Under the Counter
Under the Counter is a narrative simulation in which you run a bar on a local market. Your task is to solve the mystery of its missing people while serving food and moonshine to both city residents and demonic forces from a parallel world.
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Serve your famous stew and drinks to customers. Be careful to do it right so the payment is adequate.
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Help the locals, the resistance movement, and even the invading soldiers (at least the ones who are friendly!) by using your exquisite networking skills and natural charm.
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Test your senses and serve simultaneously. You know, like a good bartender who pours the pint while chatting up his guests.
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Immerse yourself in a wartime story with a supernatural twist. Surely Eastern European urban folklore is not something that you can experience in video games very often?
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Enjoy the alluring hand-drawn graphics and animations that reflect the strange atmosphere of the unfolding story.
You play as Vincent, an ex-sailor who started his stall with food and drink. People still need to eat during the war, and you can cook the best stew basically out of anything. To make things fancier, your second specialty is home-made booze. [And in times like these, people drink a lot.] It is unique not only because of its sheer alcoholic content but also in the way it is served. Most people will drink just as a straight shot, but AT YOUR PLACE they can mix it with cherry juice! Simple, but genius.
The biggest problem that interferes with your business is the Great War that has started a few months ago. So, your city is now occupied, the enemies are imposing their new order, and they don’t treat your people in a good way. But by some strange twist of fate, they do seem to like you and your services. It makes you the perfect double agent and you immediately start plotting with your former friends from the military.
The war is in its prime and the enemy is omnipresent. But that’s not all. The market keeps getting weirder. First, you hear about the disappearances. On top of that, there are rumours about an odd military unit that has just arrived in the city. Since the day you heard about it, you’ve kept having eerie recurring dreams about a monstrous entity slithering in the darkness and gazing at you with its many eyes. And your customers seem to become increasingly stranger each day, not to mention that mysterious woman who carries a faint, yet so easily recognisable scent of the sea…
Read More: Best Hand-drawn Visual Novel Games.
Trouble Hunter Chronicles: The Stolen Creed
Iskonsko Studio has put a lot of hard work into this indie gem and it really shows!
From the starting scene I was instantly hooked and wanted to keep playing to find out how the story unfolded. There’s a lot of puzzles to solve and most of the characters in the game are voiced which I think adds a lot to the immersion.
Don’t be fooled by the demo. The full version is so much better, smooth and fun to play than that early build of the game.
I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys Point & Click- adventures
– Real player with 15.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hand-drawn Mystery Games.
It’s a long path to the truth; good luck getting there.
Though my recommendation is somewhat low, those particularly fond of Point & Click will find more to digest here, if not a sufficient challenge. Trouble Hunter Chronicles: The Stolen Creed is a pretty packed adventure with a lot of dialogue and puzzle-based trials. If one can get past some rather apparent technical visual and auditory mishaps, it’s a perfectly satisfactory mystery title geared towards retro veterans. But I really must stress: good luck.
– Real player with 8.2 hrs in game
Mud and Blood
I love the Mud And Blood saga.
I’ve been a fan for 15 years of the games and the concept behind, which is kept in its Steam version.
It’s a one man army of a game which provides you with a strict and unforgiving challenge.
The game requires you to be alert and actively playing, focusing on each decision and movement in order to avoid certain defeat. This causes the player to descend in a trance, in which you need to be at 100% of your playing capabilities.
The game “fuses” MnB2 and MnB3 togheter, and are now being called classic and campaign.
– Real player with 333.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hand-drawn Difficult Games.
As a tester for this game, there’s a reason why I have played this many hours of this game. I’m not the kind of guy who’s a masochist, especially as someone who can remember plenty of times raging at this game. Some moments will be easy and some moments will be randomly challenging. But for new players, especially those unfamiliar with the older Mud and Blood flash games, you will get screwed really hard in the first few or even several hours until you learn. However despite all those moments, I still come back and play this game again and again because its difficulty is what makes winning rewarding, and its randomness is what makes the game replayable. I’ve lost lots of men to standard rifleman, and other times I managed to beat back a element of infantry backed by armored vehicles.
– Real player with 220.5 hrs in game
Svoboda 1945: Liberation
Svoboda 1945: Liberation was created by Charles Games in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. It blends fiction and historical accuracy and uses a diverse range of gameplay and storytelling techniques to recount experiences in Svoboda, a village near the Czech-German border during and after WWII.
The game includes historical documents, photographs, video footage and an encyclopedia that ground the stories in reality making the often harrowing accounts all the more emotive. In addition to the various real elements and factual information, the game also uses a mix of fictional aspects such as FMV video clips and conversations, explorable scenes, animated comic strips and mini-games to deliver the narratives.
– Real player with 5.0 hrs in game
Svoboda 1945: Liberation is the newest game to come from Czech developers, Charles Games. Following the critical success of Attentat 1942, the developers continue to convey history in innovative and engaging methods. Integrating FMV interviews, minigames, comic-style scenes and an abundance of factual documents to read, the game was fascinating from start to finish.
Pros
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Varied gameplay and minigames throughout.
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Immense collection of factual documents to read (optional).
– Real player with 3.8 hrs in game
Herr Palmister
India is finally free! Changes are coming!
The new government promises equality to every citizen, which will be achieved by the Reformation of the Castes before the end of 1939. Now it is not the birthright that determines the fate of a person, but their hands - the distribution of new activities occur through the reading of the palm.
In this small indie narrative-focused game you play as a palmister, working in a branch of the newly formed palm-reading agency in the Third Reich embassy in Bombay. The relationships between the governments of Germany and the new, Free Republic of India are very close. The Fuhrer denies participation of German troops in the overthrow of the British regime, but it is rumored that only German speech was heard on many merchant ships that arrived at the harbor a couple of days before things heated up.
The gameplay is inspired by Papers, Please, and similar puzzle games; look over people’s hands and select their new occupation according to the combination of lines and palm type. Some of those people will gladly accept their new occupation, some will not. There will be arguments, threats, and tears. But in the end, the power is in your hands - and we can only hope it will remain like that.
Be careful when you make decisions - in the power trip you may not notice how a new revolution will flare up outside the window.
Game features:
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Totalitarian bureaucracy puzzle gameplay
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You can actually learn basic palm reading from the game
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A constant feel that even though your choices matter, you’re just a cog in the wheel
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From 2 to 4 hours of gameplay
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Non-linear storyline, full of struggle and conspiracy
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Multiple endings
Flying Fury
Loosly based on WW2, you take control of your choice of plane (spitfire, lightning or zero). Try to survive as long as possible by dodging bullets and planes. The roll, canon and rockets will be needed on harder difficulties.
A side scrolling shooter with a bullet hell influence.
Does it explode? Yes. Everything does. Enemies show their battle damage through having chunks be blown off. There are multiple enemies all with unique behaviours, all which are designed in junction with each other.
The Girl Who Sees
Cute game! Just like you!
– Real player with 3.6 hrs in game
Really fun. At first it seems really rudimentary and simple, but when you get into it a little more, it teaches you a lot of Tagalog and a lot about Filipino folklore. It also has a fun potion mixing mini-game and pretty good combat if you pick the RPG option instead of the answering trivia questions option. I only just solved the first quest, so I’ll expand my review at a later time, just want to say this is definitely worth a look.
– Real player with 1.6 hrs in game
Flowers -Le volume sur ete-
Wow, wow, wow. What a game. Let me just say that this is usually not my kind of thing, but by the end of it, I really quite enjoyed it. This is the second game of the series but if you didn’t play the first game like me, you really wouldn’t be lost at all so there is nothing to worry about there.
I don’t think the main story is particularly interesting. In some ways, the main story is actually really cliche. But I think what really carries the story through is the dialog and character development these characters go through on top of just being interesting and likeable characters in themselves. I particularly love Erika, the MC of this game and Suoh who I think is the MC of the last game. Chidori never rubbed off on me that well but I feel like that was the point of her character and her development by the end of it made me care for her all the same.
– Real player with 39.4 hrs in game
Score: 10/10
Spoiler warning: If you don’t want any spoilers for this game, jump to the last paragraph
(I will refer to Flowers -Le volume sur printemps- as Spring, this game as Summer, Flowers -Le volume sur Automne- as Autumn, and Flowers -Le volume sur hiver- as Winter.)
Scores for the series
Whole Flowers Series: 9/10
– Real player with 32.0 hrs in game
My Memory of Us
A beautiful game. Not much in terms of gameplay, (I was able to 100% it within 10 hours), but completely worth it for the story and the art. I love how, despite being a WWII story with it’s fair share of dark and sad moments, there’s so much adventure that it felt like I was experiencing an interactive children’s book. Especially with how well the art, music, and narration is done.
Despite being an unrealistic story (with a robot army,
! giant robots, and even a floating bathtub fight with a giant robot fish!? , this game manages to create a unique and fun experience without trivializing the darker sides of war and the effects it has on people’s lives. I went into this game completely blind, not even knowing it was about WWII until a few chapters in, so the realization of what was really happening hit that much harder for me, especially since up until that point, it was just a boy and a girl having fun and then hiding from robots. And it’s really easy to get attached to these characters and feel what they are going through, despite the fact that none of the characters actually speak, except for the narrator between chapters.
– Real player with 20.7 hrs in game
My Memory of Us
The highlight of the game is the story. It’s a bittersweet tale that will play with your emotions throughout, and even though the subject matter is horrific it still manages to entertain and lift your spirits.
Rating
79 ️⭐️⭐⭐️⭐️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmpEN8UAHSg
– Real player with 12.0 hrs in game