up, even though it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things (possible alternate title 1: "Ashtray Pickup Simulator") and the locations themselves are full of life, but whenever you need to find something to proceed further, it's never a challenge of any sort. Half the gameplay is asking Opal about all the interesting stuff you find and whatever conversation or story comes out of that (possible alternate title 2: "Hey, mom!" Simulator"), and it genuinely miffs me that whenever you pick something up and it's just Tess commenting on it, Opal absolutely never chimes in - that's just unrealistic, considering it's her childhood we're investigating here and makes the game feel more empty than it already is, considering you don't get to see the characters occupy the space they're in unless they're talking to each other. Also, if you ask Opal to elaborate on an item you just picked up, you can see it locked in mid-air in the spot where you were looking at it seconds ago. Clearly not supposed to happen, but still funny. There's no satisfying climax or conclusion to the secret or what might happen to Tess and Opal after they move out, but alas, that's very much like real life, I suppose. It may not have been nearly as wondrous as What Remains of Edith Finch, but I still enjoyed the journey aspect of it. I saw a little bit of myself and my mom in Tess and Opal, and I feel like that's enough to still keep this game in the back of my mind, just in case I might manage to get my mom to play it one day. All in all, it was engrossing enough to play through in one sitting, but it's definitely too expensive for how short it is, so once again, I'm glad that I got to play it through Game Pass. (Also, maybe this is more of a me issue, but even though the voiceover is only available in English, the game language was set to Polish by default, and I couldn't change it back to English? Other choices included German and Russian, which makes total sense, and then… Brazilian Portuguese, for some reason? Seriously, the lack of a choice to go back to English is just confusing to me.)

This ain't my first rodeo… so I got my friend to watch me play it. I've only beaten it while streaming it for her, cause after that there's really nothing new to unlock… yet still a bunch of achievements left to obtain. Well, what can I say… it'll get repetitive from this point on, but I still love this game. It hits the cozy spot like nothing else, and after I complete it here, I will have completed it three times, each one on a different platform. Looking forward to trying out the sequel in the future.

Now that I'm branching out to all the other copycats, I've noticed there's an overwhelming amount of these made with just… well, cats. So to postpone that for a bit, I chose to play this one instead. The underwater kingdom location looked pretty cute and the BGM was nice, too. 's just a shame it was so easy.

I appreciate that this one used pictograms as hints. My favorite part was definitely "embassy" being lumped in with words starting with the letter U. Only one more to go now.