lukebee
A lesbian ghost-story anthology that runs the gamut from spooky romance to sci-fi dystopian thriller. None of it ever gets as dark as their previous VN Soundless, which was genuinely a really upsetting and disturbing read, though I'd definitely still suggest minding the content warnings. I think my favorite story was either Suburb or City, but I enjoyed all three.
2012
2022
I'm extremely bad at this (no surprises there given I also sucked at VOEZ and have very little bullet hell experience) and the XP grinding was sometimes annoying, but I had a good time regardless; the story goes so much harder than I was expecting, and it's rad how queer it was. Plus, there's a good number of songs I liked even if not all of them were to my tastes.
2023
2020
2022
2016
2017
2023
I remembered enjoying Teslagrad back in the day, and yeah, it's still pretty good! Can't say I cared much for the boss fights, but flinging your character around with magnetic attraction and repulsion is a good time, and the remastered graphics look great. Really glad the game eventually marks the collectables on the map so I didn't have to rely on a walkthrough to get the true ending, though I did manage to find nearly all of them on my own before then.
Never played a Monkey Island game before (they're slightly before my time) but I really enjoyed this. The jokes are funny, the puzzles are generally pretty good, and there's an interesting thread running through the narrative about nostalgia and trying to recapture your glory days—I was kinda reminded a bit of The Matrix: Resurrections, which was also a legacy sequel that's self-consciously meta about its position as a legacy sequel.
2023
2022
An incredible historical murder mystery narrative set in a 16th century abbey. Phenomenal lettering work, which feels like a strange thing to fixate on in a video game, but the way different characters' dialogue is presented in different scripts or print based on their occupation or background (or more accurately, your character's perception of them—there's at least one instance where the font changes when you learn that a character is more educated than previously thought) is some fantastic attention to detail, as are the occasional appearance of typos that are then crossed out and corrected, and references to Jesus/God that are filled in after the rest of the sentence as the writer switches to red ink. That attention to detail extends to the narrative as well, which does a great job laying out the rich social fabric of the abbey, from the monks to the peasants, and the slowly brewing class tensions between the different factions, and the story goes to some surprising and genuinely heartbreaking places.
Also, slight spoilers here, but I loved how the game refuses to let you off easy when it comes to solving the murders and accusing a suspect. This ain't Ace Attorney; the evidence is never decisive and the suspects don't break down and confess when confronted, so there's this awful lingering feeling of "what if I got it wrong?" that you just have to sit with and live with as your meddling costs people their lives, and I think that rules.
Also, slight spoilers here, but I loved how the game refuses to let you off easy when it comes to solving the murders and accusing a suspect. This ain't Ace Attorney; the evidence is never decisive and the suspects don't break down and confess when confronted, so there's this awful lingering feeling of "what if I got it wrong?" that you just have to sit with and live with as your meddling costs people their lives, and I think that rules.
2014