No Longer Home
NLH is a game made with a great deal of care by very talented people. There’s a lot to explore in it but that’s really on you, the player, to engage with. I’ve played through it three times now (only once on steam) and every time I discover something different I never noticed before, or find a different path to go down. I do think it trusts the player to want to engage with it and think about it and do the legwork. I think it’s probably easy to rush through and that’s where people get short playtimes but it’s a game worth relaxing into and making the effort to explore,
– Real player with 7.2 hrs in game
It’s simple: this is Cultural Marxism disguised as a video game.
For reference, I gave this a chance, and finished the game with several achievements.
Let’s start with the good, because credit is due where credit is due:
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the moving geometry designs are really well executed.
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the music and sound effect are spot on. Little details here and there give the game its charm.
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the game won’t make use of it, but supports ultra wide screen (ie, it will boot and run at 21:9 on a 32:9 screen).
Now for the bad.
– Real player with 5.6 hrs in game
Facettes
The game
Sitting at her messy desk. The objects that dress it evoke chimeras, stories and fantasy characters for our protagonist, the Author. Dreamy and immersed in her imagination, she brings this decor to life.
Through this introspective adventure, explore the identity questions of the Author, this faceless protagonist. Let yourself be guided by this inner journey to the rhythm of her personal wanderings.
The Author is the character that you will play and follow through her inner journey.
The gameplay
Dice in hand and perched on this desk, the Author of Facettes invites you on a journey of identity initiation. At your fingertips is a dreamlike world, populated by heroines, Potentials and life paths to discover.
The Author keeps creating more Potentials using tabletop RPG mechanics: roll a dice and assign values to various characteristics in the process of character creation.
There is a set of Potentials to collect, alongside the objects which inspired them and the voice recordings of the Author’s thoughts.
The Potentials
Her experiences give life to fantastic creatures and worlds yet imbued with reality that nourish the personal construction of this mysterious Author.
These creatures are the “Potentials”, enigmatic women whose stories represent many possible lives for this mysterious protagonist. They each have a past, a purpose, and ties with other Potentials in this introspective journey.
The world
The stories of these chimerical women gradually come to life through the dreams of the Author in the phantasmagorical world they inhabit.
Mirror Island is the main place of this fantasy universe. There is where most of the Potentials live, but some of them are not terrestrial beings.
The island is torn apart by a conflict involving many of the Potentials rivaling to rule this land.
Features
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An inclusive and LGBTQIA2+ game celebrating the queer identity, which is also an accessible and nice-looking game introducing an issue by experiencing it
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A metaphorical and poetic experience sharing the process of self-discovery and accepting one’s identity
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A relatable story that contributes to build empathy with the Author, the characters and LGBTQIA2+ community, providing more content to understanding the issue and self-questioning
Nuances
Facettes is the third game from the Nuances series which holds a strong message about feminism, LGBT+ themes or inclusiveness.
It follows Sweet Love, a game about moral harassment within a couple, marital rape and femicides and A Comfortable Burden, a game tackling mental load with an otter couple.
Read More: Best Interactive Fiction Mythology Games.
Heart of the Woods
Heya! Zombie Cecelia here!
This is gonna be my first proper-ish game review on Steam so expect a not so much a review than me waffling review
So I bought this game on release (15.02.2019) and played a bit of it before work and stuff happened so was too busy then kinda forgot about it for over a year and only just got back into it about a week ago… Oops!
I guess because I can’t physically go outside due to sickness and the lock-down, meaning my favourite bookstore is closed, gave me the incentive to pick up Visual Novels (VNs) again (I usually prefer reading from a physical book rather than online buut let’s not delve into the reasons for it lol plus VNs have their own magical quality so it wouldn’t be fair to compare the two… but I digress because this is meant to be a review)
– Real player with 34.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Interactive Fiction Dark Fantasy Games.
(This article was written as a blog post )
Heart of the Woods looks like a nice interesting love story about 2 girls, one human, one ghost. It’s homo, so it’s just what I needed to escape from the real world. Although it appears to involve love across the living and the dead, which is a concept that’s been done to literal death. But hey, the game is well-received, it’s on sale, the artstyle is new to me, and most importantly, it doesn’t appear to be too long. So I guessed it’s going to be a nice fit for the spare time I currently have.
– Real player with 21.9 hrs in game
Monstrous Lovers
Monstrous Lovers is a light-hearted BL visual novel. It features four different monsters to pursue a romantic relationship with, all while trying to juggle your job in a new town. Just when you think things are finally settling into a comfortable routine, big news hits the town, shaking things up once again.
Characters: Christopher Wells is our MC who is bored with his current job position. He feels like he’s not doing enough to actually help those who need it. He requests to be transferred to Saint George, the city with the highest population of monsters in the country. Despite his desire to do good, he’s not exactly welcomed with open arms. Underfunded, understaffed and not exactly welcoming of humans, Christopher really struggles to even officially claim his job.
– Real player with 20.5 hrs in game
TLDR:
Monstrous Lovers is a supernatural geared visual novel with four love interests. The game comprises of a variety of choices and a clear benchmark where the player will know which route they have entered. Each character has a good and bad ending, which you get is pretty clear despite not being explicitly stated as such. The characters are enjoyable to interact with each having their own distinct traits and personality. Explicit content is limited to about two to three sentences without a CG so if that’s what you’re looking for this won’t provide that.
– Real player with 13.9 hrs in game
Otter of My Life
Otter of My Life had potential. HAD is the keyword.
I think a lot of issues revolve around translation errors and just plain bad game design (i.e. gender and pronouns having an affect on what endings you can get, lots of typos, text box issues, etc.). Normally I would ignore typos- English is a hard language to learn- but the grammatical issues are too bad to ignore in this case. This game has been out for over a year now and there’s no excuse to not get better translators.
The writing is bad. Not just “free to play game that was thrown together in a basement” bad- it feels like a middle schooler wrote it for their first English assignment. None of the characters are interesting or get any depth, and the routes are entirely too short, even if you’re just grinding for achievements.
– Real player with 5.9 hrs in game
Plot Lines are short and characters lack any depth. I was able to get the generic Bad Ending and one of the good endings in under 33 minutes. You don’t get to see these characters grow or even become too attached to them before you’ve completed their ending. We learn only surface level details of the characters we are dating and none of them have chemistry with our character or each other.
There are other weird oddities. Some of the characters are more poorly drawn then others and some of the Bigger Character Sprites are missing the details of their smaller versions. Which is weird since the Smaller Version could be easily upscaled. Dialogue is awkward and character speak or interject with information in ways that no Human ever would, which leads to Dialogue which can only be cringed at. The issues with the dialogue are clearly because the creator is not a native English Speaker, but even if the dialogue was improved. It would not help the Shallow Characters, lack of world-building and short, predictable and boring storylines.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
10mg: Cover Me In Leaves
Fantastic game! the music, atmosphere, writing, and art were all beautiful. It was a lovely wistful experience. I read out loud while playing. It felt good. Really captured me. I recommend it.
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
Great atmosphere overall, excellent art and solid sound design, but the standout is the writing. Confident and direct, sometimes crude, but elegant and intimate. If the game were any longer the writing style would wear out its welcome, but since it’s (intentionally) short it doesn’t overstay its welcome and invites you to read it more than once to enjoy piecing it together (and also, you know, enjoy the writing).
In short: I’ve paid many times the price of this game for books that weren’t a fifth of its quality. Recommended.
– Real player with 0.4 hrs in game
A Day of Maintenance
You’re a distant blip amongst the sands around New Port City; It’s been a long few shifts, but you’re almost done with doing your sweep of the guidance stations for the docking spaceships. Take your Massive Self-Sustaining Installation Repair Truck (or MSSIRT for short); & travel the landscape to fix the last few on your list for the day with your trusty multi-tool crane.
A Day of Maintenance is a new, unusual kind of exploration game, taking cues from In Other Waters, 17776, Signal from Tolva, and Euro Truck Simulator 2
If you’ve ever found yourself thinking:
“I want a kind-of-technical driving game with a little gay romance but also some discussion over robot worker consciousness. (With crane operation gameplay)"
This game is for you.
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Around 8 hours long
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This game is deliberately slow-paced. Enjoy the drive, sip a cup of something warm, fix sites in the distant future.
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Chat with your Robot Boyfriend, 6 workmates, & a couple other characters along the way.
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Best played with a gamepad. But there’s mouse & keyboard bindings for everything.
Chat with Orby about cool stuff like databases, satellite software, and the possibility of having your mind overwritten by a routine check-up.
As you drive the open desert, your crew of fellow maintenance robots will chew the scenery; debating over trains, spaceships, philosophy, and hats.
Oh! You might also uncover a conspiracy.
A Normal Lost Phone
Game Title: A Normal Lost Phone
Achievement Progress (at the time of post): Completed
(My reviews assume you have read about the content of the game in terms of gameplay. I am simply reviewing each individual aspect based on my opinion. This allows for my reviews to be spoiler-free. You may find I rate by different categories in each of my reviews. This is because every type of game is different, and will not have the same content. I think it is pointless to leave a category blank or write ‘unrelated’, or something similar.)
– Real player with 13.2 hrs in game
A very well written, and immersive experience.
IF you have an open mind, are into a TON of reading, and some detective work.
It really is finding a lost phone, then being a total nebsh*t, looking at everything on the phone, opening new things as they come in, and reading about part of the owner’s life story as you go. The story will not be for everyone. It does touch on some sensitive content, that may not appeal to everyone. If you are open-minded about transgender lives, and want to try to understand a brief snippet of one story, you may enjoy it. If you are a bigot and closed-minded, well… this isn’t for you. Just move along.
– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game
A Wild Catgirl Appears!
To start out this review, I’m going to go ahead and say that I’m a dude who really appreciates kind of shoddy/nonsense VNs, so when I saw this game appear on the front page of Steam the day after the Holiday sale for about as much money as I had in my Steam Wallet, I was in. I went in with no expectations or desires, and that was definitely beneficial to the experience.
This game is just very innocent, like an 8 year old’s journal entry except with a little bit more cleavage. The writing looks like the authors used only the 100 most frequently used words in English, so it’s very easy and fast to read. This honestly would be a pretty good game for someone learning English as a second language. They go to a mall! A beach! A cafe! It reminds me of a Spanish 102 lesson, and it kept my attention more than a Spanish 102 lesson because it had anime cat girls with big boobs in it.
– Real player with 32.5 hrs in game
Alright, I’m trying to be real fair here on the game. This game is rough in so many ways. Just booting the game presented major challenges that do not lend to a sellable product:
No music on the title screen, bare bones UI of “Start” and “Load,” and the game crashes when you alt+enter to full screen. This is a major red flag and should have been polished considerably more.
As far as UI goes, the interface is buggy, skipping text is hard to stop when you want it to stop and going full screen makes the window spill out of your screen if you have a smaller monitor. Hitting the log button reveals a similar issue to the save and load screen of very hard to read text, but with the added issue of the background image failing to load due to a broken asset link. Slogging through the game becomes a severe pain with these issues, especially when replaying for the other endings.
– Real player with 6.8 hrs in game
Queerskins: ark
NOTE:
Unfortunately, Steamworks has decided to inexplicably censor this 6DoF interactive VR. If you want to support queer content and voices, please let Steam know of your displeasure. And, head to Viveport to download this woman produced and directed interactive experience, part of a Peabody award winning series! https://www.viveport.com/bcbd1d54-ac06-4b2e-a393-3851e6173440
Queerskins: ARK is a 6DoF interactive virtual reality experience. Reading a diary left by the estranged son, a Catholic mother (Hadley Boyd) finds a way to transcend herself and her grief by imagining him alive and in love. With heart-wrenching performances by Michael DeBartolo and Christopher Vo in volumetric video and the storytelling potential of spatial sound, Ark allows you to enter her imagination and co-create the lovers’ intimate dance through your body position and movements. An Intel Studios Original co-produced with Cloudred.
The Attic
The viewer finds herself in a dimly lit attic bedroom, a place that seems to be stuck in time, heavy with memory. Here, you assume the passive role of an observer in a 360˚ environment. Unable to move, you can examine the memorabilia-laden surroundings and begin to get an idea of time, place and what the story might be about. Mary-Helen begins reading her son’s diary.
El Matador
As Mary-Helen begins to imagine her son’s world, you are transported to a beautiful beach at dawn. Sebastian and his lover Alex appear, like a daydream nearby in the landscape. We allow Sebastian to break the 4th wall and directly implicate you in the scene. We position you quite close to the two men, just outside their personal space as you listen to their conversation. As Mary-Helen finds freedom in her imagination, you too now have the freedom to move around the beach as the experience transforms into 6DoF.
The Memory
The scene crossfades to an abstraction of the beach. Sebastian and Alex begin an intimate dance. Depending on how you move in the space, the dancers appear to respond to your presence. The performance has been choreographed as a series of segments, each visitor sees only 5 out of possible 24 combinations within each play session. Replay it to see other potential variations, follow the blue glowing lights to hear Mary-Helen reading Sebastian’s diary entries. Raise both arms to gain a new perspective, point your arms forward to fly!
Back in the Attic
As the lovers fade away, you are now back in the attic. It is the magic hour. The room is lit with a flat, golden light, reminiscent of the light on the beach. With a return of detail and color, it feels like the room has come back to life. Mary-Helen contemplates her new found sense of self.
Note
Queerskins: ARK is a room scale experience. It can be adjusted for available space:
— Small (10’x10’ / 3x3 m)
— Medium (20’x20’ / 6x6 m) — Default
— Large (30’x30’ / 9x9 m)
Subtitles are available in English, Spanish, Italian and Polish. Subtitles can only be set at the beginning of the experience by using your controller or by pressing corresponding keys on your keyboard. Please see the experience splash screen for details.