// down to earth // which cleverly jumped ahead on the list by adding //

very short game, pretty sure it took less than 20 minutes, not difficult, but very cute and had a good soundtrack

#gameing

a completely normal dating simulation that is definitely completely sweet, innocent and normal

look i probably won't ever play this again but i gave it a run-through (i dated emogaru) and honestly it reminded me a *lot* of the kind of dumb things my friends and i used to write to make each other laugh. solid nostalgia trip for me and i can imagine the people who made this had a lot of fun doing it

#gameing

a short hike:

this game was exactly as good as everyone said it was! ended up playing for an hour, got to the peak but have a lot to do still. loved every second of it

#gameing

adjacency:

played about half an hour, very pretty puzzle game. it took me a bit to grasp the concept (click on a color to have it fill in the adjacent shapes, the name probably should have tipped me off) and it seemed to ramp up in difficulty pretty quickly but i might just be bad at this kind of puzzle tbh. definitely a nice zen kind of game

#gameing

affinity:

straightforward puzzle game, i sort of wish there had been a help button or something to explain the concept at the start but i also could have like, read the game description. music was nice, another soothing game. i really appreciated that there was no time limit, no counting your number of moves, just you and the puzzles

#gameing

AIdol:

this is an aggressively pink virtual novel about programmed AI idols. i only put a half hour in but i'm already invested enough in the story to continue at some point. tbh i probably would have played longer but i have to stop for dinner. the MC has an actual personality which is nice, even if that personality is "being a shut-in who spends her time on idol forums." it's uhhh, relatable. and def better than the usual blank slate

#gameing

i'm finally back to this, with anodyne

cute zelda-esque game, so far i have a broom and i'm not afraid to use it. good variation in types of enemies too

#gameing

another lost phone: laura's story:

i played the first lost phone game on mobile and i definitely thing it works better in that format. i was really happy to see them add a "don't fucking do this to peoples' phones irl" warning at the beginning of the game (paraphrased). i could see where the story was going pretty much immediately because haha fuck men but it was still sad and interesting to unravel all the different pieces

cw on this game for emotional abuse and messing with medications

#gameing

arcade spirits:

holy shit i love this game so much why hadn't i heard of it before

very cute VN about working in an arcade. all the characters are great. MC is relatable but without being a total blank slate. i don't know what else to say really, i'm obsessed. i played a little under an hour and finished level 1, definitely gonna finish this one at some point

#gameing

as we know it:

another fun VN. not very eventful - i played about an hour and i feel like i'm just now starting to get into the story. the characters are great though and there's just a tiny dash of stat-raising. will definitely come back and finish at least one route (i'm going for jude right now)

#gameing

baba is you:

yes i know this isn't an itch bundle game, just one i have never gotten around to that was in my library. it's just as good as everyone said it was when it first came out! i'm not sure why i never bothered playing it before (lack of puzzle moods?) but it's really inventive and interesting. i love finding ways around the puzzles, and the less obvious solutions are always the most fun. also i love becoming a wall.

#gameing

baked magic:

i didn't give this one a full 20 minutes but that's because it didn't take that long to finish it. the premise is great ("baking with lesbian witches") and the art is really cute but it's so short! the interactivity is also really limited which i'd be okay with if it had better writing but unfortunately the story didn't draw me in much either. it's a cute, quick-read VN though

#gameing

beacon:

this game is so pretty! very smooth, good combat, the DNA mutation thing seems to give a high replay value. reminded me a little bit of rogue legacy in the reborn-with-different-modifiers sense, although it's a little less random since you can play with your own stats and choose to throw out a gene that mutates in a way you don't like. definitely a fun one and i love the beeps and boops of the sound effects too

#gameing

bird bakery:

ok this one doesn't require a full 20 minutes because it is just a cute little bird maker, but check out my cute little bird

#gameing

brassica: a marry tale

this was shaping up to be really fun! only the first 2 acts are out, so i got sort of cut off after 26 minutes, but it had some funny fourth wall stuff and my choices definitely seemed to impact the story in a very instant gratification kind of way. might actually come back to it when the full game releases

#gameing

catlateral damage:

this is the one a couple friends had been hyping up to me off the itch bundle and the premise was fantastic. loved being a cat and causing chaos. only downside for me was the timer was unnecessarily stressful for me for this kind of game (i think there is a sandbox (litterbox) mode though) and the camera was stuttering a lot. i turned my mouse sensitivity wayyy down and that seemed to help but then my mouse sensitivity was way down, so, yknow. plates were my favorite thing to knock off shelves, they made a very satisfying sound crashing to the floor and breaking into pieces

#gameing

cats are liquid:

it's cute! you're a cat! you can become liquid and also wall jump and fly. easy enough platformer that i'm able to get through each level fairly quickly so it might not be difficult enough for anyone who actually plays platformers well, but i enjoyed it

#gameing

changeling:

another otome VN with a very intriguing premise. i'm already torn between several potential routes so that's a good sign! art's nice, the writing is good, MC feels believable, definitely gonna come back to this one

#gameing

cook, serve, delicious 2:

ok i don't know why i love these kinds of chaotic soul-sucking time management games but i do. i fucking hated working food service but here i am fake working food service and thoroughly enjoying myself

tbh probably just gonna land on this one for a while today! it's very fun if you like this kind of thing

#gameing

i went back to the beginning on this again!

got a free game and the VN itch bundle (i know, i know, no more games) and also reorganized the list a little bit to remove sequels and DLC that i'm not going to play until i get to the first game, so now i'll be able to click right through the list

so i went back to the top with half an hour of aer memories of old:

it was pretty and vaguely soothing, the flying took me a bit to get the hang of but once i got it i had fun. none of the puzzles seemed particularly new or interesting but i really appreciated that the "fly through these hoops and a door opens" puzzle wasn't timed. love the story-through-exploration thing but the number of floating islands actually made the world feel a bit empty - i kept landing on islands and realizing there was nothing there besides a few rocks and maybe a tree. if you're between this and "a short hike" i would say go with a short hike but free is a great price and i had fun with the bit of it that i played

#gameing

ok gotta be honest i only gave BDSM Boys side story about 2 minutes and i regret it

i'm not familiar with the original webcomic, and also it's 1pm and i'm sober, but the writing was terrible, i wasn't into the art style or the look of the guys, and the sex scene (which started a minute and a half in at best) came with this awful old-school porno music that made the bad writing even worse somehow

i'm not opposed to sexy games, BDSM, or necessarily even yaoi/slashfic but absolutely nothing about this game appealed to me. it was in the same bundle as ladykiller in a bind, which i loved, so i figured i'd give it a shot but....nah

#gameing

crest an indirect god game:

i really liked this one! played an hour of it. it felt a bit like reus but you can't directly affect the world - you put out commandments and your followers choose whether to follow them, decide how they feel about them, and sometimes misinterpret them. you can also hop down to the underworld to talk to your dead followers and see what went wrong and how you could have tried to save them. it's a neat premise and there were some funny moments

#gameing

cromwell:

it was ok i guess. i honestly thought it was a precursor to reigns and was gonna say that i'm glad reigns ended up adding more depth and becoming less linear, but then i found out it wasn't the same people at all and was actually sort of a knockoff educational kind of deal. i liked the custom character designer but i'm not sure how or when that shows up in the actual game - i didn't see my custom character at all but i only put 20 minutes in

#gameing

darksiders:

finally made it back around to where i was on the list before the giant bundle purchases!

i actually kind of really appreciated the fact that darksiders just drops you right in the middle of the shooty stabby part. right off the bat, you know what kind of game it is! not that i don't love a long backstory cutscene but sometimes it's kind of nice to get mechanics first and ask questions later

that said i wasn't super interested in the snippets of story i saw. the stabby stabby was fun, combat felt good. will probably have to remap a lot of the key bindings though if i go back to this one. looks like the different items and abilities have the potential to get really interesting and fun

#gameing

deadlight, director's cut:

honestly almost didn't even install this one because i'm so bored with zombies, but it's actually kind of a neat concept. i like the platformer/puzzle vibe a lot more than the typical zombie survival thing

that said, i'm so bored with zombie. put in 23 minutes and probably won't go back to it any time soon unless i'm really feeling it

#gameing

death squared:

really cute puzzle game with blocks that is definitely supposed to be co op

i put in 20 minutes controlling both boxes and the puzzles were still a lot of fun! but i definitely think it would be a lot funnier and more chaotic with another person. unfortunately i have exactly one person to play couch co op with in this pandemic world, and he's busy today, so i'll have to shelve this one for another time

#gameing

deathtrap dungeon:

holy shit this game is old. like, pixelated bikini armor old. it probably had some neat and possibly innovative concepts for its time, but i found it really hard to navigate even after remapping basically every single control key. i managed to push a few levers and open a couple doors, but it's incredibly clunky. probably won't come back to this one.

#gameing

desert child:

this was an absolutely delightful surprise of a game! i'm not very good at racing games and not usually into them, but the racing in this one is sort of beside the point. i built up enough money on earth in the 28 minutes i played to make it to mars and explore a bit and there's a LOT to do, lots of ways to upgrade, stats to keep track of, it's an incredibly detailed world for a pixel racing game. the soundtrack fit really well, the art was fantastic, nothing but good things to say, really. i don't think i'm good enough or versed enough in racing games to say if it's a good racing game or not, but it didn't punish me overly harshly for fucking up and i enjoyed it a lot. probably gonna come back to this because i really feel like i just scratched the surface - i found a seedy bar with a whole range of options that i haven't even touched on yet, for example.

#gameing

dream hard:

literally had no idea this was a robert yang game until the end! it was a cute little beat 'em up where you punch fascists with the help of pop stars to the sound of "big booty bitches." in the end, once you've defeated the CEO with the help of madonna, it gives you a nice little message of hope and transitions into a dance club scene to "i'll make a man out of you" from mulan. doesn't have a ton of replay value (only took me 14 minutes, and every time you die you get resurrected "in solidarity" anyway) but it made me smile

#gameing

driftland the magic revival:

this game seems really cool and it's kind of a shame i tried it out at 1:30 am after several drinks, but such is the alphabetical lottery. i just got through the tutorial (with a few tab-outs) but the focus on exploration was a nice draw. UI looked great and mostly intuitive, with some exceptions (the right-click options not having a spot on the menu was a little odd to me, but they're all location-dependent so it kind of makes sense). no idea how resources balance in a real game but i like the idea of shifting between magic and physical resources. there's a campaign mode, which i definitely intend to explore at some point - i doubt i'll ever have the apm to care much about the multiplayer, if it even has a multiplayer scene still

#gameing

dubwars:

ok this game is really fun and i'm incredibly bad at it

it's basically geometry wars, except you don't control the weapons. your ship shoots out various lasers along to the music and you just have to dodge around and try to aim them appropriately. huge potential for sensory overload (electronic music, flashing lights, lots of movement) but i can see this occupying basically the same space for geometry wars for me, which is "game i'm awful at that i keep going back to for some reason"

#gameing

dungeon siege:

it's another really old game, but this time it's shockingly playable. i can see a lot of modern RPG concepts in it. the story seemed fairly cliche, although it may have been more interesting in its time (but i kind of doubt it - so far it's simple farmer's friend dies and farmer has to go save the world from evil fantasy race). spells, combat, inventory etc seemed intuitive. a really cool thing is that you can move around in the expanded map mode which was really helpful for me, a person who gets lost every five seconds. i don't know if i'll play through the entire game, but i can tell the people who made some of my favorite games have played this one

#gameing

ellipsis:

another beautiful puzzle game that doesn't tell you anything about how to play. like, i get it, the mechanics are part of the puzzle i guess. the problem is it's just not that interesting. you dodge around obstacles that kill you in order to collect star pieces. i honestly probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if it hadn't been alphabetically so close to dubwars, which i just found a lot more interesting.

#gameing

errant kingdom:

this is a VN that seems really well-written and, at least so far, has a lot of depth and ~intrigue~ which i love. according to the description some of the LIs are also poly which is also super cool. it seems like the three character choices also have a lot of variety - i went with the nomad to start because i'm a huge sucker for rogues. can choose he/she/they pronouns for your character, and there are a couple nonbinary characters in the game. also demons and fae and a disgraced knight and political turmoil and yeah i'm definitely coming back to this one #gameing

oops i've been doing this without the recaps

anyway eselmir and the five kingdoms:

i don't know if i didn't give it long enough of if it's just not that deep but the point and click aspects really didn't go anywhere for me - my next moves were always very obvious which isn't really what i want out of a point&click. there's a depth to the lore but i wasn't really drawn by the story either

#gameing