In Outer Wilds you are stuck in a time loop and have to restart every 22 minutes, and you're tasked with exploring a solar system. It's really hard to talk about this one without spoiling it, but I'll try to keep it vague. This game is a masterpiece at creating emergent narrative for the player. Each of the planets you explore works in its own way, and it's up to you to figure out how to explore the solar system. It's like one giant puzzle to solve, figuring out how everything interacts and how things change over time. The whole system is so perfectly designed, you could start anywhere, and you'll discover clues to other things somewhere else, and everything just fits together really well. You start the game with everything you need to finish it, and could conceivably finish it in 22 minutes. But for most people it will take around 20 hours, because you need to venture out into the system to gain the knowledge you need to get to the ending. It's just really cool that the only thing you gain through all your journeying in this game isn't some special tool you need to advance, it's just knowledge, learning how everything works, that lets you get closer and closer to your goal. And that ending is definitely worth getting to.

Tetris Effect:
I'm yours forever
There is no end in sight for us
Nothing could measure
The kind of strength inside our hearts
It's all connected
We're all connected in this love
Don't you forget it
We're all connected in this love

Me, not leaving a space for the square piece: Shit! Fuck!

I'm reading some of the negative reviews on here and I feel like I played a completely different game than y'all? I went through two routes on here, Mat and Brian, and intend to go back and do more later. I found the writing to be very charming and funny, and the core gimmick of everyone being a single parent to be an interesting dynamic between the characters.

I really like how all the different characters explore their own theme, such as Brian's toxic competitiveness or Mat's social anxiety. If you're going to play this game I would go in expecting to deal with things more along these lines, rather than expecting the game to tackle the myriad of ways homophobia effects gay men in the real world. The game sets itself in a sort of unrealistic but optimistic fantasy, in which you can be gay or trans and find love free of discrimination, and it's one of the things I liked about it.

I think taking the extra step from "this game doesn't portray anything too specific to gay culture" to "this is actively one of the most homophobic games I've played" is an extremely exaggerative critique. I do see the argument that it could be viewed as erasure, and I'm not trying to invalidate anyone for whom that's a deal breaker. However, due to how well I thought it did at dealing with the things it did choose to focus on, as well as laughing out loud at multiple points during my playthroughs, I loved this game overall. I look forward to playing more of this in the future.

Mat is the dreamiest daddy, and I have a band called the Skammunist Manifesto!

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 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.