I backed the Cartomancy Anthology on Kickstarter back when the campagin was still very new. I expected a nice variety of games packaged within a nice looking and creative game launcher. What I did not expect was that some games would become my favorites of the entire year, three even some of my favorites ever. I played a three-card-spread every day, for a week, which was an experience of wonder, suprise, confusion and sadly also a little frustration. Let's work our way backwards through these emotions.

Some games are quite buggy, three of them I found unplayable because they would repeatetly softlock me. The Cartomancy Anthology as a game launcher is also not without its faults, lacking any customization next to audio volume and also sometimes crashing so hard I needed to restart my PC afterwards.

The concept of the launcher is novel and actually really cool - you unlock games by pulling them from a tarot deck randomly (although you can filter only for new games). But the lack of any further description other than a basic summary and the credits makes it difficult to asses the time comittment needed for any given game. Some are really short (The Magician for example only takes three minutes), others come close to being an hour or two long. This sometimes lead to confusion for me, as I didn't know if starting the next game even makes sense time-wise.

But this difference in approaches to their length is also a strength of the collection: You really never know what you're going to get. And that's brilliant. The games all focus on different themes, ideas and concepts. I was amazed by some of the genre-fuckery on display here. Some of these experience made me rethink my conception of a (great) video-game entirely, some were incredibly inspiring, some were very stylish and polished.

As you might have noticed, I crossed the line to wondrous amazement quite some sentences ago. This is the feeling the entire experience left me with. I am in awe of some of the creativity displayed here, of the themes some games tackle and how they do it. Thanks, come again might actually be my game of the year, dealing with the topic of self-abandonment in a beautiful and haunting way. The Tower is the best visual nove l've ever had the pleasure to read, eerie and depressing, yet incredibly beautiful at the same time. It completely broke my conception of what can be done with (sound) design in regards to textboxes. The Magician might be the shortest of the games but is also the most aesthetically beautiful, and tells so much, conveys so many emotions in so little time. With only two games that I didn't like and three that didn't work for me, the 22-game-long collection has a high intensity of bangers. It's so great to see what the (queer) indie scene has to offer, and I will definitely return to some of the games. In other words: Thanks, I will come again.

(Other favorites, in no specific order: Tonight, Together, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Star)

I came in expecting a collection of games, and what I got was a collection of games, fiction, interactive art, experiments, and sometimes just... vibes. While some games---or experiences I guess---are more technically impressive, polished, or even just longer than others they overall embody a messy, emotional, beautiful, meaningful, and often queer experience. As the kids say, it's hashtag relatable.

I ended up playing every game in one sitting and only learned afterwards that the intention was for the player to do a pull or spread once a day or so. I don't regret it but I also don't recommend it, though I can see myself getting frustrated if I did that because some games are much longer than others and it would mean that while I would spend 5 minutes in one session another would take a half hour.

Instead of reviewing each individual game, I'll just list my five favorites and why I like them without spoilers: Hierophant. Empress, Emperor, Magician, and Tower. Hierophant won me over with a very unique and beautiful art style, though the story also helped a lot. Empress and Emperor were both just Really Solid Games with great mechanics and execution, and while I could honestly see them as "full length" games they were also just perfect in length and didn't overstay their welcome, plus, once again, they both told great stories. Magician and Tower were probably the least interactive of the bunch but they stand out in art, audio, and especially the stories.

So yeah, many of these games tell great stories. There were a few that were lighter on the fiction (especially one that's an arcade score chaser) but even they had worldbuilding and themes and vibes. Overall these games all want to tell you a tale, and I found that almost all of them succeed.

There were some issues I had with this anthology, though. I felt that a few games were a bit longer than they needed to be and overstayed their welcome. I encountered some technical issues: most noticeably I could not run one of the games and another had a gamebreaking bug that made it impossible for me to progress. This leads me to another issue I had with some of the games: it makes sense that most games are short enough that they don't provide a save/continue feature, it is frustrating when a medium sized game doesn't have it so if someone had gone wrong I had to replay the whole thing.

Out of the 22 games I finished (or "finished" in the case of the endless games) all but 6 of them. As mentioned before, 2 games I couldn't play / didn't finish due to bugs. There were 2 that I gave up on because the in game explanations weren't really enough for me to figure out the game, and 2 that I quit halfway due to difficulty. I do plan on going back to the bugged game and 2 of the others because I really enjoyed the time I had with them. So overall I've enjoyed 19/22 games in this anthology (and maybe 20 once I see if I can fix the can't start game problem) which is a VERY GOOD ratio. Like, when was the last time I even enjoyed more than 3/8 games in a bundle?

Oh also you can pet a capybara in one of the games.