Depression is a truly vicious bastard. It’s hard to capture or explain just how debilitating and awful it is, unless you’ve lived with it, or lived with someone you hold dear and close to you who suffers at its hands. It’s also a crushingly heavy topic, so it’s little wonder few games attempt to tackle … Continue reading You Used To Be Someone
Tag: Interactive narrative
Wide Ocean Big Jacket
As I played Wide Ocean Big Jacket I found my thoughts were drawn to the notion of the pastoral. If you’re unfamiliar, we use pastoral in literary analysis to describe works that idealise the countryside, giving rurality an almost mythical quality in contrast to the hurly-burly cynicism of urban life. It’s a traditionally European style … Continue reading Wide Ocean Big Jacket
Escaped Chasm
The latest in my adventures of trawling my massive bundle of games on itch.io for stuff that’s short and simple to play in-between long console titles, Escaped Chasm caught my attention for one very specific reason: Temmie Chang. If you’re even remotely familiar with Temmie - and let’s be frank, that’s exactly how familiar I … Continue reading Escaped Chasm
Homing
There are a lot of things that drew me to Homing when I saw it pop up in my itch.io library. It’s low-poly (always interesting to ancient nerds like yours truly), it’s got a gorgeous pink and teal aesthetic, it’s about a bird. All easy wins. Oh, and it’s marketed as excessively queer and about … Continue reading Homing
An Airport Game
As I think I’ve remarked before, I’m often left in awe at just what subjects indie game developers manage to construct games out of. Take An Airport Game, for instance. It’s yet another one of the games I found squirrelled away in the ever-expansive depths of my itch.io bundles and, like so many of these … Continue reading An Airport Game
1365
One thing I’ve come to love about games I discover through itch.io is the breadth of topics and themes they take on. Often they’re quite heavy ones but I think that’s only natural; after all, it’s the heaviest emotions which inspire us the most, whether that’s the blossoming highs of love or the vicious weight … Continue reading 1365
Dear Esther
Whenever Dear Esther crops up in conversation, you’ll almost always find someone espousing the (not unreasonable) opinion that it isn’t a game. After all, I think most of us would accept that our traditional understanding of what a video game is includes ideas like having a failure state and overcoming some kind of challenge to … Continue reading Dear Esther
A Mortician’s Tale
There are all sorts of interesting ideas for games floating about out there. If you can think of a concept, I’m sure it’s all but certain that someone has made a game on it. Obviously there’s all the standard ones, like heroes embarking on a magical quest or people out for revenge and all that … Continue reading A Mortician’s Tale
Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard
Unlike the first time I sat down to review a Frog Detective game, I think now I know what I expect and what I feel about this series. It might be some bizarre mix of bafflement, bemusement, and an odd sense of elation, but it is at least a concrete sense of how I regard … Continue reading Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard
The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game
I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to introduce what I feel or think about Frog Detective. Based purely on the name alone, I admit I absolutely would not have even given a second glance to it if it had scrolled into my view on Steam. It reminds me too much of that miserable … Continue reading The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game