was so engrossing that it made me forget about my eczema

I’m glad hosting a games club pushed me to play this - not sure I would have picked it up otherwise. But after a couple of hours the game wears on you and you begin to really admire the complexity of these relationships - with Jala’s family, but also with her own cultural identity and sexuality.

we cant know for a fact dinosaurs didn’t have pastel pink space buns

childlike wonder and whimsy is so back

off-putting, perhaps even rancid

crazy how rewarding the insets are. just a couple of detailed panels - often close-ups of hands, grazing/grasping/caressing - but the visual impact is so great that you gain the same satisfaction that cutscenes in videogames are designed to give you. i screenshotted every single one

Because this game was Ian MacLarty's response to his time with the Grannies playing Red Dead Redemption 2, I took my time with this game to try and capture all its glitches and boundaries in screenshots. You can take a look at them on my are.na channel if you want!

if you felt like this game should have offered something more? skill issue

was pressing the capture button every minute of this game, completely won me over with the art direction

Felt like the difficulty progression stayed relatively flat through the game (completed every level (and their alternate solves) of this in about an hour! Way too easy), and was disappointed to see certain themes (and the mechanics they came with) under-utilised, like the werewolf and the vampire. All of these had potential to add some difficulty, but only stuck around for a couple levels each.

Otherwise the schtick of the game is clever even if the puzzles themselves weren’t (reminded me of Professor Layton a bit) and the way the puzzles changed as you made edits was very satisfying to watch!

Aunty Jane criticises your character for not actually being clever, instead simply choosing the right answer out of a 50/50 probability - and I felt like this was what the game was for the most part, a series of 50/50 answers that happen to be right.

Whether or not your answer was able to get a response that gave you a clue rarely had anything to do with the characters you were engaging with. Mum likes to be flattered and Aunty Jane likes to win, but otherwise, character responses felt random + continuity between conversations, rare.

2021

Perfect sick in bed video game

I feel like the adoration for this game this year may have been driven in large part by nostalgia - what I saw in this was a pretty generic point-and-click game. I don't think I ever had that lovely 'aha' moment from any of the puzzles, and I never cared enough about the dialogue and humour to not skip through it.