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

A stellar work of interactive fiction about a home-schooled girl in a conservative Christian community who's devoted herself to competing in the national spelling bee. Quietly devastating in places, and always empathetic towards its subjects.

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.

It's pretty cute and there are some decent jokes, but I was mostly pretty bored by it. I like visual novels but this just wasn't doing it for me, maybe because I'm not much of a Sonic fan.

Goofy driving(?) game whose loose controls and occasionally unpredictable physics could sometimes be more frustrating than fun, but overall I enjoyed it for the silliness and constant novelty of seeing what kind of new "car" I'd be asked to drive.

Continuation/conclusion of Noisz's story. Still really bad at it, still enjoyed it anyways.

Extremely addicting semi-idle roguelike. Took me a bit to figure out how to throw together effective builds, but once I did, it's just mindless enough to make for the perfect podcast-listening game.

Point-and-click game with a lovely photo-collage style. Really liked the emphasis on music in this one; listening to NPCs engage in little jam sessions was great every time.

2017

I'm extremely bad at this game (started the story on Normal difficulty and had to lower it to Easy partway through), and the story's weaker than Starlight's, but I still had a good time with it and it provided some much needed context for certain things referenced in Starlight.

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.

Considering how goofy Powerhoof's other point-and-clicks have been, I never expected I'd be this invested in more serious fantasy storytelling from them, and yet here we are. Eagerly awaiting the next installment.

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.

Very silly little shitpost game about trying to parse some extremely obtuse pseudo-legalese and shakily recreate your signature with a mouse a million times over.

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.

2014

Short and sweet little platformer. Tight controls, doesn't overstay its welcome.