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)
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)