Pink Gum
Pink Gum is a very short journey through a life as told by chewing gum bubbles. I pondered how to sum this game up in a sentence, and I guess that’s the best I could do. Not great, really.
I think its one of those things that no matter what I might say, you could go, hmm, sounds interesting, but when you actually see it, it will make perfect sense. Which begs the question “Why am I even writing about it then?”
Because I think Pink Gum is well worth checking out. For the small amount of time and money you spend, you get a visually appealing, thought provoking experience. I’m also pretty sure that my opinion isn’t enough to persuade you, so here are some quotes about the game from famous people.
– Real player with 1.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Experimental Philosophical Games.
Pink Gum is a short but powerful experience that tells us about birth, life and death from a unique point of view.
I really recommend this game to everyone.
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
Cat’s Menace
This game was a lot of fun to play in front of my stream audience, however playing it by myself without friends would have been a rather miserable experience, I’m afraid. The game has no save or checkpoint system, so when you have a Game Over, you have to start the entire game over from the beginning. The game operates by having you assign a cat to a task and making choices to decide whether the cats succeed or fail in the mission. The choices have no logic behind them, so it’s a coin flip in deciding if you lose the cat you assigned or not. Also, it doesn’t seem to matter which cats you assign to the mission. They’re essentially just very cute life counters.
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Experimental Visual Novel Games.
So, I’m going to be honest and say, I LOVE CATS…
Now, when I then looked at the “Similar to games you’ve played: The Witcher 3 and Portal 2” I was ready for this game to BLOW. MY. MIND.
Spoiler alert: It did not…
The other reviews are spot on:
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English translation is bad, even to the point where some things doesn’t make sense
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It’s game over pretty easily and you have no idea what would be the right answer to the events you’re prompted with
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When you get a game over, you start over from the beginning - so it becomes a pattern of blindly guessing what’s right and having to remember every right answer to get further in the game. Which gets boring and annoying very fast.
– Real player with 0.4 hrs in game
Draw & Guess
the best game in 2021 no cap
– Real player with 122.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Experimental Casual Games.
***server game design sht, buy to suffer.
If this is a brand new game, it can be forgiven, but how long has it been, how much money, bugs and servers are still not optimized, why?
– Real player with 49.5 hrs in game
Medulla
A short, easy game that embodies magical realism to a T.
This meticulously hand-drawn side scroller makes for an immersive journey through a surreal landscape that ends much too quickly for my taste. The puzzles were somewhat of a challenge and satisfying when I figured them out, although I was far more interested in the bizarre creatures and artworks that revealed themselves as I progressed through the game.
All in all, a good buy worth the price.
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
This game has way too high a production value to be going this under the radar.
It’s basically a Limbo-type game. It’s a cinematic puzzle platformer with very impressive visuals. But Medulla trades the horror vibe of Limbo for one much more surreal and mind-bending. The puzzles are not too difficult, you won’t be stuck on one for very long, but they still require you to adapt your thought process to the psychedelic rules the game plays by.
I wasn’t able to glean much of a solid story until the very end, but the varied and detailed graphics kept me going.
– Real player with 2.5 hrs in game
Ochitsubaki
A fallen camellia is a beheading, every time, every petal falling at once: a severing.
════*.·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·.*════
TW: CSA, animal death, violence, suicidal ideation
OCHITSUBAKI || 落ち椿 is a visual novel about the impossibility of translating trauma. It is a bilingual JPN/ENG game about translation and how it can run as deeply as the way hypermarginalized people constantly “translate” their identities and trauma for the understanding of others, no matter how far it is from the source material. It’s about recovering from trauma through the genuine compassion and consideration of another person, who manages to See the aftereffects of trauma and are willing to meet that person’s unique needs, regardless of if they “understand” them or not.
Ochitsubaki is only loosely a visual novel, which is to say it is a story-based game with a strong aesthetic component. Ochitsubaki has a deep, rich tapestry of aesthetics in unifying modern elegance with unique retro anime-inspired character portraits. The original soundtrack derives inspiration from traditional Asian pentatonic scales, particularly but not limited to Japanese ones, that also derive a modern, Genshin’s Liyue-type twist that sets it firmly in contemporary times. It has three language options: JPN, ENG, and JPN translation. The ENG/JPN versions are two different renditions of the story, thus requiring a separate JPN translation, emulating what happens when you try to translate something as complex as identity. You can consider that the only real choice you make in the game is which language to play it in, and each language option provides a different “route,” a similar but very distinctly different iteration of the story. The language modes mimic the powerful loss that happens when stories–when trauma–is translated.
The demo only contains the first two ENG chapters, an estimated 30-45min of playtime.
════*.·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·.*════
Hanashiro (he/she/they) and their few remaining kin all react differently to the trauma of being immortal and witnessing the apocalypse over and over again in different cycles of reincarnation. Shiragiku is unfazed and cheery and flippant and whimsical and capricious; Shirayuri is nowhere to be found; and Hanashiro? Hanashiro is planning on their death in 10 years, when the camellias fall, if they cannot find a reason to live by then.
Hanashiro and Shirayuri have witnessed THE END OF THE WORLD before. But no one believed them. Shiragiku has seen many, many apocalypses, but she has never been hurt by any one after the first. Shiragiku has remembered every single end; Shirayuri has remembered none; and Hanashiro only remembers some. Which? Even he doesn’t know.
Hanashiro misses speaking her fey mother tongue, but she can’t seem to find anyone willing to listen to her, not even her own kind. And then she makes an enemy who just might. Their name is Lun Kochouran.
And they might be the first one in a millennium to learn the Amayuri tongue.
They also might be the first to kill an immortal.
Sunlight
Awful. A collection of random voices muttering gibberish in splat water color forest, and your arms are missing. You can’t understand what they are saying, so just tune them out. There is nothing to interact with, just painted trees and land, and sky. It takes a full minute to boot into it, and likewise to get out of it… Maybe if you waste 20 minutes into it, you can find some angle in the ‘forest’ to take a few nice screenshots and use them as desktop wall paper. But not much else in this, some additional random moaning choir music, pleasant but formless and meaningless. Pity, it seemed like it would have potential if they cleaned up the broken audio noise, reverb overload and overlapping garbled voices. In SETTINGS - You can turn down the voices, the Music, and or turn down the nature sounds to Silent. Try just Nature, no voices, no music. Then, you’ll enjoy a quiet walk in the woods. It does have an ending once you pick a handful of flowers. You can post your thoughts at the ending to share them with others. You could also just put on the music and silence the rest, enjoy the music playing in the background while you work. But the voices - ugh - babbling gibberish. Graphics 7/10 - watercolor trees.
– Real player with 1.2 hrs in game
Sunlight
Sunlight is a thirty-minute walk through a beautiful forest enhanced by a wonderful Tchaikovsky arrangement. It’s a decent entry in the walking sim genre.
– Real player with 1.2 hrs in game
Creepslore
Welcome to the world of CREEPSLORE, where text shown in all caps means someone is SHOUTING!
Take part in a surreal, interactive arthouse adventure inspired by older Adventure Games mixed with Choose Your Own Adventure books and RPGs. Supported by it’s massive list of (112+!) characters, heartfelt story, and uniquely weird art style, Creepslore is here to make you laugh, cry, and question it’s creators' sanity and overall well being.
The game takes place sometime during the 1970’s, and is told from the point of view of a sarcastic character who gets suckered into an adventure after arriving on a monster filled island. Realizing there’s no way back, he now has to deal with a bunch of intoxicated creatures with idiosyncratic tendencies (ergo: they’re also stupid) who think humans are the de-facto best gourmet food option.
What this game offers:
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surreal & tongue in cheek humor
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a story with 5 completely different scenarios (no forced repeats of dialogues to unlock ‘extra’ content!)
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18 explorable locations, ranging from cities to swamps
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more than 110 individual characters
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pre-rendered backgrounds created in Quake
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even MORE NUMBERS to grab your attention
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text, text and some more text
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a sad fish
What this game DOESN’T offer:
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saving the world
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cute anime girls
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fan-service
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a happy fish
PS: if you’ve ever wondered why the Giant Spider in Skyrim carries coins, and where the hell it puts them, we’ll, let’s just say we have the answer to that.
Horror Girl Puzzle
It actually seems that among the 100-achievements, profile-limited games that are coming out these months on Steam there are some of them worth the while. I mean, I see every week a ton of “everything + puzzle” game or similar titles and of course most of them are asset flips and little else.
Developer Anatoliy Loginovskikh made a great effort in his drawing style here and he shows us his best horror-themed girls' operas, that of course compose the base of this puzzle game.
We will in fact be asked to solve puzzles through various mechanics, mainly by dragging and rotating the various pieces. And we will compose some really beautiful artworks, all made specifically for this game.
– Real player with 46.5 hrs in game
- ### Morlan’s shorts:
No more and no less weird than the other games from this developer. At first it’s a simple twist-puzzle but later there are..elements added. The nude-tentacle-girl-art is quite well done and I liked it and the little other puzzles are fun. It’s a very very short game though so you may want to pick it up on sale.
Don’t waste more time reading lengthy reviews.. time is of the essence!
– Real player with 2.0 hrs in game
Red Falcon
History
You are the Red Falcon, Earth’s last hope. Your mission is to save the planet from a sectarian heresy that is invading Earth in a huge armada. Who they are and why they arrived is unknown, but one thing is certain: these sectarians are the most dangerous beings in the galaxy. By controlling a unique Soviet development, the flying Volga class “Earth-Cosmos”, you will have to hold out on the battlefield as long as you can.
And remember: in your hands the future that never was.
Features
You have technology at your disposal: the Orbital Research Institute “Lenin-407”, which allows you to study enemy weapons and then use them, and the Orbital Laser Launcher “ZHEK-1505”, which shoots a huge laser that pierces through all enemies.
Collect debris from enemy ships that serves as fuel for the laser machine, research material for the Research Institute, and building material for the majestic paneled house you’ll erect.
Use all these technologies wisely to destroy as many sectarian rats as possible.
That’s not all!
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An interesting and entertaining synergy of two classic genres: Invaders and Tetris
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7 different types of enemies with their own behavior and weapons
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Soviet style that borders on absurdity
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Dump enemy debris into the orbiting ORI “Lenin-407” to fire enemy weapons
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Infinite arcade – last as long as possible in the game
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Leaderboard showing the best players in the world
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Simple and intuitive controls
Sayonara Golden Days
A short if not somewhat relatable story of a group of friends slowly growing apart due to life and the project they left behind. It has a bit of a puzzle that doesn’t take too long to figure out.
All of the story is told through dialogue before each level or little snippets.
Only real gripe I have is the rather extremely slow pace of the character (annoying but understandable to fit the first game feel) and that the game crashed on me during credits roll. It was a nice game, but since it deleted my save file I don’t want to restart just to see if the last achievement is at the end.
– Real player with 0.7 hrs in game
Short, worthwhile, a good experience. I’m glad I got to play the game, and I enjoyed learning about the characters. I had some problems with menus and freezing, but this didn’t drastically impact my experience.
– Real player with 0.7 hrs in game