Flat Eye is a little shopkeeping/visual novel hybrid, covering themes of technology, capitalism, and identity. The shopkeeping is chill and satisfying, executes nicely upon most of the building/management conventions you'd expect, with an interesting added layer of supply-lines that must me hooked up to one another to keep things working.

The visual novel side, however... fuck. The writing is insufferable. I'm a queer person who is in love with a queer person and surrounds myself with queer people. But when I look at a little tumblr ass red nose lookin character strolling into my shop and I think to myself "Yeah they're gonna be nonbinary arent they" and then they are, and they start soapboxing about fatphobia and patriarchy, it's like. Yeah buddy. I know. Find a more interesting/nuanced way to say it. It's just full of tactless cringe like that. It's the most twitter adorkable millenial version of identity politics, satirical writing, and pseudo-black-mirrory situational drama. And it's all pretty much unskippable, like you have to interact with all these dorks to keep the game moving. I had to drop it because of this. It's a bummer that in your game about how human interaction has more value than capital - your capital-building simulation is good and your human interactions are fuckin annoying.

A beautiful and thematically rich experience that explores the best and worst of how communities develop, as well as nostalgia, decay, faith, and the role that commerce plays in everything. Funny, smart, inventive, and just kitschy enough without venturing into any kind of shallow pastiche. These guys put tons and tons of love into each and every character, page, story, and piece of music. I'm not great with writing-heavy games, but when I picked this up, I totally couldn't put it down, and since finishing, I've still just been thinking about it daily. CHOWDER MAN 4 EVA!! bwl

Only played about an hour of this so far - visually really effective, and a super smart new way to do a point-and-click adventure. But god damn if you're gonna make me control a cockroach with tank controls across different 3D surfaces when there's only a handful of lives which send you back to the beginning of the game when you mess up, or even get instakilled by a cat or vacuum cleaner. I dunno, I might edit this review if I stick through it, but maybe this is something that would be best experienced through youtube videos rather than playing it yourself.

Played it at E3 in like 2012 or 2013? Met Cboyardee, he was really nice. He was wearing a hi-vis crossing guard vest with no shirt underneath. He let me play Barkley 2. He told me he wanted it on Steam within the year.

Damn. Hope he's good, wherever he is.

Edit: Just heard he's working on Katana Zero so I think he's good.

This is your brain on capitalism.

GARAGE is the kind of experience that'll stick with me forever. An immersive, overwhelming, one-of-a-kind world full of suffering, charm, grit, and love. At its simplest, it's a game about a stranger in a small town full of quirky characters not unlike Twin Peaks, but with your only mission being to escape. The layers which reflect capitalism, industrialization, misogyny, and the body, all come after. It's got a pretty heavy third act with thoughtful and harrowing emotional and psychological threads, all tangled up like pipes and wires - no matter which ending you land on.

I can totally picture myself wanting to recommend this to people, but ultimately I kinda think I can't - just because of how totally obtuse, cryptic, and kind of impossible it is to play without the assistance of the very welcoming discord community.

Great game for me. But I dunno who else it's for.