Oates has been developing a fascinating little series of RPGMaker horror games with an incredibly heartwarming edge of sincerity to them. Using a consistent stack of plugins and gorgeous consistent artwork (often re-used between games, to excellent effect), a small world of surreal melancholy is slowly built out, with supernatural monsters projecting the insecurities and struggles of modern life.

Sorry We're Open is the gutpunch game released this year, a game about being a faceless manager of a retail store, carrying your crew through day after day of absurd confrontations with mundane customers and supernatural poltergeists. You gotta keep the store clean, you gotta keep your crew alive, all the while the real evil of Corporate Management hangs over you like an eldritch vampire.

The only winning move is to realize the horrors of capitalism and leave. The game uses its multiple endings in short succession to deliver its true payoff, and is absolutely worth playing through to 100%.

Its thesis is worn directly on its sleeve: Even the manager of a store has far more solidarity with the workers under them than the capitalist monsters running the show. And if you don't realize that, you will die a husk drained entirely of life.