Welcome to Indie Game of the Week: 2022 Edition! January's going to be a busy month with all this GOTY business afoot so I've decided to start with something slow and gentle to ease us into the new year. I discovered Sigono's Opus franchise last September with the second game, Rocket of Whispers, and was charmed by its unusual but accessible gameplay mechanics focused around an emotional core that I ended the review by saying that I'd made up my mind to chase down the other Opus games in 2022 and beyond. Well, here we are fulfilling part of that promise with the first Opus game, Opus: The Day We Found Earth.

Like Rocket of Whispers, The Day We Found Earth is set in some untold number of years into the future. Man has colonized space and has propagated using genetic science to keep the limited human gene pool of each colony as varied as possible. However, it seems like this particular pocket of the human race is stagnating without new DNA, so a mission was launched to create a powerful space telescope to find the cradle of civilization itself: the pale blue dot the human race once called its only home. There's no defined year but the game's story intimates that it is so far into the future that folks aren't even sure that Earth ever existed, and that humanity may have been created by other means as a purely nomadic spacefaring race. The game's deuteragonist, an astronomer named Dr. Lisa Adams, has a book of "Earthology" in her quarters to suggest that belief in Earth now borders on the spiritual; the other human occupant on the station, a man named Makoto, is a little more skeptical about there being a planetary origin of life and of the mission in general. The game's protagonist, meanwhile, is a robot named Emeth with a childlike personality who was created by Lisa and looks up to her as both a parent and a friend. Part of the game's narrative is how Emeth's ability to find accurate approximations of Earth is often hampered by his mood swings and tantrums, especially when a hologrammatic aid created by Lisa and built in her image and personality rubs him the wrong way as a fake version of his closest companion.

The game itself focuses, as you might expect, on scouring the cosmos for exoplanets that resemble Earth. Many details have been lost - apparently no-one remembers that the Earth had seven fellow planets in its star system, as that would've narrowed down the search considerably - but enough information remains that planets bearing the same gravity, average surface temperature, distance from its star, and atmospheric conditions can have up to 99.8% compatibility with the image contemporary scientists have of Earth, should it exist. Most stars are written off with a "compatibility: low" message with no follow-up, but a few special ones have some Mass Effect style rundowns of how it's close but not quite right, perhaps even a habitable planet that is nonetheless not the one humanity is searching for. The game alternates this planet searching with story moments, and like in Rocket of Whispers more of your home base becomes available to visit with various notes and keepsakes giving you some background into its characters, the setting, and the general vibe around what is seen as an overly idealistic endeavor. There's even clues and other data that points to "curiosities": celestial objects that aren't Earth but are interesting in their own right, like galaxies, supernovae, and constellations. The search for these non-Earth objects are the closest thing the game has to side-quests, with more unlocked post-game.

For the most part, Opus: The Day We Found Earth is just that one Mass Effect scanning mini-game without the material rewards used elsewhere in the campaign; rather, discovery is its own reward here. Players are given some direction with each target star, first with accurate coordinates and later with the AI pointing to a handful of likely stars clustered together. Later stars need a bit more guesswork, though most are obvious enough by their slightly greater prominence over their neighbors. It's certainly not a difficult game by any stretch as a result, and I feel that's largely by design as a casual gameplay experience with the primary goal to tell a story about hope and faith in the face of the overwhelming improbability of finding a blue needle in an enormous black haystack. I found it to be a chill enough time, though I would've perhaps preferred just a little more nuance and challenge, and for as predictable and sudden as the ending might've been it did feel somewhat earned. Rocket of Whispers is a clear evolution of this particular format, albeit with valuable scrap and keepsakes dotting the remains of human civilization rather than stars dotting the vastness of space, and I'm now looking forward to playing the third Opus game, Echo of Starsong, more than ever. It was worth going back to check in on this one, for as relatively brief as it was and paper-thin as its mechanics were. Plus, I just really like astronomy in games; it's one of those things like photography or fishing sidequests in that I can never get enough of their relaxing pace. Here's hoping the rest of 2022 can be as laid-back.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

• Game: Adglobe and Live Wire's Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights.
• Release Month: January.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 01/01.
• Completed: 06/01.

Well, here we are, fashionably late, looking to review a whole stack of 2021 games in January 2022. I would've put this together in December but I was looking to finish up a couple of series (VN-ese Waltz and The Dredge of Seventeen, check 'em out) and Christmas is always a bad time for indulgences, which is to also say a good time for a feature on newish games. Our first port of call is the Gothic, picturesque, lugubrious explormer Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights in which a "White Priestess" named Lily attempts to purify the blight of a ruined kingdom with the help of the phantoms of its fallen heroes.

Right off the bat, Ender Lilies struck me as a "best of" amalgam of many 2D explormers, with or without Souls aspirations. Its plot is similar to Hollow Knight and Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, its aesthetic and dour color scheme is similar to Salt & Sanctuary, and its soul system is similar to Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (which of course was inspired in turn by Castlevanias Aria of Sorrow and Order of Ecclesia). If nothing else, it's an indication that the developers' did their homework when studying the competition, though having a heightened genre awareness is not necessarily a bad thing as I'll get into in a little while.

As the delicate Lily is defenseless on her own, she surrounds herself with spirits that she's recruited after purifying their bodies cursed by the Blight; the corrupting nature of which has since turned them into horrifying undead monsters robbed of their sanity. Each soul is either that of one of the kingdom's big-name heroes - the major boss fights of the game - or nameless peasants, nobles, soldiers, and prisoners caught in the same sudden apocalypse, which are all fought like mid-bosses while exploring. The named heroes are your main attack skills while the others are subskills, the latter often having uncommon firing patterns or defensive qualities at the cost of longer cooldowns and a finite stock. As was the case in the aforementioned Castlevania games with the same mechanics, there's a huge variety of these spirits to experiment with and potential synergies to discover, though the game's upgrade resources are finite enough that you're encouraged to find the skills that work best for you and push only those to their highest levels. The "main" skills basically work like different weapon types in Castlevania: you start with a standard longsword that slashes ahead in a horizontal arc, and soon find a heavy axe with a large vertical arc and a ranged spell with a slight homing effect. The weapons with the big arcs are naturally best at hitting flying enemies, and the game has something similar to the poise system of Souls where doing enough concussive damage can knock an enemy down and stun them for a while; as a result, I was rocking that heavy axe for most of the game.

As an explormer, there's naturally the usual selection of traversal upgrades, including the double-jump (found very early), the air-dash, the hookshot, and the ground pound. Of note is Ender Lilies's map system, which borrows a page from the new Resident Evil remakes by having map squares be one of two colors depending on whether or not you've found all the important items in those rooms: these items can include story notes written by the major players within this kingdom, the crystallized blight currency needed for upgrading spirits, or more useful upgrades like a relic (as with Hollow Knight, you have a very limited amount of points with which to equip these passive boosts) or a max health increase. The map also helpfully indicates exits you haven't yet been to with a red dot. The rooms are drawn to roughly correspond to their actual size as well.

On top of this forgiving map system, which still doesn't give too much away, the game is replete with other quality-of-life touches that puts it far beyond the standard level of fairness presented by explormers. For one, you unlock the ability to fast travel between checkpoint "respites" almost immediately once the game begins, and can at any time - at no cost - teleport back to the last one you visited. If you should die while exploring, there are no corpse run mechanics or loss of momentum: you simply reawaken at the checkpoint with the same map progress and items/XP you had upon death. Levelling up provides a minor boost to attack damage - health is entirely determined by upgrades and relics, as far as I can tell, and the only way to mitigate damage is through relics also - whereas the best means of increasing damage is using the crystallized blight found on corpses to upgrade your current spirits. Even if you're not the biggest fan of backtracking, the map and fast-travel systems help mitigate a lot of the busywork and the regular levelling ensures that you've never too underpowered unless you're running past everything. While the game is exceptionally fair with its exploration, the combat can be a bit tricky until you find the right groove: bosses in particular are nasty all the way through the game regardless of your level and upgrades.

Something I've noted after playing both Ender Lilies and Blasphemous a little while ago is how the two games betray something of the developers' preferences when it comes to their approach to the Souls series. In Blasphemous, parrying attacks is tacitly encouraged by how effective the resulting counters are and by how relatively simple those parries are to pull off; likewise Ender Lilies has a slightly stronger dodge roll than most of these Souls-like explormers, with almost every part of its tumbling animations given i-frames. It's a subtle look into how those developers respectively tackled the Souls games they were inspired by, and how those playstyles went on to directly influence their own attempts at the same formula. With no other effective means of avoiding damage besides leaping out the way, the dodge roll is something you learn to rely on quickly while playing Ender Lilies.

Another aspect I appreciated about Ender Lilies is that, while it starts fairly linear, there's a point around the mid-game where you find yourself with several avenues to explore. Some of these locations are mostly blocked off until you have the right upgrade, but you're still able to peek inside and grab some early items and get a feel for the enemy difficulty in that part of the map; because getting around is so easy, there's little to lose if you go off in a direction that isn't the one the game is subtly hinting you towards for its next story beat.

I'm not going to say that Ender Lilies is the most original game of this particular mold - if you've played as many of these games as I have, the similarities are all the more stark - but it is one that embodies a firm understanding of what makes these games tick and what is perhaps unnecessary. The game design is purpose-built to minimalize backtracking, eliminate annoying corpse runs death penalties that serve to fester anxiety due to what's at stake if you fail, elucidate on where you might want to revisit by highlighting areas that still have something to find, and focuses its challenges instead on tough enemy and boss encounters that require the player carefully consider their spirit selections and study their opponents for attack patterns to avoid and pauses to exploit. It is also an exceptionally pretty game in terms of backgrounds and lighting effects, though I'm still not a fan of that awkward "paper doll" animation style that is regularly used by non-pixel 2D games. Nonetheless, a promising start to a month's worth of GOTY catch-up playthroughs.

Current 2021 GOTY Ranking:

1. Scarlet Nexus
2. Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Nights

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2021

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro blog.

Wowzers, what a year, huh? I'm referring to 2017, of course, which despite all its problems didn't involve actual plagues, just metaphorical ones of bigotry and gross incompetence. Talking of gross incompetence, I only managed to complete three more games to conclude this project but boy howdy and land of goshen are these three every bit the showstoppers a finale could ask for. We've got picross!

Before I launch into those, however, I want to briefly highlight a few "honorable mentions": games that, for whatever reason, I couldn't bring myself to finish, or even start. Games that had technical issues (mostly on my side, mostly potato-related) or were just not what I was in the mood for at that moment. I might have to circle back around to some of them eventually; after all, while I successfully completed my top 100 for 2017 back in October (rendering this star-studded finale somewhat anticlimactic), there's always more tweaking and shuffling to do. Always. Forever.

• Sundered: Eldritch Edition: A stylish explormer from Thunder Lotus, which recently earned a lot of award buzz as the developers behind Spiritfarer. I'd played Sundered previously back in 2020 for an Indie Game of the Week entry (#174) but never got around to finishing it. My PC could just about run it, but it was one of those explormers with a heavy combat quotient and very much needed to be slowdown-free. I might double-dip on one of its console ports eventually; I've seen it go on sale for pennies before now.
• Dragon Quest Heroes II: Would you believe this was a Xmas present? A little too late for this feature but I'll get into some DQ Musou later in the new year no doubt.
• Paradigm: I was enjoying Paradigm, a very strange point-and-click that reminded me of those affectionate Ben and Dan genre parodies, but again ran into some technical issues. I'm going to punt it into 2021's Indie backlog and see if I can give it the love it deserves.
• Everything: Trying to run anything on this PC is an uphill struggle, let alone Everything. For a little philosophical game it sure has some beefy requirements.
• Ken Follett's The Pillars of Earth: This is a video game? I thought it was a miniseries. I wasn't sure whether to watch that first (or read the dang books like an adult, even) in case the game built on them in some way but kinda left it too late.
• RosenkreuzStilette Freudenstachel: This sesquipedalian Mega Man homage looks to be a slight improvement over the first RosenkreuzStilette (also localized in 2017 and covered back in March's Dredge) but I hit a wall with its ridonkulous difficulty almost immediately and decided I had better things to do, like punch holes through a steel girder.
• Children of Zodiarcs, A Rose in the Twilight, MagiCat, Seven: The Days Long Gone, A Robot Named Fight!, River City Ransom: Underground: Some neat-looking Indies for which I neglected to find time. I'll play and cover them for some other feature. Dredge of Seventeen II: The Re-Dredgening? Maybe not that.
• Sonic Mania: I haven't said no, not quite yet. It's just... well, it's a modern Sonic game. Once bitten, and all that.
• Metroid: Samus Returns: Last on sale April 11th, 2019. Thanks for nothing, Nintendo.

Cuphead

Cuphead is this year's Into the Breach for me: a game that, owing to its genre, would not normally be something I'd be interested in were it not for its glowing reputation, to the extent that it broke out of its niche and found a greater audience. In Cuphead's case, that niche is super-tough run-and-gun (and shoot 'em up) shooters in the vein of a Contra or Metal Slug, or perhaps a Gunstar Heroes or Alien Soldier given its boss rush structure. Obviously, a big part of that unanimous appeal is in its striking '20s Fleischer Studio inspired character designs and animation (and music), which is both flawless in its execution and an aspect that has been endlessly championed and dissected by those far more versed in the animation history it venerates.

Cuphead, if you've somehow buried your porcelain noggin deep in a kitchen cupboard all these years, is largely focused on boss fights with dangerous, screen-filling opponents whose attack patterns you need to memorize as you slowly whittle down their health with a selection of different firing modes. Bosses frequently go through multiple stages so it takes some practice and research before you're able to defeat them without taking too many hits, and then ideally can do so even more efficiently on subsequent runs if you feel so inclined to chase a higher ranking. There's also the occasional run-and-gun platforming stage to break up the parade of bosses, best completed early for the coins they offer as this cash grants you new weapons and passive perks at the local store. Run by a man-pig with an eyepatch in one of Cuphead's many subtle references to other classic games, these store-bought power-ups are permanent once owned and are often ideal for specific boss strategies and thus useful if you're underperforming against them and trying to fine-tune your approach. Granted, you have to remember to equip them, and possibly give up some other handy upgrades in the process.

Mechanically, the game is extremely tight and I think this is probably the reason for its enduring legacy once the novelty of its presentation has worn off (which it won't, but all the same). Since the par time for almost all the run-and-gun courses and boss battles is a mere two minutes, fights don't tend to drag on and on into these marathons where you feel like you've wasted a significant amount of time if you should crash and burn at the final hurdle. You can take three hits and can upgrade that number to five, which is more than fair once you have a boss's various forms down and have learned how to anticipate the worst it can throw at you. Your hard-earned "super arts" do enough damage to force the next form along faster if you're having trouble with a boss's intermediate stage(s), or you can save them for the final form when the boss is frequently at its toughest. Parries, which have you bouncing off certain pink projectiles as they fly past, builds the super meter quicker for even faster victories. There's multiple avenues through which to improve your prowess on a specific fight or at the game in general, if only gradually, by utilizing all these intrinsic advantages to their fullest. Given the relatively small number of moving parts - it isn't like Souls where you endlessly have to consider and reconsider your character build and current gear if you've hit a roadblock - cracking whatever formula you need to take down an obstinate boss isn't a Herculean task, though actually executing on your plan successfully might well be.

Cuphead pulls a smart economic move that games like Fred Wood's Love series also figured out, in that due to its nature as a super elaborately-animated game created by a smallish studio who already spent many years developing it on a shoestring budget there's only necessarily so much content to go around, and so the players need strong incentives to replay a lot of what they've already seen. The first incentive Cuphead provides is by scoring your performance: a letter grade based on time taken, number of parries, remaining health, and your usage of super arts (more is better in this case) will net you anywhere from an A to a C, with achievements for netting as many A-ranks as possible. The second incentive is by introducing an Expert Mode, unlocked post-game, that adds an S-rank tier for those willing to put themselves through the wringer a second time against even harder versions of the bosses. That said, if you just wanted to complete all the bosses once there's at least twenty and the later ones might take a while if you're anything like me, so even if you're not a highscore chaser or an achievement hound there's more than a single session's worth of frantic action on offer.

Accessibility-wise, this isn't a game that plans to take it easy on you. There is an easier mode for boss fights but these are intended to help you get used to the boss's attack patterns by slowing them down or making them less frequent; you still need to defeat the "regular" difficulty for each boss in one area to move onto the next. Experimenting with power-ups, at least those of them you have, and taking on the run-and-gun stages and the bonus game mausoleums to unlock more super arts are often helpful. An average player will probably defeat most bosses, albeit with lousy grades, without too much trouble until they get to the last area at least, and by then they should have access to all the power-ups there are to unlock and have the means to discover an ideal plan of action. I found the horizontal shoot 'em up stages hardest myself, though that's possibly because I have far more experience with platformers than I do the likes of Gradius or R-Type.

Ultimately, I was never going to be the biggest fan of Cuphead because those run-and-gun bullet hell types are not the sort of genre I typically enjoy. Bashing my head against a tough boss can be fun in certain contexts, like in RPGs where I can always go grind if I feel overwhelmed, but when those battles are almost all a game is it can feel a little limiting with no other recourse than to "git gud". However, Cuphead is also something that I can respect a great deal and not just for its incredible art direction; its suspenseful slobber-knocker showdowns belie some very intelligent and considered game design. The whole 2D boss rush shooter format was what the developers decided worked best for that style, even if I might've wanted an explormer with more traversal power-ups myself (but hey, maybe we have enough of those?), and there's some irony in knowing that, despite looking like something made 100 years ago, those graphics will be timeless in a way most polygonal or even pixel art games won't be. I suspect people will still continue to discover Cuphead years from now and it'll be as fresh as ever.

Ranking: C. (This is a personal list and the top half is so competitive as of December that I can't see Cuphead beating anything in the top forty, all of which I adore, given my annoyance with some of its challenges and my apathy with the whole concept of repeating content over and over just to earn higher grades. Even so, it definitely deserves a look-in as one of 2017's most important games and so I think somewhere in the middle of the table is a peachy keen fit.)

Pepper's Puzzles

Video games are usually created for broader entertainment purposes but some occupy a double role as something close to a therapeutic aid, helping players to relax with a structure or process that becomes almost automatic after enough practice. Tetris Effect is named for and utilized this phenomenon credited to the venerable Soviet block-stacker, drawing its audience into a world of calming synesthetic beats as they unhurriedly cleared lines purely on reflex. Similarly, the humble ritual-intensive nonogram puzzle has often performed the same role for me, and over the years I've come to appreciate what makes for a good picross game. It's a more elusive quality than I previously credited to the developers that have worked on such games, such as Jupiter, and having tried a few of the cheaper Steam offerings the gulf between their quality is significant.

I'm glad to report that Pepper's Puzzles is one of the better cheap picross games currently available on the Steam store (and Itch.io too, if you're of a DRM-free persuasion). There's the more apparent virtues of the game, which include a silly sense of humor that governs the selection process for the puzzles themselves, giving you unexpected jokes once the puzzles are complete along with suitably dumb captions. There's the more ambitious "mosaic" mode in which you're completing panels, each a 15x15 puzzle, to assemble a larger image. There's the surreal addition of a time-trial mode that tests your puzzle-solving efficiency with a series of randomly generated "pixel noise" puzzles that don't resemble anything (except maybe Missingno). There's a Steam workshop-enabled mode to import user-created puzzles or export your own. There's the titular Pepper herself, who occupies the role of a friendly tutorial provider and general cheerleader to encourage your efforts. However, for all its frivolities, the core the game's puzzles and mechanics are the real star, for as invisible as good game design tends to be.

One aspect where this attention to detail to shown is how the game takes on the less common "Wario" ruleset for addressing player penalties and mistakes. Some games would penalize you then and there for a misclick, perhaps artificially adding to your time or denying you a "perfect" score, while others simply keep quiet about any mistakes you might make. The latter, named for the Wario mode in the Super Mario's Picross series, is also the preferable option: misclicks aren't necessary errors of judgment but often purely unforced, like drawing in a row of tiles and going one block too far accidentally. While this approach appears on paper to be far more gentle, there's the risk of a cascade of falsehood from a single mistake; once one line has been completed incorrectly, that will then pass onto its adjacent lines and perpendicular lines and create a mess that the player might not be able to fix. Pepper's Puzzles single scoring factor is the time taken: you can earn up to three stars per puzzle if you complete it under its par time, usually quite generous, and the stars don't really do anything anyway unless you're trying to earn all the achievements; it's not like some other picross games where the stars are currency needed to unlock more puzzles.

Pepper's Puzzles also has a mechanical rule change I didn't anticipate, though it's relatively minor and I'm undecided whether or not it improves the pre-established picross template. My apologies for getting all technical on you all, but in most picross games when you've surrounded a series of filled tiles with some crosses, the latter indicating tiles that are not part of the image, it'll grey out the corresponding number clue. Say, if the clue is "5, 3" and you fill in the 5 and bookend it with crosses, it'll grey that number out while leaving the 3 (unless you've previously filled/surrounded that also). In Pepper's Puzzles, no number hint is ever greyed out unless you've managed to connect it to the one of the grid's terminals, i.e. its far left, right, down, or upper edge. Thus, to go back to the previous example, even if you've surrounded that five with crosses, it won't take affect unless those crosses extend to the very edge of the grid. Sometimes this doesn't make a whole lot of sense - if the five is, say, two tiles away from the edge of the grid it's not like anything else can fit in there, and you've already found the five anyway so there's nowhere else it could be - but there's a logic to this approach if it means eliminating any possibility that other filled tiles are in those spaces. If you fill in all the number hints without "capping" them in this way, they'll be greyed out regardless, so the rule isn't even all that consistent about this. It caught me out a few times when reviewing my mid-puzzle progress, seeing that a larger number hint hadn't been greyed out had me thinking along the lines of "oh, did I miscount how many I'd filled in?" before realizing I just hadn't placed all the necessary crosses around it yet, but it's also not the sort of wild rule change that, for instance, Pixross implemented that significantly changed the challenge level of the puzzles. I can understand why it's there, it's just that anything being different in a picross game - something that has existed for almost thirty years in interactive media - takes some getting used to.

As with its contemporary Paint it Back, with whom it shares its occasionally surreal sense of humor, Pepper's Puzzles is an easy recommend if you're looking for a decent-length picross game that's cheaper than the Picross S series for Switch, which is the closest thing picross games have to a pedigree franchise. Even if its alternative modes aren't to your liking, there's still 240 of the core "Classic" puzzles separated into sixteen thematic categories and they'll often mix it up with unusual grid sizes like 20x35 or 10x17 to keep things interesting. Running goofs like the ridiculous non-litigious names for puzzles based on movies or video games and unexpected twists in the story-like "Daily Routine" set made for some funny moments, creating something distinct from the usual pixel art subjects that tend to comprise any given picross game.

Ranking: C. (A good picross game is hard to pull off, despite what feels like a very simple approach of taking some pixel art and generating a bunch of number clues needed to recreate it. So many great picross puzzles will stump you until you figure out that one line that causes everything else to click into place. Pepper's Puzzles is relatively basic but the humor and solid fundamentals were enough to maintain my engagement throughout, fitting in a handful of puzzles whenever I had a moment free last December. Happy to place it above the first Picross S game, which was underwhelming especially considering it cost me twice as much as Pepper's Puzzles.)

Zwei: The Ilvard Resurrection

I've written about the Zwei games as part of a week-long retrospective on Falcom some years back during an E3 (back when those were still a thing) but I didn't really get what they were going for back then. The Arges Adventure, the first Zwei game originally released in Japan in 2001, had a fun localization but the gameplay felt a bit too basic, running through non-descript dungeons as a pair of protagonists: one magical ranged, one melee, with instantaneous swapping between the two not unlike Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. The second Zwei was made way later in 2008 and is a much more confident and feature-rich take on the same formula, as the player controls dashing pilot and typical anime protagonist Ragna Valentine and the cool-headed vampire princess Alwen as they both seek to reclaim Alwen's invisible ancestral castle(vania) from a band of mysterious villains, recovering her transplanted magical skills along the way.

The game straddles the line between the type of action-RPGs Falcom usually makes by way of the Ys and Xanadu franchises, in which the player has a lot of alacrity and what almost feel like brawler techniques with which to eliminate enemies quickly while incurring as little damage as possible, along with a dungeon crawler where the goal is to always be wary of traps and ambushes while seeking out every dead end for treasure chests and other secrets. Like Tokyo Xanadu there's a certain arcade sensibility that crosses over from the gameplay to the dungeoneering format, namely that you are rated for your performance: this includes damage taken, time taken, and item-bearing pots destroyed. Each dungeon instance that is rated this way is compromised of three floors with a certain thematic connection, say the same type of traps or elemental enemies, and as well as earning grades that contribute to your overall "Hunter" rank (worthwhile for the items you get upon ranking up your Hunter title) each of these dungeon instances has at least one treasure, some of which require solving puzzles or looking further afield. Treasures are then sold to the local museum where they can be viewed in their display cases. The game's flow is such that you're often entering a new location, completing a chain of dungeon instances to reach a tough boss fight, procuring one of Alwen's magic spells (expanding her utility) as a reward, and getting a bit of story and exposition before moving onto the next area.

What really makes Zwei shine is how little it takes itself seriously, and this is true for both the narrative and for some of the game's mechanical flourishes. Despite being a typical RPG set-up your two protagonists are a lot more genre-savvy than they let on, if not quite breaking the fourth wall every opportunity they get, and their easygoing flirty chemistry is a lot more appealing than the usual will-they-won't-they obliviousness that tends to be the case for central couples in anime and JRPGs. The game is similarly filled with eccentric NPCs that either help with vendor duties or hints, but mostly exist for color. There's an in-game bestiary for the monsters - for whatever reason, you can collect figurines of each monster type and see those displayed too, though the drop rates aren't always favorable - but also one for the characters, which you gradually fill in by visiting them after every major story beat to learn more about them. You get some fun little side-stories springing up here and there, like a delusional elderly mayor who believes himself to be a swashbuckling hero that everyone in the village has just kinda made their peace with.

The aforementioned mechanical flourishes arrive courtesy of the game's "widgets": collectible gadgets that each add new windows to the player's HUD while exploring. Some of these are useful: there's the customary mini-map, there's a sniffer that tells you if there's a treasure chest in the direction you're pointing (including whether or not you've already opened it), there's a scoreboard that tracks how well you're doing rank-wise for the current dungeon, and there's a monster tracker that tells you the current HP of whatever you're fighting. Then you have widgets that are considerably less useful: an email service that lets you see the correspondence of various NPCs, a tiny scrolling marquee of the current state of the plot (this same rundown is on the pause screen in full), a scale that displays your current character's weight in kilos, both a digital and an analogue clock (neither track in-game time but rather the current date and time on your PC's clock), a TV that just shows you a close-up of your own character model with "action blur" to make it seem like you're in a tokusatsu show, and an always-active typing mini-game that'll reward any correct key presses with exactly one coin (at the stage of the game when you find it, you need thousands to buy anything). You can see from the attached screenshot how playable the game becomes when you have them all equipped at once.

To add to the game's list of curiosities, it brings over the same unusual system for character growth that the first Zwei had. In Zwei, you do not earn XP from defeating enemies. You do not earn them from completing dungeons, or completing quests (the game doesn't really do those), or spending currency in bonfire menus. Instead, you earn them by eating food. Food is regularly dropped by enemies, chests, and breakable pots and can be used as healing items in addition to their XP gains. The idea is to balance their utility, using them if you're incurring a lot of damage which then allows you to level up and be hurt less often. You could also chow down on every piece of food as soon as you find them, though there's a couple reasons why this is a bad idea: the first is that you might need those heals later, especially in a boss fight, and the other is that you can trade ten food items for an upgraded food item of the same general "type" e.g. ten lollipops become a bar of chocolate. The upgraded item gives you considerably more XP than the ten lesser items combined, but the healing is only mildly improved: depending on your style, and how often you get hurt for that matter, it might serve to do keep a stockpile of the lesser foods around. It's a deeply strange system in concept, but one that works surprisingly well as a risk vs. reward system: by only eating when you're regularly overwhelmed by the enemy's strength and need to heal, you can soon catch up to them and remain competitive.

A major component of Zwei's charm are its odd and inventive ideas, and they help make the central gameplay loop of running through dungeons evading traps that much more compelling. That's not to dismiss its excellent script and characterization either, nor a typically fantastic Falcom Sound Team soundtrack which combines the usual Ys bombast with some Castlevania-esque gothic orchestral stuff when facing off against the game's rogue's gallery of demons and werewolves. I'm glad to have ended the year and this feature on such a hidden gem. I can scarcely imagine what my 2017 GOTY list will look like without it.

Ranking: A. (I think it narrowly misses the murderer's row that is the top ten, but absolutely struts its way into the high 10s alongside its fellow Falcom alumni Tokyo Xanadu. An excellent action-RPG dungeon-crawler that keenly understands the similar but distinct needs of both of those RPG subgenres while displaying the same localization prowess that made and continue to make the Trails games such a treat. It's almost criminal that its initial launch crashed and burned due, in part, to how Japan was mostly done with PC gaming back in 2008 when it first released. My fervent hope is that more players discover these sassy, breezy Zwei games once they've had their fill of all the Ys and Trails on offer.)

That's going to do it for December's Dredge of Seventeen rundown and for Dredge of Seventeen itself. The newly revised "2017 GOTY (Adjusted)" will be ready to go hours after this entry is published, now filled to the brim with a hundred games of note along with a bunch of fun stats and such. My thanks to all those who followed along throughout 2021, whether you read the whole thing or just skimmed the parts reviewing your 2017 favorites.

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels. Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes.

Yeah, I dunno what to tell you, but this is the third month in a row where I selected a scary, grisly horror game for the VN-ese Waltz, despite being even further removed from Halloween here in late December. I did temporarily consider a visual novel of a more romantic nature in time for Christmas - from what I understand, the Japanese treat December 25th as a bonus Valentine's Day - but all the touchy-feely ones I have on standby are of western origin. No knocks against the burdening gaikoku visual novel industry, just that my original intent for VN-ese Waltz was to establish a Japanese "base" to better appreciate these foreign interpretations of the format: like starting with the source of something before moving onto the homages. So, I find myself with yet another well-regarded horror VN instead: 2018's Spirit Hunter: Death Mark from Experience, a doujin developer perhaps best known for Wizardry-style dungeon-crawlers like Stranger of Sword City and Demon Gaze.

That said, Spirit Hunter really errs much closer to a standard adventure game rather than what we consider a visual novel. There's plenty of inventory puzzles, for one, and it even has combat of a sort (more on that in a moment). The story concerns an amnesiac man who finds himself in a mansion owned by the Kujou family, a noteworthy clan of psychics: the head, Saya Kujou, is soon discovered dead in one of the rooms, felled by an odd curse that caused flowers to bloom from her torso. The mansion's only other occupant is a polite doll who introduces herself as Mary and a guardian spirit of sorts for the Kujou family. She's aware of your plight - the amnesia is caused by a curse similar to the one that killed Saya, leaving the titular mandible-shaped "death mark" on the protagonist's arm - and recommends working together with other "mark-bearers" to find and exorcise the spirits that created them. The game is broken up into chapters, each pertaining to a different hostile spirit.

As Experience's background is in first-person dungeon-crawlers, it was no surprise to find out Spirit Hunter has a similar format for its exploration. Each chapter has the player and one companion explore haunted locales for a means to defeat the spirit within, moving around a map using directional prompts and gathering items and clues along the way. Occasionally, the player will run into a life-or-death encounter with the target spirit or its minions and must choose between several multiple choice prompts to avoid an early demise. Eventually, once all the pertinent clues have been gathered, the target spirit apparates for a fight. You then have to use items in the right order to either destroy the spirit or peacefully resolve its grudge; either way, the spirit vanishes and the game moves onto the next chapter. What's notable about this system is the importance of the chosen companion: there's usually two or three per chapter, each possessed of separate skillsets. For instance, the fourth chapter has you hunting for a spirit that was formerly a science teacher, and your companions includes the skeptical scientist Madoka Hiroo, famous psychic Tomoko Yasuoka, and music idol Ai Kashiwagi: as the spirit has a weakness to sound, Ai is needed for the final confrontation, but prior to that the protagonist must complete a series of school tests including one written in German, of which of the group only Hiroo is able to read. Along with the correct item usage, the game provides plenty of hints to most if not all of these roadblocks though some trial-and-error might be necessary.

While the game has an interesting premise and structure, I found myself running into all sorts of issues. Most pressing of those of the technical variety was how the extreme spooky vignetting during spirit encounters made the game slow to a crawl on the ol' potato, though since it wasn't an action game it didn't interfere too much. It felt like one puzzle might've been lost in translation somewhere: there's a spirit that will react poorly if you mention eyes or "anything sounding like 'eye'", and during a conversation with it you're prompted to talk about the color of something and will get penalized if you select green or red instead of pink - there's no obvious wrong answers here, since this is the first you've heard of anything color-related, but it's possible it had something to do with the kana or kanji for "eye." It could just as easily have been a missing clue, or was supposed to be a wild guess. As you might imagine, death states can be pretty common if you stubbornly refuse to use a guide. Spirit Hunter's other major issue is with its odd UI: there are limited places to save while playing, basically only while exploring or in the Kujou mansion hub, which means having to complete the 30-minute prologue before you have any UI options. The options menu has a "save and quit" option but it only refers to any changes you made to the options themselves, not the game state. Instead, you have to use the separate save/record prompts on the hub or exploration menu and to quit you have to access your bag, where items and clues are kept, and choose to exit option in the bag menu which is actually the prompt to exit the game. The amount of confusion this generates is such that there's actually a user-created Steam guide to tell you when and how to save and/or exit the game without just alt-tabbing/ctrl-alt-deleting and shutting down the process. I can only assume it's more straightforward for the console versions.

Spirit Hunter does possess a strong command of atmosphere, vital for its thematic genre but also something that tends to come easily to the first-person dungeon-crawlers upon which the game's adventure mechanics are loosely based. The genre got its start with precursors like 1982's 3D Monster Maze and 1987's Dungeon Master, both renowned for using sound design and monster AI to heighten the tension as you explore a dungeon inhabited by hostile creatures in real-time. Likewise, Spirit Hunter will toss in the occasional jumpscare - the player explores areas closely with a flashlight reticle, and it'll pass over eerie sights that'll suddenly vanish with a noise - but does its best work by building suspense, making areas feel more dangerous the longer you stay there. The ghosts are kind enough to not actually attack until a specific point in your investigations when you have everything you need to defeat them, but as soon as you hit that trigger - which you'd have no way of anticipating the first time through - you're suddenly thrown into the thick of things and forced to think on your feet.

One unfortunate choice the game makes, possibly owing to the nature of Japan's doujin scene, is a certain degree of unnecessary lewdness: several female characters are found in compromising positions during a ghost attack, only narrowly avoiding the need for the usual genital censors that Japanese games require, and it's absurdly gratuitous every time it happens. For example, a perky highschooler ingénue gets abducted midway through the first chapter and is later found strung up by thorny vines in her underwear: there's no indication that the spirit is a pervert (it's actually the ghost of a grade-schooler) and so there's no narrative excuse for this sudden cheesecake. It's not enough to be a dealbreaker by any stretch - though I might suggest Jason not play the game on UPF any time soon, just in case - but a manifestation of the male gaze that feels entirely out of place, often undermining the game's more serious horror atmosphere. I'm just grateful that at least the stoic protagonist doesn't turn into a Tex Avery wolf whenever it happens.

On the whole, though, Spirit Hunter earns points for its distinctive structure, a decent enough localization, its dread-inducing horror atmosphere, and an episodic format that allows for both intermittent and marathon play sessions dependent on the player's preference. I suspect most of these UI issues are buffed out for its sequel, Spirit Hunter: NG, which I managed to snag in the same bundle and might reserve for a future visual novel-based foray in 2022 or beyond. It's also yet another example of a VN created by RPG developers: a phenomenon that isn't as rare as I'd previously thought. I'd be curious to see a few other RPG developers give it a shot too; what the heck would a Falcom VN look like? Given the talented writers behind the Trails franchise, I wouldn't put it past them to make something worthwhile.

All that's left is to provide the usual spoiler-blocked discussion of the ending and to thank anyone for following these adventures of a VN neophyte. I hope to incorporate many more in my Indie Game of the Week feature, if not necessarily in another standalone feature like this. (Though I did already pick out a name, VN-ese Whirl, just in case.)

What better way to finish off a year of Indie game reviews, and especially this year in particular, than with something as relaxed and breezy as a slice-of-life-sim? My Time at Portia, originally released in 2019 by Chinese studio Pathea Games, takes the type of formula most recently championed by Stardew Valley (but has been around much longer) in that you operate your own business in a peaceful frontier town earning money and renown via any (legal) method you please. That might mean taking commissions and crafting your client's desired objects in your atelier, digging through the ruins of the old world for priceless relics and ores and other valuables, cultivating your own garden or livestock, bashing monsters for loot, or upgrading the tools you have to do all of the above more efficiently. You can also befriend (and date (and marry)) the townsfolk, donate to the local museum, take part in annual festival days for special rewards, or just sit on a park bench consuming libations until you pass out at 3am. Truly, the life you've always wanted is available in Portia.

The most striking quality of My Time at Portia, shared with a handful of other Indie Game of the Week candidates like Earthlock (IGotW #205) and Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom (IGotW #164), is that of its immense ambition. These types of multi-plate-spinning life-sims are difficult enough to program and balance at the best of times, or at least I'd imagine with their vast number of moving parts, so to do so in a fully open 3D environment as a fledgling Indie studio seems almost foolhardy. Evidence abounds of the unfortunate reality that the development team has maybe bitten off more than they can chew, with some bugs here and there, some activities feeling a little undercooked (like the combat), and the game's aesthetic having a lot of plain-looking environments and character models that sometimes err a little too closely to the Klasky-Csupo uncanny valley of misshapen horrors, but there's clearly integral elements of My Time at Portia that the devs spent a long time perfecting and given the open nature of a game of this type it's easy enough to avoid the content that doesn't quite gel the same well-considered way. For example, the digging mini-game found in the various "Abandoned Ruins" scattered across the world is oddly compelling for the ease with which you can acquire a lot of artifact pieces and materials in short order, the fishing mini-game is basic but serviceable in the way most fishing mini-games tend to be, and Portia's substantial social scene is rewarding to navigate, whether you're looking for friendship or something more. The other half of the game's philosophy, that isn't its "fuck it, just throw everything in there" chutzpah, is that the devs (correctly) decided that this genre is meant to be relaxing and stress-free and tweaked the game's ruleset to match: there are time limits to the optional commissions and assignments, but all of the important tasks are open-ended and can be resolved at your leisure. In addition, instead of suffering a stamina or money loss penalty for collapsing while exploring, either because the clock hit the day's fixed bedtime limit or you got your ass beat by monsters, you suffer zero ill effects: you simply wake up in your own bed the next morning at 7am like nothing happened, ready to start the day afresh. While this does negate the late-night urgency to rush home to hit the hay, it also encourages a great deal of freedom: if you wanted to try that multi-floor dungeon despite the sun having already set, you might as well see how far down you can get before zonking out since you've nothing to lose.

The alternate side of these farming and building life-sims is the social aspect, and Portia does a good job filling its town with dozens of quirky citizens with whom to acquaint yourself. Like Stardew, it sidesteps any limitations regarding sexual orientation by making the town a big ol' bi free-for-all, and there's eighteen bachelors and ten bachelorettes in total though some won't appear until later in the first year. There are fifty-four characters total that the player can have some sort of relationship with - by which I mean, can build affinity with conversation and gifts for potential friendship perks - including five animals. Portia's a lively place, though the game does you a favor by giving people with active quests helpful icons on your map and mini-map; both for those with quests yet to be accepted (with an !) and those waiting to receive their items (with a ?). Socializing and raising friendship ranks takes time and dedication, but on top of completing commissions for them there are multiplication bonuses for giving them gifts on festival days - also when you're most likely to see the whole town assembled together, making it easier to mingle - and on that character's birthday, the latter of which is information gleaned only after passing a certain friendship level (though you could also just consult a calendar guide online somewhere). One feature of this game's socializing that I've not seen elsewhere is how upgrading your friendship rank with one character also earns you points with everyone in their "circle": this includes family members, but also close friends and work colleagues. I'm only one season into the game so far - about ten hours or so of game time - so I've yet to progress any of these social links to a significant extent, but I do have a fairly firm grasp on everyone's personalities by this point. Some of my favorites include a group of seven near-identical brothers that remind me of Yangus from Dragon Quest VIII, the sassy waitress Sonia, a kid called Oaks that was raised by bears and looks a lot like Final Fantasy VI's Gau, the soft-spoken scientist Petra and her Doc Brown-like boss Merlin, the gregarious farmer girl Emily, and a dopey-looking pig called QQ who for some reason is listed as an "adversary." The one person you can't befriend is your Waluigi-esque nemesis and rival, Higgins, who takes all the best commissions early each morning and tries to out-perform you as a builder every step of the way with moustache-twirling antipathy. He is annoying, but then the game needed some source of low-key, Groose-ian conflict.

As for stuff to do, most of the game's fund-raising, story missions, and progression are tied to crafting in some way. You are given your own building studio to register and name once the game begins - "Build Pullman" is what I went with - and then gradually develop it by assembling new production equipment like workbenches, furnaces, grinders, cutters, skivers (which does something with leather?), or cooking sets, with more advanced versions of each to follow. With the exception of the workbench, anything built in any of these workstations requires time and fuel: the latter from wood and charged-up power stones. Commission times are usually pretty generous - the shorter ones are still around a week and change - so it's no sweat to find all the right minerals and leave these components cooking while you work towards other goals. Later on, you can buy more land around your homestead and upgrade your house, workbench, and assembly area: the first improves your stats, since they're tied to experience levels, equipment, and your interior decoration, while the latter two allow you to build even bigger and more elaborate projects. I particularly like the way the assembly area allows you to visualize your in-progress undertakings, letting you know clearly which components are still left to be constructed and attached. Beyond construction, you can delve into ruins: there are two types, one has you moving through traditional dungeon floors fighting enemies, while the other is the aforementioned digging mini-game in which you locate and mine your way towards buried treasure "nodes." You can also go fishing, play mini-games with the locals, and - once the museum opens - work towards filling it with one of every precious treasure you can find. Crafting is still the primary means of earning cash and story advancement, however, and most of the above feeds into your building efficiency in some way even if all you're doing is increasing affinity with the townsfolk so they give you discounts when buying materials. That said, there's always plenty to do on any given day. An intimidating amount to do, in fact.

My Time at Portia also has some deeper lore behind its idyllic charms that it'll occasionally surface during the story missions. The world as we currently know it managed to wipe itself out leaving nothing but ruins and ancient technology behind, with the current world's population having descended from whichever survivors remained safe underground or inside shelters. One of the game's schisms is between its non-denominational "Church of Light," which encourages you to hand over ancient technology to be destroyed in exchange for useful agricultural tools so that the world never reaches that apocalyptic tipping point again, or the local Research Center which wants those ancient relics to help recover what was lost. It's ultimately to the player's benefit to donate to both sources for the useful items that result - there's plenty of that old trash to go around, fortunately - but this plays into many of the issues that plague the town of Portia that the player is tasked with fixing: ruins full of hostile robots left behind from a bygone age, incredible technology that requires a resourceful inventor like yourself to utilize, and new areas of the town that can be awoken and developed once the old world problems affecting said regions are resolved. This main mission chain, from a cursory non-spoilery glance at the game's progression tree, seems to be as vast and ambitious as the game world itself. I don't think it'll be something I'll be done with before the New Year, but then January is a typically slow month ideal for games like this.

The game does have a long list of pros and cons alike, but the sheer size of its scope and ambition is remarkable; given the amount of content and how much you're expected to experience, it can be forgiven its faults to an extent the same way a Bethesda RPG might. If nothing else, the game works just fine and hasn't crashed yet, even if it hasn't always been a technical picnic with its occasional slowdown and glitches (I'm playing the PS4 version, for the record). I'd be curious to find out how much the development team learned from this dry run when they release the sequel, My Time at Sandrock, sometime next year. Importantly, it succeeds enough at what it does to have already left several hooks in me: I'm going to have to be careful I don't lose entire months to pottering around my cutters and skivers in the near future.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

I thought about it, and I decided we needed one more explormer this year for Indie Game of the Week's penultimate 2021 entry. It's definitely been their year - Metroid Dread, Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Nights, Unsighted, F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch, Grime, Astalon: Tears of the Earth, etc. - though I won't be discovering any of those until next year and beyond. This week's map-based mayhem comes courtesy of Blue Eagle Productions, a.k.a. Paul Schneider, with their 2014 release Super Panda Adventures.

Now, you'd be forgiven for looking at Super Panda Adventures and figuring it for some low-quality product given the crude visuals, which seem to rely heavily on a certain paint program that comes with most versions of Windows. In that respect, the game doesn't offer the most promising first impression. I was happy to discover, then, that it has a solid, combat-focused foundation and a relatively uncommon structure for its genre to set it apart. The story of Super Panda Adventures begins as a not particularly subtle Kung-Fu Panda riff (the protagonist is literally called Fu) and then expands into absolute nonsense about robots invading from outer space, so it's best not to worry too much about the particulars. What's notable is that the game's narrative splits into multiple smaller arcs regarding NPCs you'll encounter a few times, each of whom sends you to complete tasks for rewards. Some vanish for half the game, like Fu's Elvis impersonating Uncle Bob, only to reappear much later on with new tasks. Each of these quest chains culminates with one of the game's big upgrade items, however, so they're all worth it (and in fact necessary) to pursue. The benefit of this format is that there's usually several goals you can pursue at any one time, ideal if you find yourself bouncing off a particularly tough stage or boss since you can always come back with more experience levels and gear.

I would've said Super Panda Adventure's structure was something I hadn't seen before in a game of its type if I hadn't also recently played the similar Super Win the Game, another 2014 release (IGotW #236). Rather than one enormous contiguous map like many explormers, Super Panda Adventures splits itself into multiple stages connected by an overworld map. Most stages can be visited as soon as you have an objective there, but it's unlikely you'll be able to explore the entire area on the first visit: you'll need the right upgrades for that. Given each stage is relatively small, there's no in-game map to peruse - sometimes a dealbreaker when it comes to defining what qualifies as an explormer, but in this case I can understand doing away with implementing the many separate maps the game would need. I found myself bouncing between previously-visited stages whenever I picked up a new traversal upgrade, wanting every advantage possible going forward, and eventually started taking notes when I realized these revisits were using up too much time. An added wrinkle is a key system: each stage has three keys for color-coded doors, some of which are tied into the core progression - for most stages, you're there to pick up a vital item or defeat a boss or meet an NPC to move the plot along - but most are hiding away valuables and their keys are not always so easy to find.

The game has an emphasis on combat, giving Fu three types of weapon to wield soon after his adventure begins: his sword, powerful and capable of crits but limited by its very finite range; the shuriken, which act like boomerangs for some reason and can perform long damage chains at the apex of its throw if you judge the distance right; and spells, which include fireballs and a hammer that can smash through certain blocks. You can get by mashing your way through most fights with minions though the game gets a lot easier to manage if you take advantage of defensive options like the shield, which funnels damage to a separate health bar when active. Bosses need a bit more caution, since they'll drain your health fast even if you take the time to grind a bunch of levels. Speaking of which, experience isn't usually something dropped by enemies: most of the earned XP will instead come from XP items scattered around the environment (the bigger earners are naturally in harder to reach places) or gained through combo bonuses. You can also buy XP directly, as there's not much else to spend coins on besides health refills. Skill points earned upon levelling then go towards various passive perks, like added damage for each weapon type, more health, more armor, mana regeneration, longer post-damage invincibility periods, and so on. I didn't level up anywhere close to enough times to max out these skills, so there's some player determinant prioritizing required. It's not the most sophisticated combat system I've seen in an explormer but all its frantic hopping around avoiding projectiles while utilizing multiple ranges at once does give it a certain arcade appeal, as do common explormer upgrades like a ledge grab and gliding for the platforming half of the equation.

There's a number of elements of Super Panda Adventures that feel incongruous to the "expanded Flash game" attitude of its presentation. The first is a suspiciously good soundtrack by one James Dean, who I'm sure has heard all the jokes already so I'll just say that if they're not recognized as a Giant of the freelance Indie soundtrack scene they ought to be. Here's the richly elegant track that introduces the game and almost sounds like something from You Only Live Twice, though my favorite track - a desert theme that has a great bridge - sadly doesn't appear to be uploaded anywhere. There's also some pretty intense drum and bass on that soundtrack too to balance the softer stuff, and on the whole it's a little unexpected to have such a quality soundtrack backing an MS Paint panda hopping around fighting robots disguised like Groucho Marx. Definite Plok vibes to the complete package (in case you needed a refresher). The other unexpected element is the game's length: I had something like eight hours on the timer once it was over, with around twenty decently large levels in total each with multiple paths and secrets to find. It's not like it felt unnecessarily padded either: while there weren't too much geographical variance, the slow escalation of puzzle, platforming, and combat difficulty meant it earned that longer runtime. It felt like every other minute I was playing Super Panda Adventures my face was doing that meme of the woman drinking Kombucha and then grimacing followed by tilting her head in surprised approval. For all the (somewhat hypocritical) barbs about the graphics they're entirely functional; they're not the draw of the game and they shouldn't need to be, even if the bar continues to rise precipitously as bigger talents get on board with this whole map-and-upgrades throwback phenomenon. I don't think Super Panda Adventures stands out as particularly noteworthy, especially some seven years later, but I can't say it didn't impress me occasionally.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro blog.

After all that effort last month to get through as many remaining 2017 games as possible we're back to a relatively sedate offering here on November's The Dredge of Seventeen, working through a mere trio of games that are nonetheless solid contenders for the mid-tier that I'm sure many folks missed out on, my 2017-situated past-self included. They're all adventure games too, which I'm starting to think had as much of a banner year as the RPGs did. When I knock out December's entry some time around New Year's, I'm planning to break down all the games left behind; as I suspected at the outset, there's still so much left in the year that I couldn't quite accommodate in time. That includes big names like Metroid: Samus Returns, Cuphead, Snipperclips, Sonic Mania, Pyre, and so many others but also a huge number of games I'd never even heard about prior to researching this project back in January, and adding what I'd found to various wishlists (and shopping carts) as this year pressed on. That "late to the party" process accounts for two of the games presented here in this November entry, with the third only coming to my notice after covering its predecessor sometime in 2019.

It's given me pause for thought that - even if the intervening years haven't been quite as strong as 2017 on the whole - I'm sure similar scenarios apply to them as well: that there are simply too many franchises and corners of the game industry I'm negligent about following, left to slip through the cracks and denied their due. A reason if more were needed that Giant Bomb could use a few more staff members to extend its reach.

The Inner World: The Last Wind Monk

The United States is credited with establishing the point-and-click or graphic adventure game, being the home of both Sierra and LucasFilm, but it's Germany that kept the home fires burning after the genre all but disappeared from the mainstream after the FMV era of the late '90s. Since the genre's Indie insurgence, Germany has continued to have a significant presence in that arena with the likes of King Art Games's The Book of Unwritten Tales, Daedalic's Deponia, and Studio Fizbin's The Inner World. All three have a similar sardonic sense of humor influenced by Simon the Sorcerer, a UK-developed series that saw greater appreciation in Germany the way the US-made Wizardry and Lode Runner saw massive traction in Japan. Of those three, however, I'd only discovered the first The Inner World fairly recently: this February, in fact, when the first game popped up in the rotation for Indie Game of the Week. I'd then find out around that same time that its sequel was a 2017 release: one I quickly pencilled in for a visit with this feature before the end of the year.

The Inner World's titular setting is an inverted globe with limited illumination and no naturally produced air. Instead, wind is summoned through massive tubes running through the world's "underground" courtesy of a ruling class that can musically activate the tunnels with their nostril flutes to flood the world with fresh oxygen. It's an odd idea for a setting and one that the first game takes its time in delineating as it moves from one situation to the next along with introducing the protagonist, Robert, the last of the flute noses, his rebellious paramour Laura, her pigeon partner Peck, and the evil tyrant (and Robert's adoptive father) Conroy. As The Last Wind Monk picks up a few years afterwards, the first game is essential to understand the world, the lore, and how the events of that game have led to this sequel's present predicament. It also means, as a direct sequel, I can't talk about the story of this one without spoiling the previous.

With that in mind, I'm just going to focus on the structure, puzzles, and script quality. Like many modern adventure games, Studio Fizbin took an episodic approach where each new chapter takes place in a new zone with new puzzles to solve and almost all the inventory is thrown out after moving on. That has the positive effect of reducing the number of active hotspots and inventory clutter as the game progresses, meaning it's that much easier to solve puzzles through trial and error if you can't get there logically in the manner the game intended, but the regular switching of venues also allows for a greater variety of puzzles. A persistent mechanic is the way Robert can learn songs to play through his flute nose, each of which has an affect on the world's hidden machinery: a song that makes platforms rise, for instance, or produces a strong gust of wind from any tunnels nearby. Different screens will have elements that these songs can activate, while in others they're irrelevant to the current puzzle(s). A new change to The Last Wind Monk is giving Laura and her partner Peck expanded roles, with both now playable in their own chapters of the story or together with Robert. Sadly, a lack of special abilities means Laura is often interchangeable with Robert when it comes to the puzzles themselves. Peck's a different story, however: though he cannot talk, he is able to fly and that means reaching items and hotspots that others cannot. All three share an inventory when together, though there's one memorable section in a monorail station where Robert and Laura have to figure out how to pass items back and forth while trapped in different rooms.

On the whole, the puzzles in this one are slightly tougher than the previous game's, but the aforementioned compartmentalizing of the game's regions means you're unlikely to be stuck for long. However, there are a few where you might need some external note-taking to solve them, including a puzzle where you have to instruct someone to draw a specific unseen breed of cactus by comparing and contrasting with six others: the idea being that three of these cacti have characteristics that the final one might have, but are not apparent on the other three, which means eliminating every element that appears on those latter three (it makes slightly more sense in-game). There's another puzzle involving connecting nodes on a switchboard that relies on some entirely unhelpful new age-sounding hints about the sun and roots and whatnot: these hints actually correspond to icons on the switchboard, but the symbols and the instructions are often so vague that you're left trying a bunch of combinations for many minutes until everything finally lights up.

The script is generally witty and like the first game leans into Robert's oblivious wishy-washy nature and Laura's aggressiveness to humorous effect, giving them a lot of material to work with when talking to each other or NPCs. One particularly mean-spirited running gag carried over from the first game is the way that some adventure game puzzles call for the occasional bit of misanthropy, and the soft-hearted Robert always chastises himself for possibly hurting or killing an unhelpful NPC once you've solved whatever puzzle is connected to them - small splashes of dark humor like this are common to the Simon the Sorcerer template these games venerate. NPCs can be interrogated on a number of topics, each of which are grayed out on the interface when no new information can be gleaned, though those same options won't disappear entirely if you need to hear them again for the sake of a hint. Speaking of which, the in-game hint system seems to have been altered too, and now they simply remind you of what your current goals are; find a way to get this item, distract this NPC, and so on. Handy for a refresher if you're completely lost, but you're not going to be able to rely on them for explicit instructions.

The Inner World: The Last Wind Monk carries over the strengths of its predecessor even if it hasn't evolved too much - that's perhaps by design, given that it's from a throwback genre - and after two games it's evident that Studio Fizbin has a very clear idea how these games work and what makes them appealing. My usual favorite QoL features are here, specifically the button that highlights all hotspots on the screen to eliminate pixel hunting, and visually the game has a simple look that nonetheless benefits the light-hearted adventure it presents. That it can also juggle darker themes like child abuse (verbal and physical), religious persecution, racial discrimination, and oppressive autocracies while maintaining its sense of levity is admirable also. The one negative I can hold against the game beyond a few duff puzzles are the awkward controls on Switch if you're playing that version while docked: instead of using the analog stick as a cursor, you have to walk as close to the desired hotspot as you can and hit Y enough times to cycle through all the nearest hotspots until you get the one you want. It's awkward enough, especially when there's a group of hotspots bunched up together, that you're far better off playing undocked and using the touchscreen for everything.

Ranking: C. (I've been packing the C-tier with so many new additions since embarking on this blog feature that I've lost sight of where the current goalposts are, but I'm pretty sure The Inner World: The Last Wind Monk will make it in. It's a solidly made throwback with a few fun gags and a slightly higher than average challenge level but isn't particularly remarkable or noteworthy beyond that, which is why it won't be placing higher. For reference's sake, the B-tier has games like Gorogoa, Life is Strange: Before the Storm, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Rakuen - all very daring games both thematically and mechanically. C-tier meanwhile has Tacoma, Night in the Woods, Subsurface Circular, and Bear With Me which are better neighbors for The Last Wind Monk's modest charms. Damning with faint praise perhaps, but it really is getting competitive in that region of the list.)

Tiny Echo

Even compared to the breeziness of the above game, Tiny Echo is considerably more modest and streamlined. Centered around a simple quest of delivering thirteen pieces of mail to enigmatic beings across a subterranean world, Tiny Echo is far more dreamlike and sensory in its approach and like many foreign-produced adventure games (the studio, Might and Delight, is based in Sweden and is best known for those Shelter arboreal survival games) foregoes language and text for mostly ideographic and contextual exchanges. The protagonist, a little eyeball with a torso and legs named Emi, sets out to deliver what aren't so much physical envelopes but manifested wishes: these all come from the surface, where a group of odd humanoids are struggling to survive a barren world. By awakening the spirits these wishes are for, each representing a different natural or manmade concept, the surface becomes that much more survivable for its occupants.

Because emotions and immersion play a larger factor in its wisp of a narrative, the game is a sensory treat: visually impressive with realistic looking areas (they almost look like miniatures) with less-than-realistic anthropomorphic residents, and great sound design that often are a factor with the game's puzzles along with a serene soundtrack that is like a balm for the soul. It's very akin to the work put out by Amanita Design: playful experiences connected by a loose thread of a narrative rather than something more story- and script-focused. While the world is relatively small it compensates by being a little convoluted in its structure, with doorways often leading to unexpected exits. You'll often solve a puzzle or activate an object in one area for it to open a route somewhere else, so you get to learn how the game map operates with some exploration and experimentation. An early example involves waking up a creature sitting in a hole: once awoken, the creature sits up and reveals that its lower half was blocking a tunnel. That same creature is one of the thirteen that you must deliver a message to: some are ready to accept your delivery as soon as you find them, while others might involve a little mini-game or puzzle before they're amenable to receiving their mail. The latter scenario constitutes the majority of the game's interactive aspect, which is otherwise fairly slim and lacks mechanics common to other adventure games such as a persistent inventory or a means to communicate with NPCs that isn't just handing them a letter.

Tiny Echo is a brief (about ninety minutes) and simple yet attractive and thoughtful adventure game that fits the Indie model to a T: it's not something you could hope to sell in a retail context, so minimalist is its approach, but something worth seeing through for the meagre amount it asks for to enjoy its surreal, striking aesthetic and smattering of cute environmental puzzles. If you're a fan of artsy point-and-click games from Amanita or, going further back, Windosill or The Tiny Bang Story, it's worth seeking out.

Ranking: C. (I'm starting to realize my lazy tendency to give everything four stars is going to bite me in the ass in this case, since I've taken an already competitive tier that was twenty games strong and expanded it to at least fifty since January. I've no idea where Tiny Echo will end up on the finished list, but I feel its combination of strengths and weaknesses - though different to The Last Wind Monk - will put it in a similar position. Its dreamlike ephemerality, though potent while in the moment, might end up working against it come the final judgement.)

Chaos;Child

Chaos;Child follows last month's The Letter as a visual novel that I was able to talk about in two separate features (the other being VN-ese Waltz, my unfortunately-named trek through some big name visual novels) and like The Letter is a spooky supernatural thriller where anyone might perish at any moment. I've discussed most of the essential qualities of Chaos;Child in its aforementioned VN-ese Waltz entry, so this will be a round-up of final impressions and spoiler-blocked plot twist discussions. (Just for a recap though: Chaos;Child is set in Shibuya some six years after a massive earthquake leveled the area. Recently, a string of bizarre murders has caught the attention of the local highschool's newspaper club, the president of which finds himself entangled with the murders and, soon enough, a far more dangerous and strange reality hidden beneath Shibuya's surface.)

Chaos;Child was considerably darker than I anticipated, even with those grisly and bizarre murders right at the forefront. The default story becomes almost a struggle in part because of the procession of downer moments that punctuate the late-game, or at least its default route. Speaking of which, the game has an uncommon structure when it comes to replays for alternative endings. I figured the delusion feature of the game - where the protagonist imagines a positive or negative fantasy scenario, or skips them both to stay on track - would have some effect on story branches, and I was right to an extent. What actually occurs is that the delusions have zero effect on your first run through the game: the story is railroaded to a specific conclusion regardless of any delusions you may or may not have triggered. Upon a new game, though, you have the opportunity to unlock character-specific routes regarding four secondary female characters based on activating specific delusions related to them: the protagonist's overbearing older foster sister Nono Kurusu, the bubbly underclassman and human lie detector Hinae Arimura, the quiet gaming otaku Hana Kazuki, and the legally dubious foundling Uki Yamazoe. Not only do each of these smaller scenarios explore what might happen if you get closer to that character - mild spoilers, but none of these "romances" end well - but they also reveal important character motivations and other vital background information about the overarching story that help fill in gaps in your knowledge. It's only once you've seen all four of these routes and learned all they have to impart that the "true" ending, set a few months after the main story, can be viewed. The true ending works better as a satisfying conclusion to the story as you might expect, though there's still much heartbreak in store and the door left wide open for another story set in the same world - something that the Science Adventure series as a whole excels at, given its many sequels.

Anyway, I'm glad Chaos;Child didn't descend into a thousand-branch nightmare like The Letter - as clever and difficult as wrangling that many variables must've been - and playing through the game the first time while cherry-picking delusions (or save-loading before the delusion trigger to see both) made it easier to ascertain which ones would trigger specific character routes, so it's not quite as obtuse as similar VNs have been. I still dig a big ol' flowchart of decision branches I can navigate, such as the one in Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma, but Chaos;Child's approach works as a more subtle alternative.

So, as is usually customary in VN-ese Waltz when I can actually complete the game in time, I've got some spoiler-blocked sections that discuss the end-game. I've separated them into three categories: the end of the normal route, the content of the four character-specific routes, and then a smaller blurb on the game's true route and finale. The idea is to peruse them once you've passed those parts of the game, though if you're not interested in doing that and just want to hear about some wild anime shit by all means partake at your leisure.

Part 1 (Normal Ending):

Part 2 (Character-specific Endings):

Part 3 (True Ending):

Anyway, I think the mark of a good visual novel - or a regular novel for that matter - is that it leaves a strong enough impression for this amount of garrulous musing on plot details days later. Those murder scenes aren't something I'll soon forget either.

Ranking: B. (Steins;Gate is one of the strongest VNs I've encountered while covering the things and Chaos;Child is only slightly worse in my estimations, making it a strong contender for the top half of the list at the very least. I'm putting it in the B-tier just so I don't triple up on the poor old C-tier for November's entry, but it might end up slipping to just under 40th place when the dust has settled all the same. Again, given how I've turned this list into an organizational bloodbath to contend with in a few more weeks after this series reaches its finale, it's certainly not a placement to sneeze at.)

Next time: There was another Falcom RPG released in 2017 so you best believe it's going to be my swansong for this feature. It'll be a busy month with the holidays and this ridiculous GOTY-related feature I'm batting around so I might not have time for anything more, but I'll see what I can scrounge up for some last-minute additions. We've now reached 107 items on the list - 101 if you remove the HOPAs and the one F-tier I've awarded - which means we're safely in the clear regardless of what December brings. That's a(n entirely self-inflicted) load off, at least.

One of the mini-arcs I've had going on during the Indie Game of the Week's tenure is getting over my general aversion towards scrappy RPG Maker projects, especially those of a freeware nature and/or visually rough presentation. It's not so much that I'm putting on airs with regards to the high standards a game needs to pass before I deign to bless it with my insightful drivel, but rather that there's an apprehension in parsing such an immense library of projects created by no end of imaginative and dedicated developers who maybe don't have the scripting or other technical talents required to bring their ideas to life via other avenues. In that respect, entry-level software like RPG Maker or Ren'Py are indispensable in creating a tier even lower, budget-wise, than the many comparatively slicker Indie games dropping on Steam and other marketplaces on a regular basis. It sometimes feels like the video game industry is one of those vertical cities where those at the top enjoy the most wealth and visibility. There's substance to be found deeper down, but it takes more effort to find.

Off, or OFF, is one of those RPG Maker projects that found itself a global cult offering despite debuting as a French language game. Like fellow EarthBound-alikes, it uses the familiarity of turn-based RPGs to tell a subversive and mostly symbolic tale about an entity born to purify the world. The world, in this case, being an unusual dimension of four "zones" floating in an endless void, each possessed of a certain philosophy behind its creation and maintenance and presently plagued by aggressive phantoms. The Batter, as this determined individual is simply called, seeks to destroy all these phantoms but also the corrupt guardians of each zone: their would-be deities, each of whom responsible for the nature of their pocket of this universe. The Batter is joined by "Add-ons," voiceless rings that fight alongside him and possess specific skills (called "competences"), as well as a feline being calling itself The Judge that pops up occasionally to dispense advice and exposition. It would be pointless to explain the story, because it's both incredibly straightforward and hopelessly abstruse. The Batter exists to purify all. You, the player, are there to help him achieve that.

Perhaps owing to its age - the game was first released in 2008, making it one of the oldest I've covered on this feature - the game is disappointingly basic in a mechanical sense. Combat is definitely not the game's strong suit, and most encounters can be defeated by simply spamming the standard attack. It presents some odd ideas, like having the fundamental elements of the world be metal, sugar, smoke, plastic, and meat, except you rarely need to rely on elemental weaknesses to complete any battles against enemies that possess them. Equipment tends to have names like "Aura of Sincerity" or "Fibula Epidermis" but still work as the usual incremental bonuses and require flushing out all the money you've earned to fully upgrade your party's gear. Bosses, meanwhile, offer a bit more of a challenge but most can be brought down with your strongest competences and remembering to heal when needed as well as remove any particularly burdensome status effects like poison and madness (which works like confuse). There's little in the way of a "puzzle boss," or any encounter that requires an alternative to throwing your strongest attacks at it until it gives up, though there's at least one superboss and some tougher regular enemies for those willing to take on the risk for the rewards such battles offer.

Instead, I'd suggest that the game has two core strengths that lie elsewhere: the first are the game's puzzles, which tend to revolve around finding passwords and discerning correct routes through obfuscating barriers (a certain sound-based maze made famous by the likes of Ocarina of Time is one such obstacle). Another puzzle solution is found by consulting the game's readme file, and I'm not entirely certain if that part of the document wasn't blank until I triggered something in-game (in any case, it won't make any sense until you're at the relevant part of the game). To some degree the game feels more like an adventure game than an RPG, at least in terms of where most of its ingenuity and imagination can be found, with the RPG battles serving to break up the wandering around. The second strength is the game's atmosphere, temperament, and writing: Off is deliciously strange and revels in its unnerving approach to storytelling and worldbuilding. Exposition cutscenes are regularly delivered over what appear to be diagrams of industrial machinery and cattle slaughter drawn in the 19th century and your loquacious cat friend the Judge is never without a sharply delivered bon mot. Enemy designs range from the silly to the perturbing, never really giving away what the phantoms are and why they persist across these zones. The most striking use of atmosphere, and one of many aspects that would later inspire Toby Fox's Undertale (along with a heap of other 16-bit RPGs), is how you can return to a zone that you've "purified": instead of the usual NPCs and the zone's looping music you are instead met with almost complete silence beyond some hushed whispers in a land now devoid of color and substance, with only terrifying demonic creatures for company. These beasts are often considerably stronger than you can handle if you're at the point where you've just cleared that zone, though can serve as good sources for XP and money in the late-game if you're saving up for better equipment. It's an exceptionally eerie development, not least of all for what it suggests about the nature of the Batter's journey and of the Batter himself.

I can't say I had a great time with Off overall as its rudimentary combat, frequent random encounters, and over-reliance on maze-like dungeon design served to detract from rather than enhance its more aesthetically-inclined assets - the sole exception being the jaunty standard battle music, which I never grew tired of hearing - but it did feel like a game I probably should've played closer to its release to appreciate in full and one that still carries some cachet today with Indie RPG enthusiasts, helping to set the stage for equally subversive games like Undertale or Anodyne to follow. The wild swings it took with the game's structure in the final act are outlandish and brilliant even after a decade and a half of imitators to lessen its novel sheen and I particularly liked its ostentatious script (and the excellent localization of same) and subtle exploration of themes such as rampant consumerism, the soulless and cyclical drudgery of heavy labor that only serve to benefit the ruling elite, and the pain and resentment caused by neglect. I'm not sure how much "reading between the lines" Off actually has - much of it seems to be eccentricity for eccentricity's sake - but it was worth seeing that story through to its end, in spite of the horde of random encounters it took to get there.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels. Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes.

Welcome once again to the land of visual novels, where extreme violence and flagrant fanservice work in tandem to make me squirm in my seat. We're long past Halloween at this point and yet I find myself with another horror game: Chaos;Child is part of the Science Adventure franchise from 5pb. and several others, which I've visited twice before with Steins;Gate (note the trademark gratuitous semi-colon) and Steins;Gate Zero. While the two Steins;Gate games were directly connected by their continuity, Chaos;Child appears to be set in a different version of Tokyo with a different set of characters; however, I'm not wholly certain if it isn't meant to be one connected universe. I know that the other sub-series in the Science Adventure franchise, Robotics;Notes and its sequel DaSH, have a few Steins;Gate characters too. What perplexes me about Chaos;Child's connection to the others is that it starts with a pretty significant in-universe event: a 2009 earthquake centered on Tokyo's Shibuya district that killed thousands of people.

Chaos;Child sees the newly rebuilt Shibuya of 2015 terrified by the re-emergence of a notorious series of murders that previously ended with the earthquake, each of which are as bizarre as they are perturbing. This naturally has everyone's curiosity piqued, especially the aspiring journalists of the local highschool's newspaper club, of which the game's bespectacled protagonist - Takuru Miyashiro, a boy orphaned by the earthquake - is the president. Taking it upon themselves to investigate these new murders, the club members quickly find themselves out of their depth when it turns out the paranormal is involved. While Steins;Gate had more of a "hard sci-fi" approach to its thriller plotting, building a story around a hypothetical system of time-travel, Chaos;Child goes pure fantasy with its focus on psychic powers. It's quickly made evident to the player, if not immediately so to those characters investigating, that each victim had some sort of inchoate psychic ability they perhaps had yet to understand; likewise, it seems apparent that their killer(s) did as well. Like Steins;Gate, it feels like movies were major influences on Chaos;Child's story, in this case David Cronenburg's 1981 film Scanners and Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 film (and the manga that preceded it) Akira: the former with its crime thriller story of a homicidal psychic hunting down benign ones and the latter with its exploration of the potential devastation caused by the untapped power of the human mind. The game itself likes to reference movies often enough that I can't imagine these connections are coincidences, and Steins;Gate too was very particular about its cultural touchstones.

As with most of the visual novels we've covered in VN-ese Waltz, the only truly interactive aspect is that the player can cause branches in the storyline by making the occasional decision. However, it's a pretty subtle process that relies on the protagonist's "delusions": momentary flights of fancy that might lead to a ridiculous non-canon version of an otherwise normal conversation or scene. Each delusion can be positive or negative, activated similarly to the L1/R1 Paragon/Renegade triggers from Mass Effect: the former tend to be awkward seduction fantasies with members of the game's mostly female cast of ancillary characters, i.e. the fanservice, while the latter might result in a sudden brutal act of violence or moment of suspenseful horror. There's also the "neutral" option in which neither delusion is triggered and the game proceeds as normal. Chaos;Child does have that issue that Steins;Gate does where the protagonist is deliberately unlikeable at first due to their poor attitude towards others, lack of social graces, and general wiener nature, and then as more of their tragic backstory is laid bare you come to understand them better, if not fully root for them. Much of that early revulsion is due to these "delusion triggers," as the game calls them, which tend to get a little too in touch with the psyche of a perpetually horny and paranoid teenager. The game does occasionally throw in some genuine moments of levity here too, including a part where your mute "ESO2"-obsessed kouhai reveals herself to be a Leia Organa space princess ersatz, so I've tried to activate them whenever possible in spite of myself. Given the game's themes of mind over matter and the vividness of these delusions, however, you might've already figured out how they could affect the "reality" of the game despite being fictional constructs. I've not reached the part of the game where they make it explicit that the protagonist's daydreams are having any affect on the real world, but I know a VN's story-branching system when I see one (though the door's still open for some sort of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories meta influence instead, wherein the story shifts to match the player's state of mind rather than the protagonist's).

In terms of the story and plotting it's been mildly compelling with its balance of horror suspense, deductive reasoning scenes (another point where there's some player interaction: these mostly work as "have you been paying attention?" plot comprehension lessons), and a gradually-building foreboding unease similar to how the world slowly becomes more insane throughout Persona 3's plot progression. It has that potboiler sensibility where chapters end on big suspenseful cliffhangers and it certainly doesn't shy away from the violence: the game opts to start with a vlogger being hypnotically compelled to chop off and eat his own arm during a livestream, dying from hypovolemia shortly thereafter. This then becomes the first of the game's procession of equally Se7en-ish absurd murders. The game's limited visuals don't really shy away from depicting them in full either, though there is a scarce amount of actual gore shown. It's also big on character interactions, spending time to develop the relationships between its principal cast when the murder mystery aspect isn't at the forefront, in what I imagine is setting the stage for some very unfortunate casualties further down the road. Graphically the character designs tend to run together - I've taken to identifying the scrappy ingénue and the doting adoptive sister characters by their hair colors, because there's little in the faces to set them apart - and they could probably do with more expressions and portraits for minor characters (kinda easy to tell who's important if they show up with a sprite when they talk), but the backgrounds have been nicely detailed so far and, as stated above, the murder and violence scenes are suitably grotesque.

This is going to have to be another review like last month's The Letter where I'm going to delay the post-game breakdown, largely because I haven't found the time to complete the game yet (or any of its alternative routes, for that matter). Fortunately, as with The Letter, Chaos;Child was a 2017 release - or rather, its localization was - so I can punt it into next week's The Dredge of Seventeen rundown for some final impressions. On the whole it's been a little weaker than its contemporary Steins;Gate in most of the important respects - creating interesting and distinct characters, the themes and the sudden shifting tone of the story, the overall pacing, and how psychic powers running amok stretches credibility more than gadget-assisted time-travel if only just - but it's certainly not bad and I'm invested enough to see it through as the story continues to fly off the rails in an intriguing manner. I'll also have to reckon with the fact that Chaos;Child is a direct sequel to a game that has so far eluded an official localization: Chaos;Head. I'm sure I've disturbed some order of continuity by leaping ahead in the canon, even if many sources seem to suggest that Chaos;Child isn't so connected to Chaos;Head that the absence of the latter makes the former impossible to follow (certainly hasn't been the case for my playthrough). With all that in mind, I'll have more to say about how Chaos;Child concludes in just a little while.

Still doesn't feel like I've hit any clunkers yet for this VN feature though, and with only one month left in the year I'm sure I'll keep that streak alive. Jinxing? Nah, that's not a thing. Not like psychics.

At the risk of losing what little credibility I have as a reviewer, I'm partial to the occasional food analogy to describe particular roles that the wide range of Indie games might have in my video gaming diet. Many are like Lunchables: miniature approximations of much larger meals that are sufficiently moreish despite their relative smallness and/or cheapness. Others are like sushi: delectable and varied and richly flavored, but served in such small portions that you're always left wanting more. The Gardens Between is a case of the latter: a wholesome, charming adventure game with a time-winding gimmick that is over far too soon, certainly way before I had my fill of its chronological puzzles.

Metaphysically representing the memories of two close friends as they spend a stormy night in a treehouse, each of the game's diorama-like "islands" builds an obstacle course out of the fragments of a shared experience recalled fondly by the duo: e.g. the day they met after their families moved next door to each other, their various adventures and misdeeds across their neighborhood, or once-in-a-lifetime moments like witnessing a shooting star. Abstract depictions of these memories make up the fixtures of each island, such as one covered with enlarged video game paraphernalia and another filled with gigantic playground equipment, all with the invariable goal of transporting a globe of light held in a lantern to the island's peak in a ritual I interpreted as one friend helping the other to recall the incident or moment in question. As the duo walk, hop, and sidle their way up the islands automatically the player's role is to simply move time forwards and backwards when necessary, occasionally stopping to interact with a button or "garden friend" (a box-like entity capable of carrying the lantern for a while) in order to reach the top with the light still in tow.

A typical example of overcoming an obstacle would be a light-absorbing black hole in the path: one that you would evade by leaving the lantern with a garden friend and collecting it again after you passed the black hole, the garden friend having found his own separate route up. Others get far more intriguing and clever, including "freezing" time (as in, not holding forward or backward) which doesn't necessary freeze everything on the screen, or using perspective in unexpected ways - the camera frequently spinning around the island to follow the duo at all times, which often grants you advantageous angles. However, I'd be loath to get too deep into the clever ways the game utilizes these tools: encountering and surpassing them is, after all, the essence of the game's challenges.

There's also a touching story going on in the midst of all this time manipulation and light transportation between the two best friends themselves. Frendt is a kind, bookish boy without too much courage, whereas Arina is a tomboyish troublemaker with a tendency to not think before she acts. The pair complement each other perfectly, and while the game leaves it vague as to any deepening relationship between the two as they get older you get a sense that they spend the majority of their free time together. You might predict the ending or you might not, but the way the game explores and emphasizes the strength of their friendship through flashbacks without the use of dialogue or captions is masterfully done. The story also plays around with time as much as the mechanics do: at one point you solve an island involving an archaic Macintosh computer and a dot matrix printer, leading you to think that this idyllic childhood may have occurred in the distant past: it's later revealed that this memory actually came from a museum trip where the computer was one of the exhibits, with Frendt and Arina sneaking past a red rope cordon to reclaim an errant paper plane.

With eight zones featuring two or three islands apiece, the game is relatively short: about an hour and change, if that. Most islands have one or two puzzles to solve, and though they can get tricky the relative dearth of moving parts means you could solve it in a matter of minutes whether you figured it out yourself or lucked upon a solution just through trial and error. The forward/backward mechanic means you have as much time as you need to take in the entire tableau - sometimes necessary, as the garden friends will hop around in and out of view, and you'll often need to track where they go to see if they pass by a light globe that they can absorb should you lend them the lantern - and the game rewards careful observation as much as it does experimentation with the active hotspots. Sadly, the game's over before it feels like it's done coming up with new puzzles; it's hard to argue that this is actually the case, however, without a version of the game that stays longer than its welcome. I suppose it works better in a thematic sense that The Gardens Between runs out of experiences to share far too soon, given how quickly childhoods (and life) passes us all by.

As I intimated in the lede, The Gardens Between is one of those attractive, ephemeral story-driven Indie adventure games that might be too brief and meretricious for many, but I appreciated its simple message of the power of friendship - that is, through the enduring memories it creates, as opposed to weaponizing it into a giant energy ball and throwing it at Frieza or something - and I'm a sucker for any kind of time-manipulation puzzle format that regularly has me nodding my head in quiet awe at its ingenuity. I'm glad I took a chance on it.

Rating: 4 out of 5.