Yukumo is a girl on a journey, flying an airship and soaring through the clouds when a mysterious shockwave damages her engine and she’s forced to crash-land on an Island covered by fog. Kogara, a stranded member of the Nezu cat tribe, finds her and asks for help in a mutually beneficial relationship. By restoring the Sacred trees, the fog will leave the city and its citizens will gradually return, and by collecting the tree’s lantern fruits – a fuel source – Yukumo can restore her Airship and continue her adventure. Solve puzzles, make friends, and revitalize the land in an experience no one will soon forget!

3-10 hours to complete, TASOMACHI: Behind the Twilight is a puzzle platform object collection game that revolves around collecting lanterns in an abandoned city smothered by fog. As more shrines are completed, citizens – the Nezu Tribe – move back in and the towns become operational again, enabling jump pads and more accessible areas. Puzzles are skippable, you can collect money in the streets and pay 20 coins for a teleporter to the end of a puzzle if it’s too difficult. Gameplay is pretty smooth, and after the story is completed, you get access to airship racing. This profitable mini-game significantly lessens the grind of purchasing all six outfits and furniture for your house should you want it.

3-7+ hours to complete, Loddlenaut is an underwater open-world cleaning and pet sim. Restore biomes by removing oil and trash then replant native flora and re-introduce the wildlife, the Loddles. Depending on what they eat or what you feed them as they grow up, they can change into one of 13 different types! They can follow you around and help clean up areas, but they usually stay where you put them and can play with crafted toys.

Admittedly, there isn’t much of a story – the company that caused all the problems already got shut down, you’re just the guy hired to clean up the aftermath. No enemies, no puzzles, nothing time-sensitive, no quick time events, and nothing ridiculously grindy. It’s a colorful game with plenty of things to do, especially with the most recent update, and the only thing I can say it lacks is a photo mode.

Los Angeles has fallen due to numerous natural disasters and in its ashes rose the rebuilt city of Los Diablos, a lawless city untouched by the government and run by those with power – literally. Heroes and Villains are in a constant battle for control and in the aftermath of the Heartbreak Incident, the telepathic hero Sidestep is presumed dead. Armed with the knowledge you shouldn’t have and secrets that were buried long ago, remake yourself into the greatest villain the city has ever seen.

6-13 hours to complete, Fallen Hero: Rebirth is a text-based RPG with a rare villain protagonist. LGBTQ+ friendly with optional romance, it’s a pretty amazing fallen superhero novel where every choice you make feels like you’ve made the correct one where you choose the tone and level of violence. 385,000+ words and the first book of three, the next in the series being Fallen Hero: Retribution then Fallen Hero: Revelations. Reaching the end of the novel saves that game and brings it into the second novel, and so forth. Overall, it’s a fantastic novel to invest your time into; the only thing I can complain about is the lack of a save/load system and the fact that you can’t backtrack to see the results of other choices unless you start a new game.

Raen is one of the orphans of Aurelia Cavella, a town protected by the gods and led by the Divine speaker; a man who chooses a child’s destiny and path in life from the day they are born, to who they marry, to the day they die. Surrounded by an endless forest of death and monsters, this town is the only place with human life; it’s been this way for thousands of years until Raen turns 18. Preparing to enter adulthood and get matched up to have children, mysterious markings appear on Raen’s arm and he is exiled from Aurelia Cavella. Here, in the forest, he meets an impossible hermit who speaks incomprehensible truths – his entire life was a lie. It’s time to make a new one.

17-35+ hours to complete, The Divine Speaker is a fantasy LGBTQ+ uncensored VN with multiple endings and three love interests. It's fully voice-acted with options in the settings to turn off individual characters' voices. It is super high quality, I highly recommend playing it as it’s a fantastic experience! My biggest complaint is that the ending is unsatisfactory due to the unresolved questions, loose ends, and the cliffhanger it ends on clearly setting up a Divine Speaker 2, which concerns me as I don’t see any news of a second game at the time of this review, more than two years after the Divine Speaker was released. (The Divine Speaker: The Sun and the Moon is a prequel, not the sequel.)

A retired soldier from war, Aka leaves the battlefield with his war friend Thom to one of the islands in the east, in search of a peaceful life of farming and blissful normalcy. Make new friends, visit the city on occasion, go hiking, cloud watch on beaches, play some music, and find a place to settle down. Just don’t let the ghosts of your past haunt you too much.

5-7+ hours to complete, Aka is a hand-drawn casual farming sim where you play as a war veteran. There are four islands to explore and one city, with two houses you can move into - one being your starter home that’s already furnished. Farming is simple and only really needed for quest progression at the least, the scale of what you want to grow is up to you. Overall, it’s a nice casual sim with optional minigames as well as its own card game. There are plenty of fun things to do while short enough to not be grindy. The only cons I can think of is unlike most farming games, your fully grown crop plants rot if you don’t collect them, but any planted flowers stay.

This game was given to me for free to curate, which does not guarantee a positive review, and reflects my sincere opinion.

As a seasoned agent of the Imperial Security Bureau of the Earth Empire, get assigned an easy courier mission to the far-off and exotic planet Ulthar to retrieve a vital package from your currently undercover best friend, scientist, and war buddy Samir. Things go wrong almost immediately when before your starship can even land, a call to return to Earth arrives because Samir went missing. Now there is a choice before you, defy orders to find and rescue the closest friend you’ve ever had from whatever he’s gotten himself into, or stay loyal and return home.

2-6+ hours to complete, Fallen Seeds is a Hand-drawn Mystery/Detective Dating sim with aliens and biotechnology. The first VN in a planned upcoming trilogy, Fallen Seeds features partial voice acting, high-quality art and animations, moving character sprites, backgrounds, a solid OST, and skillful writing. Created from an indie group of just a handful of people, I’m genuinely impressed as this is nicer than some of the more popular VN’s I’ve read. There is only one con, remember that this is an unfinished game, and no one has any idea how Fallen Seeds series will turn out – but if the quality and pacing remain the same there is nothing to fear.

Waking up alone in a manor full of monsters roaming the endless hallways, find the other humans trapped within and ally together to survive. The exits are fake, the windows unbreakable, the only way out is hints gained through text messages asking your group to collect shining shards of glass and make a kaleidoscope that supposedly, somehow, grants a single wish. With no memories or any recollection of who you are or how you joined this twisted game, work together so everyone can leave, or become an eternal occupant, forget everything, and quietly fade away.

15-30+ hours to complete, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly is a fully voiced VN with 5 love interests and 12 endings, with a flowchart available for easy backtracking and route selection. Individual character voices, including the protagonists, can be turned off in the sound settings. Optional minigames grant you points to spend and unlock side stories, which reveal more game endings to explore. Overall, I had a positive experience playing Black Butterfly, and I particularly liked the unusual variety of endings as well as the aforementioned flowchart. For cons, there are infrequent oddly translated sentences and the confusing, conflicting skillset and intelligence of the airheaded female protagonist. Highly recommend.

2-5+ hours to complete, Minami Lane is a comfortable and wholesome casual management sim in which you rebuild and restore a small community with a Tanuki. Hand-drawn and Ghibli inspired, increase your resident’s happiness and population by adding storefronts and parks. Clean streets, pick up trash, pet cats, and manage each shop's inventory and prices to create a lively and charming place for people to live. The music is very lovely and Lofi, I didn’t experience any bugs, and the game runs smoothly. Easy to 100%, there is also a Sandbox mode which lets you create and design your own street, and the P key on a keyboard hides the UI to take clean screenshots. Highly recommended!

For generations, humanity amongst the stars has been ruled by one machine that predicts the entire life, actions, and crimes of a person before they are even born. Apheta, an overwhelming, omnipotent AI overseen and kept by the wealthiest and most powerful among the Morai planet and government, has only one weakness. Howler Artifacts; priceless relics of a bygone age made of extinct materials that are so unpredictable they cause a glitch in Apheta’s systems, and one is in the unknowing hands of Lana Brice, a scavenger and procurer of valuable ancient items through not-always-legitimate-sources. Born on Peon-5, Lana’s latest haul from a toxic swamp has drawn a noticeable amount of interest from an anonymous client and gets her wrapped up in more red tape, political plots, and rebel dreams than a small-planet girl could ever wish for.

9-18 hours to complete, Cardinal Cross is an LGBTQ+ space-themed sci-fi fantasy VN with multiple endings and three personality choices for Lana as you play. 3 romance routes, over 70 CGs, and no voice acting. Heavy on world building, there is more lore than action. Exceptionally well written, there are only a handful of spelling errors with more as the game progresses. While Cardinal Cross isn’t a bad VN, far from it, I will mention a few complaints. The game speeds up considerably when you get in the last two chapters, to the point you are teleporting from place to place which is drastically different pacing from the start of the novel. More endings are bad than good, and the plot gets pretty convoluted. Despite leaving Early Access a bit too early, it’s a solid VN I recommend If you’re really into sci-fi.

1+ hours to complete, Cats of the Qing Dynasty is a Hidden object game with 600 cats over 6 levels. Impressively, no cat is copy/pasted and I did not note any duplicates. They purr when your mouse brushes them, clicking them gifts you with a wide variation of meows, and with multiple sizes, shapes, poses, and types of cats, it’s difficult to feel bored – especially once you realize the entire game takes place on one of the famous variations of the 1085-1145 CE, 5.25 meter (17ft) long painting “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”; specifically, the version made in 1736 by five collaborating artists.

Yes, the reason this game needs 4GB of space on your computer is because someone scanned the entire silk painting in such high quality you can see the texture of the fabric it’s made on, digitally touched it up, meticulously hid 600 cats in it, then sold it on the Steam store for less than 1 USD. Clicking on the title screen in-game grants you access to the entire original scanned painting that you can zoom in and out of, without the cats. This game is absolutely worth the purchase price. There is another version titled “Cats of the Ming Dynasty” by the same developer, if you enjoy this game, you will like that one as well.

Paul Prospero is a supernatural detective, one of the rare few who can interact with the unusual, and has a spectacular ability to glimpse into the past by recreating it; solving impossible murders. Reading his fan mail, Paul gets a letter from a young boy named Ethan Carter who has a special ability himself - Using the ability to see hidden things and places in his home of Red Creek Valley, he’s stumbled on something weird, and reaches out for help. Recognizing the significant threat, Paul heads to his location only to find that darkness has already settled in the valley. Follow the trail of corpses, piece together what happened, and discover the fate of the missing Ethan Carter.

4-5+ hours to complete, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a supernatural detective walking sim where you solve multiple murders and use a special ability to see into the past to piece the story together. Purchasing this game also gives you the updated redux version made in Unreal Engine 4, while the original was made in 3. Overall, I had a positive experience playing; the storyline, voice acting, graphics, writing, and exploration were pretty fun. In particular, I want to mention that the area is made with Photogrammetry; in which remote sensing is used to take multiple photos to make a digital map to create complicated 2D or 3D digital objects. For example, the mountain range shown is based on the Polish Karkonosze mountains. There is one easily avoidable jumpscare that gives you plenty of warning. The only cons I can think of are that some story sections can be accidentally skipped if you wander off, breaking the flow of the game when you have to backtrack, and that the game is autosave only.

Prince Oscar of Ocendawyr and attendant Madeline travel to the Kingdom of Gwellinor in a bid for the princess's marriage at her royal debutante ball; but he is not the only one arriving in an attempt for her hand. Madeline’s goal is to advise Oscar, guide him, generally make him look good in the eyes of the princess, and not let him stumble into the political minefield that naturally occurs with so many high-profile guests. Things take a turn for the worse when the princess is kidnapped during her own ball, and your poor Prince Oscar is the main suspect! Not about to let him get arrested for a false crime, Madeline must unsheathe her blades, gather evidence, and investigate the other royal guests without getting caught to save her prince and childhood friend.

7-12 hours to complete, The Confines Of The Crown is an LGBTQ+ VN with 15 endings and 5 romance routes. Well written with some pretty impressive and well thought out plot twists, I didn’t note any spelling errors. Characters are fun, interesting, and well fleshed out, and in particular, Madeleine is a strong female lead who is genuinely competent and intelligent, making this a pleasure to read. Aside from a music mishap where two background tracks played over each other in an early scene, I had a very enjoyable time reading it and would recommend it to anyone interested in the storyline.

8-13 hours to complete, Koi Farm is a casual puzzle deckbuilding game in which you crossbreed different colors and patterns of Koi to fulfill book collection objectives. The atmosphere is very relaxing and it's very nice watching fish swim around in the stream and in your ponds. There is a weather system, and occasionally it will rain or storm and special koi will appear; admittingly I enjoyed this simple game more than anticipated.

All Koi have their own Koi code, a red, orange, and yellow circle made of triangles that you can share with your friends so that they can add your koi to their game. It’s a pretty neat feature you can test out yourself. In the “About This Game” section on the Koi Farm’s Steam page, there is a lovely white, red, and black Koi Code you can use. Drag the code.png image to your desktop, and with the game open, drag the image to your game window, and it will appear as a card at the bottom of the screen

1+ hours to complete, Cats of the Ming Dynasty is a Hidden object game with 600 cats over 6 levels. Impressively, no cat is copy/pasted and I did not note any duplicates. They purr when your mouse brushes them, clicking them gifts you with a wide variation of meows, and with multiple sizes, shapes, poses, and types of cats, it’s difficult to feel bored – especially once you realize the entire game takes place on a famous variation of the 1085-1145 CE, 5.25 meter (17ft) long painting “Ming Dynasty along the River During the Qingming Festival”, essentially meaning you are playing a Cat HOG on what is basically considered China’s version of the Mona Lisa in high definition.

Yes, the reason this game needs 4GB of space on your computer is because someone scanned the entire 17ft long silk painting in such high quality you can see the texture of the fabric it’s made on, digitally touched it up and meticulously hid 600 cats in it, then sold it on the Steam store for less than 1 USD. Clicking on the title screen in-game grants you access to the entire original scanned painting that you can zoom in and out of, without the cats. This game is absolutely worth the purchase price.

Working as a courtesan in a tavern, Grace lives a very satisfying life with her long line of lovers and piles of books to peruse when a particular stranger comes to the bar. A Half dragon decked out with a fancy pirate hat and coat barely has enough time to start a conversation and sit down before they toss their fancy clothing and hat at Grace and darting away – the Navy hot on her tail. Suddenly finding herself in possession of a flying ship with crew, Grace sets out on a romantic, treasure-filled adventure she’s only read about before in her novels.

6-9 hours to complete, Mutiny!! Is a NSFW LGBTQ+ VN with 5 routes, 2 being DLC. There is an uncensored patch available. Routes are chosen by who you pick as your First Mate, and endings are determined by puzzle completions and how well you deal with enemy pirate attacks; there is no harem route. None of the puzzles or text changes regardless of who you pick for your First Mate, it only influences what scenes you get at story points giving the game low replayability. I will warn you that the developers have 3 unfinished games, and that’s reflected in Mutiny!! As well. Two crew members are not romanceable, and Elizabeth’s DLC route has no CGs. I have the strong impression that there was supposed to be more to the storyline as well, as many places you visit to loot only have the word count of a single modest paragraph before moving on to another area. I suggest picking up Mutiny!! only if it’s on sale.

Thick, toxic miasma blankets most of the world leaving the human race in a perpetual struggle to survive, a scarce few able to carve themselves out a home in safer pockets of the world. Coming from the little town of Little Rock, a new, young pioneer sets out to create a Homestead in a small fertile patch of land good enough to live on and grow a garden. With the aid of potions, magic, and a 300-year-old cat familiar called Huckleberry, settle down on this thin slice of paradise and start growing food to send back home. Like all areas of the world, this new place is dangerous, a dense purple wall of miasma just a short walk away; yet you see things in the fog, new things to explore, new mysteries waiting to be found – but you know what they say about curiosity.

20-30+ hours to complete, Homestead Arcana is a Southern Farming sim with witches, magic, flying brooms, and familiars. There are three areas to unlock with each area granting you a garden expansion for the new plants and vegetables you will inevitably find in each biome. Gardening is pretty fun as you can trim plants, move and adjust leaves, pluck individual fruits, and use magic to help them grow on your Homestead. With potions to brew, skills to unlock, miasma to clear, crops to grow, food to send back home, and catnip to give to your cute cat familiar huckleberry, there are a lot of good things that make Homestead Arcana a really solid farming game; but there are definitely some cons you should be aware of before buying.

The start of this game is genuinely terrible. You can’t jump, the exploration is timed, the tutorial is not explained well with many important functions being completely left out. To make matters worse, you can softlock yourself out of the achievement “Upgraded” if you’re proactive and finish Ruby’s questline, as she kindly gives you the blueprint to make and sell your own Resolve Pendants, which prevents you from buying it and thus, getting the achievement. Homestead Arcana also can’t keep itself straight lore-wise, as the seedlings and plants you collect in the blight shouldn’t exist since the miasma kills or mutates all life. The ending was confusing since a peaceful resolution was available but the game forces to be what I perceive as an unnecessary bad end. Despite its long list of flaws, I still genuinely liked Homestead Arcana for its unique farming system and uncommon story concepts, but in the end, this is a difficult game to recommend.

High schooler Touya is heading home from his part-time job when passing by The Restricted Zone, he hears a bell ringing and wanders in only to be attacked by a stranger with supernatural powers. Rescued last minute by a bizarre, petite girl with a sword, he goes home only to find her already waiting in his living room. Apparently having awakened an ability to “hear” and locate people using a supernatural ability, he’s been noticed by a mysterious organization and warrants a bodyguard – and a new job!

9-30+ hours to complete, XBlaze Code: Embryo is part 1 of a 2 game VN series, the other being XBlaze Lost: Memories. Fully voice-acted and with 12 endings to explore, this game has a lot of moving sprites, characters, animations, backgrounds, CGs, and 47 OSTs. The ending route depends on what news articles you read throughout the game; I suggest reading all articles the first time you play. Playing all the routes is fairly simple as there is a “skip already read text” feature and when new articles appear, the game automatically turns it off so you won’t miss anything. Higher quality than expected from a 2013 VN, I had a more enjoyable experience than anticipated and highly recommend playing. My only real complaint is that the keyboard controls are awkward, as this game was clearly made with controller use in mind.

Arriving into the blue after chasing after her little sister, a girl finds herself lost in an unnatural area missing her memories and having forgotten her name; and surprisingly, she’s not alone. On a quest to get to the bottom floor of this Phantom Field, collect scattered memory fragments with Nobody to create keys to access more areas and finally reunite with her sibling.

7-11 hours to complete, XBlaze Lost: Memories is the sequel of a 2 part VN series, the first being XBlaze Code: Embryo. Includes full voice acting, multiple CG’s, one storyline, 58 OSTs and the same impressive writing and quality of the first game. More linear in nature and easy to 100%, Memories wraps up the unanswered questions left from Embryo and touches on the backstory of important characters in the BlazBlue series. I can’t mention much more without spoilers, I can’t even name character names, but I highly suggest playing the Xblaze VN series.

Simon Jarret is a literature-loving Canadian suffering a brain injury from a recent car accident and goes to see a doctor to get his brain scanned and make a treatment plan – only to find himself 100 meters under the sea a second later. Walking around the abandoned facility called PATHOS-II, Simon must use tools to bypass security locks and other obstacles while avoiding, hiding, or outsmarting machines that sound uncomfortably human, and are strangely intent on killing him.

7-11 hours to complete, SOMA is a sci-fi survival horror, or existential horror if you play in safe mode, with one ending. Many reviewers say you should only play on normal difficulty and nothing else, but I prefer safe mode as you don’t lose out on “the SOMA experience” and the game is not as branching as it appears. Not dying from enemies making you replay stealth sections is the only difference, you still get stalked and knocked out – so I suggest you ignore reviews saying safe mode is for wusses and play how you want. Regardless, SOMA is an excellent game worth playing if you’re interested in the storyline or enjoy horror games. Aside from a scripted hallway chase, there are not any jumpscares.

Deep in an underground research facility, a study sample held in a glass container shakes and bursts apart, unleashing a new horror onto humankind. A living biohazard to anything made of meat, it rips apart and consumes flesh to add directly to its own biomass, becoming bigger and evolving into more aggressive abilities. Creep your way through vents or leave blood spatters in the hallways as you make your escape from below the surface.

6-8+ hours to complete, CARRION is a reverse-horror game with pixel graphics where you play as the monster hunting down humanity and those who imprisoned you. Be sneaky or loud! Changing your size changes your abilities allowing a solid amount of gameplay variation. Weirdly chill and relaxing, the character's movement is smooth and natural despite being a mass of flesh-eating tentacles. The level design is clever with engaging logic puzzles and steady game progression. Rare are the games that let you play as the Lovecraftian Monster, rarer that the game is made well, and I highly suggest you take the opportunity to play CARRION.

Feeling solitude creeping into your studio apartment in a busy city, explore places such as the bakery, post office, florist, restaurants, and a museum around town in search of spare bones and organs to build a partner, a warm, wet heart.

2+ hours to complete, Birth is a hand-drawn point-and-click physics-based puzzle game with a wholesome creepy cute story made entirely by one person. The explorable town is a good size, with many little secrets in its fine details. I bought this game pretty much right after finishing the developer’s previous hand-drawn game from 2021, Landlord of the Woods. If you’re not sure if you would enjoy Birth, I recommend checking out Landlord first as it’s a fairly cheap and enjoyable experience with similar vibes.

A kingdom falls, and grave by grave, the dead arise. Taking advantage of the chaos, a thief slips into the Astral Academy to steal an artifact known as the Trine. On top of the Academy looking through his telescope is a wizard, and seeing the approaching army of the dead, heads down to hide the artifacts for safekeeping only to find a thief already inside. A Knight, in pursuit of the thief, charges into the academy hallways and without much thought, all three touch the Trine, their souls merging into one. To unbind their souls from each other, seek out three great artifacts, discover the reason the dead have risen, and save the kingdom from its peril.

6-15 hours to complete, Trine is a fantasy physics-based puzzle platformer and side-scroller game in which you play as a Wizard, Thief, and a Knight who accidentally merged into one person that you can switch between as needed. The Wizard can conjure platforms and move impossibly heavy objects, the Thief is an archer skilled with a grappling hook, and the Knight is a very strong, healthy tank. Trine features clever layouts, engaging puzzles, smooth gameplay, as well as co-op and local multiplayer. Despite the dated graphics, I had a fun time playing and I'm particularly fond of the OST.

30 years ago, a Great War broke out, effectively ending the human race. The world with its small handful of remaining humans left is barely surviving the remnants of the war. Great, autonomous mechs known as Warmongers roam the cities and land, still wiping out anything with a heat signature and enemy machines. The cities they were ordered to defend, have long since been empty of any life they had to protect. It started raining toxic water 9 years ago, and since then, it’s never stopped for a single day. A solitary man infiltrates a dead, still-guarded city and stumbles on one of the few places left on Earth with air conditioning, untouched by the apocalypse outside. A Rooftop Planetarium, the sole occupant inside is a robot named Hoshino Yumemi, the last remaining employee. For the first time in his life, he sees the stars.

2-3 hours to complete, Planetarian is a story-rich emotional kinetic novel that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. There are no choices to be made, only a story to be told. The CG’s are of good quality and the writing was excellent with no noticeable spelling errors. The music is a bit repetitive but overall, I had a positive and lovely experience. Despite its short length, it’s an easy KN to recommend.