Epic Tavern
Epic Tavern is a fun and interesting combination of management sim and tabletop RPG. After the tutorial, you start each day off at your tavern. You talk to your customers who usually have pretty interesting story lines, learn of new quests, serve them food and drinks that they may or may not like, get them super drunk, and build your relationships so that you may hire them to do your bidding. At the end of the day, you equip your heroes and send them out into the world on adventures that may only take the day, or it may take several. The success of these missions (and the events on the way) is based on the skills of the heroes and a few rolls of the dice. Many adventures have multiple approaches available to choose from to best fit the skills of your heroes, which means there’s a pretty good reason to play it a few times. After all your teams of heroes have finished up, they go back to the tavern for more alcohol abuse. Wash, rinse, repeat.
– Real player with 372.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Narration Tabletop Games.
At the heart of EPIC TAVERN is a lack of focus on what is trying to be and executing both game subsystems. On one hand it is a tavern simulator with resource constraints. On the other it is a random event generator in guise with “sometimes” good story elements. You as the bar-keep are tasked with navigating both of these systems. Each subsystem has a wonderful loading screen that is viewed over and over as the game loop progresses.
You can recruit and level up your stock of adventurers in tavern play and then take them out on the road rolling dice. During dice rolls there is the “safe bet” and the “risky” chance to choose from. Even though there are about 5 “actions” to choose from it only boils down to two real choices in its current implementation.
– Real player with 202.0 hrs in game
Gothic 1881
A story with a nice twist in the end, albeit it is short.
– Real player with 1.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Narration Adventure Games.
Utterly Pointless
Gothic 1881 is a very short (less than 2 hours) RPGMaker game that really fails to deliver anything meaningful. For less than $2, I did not expect much, but I have played games that are less than an hour long that have left more of an impact to me than this game does. The ideas are definitely there to be elaborated on, but the overall execution of the ideas is really lackluster and bland. If I had to be perfectly honest, this feels like someone’s college project.
– Real player with 1.7 hrs in game
Tales of Herring Lake
Rise and shine, campers! It’s time to crack open a cold one, cast your hook, and wait for the fish to come! The lake may look sleepy on the surface, but trust us, you just need to peer into its murky waters. If you choose to.
Welcome to Tales of Herring Lake, where your favourite Sunday fishing show meets Alfred Hitchcock. So grab your fishing gear and start shaping your story.
Tales of Herring Lake is a narrative-driven mystery-slash-fishing game taking place in real time, where you decide how the story will unfold. Do you fancy yourself more of a detective or a fisherman? Do you wish to unravel the mystery of the strange object floating in the water, explore the noise coming from the nearby cave, or maybe mind your own business, enjoy the view and try to catch some big fish? Either way, remember that the world won’t wait for you, and not making a decision is also a decision.
Features:
-
An immersive real-time system - decide what to focus on on a given day.
-
Choose your playstyle, make choices and see how they shape the story and your surroundings.
-
Immerse yourself in the mysteries of Lake Herring, or concentrate on the extensive fishing gameplay. Or try to do both.
-
Discover surprising plot twists, additional secrets and numerous different endings.
-
Drink beer. Catch fish. Start to question your reality. Or don’t.
Read More: Best Narration Investigation Games.
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
|
Review by Gaming Masterpieces - The greatest games of all time on Steam.
|
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
Rubicon : a conspiracy of silence
Rubicon: a conspiracy of silence, is a game inspired by whistleblowers. In this narrative game, you play as Paula Cole, a food safety officer for a multinational corporation, who gradually takes on the role of whistleblower. Depending on your choices, you will be confronted with different situations inspired by real facts, the whole scenario being based on a journalistic work, coordinated with the online newspaper Mediapart.
As a player, you’ll discuss with multiple protagonists to investigate and find out your truth. From the first discoveries to the revelations to the press, you will make choices that will have an impact on what happens next.
A Rabbit and the Mystic Fog
Experienced on the Oculus Rift
You can view my review & gameplay here: https://youtu.be/lddyGhPOy0Y
This is a 20-30 minute story book adventure for VR. You explore the map, talk to the meadow creatures, and try to solve the mystery of the mysic fog. It sort of plays like a Visual Novel, except you have little quests to do as you uncover the story. In theory, this should be a chill & lovely mini-adventure that I could recommend to families.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game. It just has too many issues. The biggest issue for me was the teleportation system in this game. It’s simply terrible. You’re supposed to be able to face the direction your teleportation marker is pointing, but I found it almost impossible to control. I finally gave up and played this game standing and just physically faced the direction that I was teleporting towards. There is no smooth or snap turning.
– Real player with 0.9 hrs in game
I didnt realize this game needed VR. I was able to access the debugger so I got a good look at the map and its guts.
10/10
– Real player with 0.2 hrs in game
A Sketchbook About Her Sun
Essentially it’s an animated music album with some simple sketches for every song. I assume the visuals were created for the music and not the other way around, but the game still has a narrative as we follow the same individual that goes through melancholy, heartbreak, and possibly depression. You can also just pick the songs from the main menu, but I am not sure if I unlocked the feature at the end. I believe the 11 songs make the full album, so it’s kind of like buying a soundtrack. I am not sure if there is any purpose to the choices that you can make during the songs, I assume those are for the 2 optional achievements. I guess it depends on how much you like the music, for myself, I liked more than half of the songs, and even for the songs that I didn’t love, I still enjoyed the lyrics. Don’t take this as a criticism because I honestly don’t care if the singer has a perfect voice, but I enjoyed her voice more within a lower range. Also, I noticed some guitar clipping which I feel should be cleaned up in the processing. Aside from those small nitpicks, I enjoyed the album overall and I will be playing it when I draw for months ;). I know not many people like paying for music on Steam, but I am all for it personally, especially this cheap. I always like to list my favorites, and that would be the ‘Planet X’, ‘Document’ and ‘Human Copy’ (I only wish you reused the part in the end of HC once in the middle, too).
– Real player with 24.1 hrs in game
A Sketchbook About Her Sun is an enjoyable experience with incredible artwork and an amazing soundtrack. The gameplay warrants itself well to replaying and is definitely worth your attention
– Real player with 1.3 hrs in game
Answer Knot
Details
Something wicked this way comes…
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1746576223
Hook
You are at home, tidying up your apartment while your wife keeps calling you and leaving messages. But you won’t pick-up…
Mechanic
An open-plan house that you navigate in first-person, exploring.
-
selecting items yields clues
-
interacting with certain items triggers the next increasingly desperate phone message
-
the game has one story, but there are side objectives to find
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
- If you like free to play, short, first-person, horror, mystery,
! extraterrestrial , point and click walking simulator, you are in for a treat!
-
The game vibe gave me a mix of Gone Home, What Never Was, Marie’s Room, What Remains of Edith Finch. However, it has no voice-over narration except the phone calls. (you can’t answer the phone)
-
Controls are moving (w,a,s,d), interact (left click), zoom in (right click), and pause (esc).
-
Music is composed of piano/chill/mellow tracks. Suddenly the quiet house becomes creepy after some distressing calls (addition to tapping and wind sound makes it more uncomfortable). Do you know that slow build-up tension feeling where you look around if something might pop out? That is what this game does to you without any jump scares.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
Lacuna: Prologue
I can’t wait for this game to drop. I played the prologue through and was excited. the game play was varied, there are alot of interactivity between the character and the environment. I really like how you can move through the game as the character talks to himself, most games you have to either skip the monologue or not hear it to continue playing. I never thought I’d like a game with this type of graphics but I’ve been finding more and more games like this that I really like. I saved the date on my calendar for this game.
– Real player with 2.2 hrs in game
This is going to be a gem! The prologue mainly is a tutorial of the game mechanics but it doesn’t feel like one at all. It feels like you are experiencing a story and based on the previews of the full game, the choices you make have an impact!
Also, the world just fits my taste perfectly! This is some modern scy-fi stuff mixed with noir elements, considering you play a detective anyways. Filled with so many details, you can’t help but feel like you were in another world for an hour :)
I also love that the game challenges you to use your brain and not just follow the instructions.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
The Shape of Time
The music didn’t always play smoothly, but other than that it was a beautiful experience. The atmosphere was serene, and the exhibition was fun to explore. The idea of timeshapes is also pretty interesting. Though, it appears to me to lead to a somewhat deterministic conclusion. This is because if every motion is equivalent to a static shape, then motion is an illusion caused by the movement of the time axis across said static shape. But if no real motion of objects creates the illusion of timeshapes, then the shape of all motion must exist beforehand. In anycase, it is a very fascinating idea. Another interesting conclusion that follows is that there might be no real direction in which motion occurs, and if we could see in 4D it would be possible to see motion in both directions. Both would be equally valid, and there would be no real distinction between forward and reverse.
– Real player with 1.1 hrs in game
Holy hell. That was a fascinating thing to experience, even if it’s telling us what we already know/felt but in a way that is poetic, well demonstrated, and reminds us that the space we occupy in the past is real in a nearly tangible way. Easily one of the more mind-expanding free offerings I’ve seen on Steam and the dev shows a really clever way to visually express our paths through time as it washes over us.
– Real player with 0.9 hrs in game