Retention: A Love Story
From a playability perspective Retention: A Love Story would have more enjoyable if the development team stripped away some of the puzzles in favor of a simpler more story driven game. Alzheimer’s, Dementia, and other forms of cognitive decay are excellent themes to explore because most of us have seen someone we love impacted. Last year 3-Fold Games explored similar themes in Before I Forget and to many, it was one of the more emotionally moving titles released that year. Retention does an excellent job making interesting stylization choices and the voice acting is fairly decent. Those two aspects prove to me that if some of the more buggier aspects of the game were removed there was potential for this to be more dynamic than the finished product.
– Real player with 7.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Experimental Puzzle Games.
Free game made by students, but I cannot recommend it. It definitely needed way more polish than it got, with clunky controls and so many bugs. Puzzles are basic but annoying and will often break, and there are no actual “saves”, just checkpoints, that don’t persist after exiting the game. There are at least 2 game breaking bugs, where the only fix is to close the game and start all over again, and after the second one I just couldn’t force myself to get through it again for the story, which just feels miserable even without the Alzheimer’s angle they’re going for.
– Real player with 1.7 hrs in game
Wanderlust: Transsiberian
Your journey across the vast lands of Russia begins in the Tverskoy District of Moscow. It’s a glorious Sunday morning on the 11th of September and you’re feeling energetic as your Trans-Siberian adventure is about to get underway. This is Henry’s story, who along with his brother-in-law Vernon will travel on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok.
– Real player with 4.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Experimental Interactive Fiction Games.
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Review by Gaming Masterpieces - The greatest games of all time on Steam.
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With the borders closed due the current pandemic, you can at least travel in your mind while playing this game.
Take a trip with your brother-in-law onboard the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest railway line in the world. You are starting from Moskow and (maybe) reach Vladivostok a few days later. The game plays like a visual novel, with a map of Russia showing your progress and photographs illustrating the journey. Keep your stress level low and your fatigue under control while managing your travel budget. Meet people while travelling, and get along with your brother-in-law. There are many decisions to make, which can lead to quite different journeys by train (or other means).
– Real player with 3.2 hrs in game
The USB Stick Found in the Grass
Really immersive game. I love it so far. I played it for several hours this evening and mostly just read the diary, which was a great story. Most games that have a diary, the diary is pretty bland but this was intriguing and I spent the whole time enjoying the story while also trying to anticipate what might be a clue or not.
I’m stuck at a part, but still working at it. The discord channel is very helpful https://discord.gg/TnWCnkEK
– Real player with 23.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Experimental Puzzle Games.
Cześć Gucio. Pisze na czacie ale nie widzisz :( nick afkret. A gra bardzo przyjemna chociaż po otwarciu wszystkich 3 plików nie czuje żeby przeszedł grę.
– Real player with 18.5 hrs in game
Forgetter
Disclaimer: I helped out with testing the game and got the game as a free copy.
The game is mostly a “walking simulator”, so the gameplay is kept relatively simple and the focus lies more on the experience of entering the very different minds of two artists and exploring their memories and traumas. Some of these memories I kind of expected (e.g. pressure from parents) but there are also other memories, some of them even pleasant that I didn’t see coming. Personally, it felt like I got to know two people by discovering some of their key memories, which was interesting to me, because I don’t know much about the artist life. I would have liked to see the game explore the different ways the “brain recycling” technology plays out for people, like in an episode of “Black Mirror”.
– Real player with 4.0 hrs in game
Novice developers from Hong Kong were very kind to submit the game to my curator page https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26168615-Video-Games-Art-International/ and ask for my opinion.
I would thank developers with a positive review, but this is more kinda mixed review.
The game is in first person view and allows for free exploration of 3D environments. Incipit of story is very intriguing and original. You’re a young girl on probation for a new weird job at MindJob corporation. You’re a “forgetter”. Your mission is to clear the minds of famous deceased artists! Yes, at MindJob they recycle the minds of geniuses and artists and implant them in children brains! Families pay for their children to be next generation geniuses and artists! But artists and geniuses minds are affected by traumatic memories and deviant behavior, so you have to erase and clean them before the new implant! Do you want your son to be the next Van Gogh but with both the ears, without deviant behavior? Mindjob has the solution for you! :-)
– Real player with 2.7 hrs in game
BurningBridges VR
You can watch my video review & gameplay here: https://youtu.be/LkCXQOm4oqg
Experienced on the Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers
I bought this game for $2.49 USD during the Steam Lunar New Year Sale 2019. I thought I was getting a good deal for a hidden indie gem in VR. It looked very cool in the store page video and screenshots to me … a relaxing platformer with cool visual aesthetics.
Unfortunately, the game is a buggy mess. This game has one of the most horrible UIs that I have ever dealt with in VR. It’s difficult to start the game. If you look at the Steam Discussion area for this game, you will see a post about the game not starting. Well, that’s because the UI is so horrible that it’s very easy to not see how to start the game. It will test your eye sight to start this game because you will have to find the vanishing red reticle to start this game.
– Real player with 1.1 hrs in game
Crashes and control problems. Avoid this one.
– Real player with 0.2 hrs in game
First Response
Welcome to your new job at the Extreme Containment Security Company! You’ve been selected by Malcolm Monaghan himself as the first subject in their brand new learning initiative! Upon your arrival, K.A.R.A. will guide you through concepts relating to Cybersecurity and the important work you’ll be doing as a brand new SOC Analyst!
Featuring an extremely talented full voice cast, First Response is a blend of the concepts seen in the walking simulator genre with simulation elements modeled after real work done by SOC Analysts! And maybe, a few surprises along the way, but we can’t say much more than that!
Flat Earth Simulator
My first impressions were positive with a beautiful model, pleasant narration along soothing ambient music.
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It would have been great to zoom in more and see cities mapped onto the model from high altitude photos.
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The Sun and Moon are different sizes, they should be about the same.
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The Sun and Moon orbits are locked.
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No Moon phases or eclipses present.
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No Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn sun orbit paths for seasons.
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Stars seem random rather than actual mapped stars along with correct movements over the plane.
– Real player with 1.6 hrs in game
Garbage.
No way to change display/sound settings in game, must quit and re-launch. No option to not have the really slow narrator read everything to you, instead you must mute it, hide the text, and then press space to open it with the full text visible for anyone who can read faster than a third grader, the text is poorly written with many grammatical mistakes and quirks that make it hard to understand, the information being presented raises more questions than it answers, and the clues that pop up every few minutes make no sense and don’t actually lead to anything.
– Real player with 1.5 hrs in game
iGuide Knossos VR
WoW! Excellent! Congrarulations for this great idea and work you have done!
Very nice to see the building as (we believe) it was in the Minoan times.
Very good narrations in greek/english that binds us with the history of the plase.
But there is a problem with some door openings that appear lower than the eye-view and is not possible to pass through.
– Real player with 3.9 hrs in game
Splinter
Splinter is a first-person movie/video game hybrid where the player explores the warehouse of a transhumanist hacker collective, watching full motion video clips that answer the question: What happened to Mason?
Splinter is an experiment with a new style of storytelling. A full playthrough is approximately 2 hours long, similar to a feature film.
Dinner Date
I’m 42 hours into this game. My date still hasn’t shown up yet. She’s probably still coming. Gonna wait a few more hours.
Updates:
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Nov. 28 2012 @ 4:09pm
60 hours in. Still no date. Maybe her car broke down and her phone isn’t working.
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Dec. 1 2012 @ 6:36pm
72 hours. Date still hasn’t shown up yet. Maybe she’s just really sick.
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Dec 4 2012 @ 2:23pm
127 hours played. Date hasn’t shown up. Food is cold and stale at this point.
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Dec 8 2012 @ 7:08am
147 hours now. No sign of date. Maybe she’s lost and can’t find my house.
– Real player with 335.0 hrs in game
I can’t remember when I got this game, but it was closer to when it came out than to now. Pretty sure it was around the time Heavy Rain came out and I didn’t have a PS3 and I thought “hey this is a novel experiment I should try this out.” It wasn’t really much back then and I don’t think it aged well at all. It’s absurdly short and I’ve heard people back then say $5 is a bit overpriced for a “demo” like this. Nowadays I don’t think people care that much about throwing $5 away to play shitty video games but fuck it.
– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game