Family is a puzzle game, based around a fictional, forgotten 80s indie music scene. Discover the strange and wonderful music of long-lost bands, while uncovering their stories.
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Played this game with my partner and it was a fun time although would probably recommend playing it alone for a couple reasons. Does an excellent job at making you feel like you’re digging through real pop culture artifacts for information. All of this is very lovingly crafted and feels very authentic. The game is quite short and also pretty easy so I’d definitely recommend taking your time and really trying to lose yourself in the atmosphere of the game. Playing with another person tends to make this a bit more difficult, so I’d rec playing alone.
This review contains spoilers
Family tasks you with completing one of those music family trees that chart a certain musical scene and how musicians moved from band to band.
Initially you're played a bit of a radio show that introduces the 80s music scene and one of it's members and then you get the family tree and a few artefacts like memoirs, reviews, articles, interviews as well as a song from each of the bands.
From this you work out who was in which band and in which role. Once you get five correct, you're given additional artefacts to go through. One complication is that people can change roles as they move into different bands, but thankfully can't be in two bands at once.
On the whole you can figure out the answers without a great deal of trouble. There was one or two I took an educated guess at and there was a bit of swapping around.
The final five caused me a bit of grief though as one of the artefacts indicated that at a point in time there were only two or three people who played a certain instrument and that was apparently the only people who would ever play that instrument, which seemed to go against the "people can change roles" thing but oh well
The atmosphere is very good, and the world feels very rich and believable (it's based on a real life scene, though all the characters are fictional). Oh and the music is very good too.
If you're interested in detective puzzly games but want a break from murders, this is certainly a nice one.
Initially you're played a bit of a radio show that introduces the 80s music scene and one of it's members and then you get the family tree and a few artefacts like memoirs, reviews, articles, interviews as well as a song from each of the bands.
From this you work out who was in which band and in which role. Once you get five correct, you're given additional artefacts to go through. One complication is that people can change roles as they move into different bands, but thankfully can't be in two bands at once.
On the whole you can figure out the answers without a great deal of trouble. There was one or two I took an educated guess at and there was a bit of swapping around.
The final five caused me a bit of grief though as one of the artefacts indicated that at a point in time there were only two or three people who played a certain instrument and that was apparently the only people who would ever play that instrument, which seemed to go against the "people can change roles" thing but oh well
The atmosphere is very good, and the world feels very rich and believable (it's based on a real life scene, though all the characters are fictional). Oh and the music is very good too.
If you're interested in detective puzzly games but want a break from murders, this is certainly a nice one.
This really scratched that Return of the Obra Dinn itch. There's one identity that I think is a touch too obtuse but overall I had a great time and I loved the vibes
pretty astounding; would have like it just a /tiny/ bit longer, but going to check out Rivals immediately anyway so not a big ding on that.
There's more guesswork involved here than there is in Rivals--notably there's basically no guidance towards the Dova Pavlova drummer (which is why Tim cheekily has a channel called im-stuck-on-the-dova-pavlova-drummer in his discord server) and I felt like I could cheese my way through far more of the characters than I could in Rivals. Despite that this is still quite good and scratches my deductive information-processing itch. Tim Sheinman is easily one of the most interesting up-and-comer developers working today and I can't wait for Conspiracy in just a few days.