No Longer Home wears its inspiration on its sleeve, having a scene from the opening of Kentucky Route Zero on its protagonist's computer screen at one point. It bears some resemblance to KRZ in its dialogue system and set design, but taking place over a much shorter time-span and much smaller space. This is a nice little slice of life game about a couple of recent college grads about to move onto the next stage of their lives. Taking place the day before the big move, it deals with a lot of the stresses and anxieties that come with not knowing what comes next in life, how your relationships might change, what personal and societal expectations there are for your future, and how the market forces of capitalism muddy the waters even further. While the visual elements are steeped in magical realism, the semi-auto-biographical nature of its writing gives the story a very personal feeling that lets you really linger in this moment of the characters lives. This could have earned an extra star if it had the time to really delve deeper into some of the topics it brings up, but for an exploration of a small moment in life, I enjoyed the brief time I spent here.

This was a disappointing one for me. I enjoyed this studio's previous game, The Council, for bringing role-playing style stats into a TellTale style game. I wasn't blown away by the story, and the graphics and voice acting could've definitely been better, but I enjoyed it well enough paired with the gameplay mechanics that I had an overall positive experience with it. One of the things Swansong revealed to me about how I play games now, is that I'm just not willing to read through a bunch of superfluous text unless it's exceptionally well written. I used to be the type of player who would read every single codex entry in a BioWare game, and when I played The Council which also has tons of reading, I read through everything I found even if I found it boring sometimes. My playstyle has since changed however, and I'm no longer willing to give my time to something like that unless I view it as being worth my time, and in the case of this game I don't think that it was. My only prior experience with the Vampire: The Masquerade universe being Bloodlines, I've already had an experience with a very well done role-playing style story in this universe in video game form. The central conflict between the Camarilla and the Anarchs in that game is thematically rich and compelling. The conflict in this game just didn't grip me in the same way, and didn't compel me to scrounge through in-game books to try to learn more about it, especially when not everything you can read is crucial or even interesting. When a large amount of the game is about investigating, and I'm too bored to care to read up on the things I'm investigating, that's a bad sign.

I also think that Disco Elysium has just ruined this kind of game for me because it did stat-based storytelling too well. In Disco Elysium every possible way you could think to build your character is valid, and the game itself is more about playing it the way that you want, because there are options for every build imaginable. Swansong on the other hand, having only played through once, really feels like there are certain stats that you could min/max to simply get the "best" outcome. Investing points into your four core dialogue stats seems way too strong, and I never felt like I was choosing between these in an interesting way. It was more "sometimes this will come up and if you have points you'll win easier" and less "multiple of these will come up and you'll make an interesting character choice." I do hope that this studio can get a couple more shots at refining their formula because I do love the concept of RPG meets TellTale. Hopefully they look at how a game like Disco Elysium does this in a CRPG format and can apply it to the kind of game they make. But for this game, it just didn't really grab me.

This is a free text based game that you can finish in approximately 30 minutes on itch.io. The premise is that you wake up one morning only to realize that you are Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and you begin spending all of his money to fix all the various issues in the world. I really like how unapologetically this game tackles real world political issues, and it does a really good job at putting into perspective the inherent immorality of being a billionaire. I think it could be a really good wake up call to anyone who hasn't put too much thought into the ethics of billionaires.

Gameplay that is as creative as it is fun, there's no other game like this out there. The way they manage to tie the gameplay into the story here is also great, as you'll be thinking about your wins and losses in order to level the character who you want to free, which then removes them from your roster, as well as thinking about which opposing team you want to elevate for the final showdown. Supergiant really managed to master the art of letting failure become not a hinderance, but an asset to their story with this game. Every character has something to love about them here and it really makes you invested in thinking about who to free, or who would even want to return if given the chance. Darren Korb of course knocks it out of the park with a banger soundtrack once again, with a nice creative treat waiting for you with one of the songs, if you've played you know which one. I only subtract half a star because well...this game is about overthrowing a tyrannical monarch but...well it's a bourgeois revolution. You're essentially doing the fantasy equivalent of the American revolution here. You overthrow the monarch only to establish a Liberal republic in which the merchant class still gets to amass vast riches. It's a near perfect game I just wish the politics were better.