Framing Dawes
A cursed teenager is thrown into a forgotten recursive wonderland where the last twenty-four hours are a mystery, her Mother’s been kidnapped and she’ll be framed for the murder of a missing boy if she can’t find him. Oh, and her pet rabbit has risen from his grave…
Framing Dawes is an atmospheric adventure game following teenager Bay Dawes on her journey to find and bring a missing boy to the asylum where her mother is being held captive before the end of the day. If she doesn’t, she will be framed for his murder and never see her mother again. Accompanied by her dead pet rabbit, Dink, they explore the hidden world beneath her town of Foresight in a flying bathtub to recover missing memories and rescue her mother.
But can she break the curse before it’s too late?
Gameplay
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Story-Driven, Point and Click Adventure.
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Players will interact with Dawes' world, collecting and combining inventory, solving puzzles and casting spells.
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There are occasional instances where the player can switch to Dink the rabbit and Dawes' mother.
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The game is composed of three parts combined into the full game.
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The control options are Mouse and Keyboard.
Highlights
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Over 90 beautifully hand-drawn environments to explore
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Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, mythological stories, Jan Švankmajer, Tim Burton, Labyrinth, Dark Crystal and old dreams
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The provocative narrative will surprise and immerse you
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Navigate to different locations in a magical flying bathtub
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Bizarre characters, talking dolls, missing socks, space exploration and more!
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Experience occasional possessions and paranormal activity
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Original soundtrack
Read More: Best Hand-drawn Drama Games.
十三月のふたり姫／The 13th month
◆“Sleeping Beauty”？
The fate of the world is bound to a princess lost in an endless sleep… The famous fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” is completely reimagined and redesigned as Visual Novel… With a demonic imagination and originality, the creators will lead you through a fantastic and illusionary world…
【Story Summary】
The princess was just too beautiful. She was given all the good qualities of this world, such things as beauty, grace, kindness, tolerance, and honesty. It would soon be the princess’ 16th birthday.
Read More: Best Hand-drawn Singleplayer Games.
Saviorless
Saviorless is a stylish dark fantasy action-platform game with beautiful hand-drawn art and animation, featuring two distinctive main characters on their quest to escape from a cursed land known as the Smiling Islands.
A cursed world to explore
Immerse into a deep narrative-driven platform with unique enemy designs and multiple characters with full hand-drawn animation. Enjoy an evocative and haunting soundtrack that accompanies the player through many mysterious and visually stunning landscapes.
Two playable protagonists
Experience dynamic gameplay that switches between two distinct characters with unique abilities and particular challenges.
Antar Child
Help the fragile and reckless child to unveil the secrets of the islands through exploration and puzzle-solving while avoiding the many dangers that lurk in the ancient ruins around.
The Savior
A violent masked avatar born to protect the children against hordes of bizarre enemies and bosses that haunt the land of the Saviors. Endure fast-paced ruthless combats against everything that stands between you and your escape from the Smiling Islands.
Read More: Best Hand-drawn Character Action Game Games.
Hellslave
The world of Hellslave
The world is coming to an end and humanity is on the brink of extinction. Save it from a demon invasion by making a pact with the Devil and praise one of 6 demons to avoid humanity’s demise into darkness. Use your newly acquired demonic power against the invaders but it may have a bigger impact on you than you thought…
A unique experience
Hellslave is a dungeon crawler unlike others following on the footpath of classic dungeon crawler but introducing new mechanics and drawing its inspirations from Dark fantasy universe, poems and artists (such as John Milton).
Key Features
Unleash unique powers and skills
Customize your character around a passive skill tree, discover and experiment with dozens of skills and demonic powers. Take advantage of synergy between skills to achieve combo and defeat your foes.
A dark world to explore
Travel on world maps filled with dozens of unique landmarks but beware of what lurks in the dark. From villages to graveyards and crypt, destroy your foes, retrieve old relics to help the inhabitants of this doomed world.
Fight your way through this perilous world
Deal with dozens of different enemies from zombies, ghosts, demons and bosses straight from hell to fight for your life and this world’s survival.
Gameplay driven by a strong art direction
Contemplate unique visuals during your journey in hell on earth through handcrafted cut-scenes and visuals.
Your journey in Hell is just beginning
Experience different playthroughs depending on the powers of your starting Demon. If the first journey wasn’t enough for you, enjoy this hellish invasion a second time with the challenging New Game +.
The Guilt and the Shadow
So, this is yet another gloomy indie game about psychological disorders.
There’s little to say about this one. In its own genre it’s probably OK. The visuals are stylish and the sound design is quite awesome.
But the story doesn’t really catch your attention. The monologues and occasional dialogues are quite unnatural. And the gameplay part just plainly sucks. You walk slowly, you need to backtrack the levels all the time, it’s surprisingly hard to find a proper spot to start climbing a ladder. So, all in all, as a game this thing kind of fails.
– Real player with 8.5 hrs in game
An emotional experience about the torments of a man plagued by the “guilt” of his mother’s suicide (“shadow”).
Set in a black and white pencil drawn world, the player guides the mentally ill protagonist through a succession of dreams/nightmares.
To advance in the game, we have to solve simple puzzles to unblock passageways or unlock memories.
The pace is slow, giving the time to the player to immerse itself in the dark atmosphere of the game. And the game can be finished in one setting, which I would recommend in order to not lose the connection to the story.
– Real player with 5.3 hrs in game
恶灵退散 Go Back to Hell
the art style is cool and the sound track slaps but this is just an eye spy game for anyone thats confused by the description like i was, theres no instructions or dialog your just looking for the weird things in each image with no other context. so ya if plot is what your looking for and not just an ideal thing this isnt it but its nice none the less 3
– Real player with 2.3 hrs in game
Gretchen: Queen of Crows
Rise from the Ashes
Gretchen: Queen of Crows is a dark fairy-tale-like action adventure game that follows a little girl named Gretchen, and her friend Baldrek the crow, as they try to survive in a world corrupted with demonic magic.
After a vicious attack on her home that disrupted her once quiet life, Gretchen must find out why she is being ruthlessly hunted by the demon Paimon and his legion of demonic creatures. Join Gretchen and Baldrek as they seek answers in a dangerous and unforgiving fantasy world. Will Paimon find the two of them, or will they find him first?
Features
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Explore a beautifully twisted hand-drawn fantasy world.
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Jump, dash, and glide your way through organic environments using Baldrek’s polymorphic abilities.
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Use Gretchen’s gift of fire to deliver deadly attacks.
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Battle a cast of disturbing creatures inspired by dark folklore, all with their own set of damaging attack sets.
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Collect ancient grimoires to unlock new and dynamic abilities.
Rogue Lords
I really enjoyed Rogue Lords, and I decided to write this review as I have a slightly different take from the others I read.
It took me ~40 hours to finish all chapters, and I always played with the same team (the starters: Dracula “the Support”, the Headless Horseman “the Tank”, Bloody Mary “the DPS”). I think I had a total of two game overs, one at the second or third chapter, and one at the second-to-last (but see below).
I read several reviews mentioning that the game is hard and RNG can hit hard. I think they are not wrong, but I did not find it THAT hard: I think it’s more a matter of COMPLEXITY. Damage already starts in the double digits, and it is not unusual towards the end of the game to hit for 30-50 (multiple times). With 3 characters on your side and 1-3 characters on the other side, you can also have several status effects in play at the same time (probably the maximum I’ve seen is ~20). You accumulate this with relic effects and maybe even battle effects, and suddenly it becomes really easy to make a fatal mistake. I remember in one boss battle I accidentally made the Headless Horseman use an attack that steals HP and SP, while he was under the effect of a Zombie debuff (healing received becomes damage), so instead of healing him I made him Vulnerable with 0 HP and 0 SP. Fun times.
– Real player with 132.9 hrs in game
Note that while I am giving this a thumbs up, there are definite issues that sour the experience (that I will go into more detail over below). Honestly, this rating should be 3/5, 6/10, or a neutral but we don’t have those options.
Long story short:
Rogue Lords is a fun roguelike very much like Slay the Spire, but not being a rip off in the slightest. It has a unique cheating mechanic and is pretty difficult while also having balance issues and run destroying bug. The concept is unique, fresh, and fun, but the gameplay could use some retuning and class balancing.
– Real player with 116.7 hrs in game
Night in Riverager
The developer mentions that there are some mild fantasy violence and also includes topics such as murder and torture; there is none of that in the game.
It’s also rather short, about 10-12 minutes where you talk to your mom and then you leave to fetch her some medicine since she has some sort of illness. When you leave your home, you venture northward to access a bridge to go to your uncle’s home.
You don’t make it. It ends, to me, abruptly. I don’t mind it being short, but I would like to have a bit more closure. At least let me get the medicine…
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game
DISCLAIMER: This is a full review, and NOT a first impressions review
Night in Riverager is a game developed by Two Star Games and published by V Publishing
The game offers some nice graphics and a really beautiful aesthetic, although some ugly glitches here and there, it is pleasant all the same
The game does suffer with some repetitiveness at certain areas of the game but a fun game nonetheless
Night in Riverager overall, however, is a fun game to play, yet sometimes repetitive and it does get boring if being played for a long time, but is a really good horror game to play in short bursts!
– Real player with 1.0 hrs in game
Ochitsubaki
A fallen camellia is a beheading, every time, every petal falling at once: a severing.
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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.