Last year Spike Chunsoft announced a remaster of divisive visual novel sequel Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair to be called Danganronpa 2x2. Intriguingly, said remaster will also include an alternate storyline, so if you don't want to suffer through the original story again you can experience a different version of events playing out on its murder island deathtrap.

Originally scheduled for a 2026 release, Danganronpa 2x2 has now been shifted to early 2027, Spike Chunsoft says in a recent announcement. Said announcement does finally offer some more details on what will be included in the remaster, however. The cast are getting new character portraits, and that lame sidescrolling world map is being replaced with a 3D map, with optional fast travel.

And as for that mysterious alternate storyline, now we know it's called "slayhem" mode, "a new scenario based on Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, but completely different" in which "a certain incident triggers a dramatically different chain of events with different victims, culprits, and tricks." It's an even bigger add-on than expected, with "approximately 20% more content than Original mode."

It's also unlocked from the start, so you don't have to endure the original storyline again just to get to the new stuff. I'm curious about the soundtrack too, but Spike Chunsoft hasn't had anything to say about whether there will be new music, remixes, or if it's sticking to the beloved original soundtrack.

I never expected to see "I got reincarnated… as a hamster!" as the opening words of a game's description on Steam. After crossing that dread threshold, I certainly didn't expect to see a banner on the same page warning me about "frequent nudity or sexual content." But here we are: grass grows, sun shines, and Sweet Hamster Days is planned to release in Q3 of this year.

This is the second time the game has announced a release date, however, as things went south the first time around (thanks, Automaton). As the developer posted on X in late 2025, Sweet Hamster Days was pulled from Steam "due to various circumstances" before its original release window of winter 2025. It will release on Epic Games Store and DLsite as well.

It's not clear why the removal happened in the first place. Games with mature content are being policed more and more by storefronts like Steam, and high-profile cases like the one involving horror indie Horses suggest inconsistent standards across the board, but I can't say for certain that Sweet Hamster Days was targeted specifically for its adult content.

If you're unfamiliar with the game, it's a "live-action romance sim" where you play as a lad named Kota who's reincarnated as a hamster named Hamta. Players take the role of beloved pet to three sisters and try to patch a rift that has grown between them using Hamta's "tiny paws and big heart," to use the Steam page's words.

Now, if you're wondering if this is also a sex thing, the answer seems to be (at least partially) yes. "This production contains scenes featuring characters in swimwear and other revealing attire," proclaims the Steam page, also musing that you'll "fall in love" with one of the girls. I don't think Sweet Hamster Days is a straight-up animal sex game—this isn't Baldur's Gate 3 we're talking about—but just be aware that you shouldn't go into this expecting a wholesome and platonic hamster experience.

I have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed by the romantic angle. I often envy the lives of my pet guinea pigs, who spend the entire day eating and pooping simultaneously in-between naps. It is, I imagine, a lavish existence. On the other hand, hamsters have that wheel to put up with; sounds too much like a 9-to-5.

Google has removed Doki Doki Literature Club from its Google Play Store due to perceived violations of its Terms of Service. The cult visual novel surprise-released on the storefront in December following its initial PC release in 2017. It's since been ported to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and iOS.

Doki Doki Literature Club was a phenomenon on its release nine years ago. By all appearances it's a run-of-the-mill Japanese visual novel about a teenage boy who joins a high school literature club "full of cute girls", as per the Steam description.

At first the game progresses just as you'd expect: the protagonist interacts with the fawning members of the literature club, many confiding conversations are had, and there's a minigame involving the composition of overwrought high school poetry.

Necessary spoilers follow: things gradually take a darker turn when one of the club members falls head-over-heels for the protagonist. The tone continues to sour and the cliche visual novel trappings gradually erode, giving way to potent psychological horror dealing with depression and suicide.

It's a beloved game that uses the familiar whimsy of Japanese visual novels—its creator Dan Salvato is American—to couch a very unorthodox approach to its themes. At release it was best known for the bracing tonal u-turn it takes, but its popularity has endured beyond the initial shock value. On Steam it has over 126,000 "overwhelmingly positive" reviews, with 1,500 of those posted recently.

Dan Salvato and publisher Serenity Forge posted a joint statement on the removal on Bluesky. "DDLC is widely celebrated for portraying mental health in a way that meaningfully connects deeply with players around the world, helping them feel heard, understood, and less alone on their journey. Managing to achieve that—making a truly meaningful difference by using the power of fiction to connect to others—is what I'm most grateful for. It inspires me every day to keep making cool new things, things that can really reach others, especially those in need of connection."

A statement regarding the removal of DDLC from the Google Play Store:

— @serenityforge.com (@serenityforge.com.bsky.social) 2026-04-10T00:49:16.894Z

The statement notes that the game remains available on other platforms. "We're continuing to do everything we can to find a path forward for getting DDLC reinstated on the Google Play Store," it continues. The publisher is also looking at "alternate methods of distribution" on Android.

Google Play Store's policies around inappropriate content note restrictions on the depiction of suicide. "Apps that promote self harm, suicide, eating disorders, choking games or other acts where serious injury or death may result," are not permitted. Doki Doki Literature Club certainly doesn't "promote" suicide, though it's perhaps far less direct about denouncing it than Google feels comfortable with, given the way the game is marketed.

If you're unfamiliar with Doki Doki Literature Club, Steven T. Wright explained its unusual appeal in a 2017 feature. "While the shock value certainly adds to the experience, it rarely comes off as crass or exploitative. Doki Doki takes great care to treat issues like depression and anxiety with more tact and delicacy than its apparent inspirations, like the infamous School Days," Wright wrote.

Witchhunter.exe looks like a lost choose-your-own adventure trapped in the interface of a Gold Box D&D game. It casts you as a witch hunter right out of Salem who has to interrogate a group of women to determine which of them is in league with the Devil.

The Devil, meanwhile, appears in pop-up boxes like he's infiltrated your operating system, adding an element of ghost-in-the-machine glitch-horror to proceedings.

The combat system, where you either have to type the right word or select it from a list before you're struck, looks like fun. I'm a bit less sure how the Devil stuff will land. Much as I liked Pony Island, I feel like I've played enough games that turn out to be haunted simulations I need to hack my way out of. At this point, the fourth wall has been knocked down so many times I'd be happy for a game to just leave it intact for once.

Still, as someone who has watched way too many movies like Witch Hunter General and The Blood on Satan's Claw and Cry of the Banshee and most of the Hammer horror movies with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee in them, stylistically Witchhunter.exe looks like it could be my cup of hemlock. You can keep up with its development on Steam and there's a beta playtest on the way.

As Tom's Hardware reported, X user Keripo posted an image and video of a physical game they had bought online on Feb. 26—more accurately, a rare pre-release trial version of the visual novel Tsukihime by Type-Moon. Only 50 copies of this particular trial version were ever produced, and as you can see in Keripo's picture, this one has been utterly destroyed.

Strangely, it doesn't look like the package was merely dropped or improperly packaged. Keripo followed up the original post with images of the package before shipment, and it looks extremely snug. More than that, the destroyed floppy disk looks like it was manually disassembled and pried apart.

"US Customs had removed all the bubble wrap and physically destroyed the floppy disk. Will file a report but literally crying right now," Keripo wrote on X."Today, an important piece of history has been lost forever... (╥_╥)"

It's not exactly clear who was responsible as Keripo continued in a different follow-up comment, but it seems safe to conclude that someone got into the box and took the floppy apart⁠—Occam's Razor would suggest the package was flagged for a search.

"While nothing can be done to undo the destruction of this historical cultural relic, as a hardcore TYPE-MOON collector, I wish to raise understanding and awareness so such tragedies will never happen again to others," Keripo wrote on February 28. "I have submitted a formal letter of inquiry to the US Customs and hope to get some answers in the coming weeks."

Whatever happened, it's a gruesome sight for anyone with an interest in games preservation. Movements like Stop Killing Games have led to all sorts of buzz about the gaps left by digital storefronts and distribution, but physical games are uniquely vulnerable to vandalism and destruction.

Developer Scope Creeps warns me as I boot up gun dating simulator Polyarmory: High Calibre Love that it is a team very much dedicated to the bit, and I didn't have to go any further than its options menu to figure that out.

For starters, there's a toggle for BDSM clowns—much appreciated for those of us more fearful of the circus—but there's also options for those oh-so-scary pronouns. You can turn them off, if you like, and Polyarmory will helpfully cross out anything that comes close to assigning you a gender. Or, if you're a true patriot, you can turn on USA pronouns and experience the entire game with handy substitutes like BOSTON, APPLE PIE, EAGLE, and PROSECUTE FAUCI.

Of course, the whole thing is absolutely dripping in satire. I'd expect nothing less from OxyOxspring, the same mind behind the racy photography game OnlyCans. Yes, the one where you take sexy pictures of soda. This time it's all about hot people with guns for heads as I play a doomsday prepper (and gun-nut conspiracy theorist) who, I think, is drugged outta their gourd. I mean, you gotta be to envision your shotgun as a hunky British bloke in a Kazuma Kiryu-ass getup.

I feel like I've barely scratched the surface across my few in-game days played, but the whole thing is batshit insane from the get go. I can spend the daytime chatting up my arsenal—outside of delectable shotgun Rimington there's revolver Viper, dommy mommy RPG Svetlana, and joined-at-the-hip SMGs Marsh and Mello. All while listening to my "truth-telling podcast" that wallows about how much regulation has tightened over the years, or watching some good ol' American television about, like, chicken eggs or something.

At nighttime, I can take my guns out to fire away at waves of baddies, and pulling off a shot that my chosen weapon likes elicits a moan and floaty hearts out of whoever I just gunned down. Completely satisfying a weapon even grants me a little dreamy cutscene—again, filled with moans. Maybe keep your headphones on for this one.

Most importantly, Polyarmory is just incredibly funny. I walk in on a Dungeons and Dragons session the guns are holding, who invite me in to play an NPC or two. I can politely turn them down, or straight-up declare tabletop RPGs as Satanism. I get in a deep conversation with Marsh and Mello about lesbian videogames. Every little bit of dialogue pokes fun at the more ridiculous aspects of conservative thinking (which, to be fair, is a lot of it), exposing the ridiculousness of it all without ever getting too in the weeds and pulling away from the absurdity of Polyarmory.

The best part? Polyarmory is free which, based on just my first couple hours of the game, feels like daylight robbery for how good it is. For something that costs nothing and only demands around eight hours of your time, it would be silly not to give this rootin' tootin' smoochin' gun dating sim a whirl.

There are plenty of superficial similarities between The Mermaid's Curse and the original Paranormasight, a 2023 visual novel that's quietly built up a reputation as one of the best mystery games of the last few years. There's the artistic style, the spooky tone, the use of an ensemble cast who have nothing and everything to do with one another.

I was happy to see all these things that helped Paranormasight find an adoring yet undeservedly small audience present in this unexpected sequel, because I'm very ready to spend more hours picking through the shattered fragments of meticulously researched horror adventure that blurs the line between fiction and reality. But what I really love about this second game is that everyone, regardless of whether they picked the original apart or are hearing about it for the first time this week, immediately gets stuck in the same bloodstained boat.

The Mermaid's Curse has the confidence to essentially start over, and that means nothing I mastered in the earlier game will help me survive this one.

The focus this time is on mermaids and (I'm pretty sure they left this part out of the Disney movie) the twisted immortality a single bite of their flesh can bring. Not knowing exactly what's going on is considered a normal part of the experience and the script, always fond of prodding at the fourth wall, makes repeated efforts to emphasise that any uncertainty is entirely natural. Characters complain how easy it is to confuse a tangled web of dusty old dynasties, or how annoying it can be when historical records mention someone having a chance encounter with a magical creature and little else, as if the observer just shrugged and let it wander off.

These instances offer acknowledgment and reassurance to stick with the mystery, welcome reminders that you're exactly as confused as you're supposed to be.

I'm not even granted the reassurance of a familiar landmark. Kameshima is a fictional island located in the very real Ise Bay, located about an hour's flight away from Sumida City, whose map I learned in the first game. Kameshima is based on Kamishima, which really is sitting in Ise Bay, and is used as the photographic basis of many key locations in the game.

More than a pretty change of scenery, this relocation introduces a whole new culture and expects me to learn brand new skills, too. Specifically those of the ama—Japanese freedivers whose practice sits somewhere between job and ancient tradition. Their work is inextricably intertwined with the region and the story; in fact they're so important it's not enough to just read about them, I have no choice but to experience their particular style of diving firsthand. Thanks to a playable 3D drowning simulator I slowly learn to appreciate just how rare it is to find and catch a lobster, the importance of not being too greedy (even if only for my life's sake), and the fear of spending too long in the water.

With this new frame of reference all the superstitions and spiritual protections I encounter throughout the adventure, ranging from sewn sigils to small shrines, feel like perfectly sensible precautions. It's also easier to understand the behaviour of the other ama I meet.

I appreciate why some want to preserve their unique way of life and sympathise with another's wish to ditch the old ways when I can recall a diving session of my own where all I had to show for a near-death experience were a few common clams and sea urchins. When the time comes to dive into the depths on mermaid-related matters, I can feel in my bones just how dangerous it is without the game having to say another word.

Using fresh knowledge and skills I've personally accrued along the way—me the player, not me the character—is a recurring theme, and extends all the way to its extensive array of constantly updated reference material. I'll be honest, I tend to politely ignore most in-game databases. They usually come in one of two types: the practical type designed to remind players of things they've already been told but may have forgotten, and the superfluous type designed to tell people what a random character's uncle ate for breakfast last month, down to the exact minute on an invented calendar system.

The Mermaid's Curse follows a different path, choosing to weave its files and the additional information they silently contain directly into the puzzle solving, encouraging me to spontaneously conduct my own extended research—and maybe, if I really pore over the details and piece a few clues together, even pre-empt some huge plot twists. More than just a chance to feel smug, the script actually makes space for my unspoken findings, featuring all sorts of easily missed little nudges, sly glances at the camera, and strange small pauses in unexpected places that all but say "You worked this one out already, didn't you?"

Some major developments exist as open secrets for an excruciatingly long while, the game patiently waiting for the perfect moment to unleash these revelations, meta-torturing me with things it knows I know but refuses to officially acknowledge.

And when these events do finally come to a head their dramatic twists may hinge on me filling in a blank text box, like the kind you'd normally find on an insurance form. Thrilling gameplay? Yes, actually. This is the biggest and most exciting demand a complex adventure can make of a player: everything lurches to a stop not so I can pick Name #3 from a short list, but to manually type in my own freeform response.

What do I know? What have I understood? Have I worked out the true name of this mysterious individual yet?

As I nervously mull over everything I've learned a murderer stands a few feet away. The Japanese names of specific stars, the activities of centuries-old warlords, the importance of aquatic observation… nothing I ever saw or did in the first Paranormasight could have prepared me to crack this case, and I can only take a strange sort of pleasure in how lost at sea I am. This self-contained sequel is a better story, and a better experience, for daring to cast everyone adrift.

You can find Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse on Steam.

On Monday, a team of fan translators celebrated the birth of the visual novel with an English patch for 1996's Japanese PC-98 game Shizuku. In the mid-90s, recently established development studio Leaf—which at that point had only made a strip mahjong game and an adult JRPG—launched a "Visual Novel Series" of three adult games, beginning with Shizuku. Leaf's style of adventure game would soon become a phenomenon.

It feels a bit shakier to say that Leaf invented the visual novel, even if the studio coined the term. As talked about in detail in the video from YouTuber Bowl of Lentils above, Shizuku was heavily inspired by developer Chunsoft's "sound novels" for the Super Nintendo like Otogirisō, which were basically, well, simple visual novels. Chunsoft's adventure games placed text over static backgrounds and let you make choices at key narrative moments, much like other adventure games dating back to the 1980s. Audio was there to help heighten the storytelling despite the limited graphics.

Leaf's big "innovation" was to focus more on depicting its characters on-screen, which makes sense considering it was an erotic game. Shizuku was also predated by groundbreaking (and wildly popular) dating sim Tokimeki Memorial, which emphasized its graphics to similar effect. But "visual novel" was such a catchy name, it stuck with us for 30 years to become the de facto phrase to describe pretty much any adventure game that prioritizes text over interactivity.

Shizuku was only a modest success, but the third game in the Visual Novel Series, To Heart, hit big, making Leaf a major player in adult adventure games in the years to come. A remake of To Heart landed on Steam last year with an English translation and no adult scenes.

Leaf's parent company Aquaplus, which publishes non-adult-themed games, is still going strong, and these days is best known for the Utawarerumono beat 'em up series. The most recent just landed on Steam in December 2025.

I played two hours of the new Shizuku translation last night. While I'm not the biggest fan of the font, the script itself reads very well. I definitely wouldn't recommend Shizuku to most people (it's very NSFW) but it's really fascinating to finally play this historically important VN in English.

— @bowloflentils.bsky.social (@bowloflentils.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-28T00:55:33.349Z

Shizuku likely isn't of much interest to actually play today unless you're fascinated with the history of visual novels. But if that's you, you can find a copy on the Internet Archive and get it running, with the English patch applied, in the PC-98 emulator Neko Project 21/W.

Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka reckons his latest game might be the last one with a 100% human-created story.

Listen, I know you're probably sick of reading about AI by now—I'm sick of reading about it, hearing about it, writing about it. Unfortunately it seems that it's very much here to stay, at least for the time being, as numerous industry figures have become far less subtle about taking advantage of it.

That increased candor hasn't gone unnoticed, as Kodaka notes. "Many game companies and creators have started openly talking about their use of AI," he mused in a post over on X, The Everything App.

He reckons his latest game, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy might indeed be the last defense against the rising tide of machine-based creations. "At this rate, Hundred Line might truly become the last grand, 200-hour game story in human history written entirely without AI."

As someone who is a bit of a self-professed gen AI doomer, even that feels like a little bit of an out-there statement, however serious Kodaka is actually being. More than that, it alerted me to the fact that The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is ridiculously freaking long.

A visual novel with 100 endings, and with what Dominic Tarason describes as a 30-hour prologue (seriously, what the hell Kodaka?) sets The Hundred Line even beyond the likes of Persona games with a hefty triple-digit playtime. It's a game so ambitious it seems to have put Kodaka and studio Too Kyo in a fair bit of financial strife: He said earlier this year that the developer was "still on the brink of going under." So, uh, when I really think about it, a 200-hour story kinda sounds like… a nightmare?

So maybe Kodaka is right and The Hundred Line is, in fact, the last 200-hour game story in human history crafted without input from AI. Hell, it might even be the first.

Despite being blissfully unaware of what frotting was until earlier today (cheers for that Fortnite), I am more knowledgeable in the ways of the omegaverse—the subgenre of speculative fiction built around the idea of a human dominance hierarchy similar to that often attributed to pack animals like wolves—than I would like.

The style kickstarted back in gay Supernatural fanfiction circles and has since spun off into a huge subsection of manga and manhwa while still remaining popular in written fanfiction. The whole thing riffs heavily off how we viewed wolf dynamics for years—humans born as alphas, betas, or omegas; the latter emitting pheromones that can make the former uncontrollably horny et cetera—and in the vast majority of cases is very much a male-on-male thing. Yes, there is also mpreg. I will not elaborate.

Its position as mostly homoerotic fiction, then, makes it difficult to envision such a thing told through a more heterosexual lens. But it seems like that's exactly what Idea Factory is trying to do with its upcoming Otomate Verse Project, according to Automaton Media.

There's very little information to go off of right now. It's an otome game for starters—a visual novel that usually consists of one female protagonist being romantically pursued by a cast of male bachelors—and an omegaverse setting "with both men and women". But a lack of info hasn't stopped people from going wild trying to figure out just what a straight piece of omegaverse fiction looks like.

"I want to be happy but are you gonna just make all the women beta or omega and all the men alpha or beta? Because there's no point then, that's not omegaverse, and this is just taking advantage of a popular verse," one reply under the announcement read.

The main concern seems to be that it'll ultimately play out like any other straight romance. "Straight omegaverse and it's just the affirmation of classic gender roles," one quoted post wrote. Another said: "'Omegaverse' and it's just another hetero story with more patriarchy".

Of course the solution here is to make the main character the alpha—I cannot believe I am writing these words on PC Gamer dot com—but the likelihood of an otome game making a move like that seems slim-to-none.

Whatever this game ends up becoming, I am interested in seeing what the reaction ultimately ends up being. As others have said, it could very much just end up Being Incredibly Straight. But it also has the chance of reframing the omegaverse setting and offering more heterosexual stories the opportunity to branch into new things. Not like it has enough of those opportunities already, mind. But you know.

If you enjoy visual novel adventure games like Ace Attorney or underappreciated masterpiece Ghost Trick, you probably owe it to yourself to try Danganronpa—a wacky game in a similar vein that PC Gamer's Andy Kelly called "brilliantly funny, disturbing, and entertaining" in his 2016 review. There's been no better time to try it than its 15th anniversary, as the original game is going for just $1.19 on Steam.

That's the lowest it's ever been, with a price of $5.99 standing as the steepest discount recorded by SteamDB in the last two years: that's a jump from 70% to 94% off. You can also get the bundle with all the games in the series that made it to Steam for a little over $13.

Thematically it's somewhere between a high school drama, Saw, and an Agatha Christie novel, with a psychotic teddy bear turning an academy into a prison of murder and mischief. While it is a visual novel, it's more gamey than the genre name perhaps implies: you investigate murders as they happen and try to pin the deed on the right culprit in a stylish minigame, literally "firing their words back at them" with metaphorical truth bullets.

The sale is only on for a few days, ending Dec. 1, and also includes a bundle that ropes in a similar mystery game by the same developer: Rain Code Plus. Altogether, there's enough adventure gaming on offer to tide you over until the next Dangaonronpa game releases in 2026—even if you're just in it for the soundtrack.

The reign of Galaxy Princess Zorana was unhappy and unproductive. Fortunately, it was also short—ended in its infancy when Her Imperial Highness took a javelin straight through the skull in some kind of space-football game organised by the Pope. The people of her interplanetary demesne were presumably quite relieved, once they'd recovered from the initial shock of seeing her brainstem kebabbed on live television.

Galaxy Princess Zorana is a distant sequel to Long Live The Queen, the 2013 choose-your-own visual novel that I very much enjoyed back in the day. Like its forebear, Zorana puts you in the shoes of, uh, Zorana, the heir to an empire whose previous ruler, your dad, has suddenly (perhaps suspiciously) carked it. She's young, naive, unprepared, surrounded by snakes, and all she can do about any of it is go to school.

No, really. Like LLTQ, the meat of Galaxy Princess Zorana is choosing a build for your Infanta. The game is divided into turns, and each turn gives you a precious two lesson slots to dedicate to any of 45 different skills, ranging from things like your princess' knowledge of spaceship innards to her ability to conduct diplomatic intrigue to her ability to kill people with her bare hands.

You aren't really expected to make it through your first run unscathed. Or at all. It's a game about picking a build and seeing what happens, only unlocking the full story of what's going on with your empire over the course of several playthroughs. I had no idea what skills would be immediately important on my first run, so I just specced into whatever skills I would get bonus progress for (Zorana has moods, and certain moods will enhance lessons in certain skills and make others slower, or prevent them entirely).

I ended up with an empress-to-be who was an absolute goddamn whizz at espionage but somewhat less good at, you know, actually talking to people. Or acting appropriately in delicate high-society events. Or who could even tell if the people she met liked her or not.

My screen was a parade of failures. My first big event—a gala welcome where a series of important political figures—was one humiliation after another. A minister makes a historical reference? I don't understand it. Someone wants to chat economics? I can barely do long division.

Skill check failures popped up and scrolled off my screen as I failed, failed, and failed again to meet their requirements in talents like Etiquette, Empathy, or Science. If this were Baldur's Gate 3, I'd have been rerolling my character. But damn, if I wanted to do some skulduggery against any of those people, I'd probably have nailed it.

This is how I ended up in a sports game organised by the Pope. Having completely failed to make an impression on my soon-to-be vassals, I tried to win the approval of the church. Of course, I sucked at interacting with Her Holiness just as much as anyone else, so after an incredibly awkward first encounter, she shipped me off to Space Old Trafford to participate in a game for her favour.

And then, well, you know how that went. Next time, I'll focus a little more on Interaction and a little less on Spycraft.

Oh no, I can feel it happening. I'm regressing to my 2016 self, PlayStation Vita in one hand and a teeny-tiny Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair cartridge in the other. What began as little more than a time-kill opportunity—I had purchased the Sony handheld and a copy of the first Danganronpa in a desperate attempt to speed up what was a ridiculously long journey to my college—had become a full-blown obsession in less than a week.

The pink blood. The bonkers executions. The psychedelic pop soundtrack that perfectly punctuated every moment: roaming the school halls and building friendships with fellow students to upbeat, peppy tunes… before discovering a body and hearing the swell of distorted music as instruments and vocals overlap each other and I'm staring face-to-face with the victim.

Masafumi Takada's work was like nothing I'd ever quite heard before, and it was half the reason I was so desperate to get my hands on the sequel after devouring the first game, Trigger Happy Havoc, in mere days. And now, with the announcement of Danganronpa 2x2—a remaster of the original Goodbye Despair along with a brand-new scenario which'll take a completely different narrative direction—Takada's work is refusing to leave my brain once more.

So I thought it was the perfect opportunity to dive a little bit into Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair's music and highlight some of the best tracks that make the game just so gosh darn good. Which, in a world where I now associate the series with Covid, Junko Enoshima cosplays, and TikTok dances I was far too old to be participating in, is something that can be easy to forget.

Bloody good pop

Takada's work can be best described by director Kazutaka Kodaka's explanation of Danganronpoa's whole vibe: "psychopop," a blend of gruesome and horrific but with all the flair of a pop beat. In an archived interview with US Gamer, Takada dove a little further into the process: "If you try to make a horror game, you're not going to beat Dead Space, so why try it? Rather than that, why not create your own genre?"

That idea is what led to what I can only describe as the most bizarre soundtrack you never want to stop listening to. Instruments and genres clash with each other yet somehow come together across jazz and electronica to craft something that is almost as odd as Danganronpa itself. But perfectly fitting.

Goodbye Despair retains a lot of the tracks and motifs of the first game, but Takada often rearranges them to strike the balance of familiarity with a more evolved experience that its sequel offers.

There are some key differences, though. In another archived interview with VGM Online, Takada said that the purpose behind Trigger Happy Havoc was to create music that felt claustrophobic. A way to nail home the setting—an inescapable school with barred windows and no outside contact.

Goodbye Despair, on the other hand, dumps all the students on a tropical island. It's the complete opposite of the first game, and so Takada "wanted the player to feel that abundance of space" through its tracks.

The tropical vibes show up throughout like in the aptly-named Tropical Despair, and Beautiful Ruin (Summer Salt). The latter is an excellent track that really helps to set the change in location, almost convincing me that things wouldn't be quite so murderous in this game. Spoilers, I was wrong.

There's also Miss Monomi's Practice Lesson, a brand-new track to introduce the face to Monokuma's heel. Another adorable stuffed animal—this time a rabbit—who faces some unfortunate circumstances right at the beginning of the game when she's converted into a half-cyborg in the same vein as Monokuma.

The song begins with an opening sting similar to Monokuma's own lesson track, but begins with a mechanical voice spelling out Monomi's name. It's a great nod to her transformation, with the entire track toeing the line of sounding cutesy but just that little bit unsettling.

It's a soundtrack best experienced with all the insanity, anime, and bright pop colour palette that Danganronpa is accompanied by. But I still have to list a couple of absolute bangers that you should be adding to all of your playlists immediately. From heart-racing tracks that put you right in the heart of each murder trial to the 'in-between murder' songs that make this whole killing game business seem not so bad:

• Argument -HOPE VS DESPAIR- -2nd mix
• Danganronpa Super Mix
• Beautiful Days Piano
• OSHIOKI Arcade rabbit
• Beautiful Ruin

Am I going to have these tracks on repeat until Danganronpa 2x2 launches? Almost definitely. Unfortunately there's no firm release date yet, but it should hopefully be out some time next year. I'm already theorycrafting about the new murderers/murderees in my head as we speak.

Nintendo Directs don't often have much of interest to PC gamers, though this September's scattershot barrage of Switch 2 trailers did include the news that Hades 2 is about to leave early access. Which is nice. Buried in the avalanche of Zelda nonsense was something else of potential interest to us, however. Something called Danganronpa 2x2.

While it looks like a simple remaster of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, the package also includes an alternate storyline the same size as the first one. While the series stalled after the third game, is 2x2 actually going to equal Dangonronpa 4? As the Steam page puts it, "The original setting and cast of characters are back, but a single incident sets off a completely different chain of events! New victims, new culprits, and brand-new tricks await. The new scenario offers the same volume of content as the original, delivering a complete and immersive experience."

The Danganronpa games are visual novels about gifted students forced to kill each other to escape a trap, with the survivors of each round having to determine which of them is the latest killer—because if they don't, the killer will be let free and the rest will be executed. If they manage to expose the murderer via a trial riddled with bizarro minigames, then only the guilty party will be executed, and the whole thing will begin again.

Oh, and it's all being masterminded by a robotic bear who acts like a game show host. That's important too.

The first in the series, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, is an excellent detective game for anyone who likes batshit twists, and was popular enough to spawn multiple sequels. While Danganronpa 2 has plenty of fans, it doubled down on fanservice and anime tropes and began a process of washing away all the delightful ambiguity of the original. I think you should probably just stick to the original and pretend the sequels and the spin-off anime don't exist, but I suppose this retelling might be able to undo some of the worst excesses of Danganronpa 2's previous incarnation.

And maybe it'll have better localization too. We'll find out when it releases some time in 2026.

Truer than You is a visual novel about the gig economy. You're hired by a start-up run by a techbro who wears "fun" t-shirts—always a warning sign—to complete vague tasks delivered via phone app. It's sort of like Fiverr only the jobs range from helping someone who might be an artist or might be a terrorist record a threatening video to being someone's plus-one at an event they don't want to attend alone like Jenny Got-No-Friends.

At the end of each gig you're given a score out of five, and it says something about how accurately it captured the Uber driver experience that when I got a four-out-of-five rating I responded with indignation they'd docked me a point, instead of relief that I'd actually scored quite well.

While some of the jobs are just "drive me to this place so I can pick up a parcel," a lot of them are about performing gender. Which is relevant, because the protagonist is non-binary, yet constantly being hired by a wife who wants to be seen with a handsome young man to make her absentee husband jealous, or two feminist radicals who want help with their environmental awareness-raising (and also maybe a third member for their polycule).

Decisions are made by choosing from speech balloons that fade away as you click through the narration. You never know how many more will pop up, so you have to choose between reacting quickly based on the first couple of options, or potentially losing the first option while waiting for a third or fourth to arrive. Simply letting them fade and not saying anything can be a valid choice too, depending on the client and what they want from you.

You also have the option to pursue some gigs and not others, or even quit your job entirely. I ditched Emerald and her jealous husband storyline because it had the worst writing, full of clunky phrases like "I stopped to a halt." There's a stilted quality to some of the writing in Truer than You, which might be down to the developers being Swedish (references to "lingonberry jam" and the like give it away), though in other places it reads more like deliberate awkwardness on the part of specific characters.

While your techbro boss (who is absolutely ready to replace you with AI as soon as it's feasible) has a set of rules that forbid relationships with clients, they seem to be inevitable. You have to choose a task on your phone every morning, including weekends, which might include someone you met while you were performing an identity wanting to hang out.

On my first playthrough I joined the polycule, which led to an abrupt ending. Fortunately, Truer than You is short enough to play a couple of times in an evening so I went back and leaned into its mystery storyline instead.

Turns out you've moved to the city and taken this strange job while you track down info on someone called Yoon who was important to you, and who died recently after moving to the city to go to college. The relationship you have with Yoon and what happened to him are another thread to follow on your own time and ultimately a more interesting one than all the dating, so I quit my job and found a much more satisfying conclusion on my second go-around.

It's a shame that Truer than You is missing some of the quality-of-life features standard in Japanese visual novels, like a text log you can scroll back or the ability to fast-forward text you've already read, or just a way to hide the text and take a nice screenshot. It tells you up front the story's written for replaying, but the UI could support that a little better.

Truer than You is available on Steam and itch, and has a demo you can try.

Over the course of the 20th century, more people were called a great—or the greatest—theoretician of Marxism than I can count. Lenin, Che Guevara, Deng Xiaoping, Tony Cliff: all these names and more bore the mantle of Karl Marx's true inheritor—the standard-bearer who had synthesised historical materialism for a new era and was prepared to lead the working class into a bright, red dawn.

Which was absurd, of course, because none of those people got the platinum trophy in The Communist Manifesto.

I don't think they unlocked a single cheevo. Unlike me, who has exhaustively pored over every inch of The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel, unlocking glossary entry after glossary entry and bonus music track after bonus track, before walking away absolutely aflame with the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

Material boys

The meat of The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel consists of a jpeg of Karl Marx delivering the entire text of The Communist Manifesto at you more-or-less line-by-line, unvoiced. There are occasionally interjections by Friedrich Engels—speeding in from the right to ram Marx off centre-stage like a Smash Bros character—who pops up if you ask for clarifications on certain terms.

For instance, if you're perplexed by Marx's reference to guild-masters, you can ask for an explanation, and Engels will pop in to deliver his own footnote from the Manifesto's 1888 edition verbatim: "Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild." Thanks, Freddy.

There's a glossary for some of the more complex terms, too, which all seem to be taken from the Marxists.org glossary. Handy when you run across a word you don't know in Marx's speechifying—things like "bourgeoisie" can be clicked on in-text to take you directly to the relevant glossary entry—but not original.

I must admit, this is a tad underwhelming. When you write the words 'The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel,' you give my imagination licence to run wild. I start imagining something akin to that Chinese anime about Marx's life: a narrativisation of the classic text that turns its rather dry political-economic theorising into something livelier—the class struggle dramatised as a doomed romance about a tsundere noble scion, a bildungsroman about a tsundere factory labourer, a picaresque about a folk hero (who is tsundere) bringing Marx's method to the masses.

To get the text—and just the text, with no voice acting save a Microsoft Sam-style voiceover function—I've read a hundred times before but with a picture of Marx (and sometimes Engels, who is not tsundere; quite the opposite) above it is, well, disappointing.

Less disappointing is the soundtrack: a collection of red bangers from across the formerly socialist sixth of the Earth. Einheitsfrontlied, The Internationale, Varshavianka: all the classics are here, playing without cessation as Marx tells you about the centralisation of credit.

These are great songs, but not all of them make sense as a soundtrack to an internationalist text from 1848. The Sacred War, for instance, might be a classic of the Soviet Union's struggle against Nazi Germany, but that's the totality of what it is. Its time and place is the eastern front of World War 2, not the Europe of the early 19th century.

At its heart, The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel isn't so much a visual novel as it is a repackaging of the text itself. There's little here to recommend it either to people who have read the Manifesto before—there's nothing new—or to people who are completely new to it: the visual novel format makes engaging with the text awkward, divided by line as it is.

Plus, you're almost certain to accidentally click with a bit too much enthusiasm and accidentally skip a line at some point; sure, you can check the conversation log to see the bit you missed, but it's an added layer of complexity that wouldn't be there if you were just reading the original text on a screen or a page.

In fact, if anything were to make me recommend The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel to potential readers, it'd be those daft cheevos. Take it from someone who has been a member of multiple doomed Capital reading groups in the course of his life: sometimes you can get real bogged down trying to read Marx, even the comparatively light and breezy stuff like the Manifesto. If you're someone who wants to have read The Communist Manifesto but can't quite stomach the process of reading it, well, maybe the siren lure of achievements is just what you need to drag you to the ending.

But I can't ding the game, such as it is, too hard for its limitations. It's free, for one thing, and while I don't think it has many advantages over just reading the actual text in print or ebook form, it's not dramatically worse, either. If nothing else, you get to listen to Dem Morgonrot Entgegen while you do it.

As much as I'd call myself a strategy enthusiast, it's always been difficult for me to get into the really crunchy, grognardy, rivet-counting wargames like Gary Grigsby's War in the East or Combat Mission. Of all of the recent Paradox grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron 4 is the one I have the fewest hours in. That ultimately comes down to the fact that I am, at heart, a roleplay dork. I care more about whether two characters are going to kiss than what caliber cannon is fitted on my medium tank.

So from the first time I saw Burden of Command—a new take on World War 2 tactics that bills itself as a "leadership RPG"—I was immediately intrigued. And after stumbling through its somewhat cumbersome tutorial, I found that it was just what I'd been waiting for.

"RPG" might be a bit off the mark. The way I would actually describe Burden of Command is as a tactical World War 2 visual novel, which is just as offbeat and interesting as it sounds. Taking on the role of an American lieutenant in 1942 and commanding a platoon through basic training and eventually the first wave of Yanks to land in North Africa, there are two main modes of play woven together.

You have tactical, grid-based combat with line of sight, cover, and suppression that could be mistaken for one of those grognard games I mentioned. But you also have text-based interstitials featuring colorized period photography, and occasionally even taped interviews with real WW2 veterans. These include many small and large decisions that can affect how you develop as an officer and the fate of your men.

Your officer has a few personality traits that exist almost entirely just for flavor:

• Sarcasm, denoting how often you deal with stress like a Buffy character
• Directness, measuring your inclination to skip the formalities and get to the point of a matter
• And verbosity, which affects how likely you are to pipe up during a briefing scene rather than just clicking through it to get to the next mission.

Your reputation for any of the above might be commented on by other characters and earn you nicknames like "chatterbox."

More impactful are the approaches your character adopts, which can each give mechanical bonuses in battle and unlock options in certain narrative decisions. You can be an officer who leads by the book, focusing on Discipline, for example. Or you can face every challenge with a sort of heroic bravado, specializing in Zeal. I started out with a core value of Compassionate, hoping to prioritize saving as many lives as I could.

But I quickly pivoted to the Clever approach, as I found that was actually the way to save the most lives at the end of the day. Concern and an open heart aren't enough. You have to be crafty and effective.

The US Rifle Company you'll be commanding is led by a captain and composed of four platoons that each have a lieutenant in charge, and these five officers are the only ones who have visible combat stats. There are also a handful of named sergeants and privates, however, whose under-the-hood personalities can be shaped by your decisions in ways that can affect how they behave in the future. These characters, notably, can die—not just on the battlefield, but as the result of narrative decisions. I lost one of my sergeants in a tragic training accident before we even shipped out, seemingly to teach me a lesson about how vulnerable any named soldier is.

Squads in combat are a bit more abstract, though. They don't actually have a set number of guys in them that can be killed. That goes for both you and the enemy. Rather, each has a morale score that can be lowered temporarily by battlefield conditions like suppressing fire, or for the rest of the mission in the form of "casualties." These can be replaced between missions, assuming your higher-ups can be convinced that you need reinforcement.

This ties into one of the most interesting ways Burden of Command sets itself apart as a tactical game. Generally, a squad cannot be killed just by shooting at it. To remove an enemy from the map entirely, you have to assault their position and force a surrender. This requires you to first lay down suppressing fire on them, which both prevents them from shooting at your assault squads as they approach and increases the chances the assault will be successful.

So the tempo of a battle very much follows a move-and-fire doctrine, where you have to scout out an enemy position, suppress it, then ideally flank it and go in for the assault. Your own squads, likewise, might take a lot of casualties and end up pinned down. But they won't generally be completely wiped out. You'll simply run out the turns allowed to you to finish the mission and have to accept a more dire narrative result.

Each map also has two different objectives for "Mission" and "Men." Mission is how quickly and effectively you completed the tasks the brass gave you, which earns you Prestige to use in leveling up your officers. Men is a measure of how well you treated your soldiers on the mission, primarily by minimizing casualties. This earns you Loyalty, which is used to level up your squads.

Getting high marks in both, I found, is usually easier than focusing on one or the other, since securing objectives in a timely and effective manner naturally lends itself to not taking a bunch of unnecessary losses, and vice-versa. But occasionally you will be forced to prioritize.

This all adds up to a war story that seems to be extremely branching and adaptable. I'm not sure exactly how adaptable yet, because I've only seen one path and the single auto-save and inability to restart a mission means you can't just go back and try a different choice. But based on the minute things I have seen Burden of Command react to, I'm very interested in finding out just how much the scenario might diverge if I called my shots very differently.

It really is that rare breed: a wargame for roleplayers. And while it may have me agonizing over every decision I make, that's exactly how I like it.

The thing you need to understand about the world is that it's run by money. Absent normal signifiers of human society, absent any semblance of structure or narrative that makes sense, this is a truth that remains. Promise Mascot Agency is a game that understands this, among other fundamental truths of the world, like how the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb and how an unchallenged incumbent mayor in a town that people mostly leave is a destructive force rivaled only by natural disasters and anonymous internet commenters. At its core, Promise Mascot Agency is a fanged ode to the responsibilities of civic life, to bureaucratic idleness and indulgence, and to the numbers going up at the center of it all. It is brutally funny, brutally mercenary, and brutally good.

Kaizen Game Works were already veterans of absurdist genrefuckery with Paradise Killer, but with Promise Mascot Agency they've reached new heights. The plot is bizarre: presumed dead yakuza fixer Michi gets exiled to a cursed town after a deal gone wrong, must team up with a severed pinky and a host of other living mascots to Win The Big Game and make Mother's money back, and in the process uncovers personal, political, and spiritual conspiracies, learns about the power of entrepreneurship, and occasionally drives his truck directly into the sea.

What's tremendous about Promise Mascot Agency is that the excessiveness of its concept only serves to anchor it deeper in our own material reality. Everyone Michi meets is real, even the people who aren't. A noble-minded bureaucrat stifled by his idiot boss is found down the street from a dissected eel whose sole purpose in life is to stop people from eating unagi; a foreign teacher who's trapped in town for visa reasons is right next door to a sentient grave marker giving unprofitable tours out of historically minded selflessness. Michi is equally likely to have a heart to heart with the owner of the local coffee shop as he is with a moss ball that speaks in beeps. Kaso-Machi is both a total freakshow bizarro sideways world and a patient and thoughtful representation of a dying town somewhere in rural Japan.

The management sim elements of Promise Mascot Agency are the chief contrast to the cheerful irreverence of the game's setting. Michi starts out so far in the hole he's probably technically somewhere else on the map entirely. The early game is a tightrope, as Michi's few employees work desperately to turn a profit while bills and obligations send him into the red nightly.

It's not as simple as doing a job and making a buck. Every mascot Michi recruits needs a benefits package to join the agency, so on top of their share they make extra profit, get bonuses, or have scheduled share increases. Also they will routinely get attacked by demons or architecture while advertising local products and need to be bailed out by the roster of Mascot Support Heroes (Yu-Gi-Oh cards) that Michi has recruited from around town (added to Pinky's speed dial.)

I found these mascot incidents incredibly fun: they're single-round so they never drag, but by the end of the game I was giving some of my buddies less protection against incidents spawning so I'd have an excuse to occasionally pull over on the side of the road and Blue Eyes White Dragon a bitch. It's a cute mechanical interpretation of the importance of community that cards representing your friends get more powerful as you help them with their quests, and also it's never not satisfying to watch the lovestruck mom that works at the fishing marina one-hit-KO a stalker.

Mascot events aren't the only way to make money, though. By the end of the game Michi has a business empire. He's got subcontractors. He's got merchandizing. He's got ads all over town. He's competing in the Mascot Grand Prix. The agency is booming; it's got plants and better internet! Pinky's running for mayor! She is constantly moments away from curb stomping an old man! It is an absolute deluge of numbers and an impressive approximation of what I assume businessmen in movies are seeing in their heads when they're talking on the phone.

There's this sense of the spiraling of money: at the beginning you're presented with a thousand layered systems you can't imagine you'll ever be able to afford, chipping away at a fraction of a fraction of money owed, and then all of a sudden you have more money than you know what to do with, and all that money can do is make you more money.

I will go to the train station and buy one hundred onigiri from the nicest man I have ever met without blinking an eye. I will empty every vending machine in the game. I will put so many stickers on my car. I can and will become god-king of Kaso-Machi through extreme financial benevolence. And yet… those spiraling millions of yen barely make a dent in the debt.

This is where Promise Mascot Agency comes into its own. Past the management sim and the truck driving (it is a great little truck), Promise Mascot Agency has one of the best stories I've encountered in a videogame, and somehow the yakuza politics and curses are the least interesting part of it. Because of the way that Michi's business ventures are tied to characters throughout Kaso-Machi, financial milestones leading to plot beats both makes sense narratively and feels incredibly natural, and I found myself on tenterhooks to discover the resolution of threads about civic fund allocation and visiting lawyers.

NPCs are memorable and well-written, and the plot is interesting and easy to follow despite taking place primarily elsewhere. It's drip-fed to Michi across time and geography, through phone calls and clandestine meetups and paper trails, despite the secrecy with which an outsider is received in a small town. It doesn't make sense how well it works, except it really does.

Promise Mascot Agency is not concise, but it is focused. All excess is intentional; all numbers point in the right direction. It is an exceptionally fun game about driving a truck around an island and chatting with the local flavor, and about managing a booming small business slash outsourced mascot corporation, and about the financial corruption of massive criminal conglomerates and your average small-town mayor.

It is, I want to be clear, totally fucking absurd.

It is so frustratingly well-constructed, balancing so many opposing tones and mechanics with such a genuine, honest, and effective narrative, that I can't imagine the next games I play aren't going to suffer without Pinky in the back of my truck tagging along. It doesn't need coherence, or genre, or solemnity; it understands something bigger than all that.

The problem with our modern, humdrum, urban existences is that there's just no magic. Back in the day, when the world was young and the woods were thick, the world abounded in witchcraft and devilry. Now if I accuse an old woman of curdling my milk, suddenly I'm the bad guy.

Not so in Urban Myth Dissolution Center, a puzzle-y, point-and-clicky thing from developer Hakababunko, which puts you in the shoes of university student Azami Fukurai as she investigates spooky goings-on in and about her city.

Azami's got the sight, you see. She sees dead people. Or not dead people, but actually the psychometric echoes of living people who have been in a location before. Maybe? I haven't quite put that one together yet, but the point is she's pretty much tailor-made to be a psychic detective, which is why the titular Urban Myth Dissolution Center has hired her.

Job offer you can't refuse

Or, more accurately, the Center has extorted her. Azami's naive and a klutz, and when she visits the center for help with her visions and accidentally breaks the their prize murder chair (a chair that kills you, QED), she's easily bamboozled into taking on a job to pay off her debt.

Which should indicate that, despite the spooky premise, the game is actually quite daft. Think the humour of the kind of anime you might catch on a Saturday morning and you're not far off. Honestly? It's not what I was expecting going in: I was anticipating something much more straightforwardly horror-themed, but I quite like it anyhow. Azami's a bit of a trope and her boss, Ayumu Meguriya, is only ever inches away from going full Gendo-peering-over-his-hands, but they come across as likeable and familiar rather than tired and played out.

The meat of the game is in the investigation. Urban myths are slippery things, prone to spreading like wildfire and mutating in the telling, and Azami's job is pinning them down. That means figuring out their origins, the tell-tale signifiers that identify which particular myth she's dealing with, and then, well, leaving. Because actually solving the problem isn't the gig, we're just here to investigate. Tough luck for the guy who hired you.

Investigation manages to keep feeling pretty varied, not trapping you in a single gameplay loop for too long at any one time, at least in the couple of hours I've spent with the game so far. A process of "social media investigation," which means scrolling fake-Twitter clicking on comments that look evidence-y and assembling combinations of search terms, feeds into the process of searching the actual scene of the crime. You click evidence, talk about the evidence with victims and witnesses, that unlocks more evidence to find, and so on. At times you retreat to your mind palace to piece together the circumstances of events by assembling fragments of phrases, like you're writing a message in Dark Souls.

All of which works quite well. Like I say, I've never felt like any of these gameplay sections have dragged on too long in my time with the game, and even when I've gotten a little stuck, the strength of the writing has kept me propelled forward. Azami's an affable chucklehead, and watching her attempt detective work is good fun.

Also you get to do witcher stuff, so that's good. A case concludes with your boss getting very theatrical as you assemble your evidence and pin down just which urban myth it is you're dealing with. It's like Geralt figuring out he's dealing with a werewolf from a tuft of hair and the shape of a wound, except it's a young woman figuring out that, obviously, this is the famous urban myth 'guy with an axe what lives under your bed'.

It's part Phoenix Wright, part Witcher, and I'm enjoying it a lot. If you want to check it out yourself, Urban Myth Dissolution Center has a demo on Steam.

She put the fucking dog down. Tied it to a tree, aimed the gun, dug a grave.

Sorry, spoilers.

Park ranger Eve killed the coyote pup she'd adopted outside her cabin in Yosemite (despite her better judgment) because it was cute and hadn’t hurt anyone the way so many two-legged abominations keep vandalizing the parks. But now the pup had done exactly what was in its nature(!) and bit a kid and Eve’s just in her 20s with a disfigured child on her conscience on top of the years of misanthropy, and to hell with it, she should just go drink herself to death in the middle of the desert. And because this is a yuri visual novel, that desert is corporealized in the form of a delusional, gun-slinging anime girl with a dead eye and an attitude.

This, somehow, is the game that feels most like it understands my life. Makes sense of it, even.

National Park Girls is a visual novel from Highway Blossoms developer Studio Coattails. Originally released episodically from 2019 through 2023, spanning both pandemic lockdowns and government shutdowns where the parks themselves were closed, the five part VN is now being rereleased as a single collection, the Love Our Parks Edition. It's out on Steam today. With it comes new art, UI improvements, and my own pitch that games can still make you feel something without rendering a character down to their pores.

At its start, Eve is an already jaded 20-something ranger in Yosemite. Never fond of the tourists—at best an inconvenience and more often a nuisance to the wellbeing of the park and herself—Eve’s hostility towards the people around her escalates until she snaps on a particularly egregious vandal, and after being reassigned to the most isolated post her doting supervisor could find, an old cabin near a campground, Eve is resigned to her self-loathing.

Then she discovers she is not alone.

Following a humorously frightening introduction, she meets the three girls already living in this cabin. Yosemite, the oldest, is an elfish woman with wit and pretension to rival Eve’s. The ranger less than affectionately likens her to an overgrown tree, with rivers for frosted tips she can ring the water out of. It comes in handy. Yellowstone is a teenager with an impression-fueled sense of humor and a literal caldera on her head, which smokes and billows with her many feelings. The youngest, Zion, is a cherub with honesty and perspective that more than makes up for her lack of lived wisdom. She’s the only sane one of the bunch.

Oh and there’s the coyote they adopted. Shenanigans ensue.

Eve finds herself living in a cabin in Yosemite with a lady who claims to be Yosemite and two girls with anatomical, topographical oddities. They’re more than just mascots: They influence the weather in each park with just their moods, teleport within their parks, and they are apparently much longer-lived than they appear. Throughout the VN, Yosemite and Eve try to figure out what these park girls really are with clues from new age books and park records, all the while learning who they each are as people together.

It’s a funny and saccharine story of found family with a charming slow burn simmering away in the background as they manage to grow better together. But growth isn’t linear.

Eve’s animosity does not make her very likable at first, but her mundane workplace frustrations and struggles at young adult actualization are sympathetic. For me, she was too relatable. As I’ve felt throughout my mid 20s, she’s lost meaning in her work and is sick of people after witnessing so much apathy to the world around her. A lot of my young life was caring about things more than people and hurting them and me and never really reconciling that beyond isolating myself. Music, writing, research, criticism; these became the world. Eve's withdrawal manifests in showing more patience to a coyote pup she should know better than to domesticate than she does to most humans.

Just as Eve and the park girls settle into a bucolic routine, National Park Girls takes a dramatic turn to a dark place—and to Death Valley National Park. It’s rare to see a game commit to such a radical tonal shift, partly due to the development cost of not just models and animations but whole mechanics. National Park Girls is literally free to lean into Eve’s humorous angst and alcoholic, ideatory nihilism with as much zest as its most whimsical and tender moments. And it is in Death Valley where Eve’s road ends. She either dies alongside the park's cocksure buckaroo or stops running.

National Park Girls isn’t profound by any means, but it was more relatable than any AAA grand fantasy or edgy romp I played last year. I just don’t make many last stands against hordes of monsters with my very pretty friends I feel entirely platonic about, ya know? I think that’s something I appreciate about visual novels: They’re not pretending to be something with a hyperbolic suffix attached, not trying to be the most anything. Perhaps that’s because the people making them are making them on their own terms, not as a corporate investment.

National Park Girls is not the most elaborate production even among VNs, but the art direction works and, most importantly, it is fully voice acted with great direction. Natalie Van Sistine’s performance as Eve carries the misery and hurt of her character further than the writing alone could. It’s also scored with a catchy original bluegrass soundtrack by Sarah Mancuso, a composer with an exceptional discography of VN and Doom WAD OSTs you didn’t know you needed.

People who will not have read this far might think: this is romance, fluff, genre fic, nothing serious! And no, it’s not literature, but neither are most games treated with such reverence. It's Treasure Island, not Moby Dick, as is everything Square Enix, Atlus, or CDPR have ever published—no matter how pretty or interactive they are. The complaints towards visual novels and such mundane fiction feels more about subject matter and audience than anything defensible of genre or form. One of these fantasies just isn’t about warriors and kings.

Like her small cabin in the woods with only one bed, there is room for stories about romance and girls and that feeling everyone that believes in something in their 20s has to get over. And like Eve, it’s content to be where it belongs.

Listen up, friends. Here are my top tips for making sure a date goes well: show interest; make eye contact; laugh at their jokes; under no circumstances give voice to your inner burning desire to escape, to flee, to gnaw off your own leg and break out of the bear trap of your life; wear something nice.

All of which, all of which, applies to the dream girl you'll take out on the town in PockeDate! – Pocket Dating Simulator, a new, free game from Ternox, the same dev behind Stonks-9800, my personal GOTY of 2023. PockeDate pitches itself as a digital sweetheart in the Steam description—an "adorable girl who forgives all your awkwardness" whose "every launch brings a new date with unique dialogues! Spend endless hours with your adorable, love-struck virtual girlfriend".

Obviously, I was in there like a shot. Or, uh, I mean I curiously, reluctantly fired it up. For a laugh.

The only girl I've ever loved

At first, PockeDate does what it says on the tin. In a beepy, pixel-art style with the hypnotically catchy soundtrack I'd expect from the dev who made Stonks, every new date sees you take your e-paramour, Akari, to a new local hotspot. The beach, the mall, an arcade, a shrine: she loves it all and she's easy to please. All you have to do to achieve a coveted "perfect" date rating is not choose any of the glaringly obvious terrible dialogue options.

It's BioWare-style romance. Build that love meter high enough and she'll invite you over. No, it's not that kind of game. We're in the realm of tasteful fades to black. At least on your first playthrough.

Which all sounds quite awful, right? Like a loneliness-generation engine. Don't worry, PockeDate's not actually what it pretends to be. It takes a leaf out of Doki Doki Literature Club's book, slowly revealing new and darker layers as you spend time with the game. Things start to come apart at the seams. Akari starts to repeat herself and to realise she is repeating herself. Responses from your character—not you—begin to creep in at random moments, revealing a deep well of bitterness, fear and frustration, and an awareness of being trapped in an endless cycle.

It's all done quite well. I'll be honest, I knew going in that PockeDate had some secret second story going on, that things wouldn't be what they appeared, and I didn't expect too much. The cute girl would become scary, it would all be very Ringu, everyone would go home getting exactly what they anticipated. There's an element of that, sure, but from what I've seen PockeDate leans surprisingly hard on the psychological torment that would come from being trapped in a sugary dating sim for eternity—doomed to whisper sweet nothings to a robotic lover until, well, until nothing. It just keeps happening.

It’s a claustrophobic brand of horror, which is maybe appropriate. Perhaps anyone who's ever found themselves stuck in a pseudo-romance they didn't quite want will empathise with the game's cursed protagonist. All I know is that I have to buy Akari something matcha-flavoured, or else she gets upset.

Underrated aspect of totalitarian dictatorships: they're a great opportunity for social advancement. You could barely move in a 20th-century autocracy without stepping into the recently vacated shoes of some mid-tier bureaucrat or other.

In times of crisis? Boy, then it gets even better. Get a good war or foreign plot going and you can set your watch by the purges. Give it a day or two and you'll be chief plenipotentiary of an entire industrial subzone. Or dead. Perhaps both.

These are the kinds of things that run through your mind playing A War Of A Madman's Making, a rather excellent and rather free political sim/visual novel from Witching Metal Productions. Inspired by the likes of Suzerain and other difficult, grey compromise simulators, you play the role of a military middle-man catapulted to head of the army after your (fictional) country's "Great Leader" had the last one ousted.

Gather the forces, armour the horses

The Great Leader's a man with a plan, you see. The whole world is reeling from the third great war, a war that ended with a nuclear stalemate. The scheme? To finally ride that wave all the way to its glorious conclusion.

The Great Leader has ordered troops to mass on the border, ready to spill over and liberate your neighbours as soon as he waves his hand. The previous military chief didn't love the plan, so he's gone. Now it's your job, and you enter into it just a day or two before the invasion is set to begin.

In other words, you're screwed. A War Of A Madman's Making isn't really a political sim so much as it's a political survival sim—your task is to paddle through the shark-filled water of politics without losing your head or your family. How hard that is (it's always quite hard) depends in large part on the choices you make about your origin at the game's start.

Are you a member of the national majority ethnicity, from a wealthy family, who conducted himself with aplomb in his career in either army, navy, or air force and has never wavered from the Great Leader's vision? You come into the game with a surplus of the boss' favour and relatively few skeletons in the closet for other ministries and ministers to deploy against you.

If you're me, though, you obviously went fully the other way with it. I played an ethnic minority from a poor background who threw himself wholeheartedly into the anti-Leader revolutionary underground. My first meeting with the man in charge was tense and his underlings—my peers at the top of the ministries of defence, finance, and propaganda—dropped barely veiled threats about my past. Tough crowd.

That's before you even get into actually running the war, which requires balancing the competing aims of military necessity and the chief's ridiculous whims—invade on all possible fronts at once, capture the capital immediately, put a bunch of untrained conscripts right in the vanguard—all at once.

Plus, there's no guarantee your ideas are any better. Fancy explaining to the big man in your weekly meetings that you disobeyed his instructions and failed anyway?

All the while, you're making a gamut of other life-or-death decisions. Which minister, if any, are you gonna throw your lot in with? Want to spend your limited budget on a personal security force in case things go south and you need protection, money that could otherwise be spent on the war? How's your family taking this?

Also, why is your daughter speaking like a cowboy? In my game, one of my two daughters had decided she was pretty much John Wayne after getting on a western kick, for reasons unknown to me.

All these questions and more. It's an excellent, challenging, chaotic thing, and all done for free in the relatively simple framework provided by the Renpy engine. Witching Metal clearly draws a lot of inspiration from the world's real-life autocracies—there's plenty of high Stalinism in there, some Pinochet, some Mussolini, and a lot of your common-or-garden interbellum weirdos besides those—without ever slipping into tedious parody. Its dystopian dictatorship feels entirely its own.

And the consequences are entirely yours. I admit, I've not seen any of the game's promised five endings yet. I keep finding myself breaking rocks in one of the Great Leader's numerous correctional facilities. It was probably something I said.

Ariadne Jones is having the worst night. Her mom’s on TV campaigning for reelection, and she doesn’t need any reminders of their strained relationship. There’s a loud party downstairs her roommate really thinks it’d be good for her to go to, but she’s an introverted nerd and she has a test tomorrow she can’t study for because of… everything else.

And now she’s just so tired she’s falling asleep, which means she’s gonna wake up in the Intelligible Realm—an afterlife full of dead philosophers. It’s a long story.

Developed by Seattle-based Intelligible Games—a self described "nights-and-weekends" studio of Riot, Bungie, and ArenaNet veterans—Pro Philosopher 2 is a follow up to 2013’s Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher. Mechanically identical with an updated art style that has matured from webcomic to visual novel status, the sequel is about Ari’s journey through the "philosophical afterlife" to save her (maybe dead?) mom ahead of her reelection, where she must debate her way through great political thinkers from Confucius to Nozick who have shaped society through centuries of galaxy brain ideas. Along the way she has to find an answer to the ideal form of government and convince her mom that—like liberal democracy—she’s not perfect, actually, but also that’s okay.

It’s an outrageous premise that’s executed artfully. From the anime-esque caricatures of its cast of philosophers (picture John Locke with Bishie sparkles) to contemporary memes (not just Hamilton references, but those too) to the comedic voice and personality that matches each philosopher's vision, the game remains humorous and lighthearted by avoiding anything too specific as to be a sore spot for American players dealing with their own election season anxiety. The problems are all general issues we’d recognize from any nostalgic era of politics past.

Pro Philosopher 2 shares more in common with deduction-based visual novels like Ace Attorney than the collegiate sport the most obnoxious men you know did in undergrad. Play consists of asking questions and finding challenges to the premises of your opponents' arguments. Knowing all your fallacies will help, but really you just need to follow the line of reasoning and see where it snags—an assumption, a leap, a tangent, a knot that needs to be unwound and then challenged piece by piece.

Debates are won by proving your opponent's logic unsound, finding the contradiction in an ostensibly perfect system rather than somehow proving them bad or wrong. Ari’s takedown of Machiavelli’s tyranny is not rooted in why torturing your political opponents is, like, bad, but in how it’s an unstable framework that cannot ever actually provide the stability its promises. Similarly, you can beat Fanon in an argument by teasing out the ways in which his philosophy may fail to establish a stable post-revolutionary government.

So, what did I learn from playing a visual novel about political philosophy in the weeks before the third straight "most important election of my lifetime?"

I certainly learned some specific terms and names I hadn’t ever read directly in intro to philosophy or my history courses, but what’s more important is the game's lesson that as much as we rely on the past, perhaps no system is truly comprehensive or applicable to every historic moment.

A recurring problem in each philosophy is how leaders are chosen and how historically marginalized groups could access education, power, and leadership. But the goal of reelection, or holding power, is not the same as making society better—that being the ultimate fantasy of the Intelligible Realm. By the time Ari bests Fanon, her senator mom, Pythia (a deep cut), is having a full-on crisis of faith.

Clearly Locke’s Liberal democracy ain’t all it, but the dysfunction apparent in even Fanon’s revolutionary state and Nozick’s libertarian utopias makes her want to give up entirely. And that’s a sentiment I imagine you, reader, are familiar with. Though Americans would blush at having so many options as Ari (you can choose between Locke or Rawls!), it doesn’t take much time reading U.S. history to feel like representative democracy has never been good enough.

What breaks Pythia out of her spiral is the recognition that there is more good to draw on than just electoral politics in these ideas, and that philosophy can—is—still being written by the living for this moment.

The "final boss" of PP2 is Plato’s Republic—a government of Philosopher Kings. We know, having bested half a dozen of them, that they’re not the infallible paragons of Plato’s original vision. And to win that debate, you must challenge its assumptions not with radical new ideas, but with the contradictions and shortcomings you’ve found in each other philosophy you’ve already debated: alienation, self interest, oligarchy, etc.

To say the absolute least, U.S. politics and philosophy have changed a lot in the 11 years since Intelligible Realms released its first debate sim. Political discourse is more reactionary. Party lines hold while policy shifts right. Alienation and burnout have driven many to anti-capitalist and anti-colonial philosophies, while masculinity-in-crisis has appropriated stoicism (presumably because it comes from ancient Rome).

PP2 has been in development in some form for much of the past decade. The world outside has changed, but the writings have not. Instead, they take on new meaning—like liberal, libertarian, Marxist, democrat, or republican all have. If even an anime Robert Nozick can yield, then I too can recognize contradictions in my own worldview.

But unlike in PP2, I can write my own argument for something better. The only explicit position the game ever takes is that an education in philosophy is a good thing (whether ethical or utilitarian). And that is a lesson worth taking outside of the game and into libraries that are funded by local electeds. As Ari and Pythia learn on their journey from the undead, with history and philosophy behind us, we don’t have to be tied down to what any ruling class is selling us this November.

The intriguingly-named Urban Myth Dissolution Center has that style of animation and use of color and typography that makes me immediately pay attention because, well: Not every developer does this, do they? That, and the occult investigation theme, make me immediatley curious at what this one's bringing to the table when modern fantasy juggernauts like Persona dominate the landscape.

"Join forces with the psychic Director of the Urban Myth Dissolution Center and solve a variety of cases involving cursed relics, rental properties with shady histories, and dimensional anomalies. Monstrous oddities and otherworldly planes abound in this occult mystery adventure game!," says the official summary.

In Urban Myth Dissolution Center you'll be new investigator Azami Fukurai checking out cases of supernatural import across several episodic mysteries focused around urban myths that roam the internet: Your slendermans and the like. Azami is in charge of the detective grunt stuff like collecting evidence and trawling social media posts all in the service of figuring out and solving, or dissolving, the mystery of the myth in question. Azami's skill in the job? Her glasses let her "see others' intentions and residual thoughts."

For many, including myself, the attraction is all about that psychedelic pixel art they've got going on. The stuttering animation and the very carefully chosen palette of limited colors indicates an artistic skill somewhere on the development team that's above and beyond what we normally find in videogames.

Urban Myth Dissolution center is made by Hakaba-Bunko, a game team based in Japan who previously won a development award at the 2021 Google Play Indie Games Festival. They specialize in adventure games and innovative forms of pixel art.

You can find Urban Myth Dissolution Center on Steam, where it has a demo, and where it will launch on February 12, 2025.

Here's a thing about me: I loved Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York, the sequel to 2019's good-but-not-great visual novel Coteries of New York. Its blend of excellent art, a killer soundtrack, and writing that—so far as I'm concerned—captured the true, stifling horror of the World of Darkness struck me so hard that it inspired my first-ever published piece of games writing, effectively putting me where I am today.

So it's a game with a profound and special place in my heart, which meant when its follow-up, Reckoning of New York, dropped last week, I rushed to get my hands on it. Draw Distance gets the World of Darkness—particularly its modern variant—like few other devs can, and I was eager to see how it wrapped up its trilogy.

The answer, I'm sorry to say, is underwhelmingly. I've not hit Reckoning of New York's end yet, but I've seen enough to call it a step back from everything that still makes Shadows of New York one of my favourite games. Music, art, and—most fatally of all—writing: It's all just a bit worse than it was when the studio was firing on all cylinders back in 2020.

Damned if you do

Where Coteries let you choose between three clans and Shadows put you in the shoes of Julia—member of the Lasombra, the vampiric clan of shadows, Reckoning has you play (on your first playthrough) a Ravnos named Kali. The Ravnos tend to be vagabonds and tricksters, a clan largely uninterested in the internecine politicking that defines vampiric sects like the Camarilla and Sabbat. Kali is no different, making her unliving as a smuggler on the outskirts of polite society. Her only haven is a tooled-up RV, and her only connections are her sire and their coterie of petty vampire crooks.

Kali is the first problem I had with Reckoning of New York. She's, well, insufferable. Tastes vary, of course—plenty of players didn't like the heavily millennial-coded protagonist of Shadows, who I related to on an almost mystical level—but it sometimes feels like every third thing out of Kali's mouth is a bizarre quip or non-sequitur pop-culture reference. It can feel like you're playing a deathless, hemophagic version of Señorita Awesome from that one viral TV show clip.

Which is a tad annoying, but even worse, it ends up undercutting a lot of the suffocating vibe that Draw Distance nailed so well in its previous games. I loved Shadows in part because it brilliantly captured Julia's dawning realisation that her embrace of unlife meant trading human systems of oppression and exploitation for vampiric ones—and that all the superpowers that came with it didn't mean squat compared to the accumulated centuries of political power her masters exercised. She was a metaphorical and literal sucker. It was, well, horrifying.

Kali's existence is not horrifying. It could be. After all, one of the first things that happens in the game is her trial—with a likely punishment of death—before a court of New York's most powerful and amoral leeches. That's scary! That's a scary thing to happen to a person! But it all deflates as soon as Kali starts referring to her interlocutors as things like "gothed-out Ally McBeal". It's difficult to maintain the tension of a scene when your hero is treating the whole thing like a lost Marx brother.

Which she does frequently. Most situations give you a choice of three responses, at least one of which is invariably sarcastic (sometimes all three), but I'm not sure they make much difference. In my time with the game I've never really felt like my choices were making much of an impression. Instead they colour the tone of the lines immediately responding to what I said before the story aggressively locks back into its set path. I wouldn't mind so much—Shadows was much the same way, with only about five or so dialogue options actually impacting the game—but I don't have a ton of investment in that story and its heroine so far.

The good news is that finishing the story as Kali unlocks a second playthrough as the clanless Anarch Pádraic, who figures heavily into Kali's story and is—at least outwardly—less prone to off-brand Peter Parker behaviour. I've not yet unlocked him, though, so I can't comment on how much his playthrough redeems the game.

It's not just the protagonist, though. Reckoning's writing as a whole seems clunkier, a bit less elegant than the fare you found in the last two games. There's more purple prose, more lines that take too long to say too little, and more dialogue that doesn't sound like anything a person would actually say. None of these flaws are new—it's difficult to write an entire visual novel without the occasional duff quip—but they're more prominent and more aggravating here.

For art's sake

Say what you like about Coteries and Shadows of New York, but they oozed style, despite consisting, in essence, of a sequence of drawings. Characters like Sophie Langley and Thomas Arturo oozed haughty imperiousness that befitted their social station, while the settings and backdrops were all lonely, haunted, sprawling, gothic.

Reckoning's backdrops are still dandy, but I'm not so sure about the character art. It still looks good, but Draw Distance has added minute elements of animation to them that weren't there before (or at least, that weren't so noticeable). Hands hover, heads wobble, characters softly gyrate up and down as they cackle and threaten. I suppose it's intended, ironically, to give the impression of life, but it's done in such a way that it kind of makes them feel more uncanny than anything. You can see the centres of gravity each point of animation pivots around.

But I'm most upset about the soundtrack. Like I said, Shadows had an absolutely killer OST from the band Resina, one that I still regularly listen to today. It was moody and oppressive and prominent and perfect, properly embodying the goth vibes of the World of Darkness. Reckoning's, by contrast, is just… there. It's a bit of light tinkling that underscores a scene and which exits your brain almost as soon as it enters it. It's a real disappointment, especially since I was hoping—if nothing else—to get a new album to add to my collection out of a new VtM game.

What I reckon of New York

So, yes, my time so far with Reckoning of New York has been a disappointment. Unless my Pádraic playthrough totally redeems it (in which case expect a follow-up article), it seems by far the weakest of Draw Distance's VtM trilogy. Where previous entries—even the imperfect Coteries—blended art, music, and writing in a way that absolutely nailed the stifling horror vibes of the World of Darkness, Reckoning seems unable to resist undercutting itself at every turn. I'm still eager to see what Draw Distance does next—the studio is more than capable of turning in great stuff—but it seems like this trilogy has gone out with a whimper rather than a bang.

The developer of a Japanese visual novel by the name of Apathy Murder Club has decided to pursue legal action after a streamer broadcast the game against a requested embargo date on its Steam page.

Apathy Murder Club, a visual novel created by SHANNON and authored by Takiya Iijima, released onto Steam earlier this month—however, as reported by Automaton, Iijima quickly noted that a streamer had streamed it "for several hours from the first day of release, through several different endings."

This is more than a simple faux pas, though. Streaming rules and regulations are far stricter in Japan when it comes to visual novels. Last year, a YouTuber in the country's Miyagi prefecture was arrested for uploading a video of STEINS;GATE Hiyoku Renri no Darin that spilled the ending of the game. He was later convicted in court.

As for Apathy Murder Club, the Steam page asks that players don't distribute or stream it until August 3, with a request for copyright. Iijima took to Twitter to vent their frustration (the following quotes are machine-translated):

"If we come into contact with people who are happy ignoring the feelings of game creators like this, we will have no choice but to raise the price of games and ban gameplay commentary semi-permanently. If that means games don't sell, then there's nothing we can do. What should we do about gameplay commentary?

"I don't make games for people to create derivative works or play them live. I make games for people to play. Is that wrong? … I make a living by making games. I support my family."

It's a fascinating conundrum—we're all used to YouTubers, content creators, and streamers being a secondary way to enjoy games, and for good reason. Twitch is pretty much a free advertising platform, and if you see someone playing a game, chances are you'll want to play it too.

A visual novel, however, straddles the line between game and more traditional media like books and films. A second-hand viewing is still different, in the same way watching a movie in a cinema is different to squinting at your laptop, but the line remains very thin. I think it's a fair argument to say that streaming a visual novel could lose its creators money in the same way streaming a movie or sharing a PDF of a book might.

It should also be noted that the STEINS;GATE, the series someone was physically arrested over, is a very popular franchise—as of 2015, it broke 1 million total copies sold. The developers of Apathy Murder Club, if the Steam traffic is anything to go by, are much smaller—though it should be noted that Apathy Murder Club a limited-time project released "as a thank you", with the studio's previous title, Apathy: Narugami Gakuen Nana Fushigi, meeting with enough success on the Nintendo Switch to prompt its existence.

Later in the thread, Iijima confirmed that, even after sleeping on it, they'd still be seeking legal action: "Since we are a company, we decided to consult with our legal counsel. The person who uploaded a gameplay video … seems to have deleted it immediately, fearing that it had become such a hot topic, but there has been no official apology.

"If I say I'm consulting a lawyer, I'll seriously take it to court, so there's no point in running away. If you're a fan of mine, you know that very well … The reason why I am so thorough is because I want to protect the future creators. Even if this person never does this to me again, they will look for other small and weak prey. Newborn creators who cannot resist should not be caught in the poisonous fangs of such unscrupulous people."

Again, that's a machine translation—so take the emotions there with a pinch of salt—but if the original Japanese passes muster for native speakers, that's one hell of an impassioned speech.

There's also enough of this language in the long thread to make me feel like this isn't just Google being heavy-handed, here: "I'm going to crush them completely" and "I will never let you get away", for example. I'm reminded of the bluntness with which another Japanese developer asked strangers badgering them for a key to "buy it, you piece of garbage".

Mind, in later posts, Iijima also seems to have calmed down: "I thought I'd thought it through overnight, but I was still angry, so I wrote it on impulse." They then explain that, no, they're probably not going to go to war with all streamers, adding "I reread what I wrote and regretted it. I have no intention of fighting with game commentators, and it's true that there are some very good game commentators out there."

They still, however, intend to take the offending streamer "to court [so] that other creators don't get caught up in this kind of situation. I don't think it would be good for the game industry to forgive the people in question, who are running away without even a single apology."

Dating sims have let you date swords and pigeons and Colonel Sanders from KFC, but the dating sim-gularity had yet approached—only now we are arrived. Upcoming dating sim Date Everything will feature 100 fully-voiced household objects to romance, befriend, or even become enemies with. This is all thanks to a pair of magic glasses that let your character interact with the things in their home as if they were people.

Which will allow you to live out two fantasies at once: Home ownership and having a life partner.

I'm pretty jaded about videogames, folks, but please believe me when I say that I watched this trailer in awe, admiration, and more than a little fear. 

"Date Everything brings an exciting new twist on the dating simulator genre. Your BFA in customer service unfortunately goes to waste as you lose your job to AI. But... a mysterious stranger sends a gift—magical glasses called 'dateviators'—which make your house come alive and dateable!" reads the description.

The trailer and screenshots alone show dozens of characters: A stylish Italian cupboard, a yeti refrigerator, a lovely piano named Keyes, a kind of sci-fi'd up vacuum cleaner, a feuding laundry basket and washing machine, a swole bookshelf lady—all talking, all characterful. It's clear that this will be more than anything an ode to the artful combination of character designer and voice actor in building a lot of personality from a spare few images and voice lines.

I'm not sure what to say. I'm gobsmacked. 100 dateable characters, all voiced, is a truly shocking number of weirdos to put in what is effectively a dating sim joke post. It's enough to have made it a game about an entire apartment building's worth of real people—which I guess would have taken more environmental modeling than this single house you can apparently walk around in first person. But still!

This game, though… It feels like some kind of dating sim Rubicon, a step into a world beyond dating sims, where so much power is bent toward the single end of dating everything that we enter a point of contracted possibility wherein the very concept of dating ceases to have meaning. If I saw a dating sim from 2034, would I even recognize it as such?

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,"
-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming 

You can find Date Everything on Steam, where it doesn't yet have a release date. It's developed by Sassy Chap Games and published by Team17. 

Have you ever wanted to be an unpaid, intern robotic journalist at a space newspaper? Of course you have, think the developers of Times and Galaxy, a raucous new indie that has you take to the hyperspace lanes in a flying newsroom to be a cub reporter on the eponymous news publication, or "holopaper" as they're calling it in the far future.

Somewhere between adventure game and visual novel, Times and Galaxy has you get thrown into the action as a rookie reporter whose job is to hit news events, figure out the story, and interview dozens of witnesses to dig up the best story you can. It's cool stuff—partially because the way you construct the story is kind of up to you, and that can lead to how it's received.

Maybe you find the story itself boring, so you get in there and concoct a bit of clickbait or yellow journalism from outrageous quotes and suggested half-truths, slap an insane headline on it, and go to print. Or maybe you're an ace news-hound who finds the best stuff, the absolute truth, and puts it to press!

It leads to some absurd situations. You'll cover stuff like "intersolar cat shows, explosive toy launches, and, of course, space ghost funerals" as well as something called "the Humanian Dirt Fair" which as you can guess involves lots of puns around the word "scoop" and "digging" up the story.

It's pretty funny stuff, and the writers were good at it.

"I've written a fair amount of horror now, and I gotta say, the real horror is writing comedy and waiting to see if anyone actually finds it funny," said developer Ben Gelinas, a former newspaper reporter who moved into game development.

I'll be honest, I think you should check this one out. If only because they were bold enough to release it on the same day as Elden Ring: Rise of the Erdtree.

Times and Galaxy was made by Copychaser games, a Canadian studio that was founded by Gelinas. Copychaser's previous game, Speed Dating for Ghosts, was pretty well received. Times and Galaxy is published by indie label Fellow Traveller.

You can find Times and Galaxy on GOG, Humble, and Steam. There's also a Times and Galaxy page on the Fellow Traveller website, for yet more details.

Inkle's next game seems to be set in, or focused on, a boarding school for young girls in 1922. The tenatively-named Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls doesn't have many details yet but it's what they're working on after releasing A Highland Song late last year. The short descriptions available so far focus on a setting in an old nunnery, and details in the background of images seem to imply that there'll be some foul play—you know, like someone falling off a tall tower.

"Offering first-class tuition in Latin, Geometry and sports, Miss Mulligatawney aims to turn promising girls into successful young women," said a press release. "Further details of the curriculum will be announced later this year."

Seems about right to me. Got all the important stuff there: Latin, Geometry, and Sports. It's a wonder they can afford to do so in this economy. There's also a stuffed owl.

Other information so far includes the presence, in the school, of senior prefects: Students who have the power to dispense demerits and punishments like "extra prep, swab chores and the dreaded 'night shifts'." The info says they're a "firm but fair" group that other students "can really look up to!" which we all know is going to be hogwash at best.

You can find Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls on Steam. Inkle's press release says it'll release April 14, 1922, which is probably a joke. Probably.

Inkle is one of the premier developers of text-driven adventures in videogames, boasting a quite diverse repertoire despite that pretty narrow focus. Inkle has released such critically acclaimed games as the remarkable 80 Days, the puzzles of Overboard!, the incredible Heaven's Vault, and last year's romping adventure A Highland Song.

Last year's Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical is getting story-focused DLC in the form of Stray Gods: Orpheus, which will star the titular mythical bard rather than base game protagonist Grace. Coming back to earth for a new story, Orpheus will once again be played by Anthony Rapp, the American actor and singer best known for his performance in the original run of the musical Rent, the film version of the same show, and most recently (and to most of you, my fellow nerds) in Star Trek: Discovery.

Stray Gods: Orpheus will focus on the "finished" story of Orpheus after the original game, as Hermes returns him to the world of the living and is able to make choices free of the influence of the Fates. It'll have six new original songs where, much like in the original, your story choices change the flow of lyrics and music mid-song.

"With [Hermes'] help, you'll guide Orpheus through the depths of mortal decision making—who to date, what to hope for, what instrument to rock out on," reads the plot description.

Last Year's Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical was a bold attempt to marry the worlds of musical and visual novel. With the branching stories of a visual novel in mind, each musical number had to branch in its own way—after all, the story in a musical is told via song. It was made by Summerfall Studio, which is headed by veteran BioWare writer David Gaider and Australian industry vet Liam Esler. The unique experiment was pretty successful, earning an 81% in the PC Gamer Stray Gods review. 

"I've played dozens of visual novels and narrative adventures in my time, and I've still never experienced anything like Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical," said reviewer Mollie Taylor. She particularly called attention to the quality of acting among the all-star cast and the beautiful work that went into the lush, graphic-novel-style illustrations of each scene. 

You can find Stray Gods: Orpheus on Steam and read the announcement there too. Stray Gods: Orpheus will release on June 27, 2024. 

I made my peace with linear visual novels a while ago—as long as there's at least a little interaction. Let me muck around in a scene deciding what I look at while being rewarded with some ambient dialogue or whatever before I get back on the train to Plot Town, and I'm happy. That's the kind of game Love Sucks: Night One was. You might have enjoyed the illusion you were steering it at times, but really it was a ride you were on and even if you leaned into the corners, you still got off at the same place. I mean "got off" literally, because the Love Sucks series sure are horny.

Each game in the series—a planned trilogy—is about surviving a single night. A college student in the Sunnydale-adjacent monster-haunted town of Crescent Valley, you're on a dangerous double date with a vampire and a succubus and, just like a stereotypical college boy, you will absolutely risk your life for even a sniff of a chance of getting laid. You're helped in this boner-headed endeavor by a magic sigil that bounces you back in time if your dates murder you before midnight. Which they might do by accident, because just like you they cannot keep their desires in check.

The real fantasy of Love Sucks: Night Two isn't the sex, though. It's spending all night at a carnival without needing a nap. The dream of being able to ride the ferris wheel, walk down the midway eating something off a stick, play the shooting gallery, visit the arcade, hell, even the bit where you stop in at the student fair and one of your friends is running a one-shot introductory RPG session—squeezing all this into a single night is as much fantasy as the threesome.

The magical timeloop helps. Night Two is most noticeably less linear than Night One when you find out how many optional scenes play out in different ways on the second go-around. You can try your hand at the rhythm game in the arcade or pumpkin-carving at the craft stall, throw yourself at Jan the vampire's fangs to reset back to a "save point", then do it again and again on subsequent loops, getting better each time. 

The reason you might want to do that, apart from natural competitiveness and a desire to Unlock Every Scene, is that you've got a secret series of runes to activate that might save you from becoming a ritual sacrifice. Those runes are activated by peak experiences: everything from "triumph over a rival" to "help with a secret desire" or straight-up "have anal sex" counts as a rune, and the more you cross off the list the better. It's like achievements, only for things your children will never believe you did.

Love Sucks is about sex and death. It balances Eros and Thanatos as explicitly as Hades, but with less Greek myth and more Buffy the Vampire Slayer and anime. Is it worth having the blood and vitality drained out of your body for a chance of getting laid? Well, no, but it's a funnier story if the main character acts like it is. And having a social life would be more fun if you could Groundhog Day your way into visiting every single part of a carnival multiple times until you were some kind of unstoppable festival wizard.

Love Sucks: Night Two is available on Steam.

Palworld, everyone's favorite Nintendo lawsuit waiting to happen, got in on the April Fools Day action early by releasing a trailer for an imaginary visual novel called Pal♡world! ~More Than Just Pals~, which is set in a high school full of Pals and their trainers who want to go on dates with you. There are a few nods to anime clichés, with the Black Marketeer cast in the role of the "devious head of the student council" and Kattress going yandere, as well as references to videogames like Doki Doki Literature Club. It's all pretty par for the course.

While a handful of studios have followed through on similar gags, resulting in visual novels based on games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Endless Space 2, this does seem to be more in the vein of the gag announcements of dating sims for Valorant or Smite—an obvious joke slapped together to fulfill the obligation to participate in April Fools Day every brand feels this time of year.

The YouTube description teases a full Rule 34 version, saying, "Pals take off their clothes⁉️ An adult version will also be released". And who knows? Since Palworld itself started with a trailer released on April Fools Day, maybe if the reaction to this is positive enough it'll become a real thing just like The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.

The part that is apparently real is a footnote that says, "Update for Palworld is coming soon!" Though whether it contains a version of Chillet you can pat like you're playing Nintendogs remains to be seen.

2023—and, unfortunately, 2024—have been dire years for industry layoffs, carrying a number so staggering and routine that you need to put the 16,000-person (and rising) loss of working talent on a chart to get a proper perspective on it.

Some would blame this all on the aftershocks of a post-Covid tech bubble's burst, but it's hard not to point at reckless over-hiring practices too—or, as Dwarf Fortress' creator Tarn Adams passionately put it earlier this week, decisions "driven by greedy, greedy people trying to make some kind of venture capital thing work out."

Regardless, some good news came out of (appropriately-named) Failbetter games yesterday: yes, their last game didn't sell that well, and yes, they're doing fine. As announced in a state of the studio address, "we've had better years, but also much worse."

Failbetter is known primarily for Fallen London, an old school browser RPG that's kept a cult following for over a decade, as well as games like Sunless Sea. Its latest venture, a gothic visual novel called Mask of the Rose, arrived last year—and according to our own Joshua Wolens, it was pretty dang good, netting a 78 in his Mask of the Rose review. Regrettably, however, few seem to have played it.

That's not just my own speculation, it's direct from the (inscrutable, grim, and likely wearing a bowler hat in a rainy alley somewhere) horses' mouth: "it didn't sell particularly well," reads the post. "We don't expect to make back the money we spent developing it. And yet, we're doing alright."

Failbetter owes its lack of card-based infrastructure collapse to avoiding expansion-hungry nonsense after the success of Sunless Skies in 2019. "In that situation, the expectation nowadays is that you hire aggressively. Perhaps in tech in particular, being profitable isn't seen as enough. A good company is one with a plan to vastly increase the value of the business, preferably at least tenfold. Some companies take a lot of risks doing that."

However, as the studio notes: "We decided to focus on sustainability." The post outlines what it sees as a common cause of disaster for studios—namely, a production cycle that spans years when "... most of the time, you can't be sure how it will do. We make unusual games, so that holds true [for us]."

Failbetter instead tucked away its newfound money for a rainy day. "We decided that a key goal for us would be that if one of ours sold poorly, we could afford to make the next one without doing anything drastic. We don't want to be forced to lay off our team members, or to take outside investment."

That's not to say the studio didn't have to make any sacrifices—Mask of the Rose won't be coming to Xbox or PlayStation any time soon, for example, with the studio noting that "we'd rather focus on our unannounced project: it's at a point where the extra programmer time would be really useful."

As for that project, it'll likely have an early access period, with pre-production wrapped up "in a few months". Failbetter promises a game "gentler than what players may expect from us … You will find the same attention to narrative, atmosphere and mystery that you've come to expect from us, but this time, you won't go mad or eat your crew." 

While that might be a disappointment to the fledgling 'cannibals for games' community, I'm just happy to see Failbetter has been sensible enough to tank an unfortunate miss like Mask of the Rose without imploding. This kind of calm, sustainable growth definitely seems like a better way of doing things—even if our current systems are allergic to the idea of keeping things comfortable and humble. 

Earlier this month a dataminer found evidence of six forthcoming DLC packages for Persona 3 Reload, seemingly confirming that the Answer expansion—a meaty campaign released alongside Persona 3 FES—is definitely coming to the 2024 remake. But now there's some even more compelling evidence, and this time it can be gleaned by simply playing the game.

Alas, you have to play Reload on its hardest difficulty, Merciless, which for most will seem sadistic given it's a 70+ hour turn-based JRPG. YouTuber Faz has used a cheat engine to fast-forward to the final moments of Persona 3 Reload when played on Merciless. When the game is completed on this difficulty, Elizabeth delivers the protagonist a message reading: "At the end of a great trial, the answer [emphasis mine] illuminates my path."

Atlus hasn't announced any DLC plans for Persona 3 Reload, but it has confirmed it won't be releasing a "definitive" version of the remake, as it tends to do with most of its games (think Persona 4: Golden, Persona 5: Royal). This was meant to encourage customers not to hold out for better versions of the game, which put a dampener on the possibility of the Answer ever getting the remake treatment. 

But it's almost certainly getting it now. The expansion was the big selling point of Persona 3 FES, which was a reissue of the original PS2 game. It's divisive, but you also can't really call Persona 3 Reload definitive without it. Taking the form of an epilogue for the main game, it follows robo-soldier Aigis in the weeks following Persona 3's climax. It takes around 30 hours to complete too, so it's hardly a negligible absence.

The aforementioned dataminer also found an array of more boring DLC packs, as per below. The only missing piece then, is the playable female protagonist featured in Persona 3 Portable. 

Persona 3 Reload released earlier this month to unanimous praise, with one of the big criticisms being the lack of Portable's female protag. Our reviewer described it as "a highly-polished remake of the 2006 classic," while noting that "a few elements don't age well."

Slay the Princess is one of our favourite unexpected hits from this year. It's a choose-your-own adventure style narrative game about a dutiful mission to (you guessed it) slay a princess.

I'm too much of a wuss myself, but PC Gamer senior editor Robin Valentine highly recommended it back in November, calling it the year's most fascinating horror game: "[The game's] core structure is so compelling and fun, and such a good excuse for the game to throw in every wild, creative, and scary idea it can into a vibrant web of nastiness."

He also said that experiencing it for yourself was vital—something that the game's own developer has now officially echoed on Twitter (thanks, PCGamesN). "The game is at its best if your first experience is playing it yourself instead of watching someone else's playthrough," writes @blacktabbygames, the shared account between duo devs Abby Howard and Tony Howard. 

This is something I'm admittedly guilty of, but only because I'm a big ol' baby. I played a little of the cartoonishly slapstick Lethal Company with some mates recently, and even that was enough to get my heart rate up. I do, however, love to hear people talk about horror games. It's like visiting a zoo: I'd be scared of a gorilla if I was in an enclosure with one, but looking through a glass pane is totally fine.

Still, I can see the point. The allure of Slay the Princess comes from your personal choices shaping the story—and you're not shaping it watching a let's play by definition. You can still get the heebie jeebies second-hand, sure, but you're not living through that crucial 'I did this' vibe.

The devs go on to write: "you can only play for the first time once, and the experience won't be the same if you're looking through the lens of someone else's choices." What's more, they even recommended piracy as an option in case your wallet's too thin. "If $ is an issue, pirate it and buy a copy later when you have money if you liked it!"

While video game piracy causes plenty of problems—especially for smaller developers—it's also sort of inevitable. The solo dev of Iron Lung shared a similar sentiment, saying that he's fine with people taking to the high seas if they think his games are too expensive: "That's completely ok. Don't buy them, or wait for a deep sale, or go the sneaky route and get them for free or whatever."

Still, it's an admirable amount of dedication to creative intent. Especially considering an uncertain buyer's first instinct nowadays is to swing by their favourite YouTuber to see if they've played it already. Still, Slay the Princess is pretty cool—and unless you're totally allergic to jumpscares like yours truly, I'd hope any potential regicide committers would support the devs with some well-earned cash.

Given that there's only about two weeks of 2023 left, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that Read Only Memories: Neurodiver has been pushed back into 2024, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little sad about it. The original Read Only Memories—which somehow turns nine years old next year, god help us—was an excellent cyberpunk visual novel I still think about from time to time

But it's no doubt for the best. As Gabe Newell tells us, "late is just for a little while, suck is forever," and at least we got a new story trailer out of it. Narrated by the game's creative director John James, the trailer gives you a look into what's going on in Neurodiver and what this whole Read Only Memories-verse is all about, man. 

Turns out it's all about being a psychic detective named ES88, who's hot on the tale of a shapeshifting criminal called Golden Butterfly. Along the way you'll use your personal pocket leech thing—that'd be the Neurodiver—to repair people's memories by biting them. Pretty standard stuff.

I'm eager to try this one. Like I said, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Neo-San Francisco in the original Read Only Memories, and I've been curious about the sequel ever since it was first announced in 2019. From what I can tell, it looks just as weird and intriguing as its predecessor.

If you too cannot wait to bite people with your personal pocket leech, you can keep track of Read Only Memories: Neurodiver over on its Steam page, where you can also check out the demo. We'll see more of it, with any luck, when it hits its release window next year.

What's up visual novel and romance fans, I've got a game here for you about flirting with death. But not like in a "dangerous motorcycle tricks" or "disaster tourism" way, instead in like a very literal way where the Grim Reaper shows up to claim your soul and intead you flirt with him. It's free, to boot.

"Fight against & romance the one hunting for your soul in A Date with Death, a romance chat simulator where you date(?) the Grim Reaper himself. Create your own character, decorate your apartment, and chat away with the charming yet dangerous Grim Reaper through text and video calls," is how developer Two and a Half Studios describes it.

And dear readers, let me tell you, people are really, really thirsty about it. In ways that people are not normally thirsty about even romance games.

"I'm nominally straight. I have a fiancee whom I love dearly. That being said," starts one review which I don't think the editors here at PC Gamer would want me to include the rest of. "Never thought i'd call the grim reaper submissive and," begins another. "Sex update please.please. please. please. (half) joking but honestly this was so. it was such a," begins a third.

I think you see where I'm going with this. People like to flirt with this man.

The game itself is a (free) romance visual novel that takes place over the internet, a strong pitch because I know you're here which means you probably already spend a bunch of time on the internet. It takes place over about a week, on account of the bet you've made in an attempt to keep your soul. Because yeah, he's the grim reaper, his job is to remove your soul from your body.

There's also an expansion DLC, priced at US$7, that adds more outfits and decorations for your room, more dialogue for the cute boy you're dating (again, he is actually death itself), and an extra ending.

Anyway let's see some more reviews, because they're very funny.

"10/10 very babygirl," says the complete body of a review I think I can actually link to. Which brings me to my favorite review:

"I need him carnally, i want him so bad its concerning to feminism," says reviewer Astrobubbs.

This is an exceptional level or horny for one game that's not explicit pornography. I would know. It's literally part of my job to read Steam reviews. As an expert on this topic: Does this game take place in a desert? Cause y'all thirsty as hell.

You can find A Date with Death on Steam for free.

Hato Moa, the pseudonymous creator of weird, wonderful, and warbling pigeon dating simulator Hatoful Boyfriend, has a problem. She says she's not received any royalties from the 2014 HD remake of the game ever since Epic picked up Mediatonic—the studio behind it—in 2021.

On September 29, in the wake of a wave of layoffs at Epic, Moa tweeted her condolences to affected employees hoping the "lovely talented people from Mediatonic" would "find a better place soon". This seems to have put Moa in mind of her own relationship with Epic, because she soon followed that tweet up with one remarking that she had received "no royalty payment for Hatoful Boyfriend from Epic since they acquired Mediatonic back in spring 2021," noting that it seems unlikely "sales have been zero for two years".

"The obligations were transferred to Epic, but they've never sent any replies to me," wrote Moa, asking the general Twitter public if they had "any ideas to make contact with the right person?"

The general Twitter public did not, beyond tagging Tim Sweeney in the replies to the tweet, but someone at Epic must have taken notice. The official Epic Games Publishing Twitter account responded to Moa's tweet, saying that its team was "looking into this" and would be "reaching out to [Moa] directly."

Well, that's good, although it is a bit odd if it took Moa venting her frustrations on Twitter to get Epic to finally pay attention. I've reached out to Epic to ask for comment on this story, and I'll update if I hear back.

The 2014 remake of Hatoful Boyfriend has been delisted pretty much everywhere besides Steam since Epic picked up Mediatonic in 2021, says Moa. That, plus the age of the game, means she thinks "the total sales should have been much lower than before," so she doesn't think she's really been missing out on much in the way of financial reward anyway. That's why she's "not willing to hire a lawyer for [the matter]... the lawsuit would not be worth my money and time."

"Unpaid royalties would be quite little, I suppose," wrote Moa, adding that "Mediatonic has a much tougher time" after the recent layoffs and reiterating her hope that laid-off staff find new jobs soon. Nevertheless, Moa's complaint prompted many fans to ask the best way to support her.

"What I want you to do is just be nice to the pigeons and birds in your town," wrote Moa, relentlessly on-brand. She did note, in response to fan questions, that the official Hatoful shop sends her royalties regularly, but she's definitely much more keen about all of us being nice to birds. I'll do my best, Hato.

One trailer at this week's Future Games Show (embedded above, or on YouTube) was not like the others. Outside of some obvious throwbacks to classic game genres, particularly retro RPGs, Dome-King Cabbage bears little resemblance to the other games we've seen at Gamescom so far. It's described on its Steam page as "a visual novel set in the world of a monster-collecting RPG," but that phrase does little to indicate the surreal mixed media variety show the trailer makes it out to be.

Every frame is full of things to puzzle over and raises more questions than it answers. Why does the angel guy have no skin over his flesh, why is this VW bug driving over a brick road in the sky, and why are there copyrights for '95, '96, and '98 floating across the bottom of the screen? It's fanciful and dark, mixing cute drooly mouse food truck workers with a choice of galaxies to destroy.

Originally starting as a project for the TyranoBuilder Spring Game Jam (where it won first place), Dome-King Cabbage also won IGN Japan's Media Showcase Award. It's being developed solo by Joe Buchholz, aka Cobysoft Joe.

Ostensibly, Dome-King Cabbage is about a cloud dude named Mush nervously making his way to a job interview. Aside from giving Mush some advice to relax and be himself, I'm curious to see how all these elements tie together. Who's the guy driving the bug, what's with the eyeballs floating in the library, and what's Mush so nervous about? Who's the girl with the slime running around in the 16-bit RPG sequence, and will we actually get to collect monsters? Why is he being drawn to Crumb Island, and what does it mean to be the Dome-King?

Questions abound, but we'll have to wait a little while for answers. Dome-King Cabbage is going to be released for PC and Switch, but we don't have a release date just yet.

I've played dozens of visual novels and narrative adventures in my time, and I've still never experienced anything like Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. It's a game that delivers its branching narrative through song rather than the spoken word, boasting a talented cast of voices from Laura Bailey and Troy Baker to Ashley Johnson, Felicia Day and Rahul Kohli. For the most part, it's a wonderfully engaging adventure—even if it is unfortunately let down at points by a lack of attention to detail.

Stray Gods drags Greek mythology into the modern-day world, putting you in the shoes of college dropout Grace as she finds herself intertwined with gods like Apollo, Aphrodite and Athena after receiving the powers of Calliope, the world's final Muse. Thing is, she gets these powers because Calliope has been straight-up murdered, somehow finding her way to Grace's doorstep to pass her gift on before dying.

It doesn't make her look very good, and understandably a couple of the gods think she's the reason Calliope croaked. That's where the Muse's power comes in handy, as Grace can cause people to break out into song and spill their emotional guts, helping to solve just who is behind Calliope's death while clearing Grace's name. A handful of them can even be romanced along the way, if that's your jam.

The musical numbers are peppered throughout Stray Gods, and it's where the bulk of the decision-making can be found. Time-sensitive choices appear throughout each song, letting me tackle the next line in different ways—I can be charming and empathetic, cold and clever, or hot-headed. 

Each approach can steer the direction of the song, too. A charming choice can make the song more delicate, while a more brute-force attitude offers a more appropriately harsh beat and lyrical flow. It can make the same song sound totally different depending on the choices you make, and I found that even when I was frequently switching tones in the same song, it flowed together surprisingly well with few hiccups.

While all three of these tones can be chosen freely during song, they can be utilised during spoken dialogue as well. This part gets locked behind a certain personality type that can be chosen at the start of the game, which enables certain special dialogue options during conversation. It was a nice touch, but I couldn't help but feel like I'd chosen the worst of the three. Other personality-driven choices often felt more fitting, and I wasn't given a chance to add another personality type to my repertoire until halfway through the game.

I really enjoyed most of the songs, particularly the first song  and one where I help the love-struck (and tone deaf) minotaur Asterion confess his feelings to the towering Hecate. Rahul Kohli's performance as Asterion is spectacular, and Laura Bailey's buttery-smooth voice uplifts every single song, somehow excelling in every style presented to her as Grace.

A bit pitchy

My biggest problem with Stray Gods' soundtrack is the freedom of choice leads to little musical cohesion. There's hardly a throughline or leitmotif across its soundtrack, and a wide experimentation with different styles leads to little memorable consistency. There are a few callbacks and the final song tries its best to pull from previous tracks, but after several hours with the game I struggle to recall many of the lyrics or melodies I heard. 

It's not the only time Stray Gods suffers from inconsistency, either. For a game so heavily rooted in its sound, it feels like little attention has been paid to audio mixing. It's especially prevalent in spoken dialogue scenes, with no two characters ever seemingly matching each other's levels. I was having to turn my volume up and down throughout scenes, lest I have my eardrums blasted out by Pan's considerably louder voice lines or miss out on hearing Calliope's soft-spoken dialogue. Everybody delivers their lines beautifully with some top-notch voice acting, but the variation in sound levels kept bringing me out of the experience.

The game's gorgeous comic book art style also appears to fluctuate throughout. Grace's design is great and comes with tons of super expressive illustrations—some particularly gut-wrenching moments in the story are punctuated by how excellently she's drawn. A moment in the game where she's on the brink of tears had me pulling the same devastated expression. Environments like her shared apartment with best pal/love interest Freddie or the gods' Olympus office look like they've jumped from a glossy graphic novel to my monitor. For the most part, Stray Gods looks bloody lovely.

Other characters look remarkably flat in comparison though, almost out of place with the rest of the game's artistic vision. It feels most noticeable on folks like Asterion and Aphrodite, sticking out when surrounded by their gorgeously illustrated companions.

It's certainly frustrating, but when everything is at the quality I know Summerfall Studios is capable of achieving, it's beautiful to watch. Many of Stray Gods' cutscenes and musical numbers are wonderfully crafted, each still image a joy to soak in. The writing is witty and feels relatable, taking these grand Greek gods and turning them into flawed humans who are all carrying their own trauma. 

Every choice feels completely distinct, too. I especially appreciated that nothing ever felt too black-and-white, no choice morally superior. It means that some of Stray Gods' more narrative-swaying moments generate some genuinely tough decisions, and I'm already excited to go back and do things differently to see what would happen instead. I'm normally a heavy dialogue skipper but I was mostly happy to sit there and soak every word, even combing through every optional path just to learn more about the game's world.

Be warned though that if you're wanting to skip dialogue, it's another thing that's oddly inconsistent in Stray Gods. Sometimes hitting the skip dialogue key would speed ahead to the next line, as I expected. Other times it would cut out entire chunks of dialogue between characters, skipping over important story beats. I'm not quite sure if it's working as intended, but it made me hesitant to do any skim-reading and utilise the skip dialogue function as a result.

It's a shame that Stray Gods has these rough edges, because it's a wonderfully unique experience full of heart. It just needs a little more cleanup, some focus dedicated to its sound mixing and perhaps a touch more attention to a few of its cast members to really shine. If you can look beyond a slightly erratic presentation, you'll find one of the most endearing visual novels that's released in the last few years.

I'm sure that many of you who love to find a precious perfect baby character and learn ever-more about them are occupied with Baldur's Gate 3 right now, but Steam's rolling out a distracting sale and accompanying event on its visual novels category. 

These are those games which let you twist, tweak, and bend the narrative to find and form a story of your own. Except for the Phoenix Wright games, which are also featured. Those have an objectively correct ending. Sorry, not sorry.

Less correct are games like Coffee Talk, where you barista your way through others' lives, or Monster Prom, a powerful little dating game that takes the absolutely absurd and amazing tack of being multiplayer.

Those of you who enjoyed the recent Pentiment might also be interested in the visual novelization of Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, which uses a delightfully shadow-heavy visual style to create a small town in 12th century England trying to build a cathedral to make their town prosper amid wars and disease. (There's also Tangle Tower, for those who'd like a less serious mystery.)

As with most of these events on Steam there'll be a slew of demos to check out, giving you a look at the upcoming year or so of visual novel releases. Those are always a treat and a way to find prospective hits for your wishlist.

You'll be able to find the Steam Visual Novel Fest from August 7 at 10AM PT on the visual novel category on Steam.

Realistic violence, torture, sexual assault. Then, to top it all off, a real turtle gets maimed, killed, and eaten on screen. Created by Italian director Ruggero Deodato, Cannibal Holocaust is often described as the most controversial movie ever made. Shot in a fake documentary movie style, the 1980 flick depicted white Americans travelling to the Amazon and being set upon by a murderous indigenous tribe—and carried a message about the media's relationship with sensationalised violence.

Today, it's considered a cult classic, but on release it was banned in almost 50 countries. Legendary Italian director Sergio Leone reportedly sent Deodato a letter praising the film, but warning him: "I think you will get in trouble with all the world". This would be an understatement, as it turned out—shortly after, the director was arrested on charges of obscenity and mass murder. The violence was deemed so realistic that the cast, sent into hiding by Deodato as a marketing stunt, was believed by some to have actually been killed during filming. On his arrest, Deodato was forced to make some hasty phone calls to his supposed victims to avoid jail time. 

After Cannibal Holocaust, and the similarly violent and disturbing House on the Edge of the Park, the director’s career floundered. Ten years later, he would be back in Italy, directing cheap made-for-TV series. Deodato would mention sometimes in interviews that producers were afraid of approaching him. While six unofficial sequels exist, the director’s plans for a follow-up seemed destined to stay locked up in his desk forever. That is, until 2019, when a small Italian game development team laid eyes on them. 

Andrea Valesini, creative director of Fantastico Studio (CUCCCHI), recounts the story of how he met Ruggero Deodato. “We shared a common friend and, as fans of his work, we were really curious to meet him, to see if perhaps there was a chance to work together. We got along quite well.” After being allowed a look in the director’s desk at his many unfinished projects and unpublished screenplays, the team decided it would turn Deodato’s story for Cannibal Holocaust 2 into a game. The director didn't even have a screenplay ready to go, just a loose outline.

“We decided the best thing to do, with our limited means, was to develop a visual novel that we could finish quickly,” says Valesini. But then, as soon as they started working on the game, the pandemic struck. “That made things difficult, since Ruggero was already quite old and we couldn’t risk him getting out of the house. Still, through video calls on Skype, work progressed, albeit slower”.

The first trailer

After a few months of work, Valesini recalls that his studio colleagues were getting antsy. “They were unsure of how much people would be interested in this, they kept asking: should we really invest so much time in this project? What if nobody cares?”. It was decided they would put together a quick and rough trailer for the game, then called simply "Cannibal", using whatever materials they had and shots from the movie, to gauge the audience’s interest. The response was far beyond what they could've expected.

“Needless to say, it blew up so quickly that we soon felt very sorry that we hadn’t put up a Steam page yet!”, says Valesini. The strength of fan interest quickly renewed faith in the project. “We decided it definitely made sense to invest more money into the game, also thanks to Ruggero assuming the role of producer. Instead of a simple visual novel, we decided to switch to a proper point and click adventure, which we were going to announce at the 2020 Steam Next Fest”. But all that sudden attention proved a double-edged sword.

“We got a letter from a bunch of lawyers, saying we did not have permission to use any images from the Cannibal Holocaust movie in our teaser. Basically, they were asking us for a lot of money”, says Valesini. While Deodato had a deal in place that he could use up to three minutes of footage from the movie, apparently the agreement was not valid for Italy. Fantastico Studio, not being able to afford paying such a large sum of money, was forced to put the whole project on hold.

In the end, it took months of back and forth legal negotiations to resolve the issue, which involved paying some—but not all—of the demanded money. In the meantime, Steam Next Fest came and went, and the planned announcement was scrapped.

From Cannibal to Borneo: A Jungle Nightmare

Fantastico wasn't deterred, however. In December 2020, the studio decided to rebrand the project from "Cannibal" to "Borneo: A Jungle Nightmare", and took the ambitious step of moving to an in-house developed 3D engine. It wasn't to be a small and low risk project anymore. “It was going to be a full-on 3D experience, which we thought would appeal more than a classic 2D point and click adventure”, says Valesini. 

The team saw a unique opportunity in the surprisingly enduring popularity of the film—a chance to be part of something much bigger than it ever could've if not for that fateful meeting with Deodato. Fantastic Studio was all-in, and decided to announce the project to the world under the new name with a more polished and complete trailer. Once again, things did not go as hoped.

“People from Indonesia started saying we were going to show them in a malevolent light," says Valesini. "Basically, we were accused of being racists, because of a title. We were getting daily death threats and insults on our social media accounts." History was repeating itself: just as Cannibal Holocaust itself had faced serious criticism of its depiction of indigenous peoples, so too was this new trailer challenged for its depiction of native tribes as monstrous and bloodthirsty, and for perceived inaccuracies in the use of tattoos, face paint, and weaponry.

"We're tired of the cannibals myth" begins an article on IGN Southeast Asia about the game, that points out the racist and colonial origins of such beliefs about Borneans and showcases outrage across social media. "What is clear is that authentic representation of Southeast Asian culture, especially indigenous cultures, in Western media remains elusive."

Valesini, however, remains steadfast that such criticisms did not accurately reflect the project. "We named the game Borneo, as there was one section of the story which would take place there. We never had any intentions to portray anyone in a racist manner. If they had seen the movie, they would know that it is always the white men who are portrayed as savages!”

Regardless of Fantastico Studio's stated intentions, the popular outcry and increasingly bad press caused momentum at the studio to grind to a halt once more. “Some of us in the studio wanted to just cancel the project altogether, others wanted to continue no matter what. We argued that, if we canceled it, that would be much like admitting they were right on our supposed racist intentions”. Deodato himself proved to be the most reassuring voice for the team: "He kept telling us, do not worry guys, I've already been there, just do your thing and ignore them." The trailer was recut and republished with a warning at the start, which seemed to deflate the situation enough for negative coverage to subside.

One becomes three

Work resumed at a fast pace, but soon a new problem emerged. By the end of 2021, Deodato's health was starting to fail. “He would still collaborate with us from time to time, but it was clear that his time was short.” In the end, he died in December of 2022, leaving the team reeling and once more putting a halt to the project. “We had to hold our horses and decide what to do," says Valesini. "Would we want to continue? Perhaps repurpose what we had developed into something else?”

 And yet, in the end, Fantastico decided to persist, still determined to show the world Deodato's vision for his Cannibal Holocaust sequel. With the approval of the director's son, the studio resumed work—but given how much time and money had already been sunk into the project without any return, it was once again forced to be more risk averse. The budget was reduced, and the scope of the project shifted back closer to the original plans. Sort of. “We were going to simply release two visual novels, under the name Cannibal Tales, two stories that Ruggero Deodato had written. These two stories won’t be connected per se, but the two narrative threads will definitely connect in our third game.” 

That third game is planned to still be a full-on 3D adventure, but developed in partnership with fellow Italian studio Troglobyte Games (Edo No Yami), and using Unreal Engine 5 rather than in-house tech. “The title of the third game is yet to be announced, but you can be sure that we will NOT mention Borneo…”. It's targeted for a release at the end of 2024 (Cannibal Tales is coming January 2024) and will function as a standalone game, as well as being part of the series.

Four years after first starting the project, Fantastico Studio hopes that things are back on track. Given the journey it's had so far, it's not easy to share that confidence. The studio's limited means combined with the inherent controversy of Cannibal Holocaust's legacy has made the project a magnet for complications, and even a 2024 release seems like it could be optimistic.

But you certainly can't knock the developer's persistence—and it does seem to come from a place of real excitement to tell this story, despite the grisly subject matter. In the few interviews that Deodato gave about the game before his death, he too was full of real enthusiasm for the opportunity to work with Fantastico and build an interactive experience. Perhaps, 44 years after the original Cannibal Holocaust, his vision will be realised for fans after all, and the curse that has been the film's legacy might be lifted. 

Invincible, the comic series created by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, came back in a big way after the success of its animated series, which released on Amazon Prime in 2021. It's an ultra-violent yet colourful and creative story, one that parodies superhero tropes without outright condemning them.

Skybound Entertainment have sought to capitalise on this renewed enthusiasm by announcing they'd be working on several Invincible games last year. This tracks—superhero games are popular, and Invincible's ripe with interesting characters to choose from. So what did they go with?

A mobile game—which kinda buries the lede with its cinematic trailer—was the first announcement. Okay, Marvel Snap did well, makes sense to follow up on that. Their first step onto Steam however flies in from way out of left field—a visual novel by the name of Invincible Presents: Atom Eve, which was first announced at Invincible's 20th anniversary panel during this year's San Diego Comic-Con.

Mike Rogers, the creative director at Skybound, described it as an "amazing visual novel experience, choice-based, [which] puts you in control of Eve … you get to decide whose ass she's kicking, who she's dating." He then went on to describe it as in "its own sort of pocket in the multiverse where you can take your Eve in different directions."

While visual novels are typically the domain of either horror or dating sims, they share a lot of conceptual DNA with comic books—something the trailer shows off in what I assume may be cutscenes that make it into the final game. There's even a funky Griftlands-looking combat system with splashes of RPG, promising "different powers based on the choices you make."

Atom Eve's a pretty vital character in both the series and the comic book, a fan-favourite badass in her own right who can control subatomic matter to basically do just about anything. She's even received her own one-episode special ahead of Invincible's second season.

Kirkman also revealed the game will "continue to expand out the Invincible world", as it has details "that we never got around to [revealing in the comic], so there's gonna be aspects to her character that you'll actually learn from this game that you've never got from the comics."

So yeah, I'm actually on board. It's just an interesting direction given the type of images conjured when you think 'Invincible's getting its own videogame'. Though given the series' genre-subversive nature, I think it's pretty fitting to plonk something weird and unique at the feet of gamers who expected something more action-loaded.

Invincible Presents: Atom Eve is set to arrive in mint condition to Steam later this year, with no specific release date announced.

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, one of the worst games ever made, is getting a remaster. This crime against nature was announced by Limited Run as part of their recent showcase which, among other things, included a remastered GEX trilogy and a spiritual successor to Zelda CD-i.

I'm going to have to turn to my colleagues' opinion on this one, because I've never played Plumbers Don't Wear Ties—and after a bit of research, I'm grateful. Nonetheless, I've thrown on the marigolds to dive into what exactly this fully motion-captured thing is, so you don't have to.

Here's an excerpt from the back of the box: "Greed, sex, spirituality, white-knuckled chases, shameful propositions, a nun, humour, true love, jaded love, taut action, comedy, a bad guy, a good guy, a hero, spine-tingling suspense, a hot babe, a damsel in distress, and a hollywood ending!" This is quite a lot to take in.

What Plumbers Don't Wear Ties appears to actually be, however, is a god-forsaken relic of a time where you could buy certain VHS tapes in a brown bag. It's meant to be a 'full motion video' game like 1992's Night Trap. The game itself—and 'game' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here—plays out more like "a PowerPoint presentation with audio cues", as PC Gamer's own Steven Messner wrote in 2017.

Just to make sure I was getting the full plumber experience, I looked up some gameplay footage and—yes. That is accurate. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties starts with Jane, played by Jeane Basone—known in wrestling as Hollywood—warning me that she'll be keeping an eye out for my slip-ups: "I trust it won't be the first time you've made mistakes with the opposite sex."

Then this.

Selecting "Gimmie full story!" starts a literal slideshow with a voice over crunchy enough to break your teeth. I'm sorry for ever doubting you, Steven. He also noted that Jon Smith gave it a "3 out of 100 in PC Gamer's July 1994 issue" and, while I don't have that issue to hand, I'm inclined to trust that assessment.

The remaster itself promises more additional features than you can shake a plunger at. It'll shake the crust off its terribly dated photo graphics, naming them "nicer" with an ominous asterisk. It also comes with exclusive interviews with the cast and creators, as well as James Rolfe—otherwise known as the Angry Video Game Nerd—who reviewed the game in 2009.

The interviews included in the trailer describe the game as a "grease fire", with one interviewee admitting that he's "giving it too much credit". Despite the horrors this game is, like many remnants of its era, an internet darling. Rolfe's review of it has over 9.2 million views on Youtube, throwing it into cult classic trash status—like Tommy Wiseau's The Room, but for gamers.

Richard Cobett wrote about Plumbers Don't Wear Ties in his Crapshoot Column on the bizarre scenes from the game: "Just pondering these moments I can't help but feel just a little better about the world we live in; both as a place of wonder where such things can happen and develop a life beyond anyone's dreams, and also not so bad about about its inevitable doom and destruction."

Limited Run seems to be on a mission to revive the 90's most obscure and cursed artefacts, and I'm honestly here for it. They're relying on nostalgia like one relies on acid to burn through steel, and it has me excited to experience pieces of gaming culture I missed. I can't, however, promise that I'll be sitting through Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. I'll just appreciate it from afar. Maybe in a hazmat suit.

I was just minding my own business on a quiet evening when I stumbled across Alpha Beta Gamer's coverage of South Scrimshaw: Part One, a free visual novel that presents a nature documentary about alien whales. I couldn't ignore a premise that good, but I still had all my expectations blown out of the water (pun fully intended).

The real killer for me with South Scrimshaw is its worldbuilding⁠—it nails the Disco Elysium thing of initially appearing very familiar, but then slowly unfurling into a setting that's almost vertigo-inducing in its strangeness. There were several moments in South Scrimshaw that hit me like the whammy of The Pale's reveal in Disco.

One of the earliest (so it's not a big spoiler) is the biology of the "Brillo Whales". They cultivate symbiotic relationships with other ocean species, forming specialized micro-ecosystems in their skin. The whales specialize in their biota, almost like they're picking vocations, and South Scrimshaw presents a dizzying array of uh, I guess "whale RPG classes." 

The protagonist whale's mother, for example, looks like a floating forest, permanently obscured by all the flora that have taken root on her body. Another whale hosts a colony of octopi on its skin, which confer their active camouflage and allow it to be an ambush predator. Still another mimics the skin and pheromones of a species of pack-hunting sharks, letting it become the alpha of the group.

The "Kronos VII" documentary crew who frame the story will break into these digressions about the shocking interplanetary politics and society looming behind the production. There's this surreal "as you already know" frankness applied to keyhole views of what feels like an already extremely well-realized sci-fi setting. They drop a primer on how alien ecologies affect human gut health here, a digression about a cartoonist who made a Spongebob-style creation inspired by this world's marine biology there. Again, I come back to the Disco Elysium comparison for this feeling of fictional history that can be by turns extremely remote or painfully, immediately relevant.

Creator Nathan O. Marsh's illustrations bring a stunning watercolor vibrancy to this alien ocean, while also adding just enough animation and movement to break up what is otherwise a sequence of still images. It's like the tropical vistas of Avatar: The Way of Water by way of Studio Ghibli (I know, I know, I'm sorry for saying it looks like Studio Ghibli but other comparisons fail me). "What if Hayao Miyazaki was really into the ocean instead of the sky?"

I found the whole thing to be an emotional, almost life-affirming experience. The story of the whale calf at its heart moves between charming and devastating while South Scrimshaw: Part One sketches out an optimistic future for humanity. The Kronos VII expedition and human society in the background of South Scrimshaw seem defined by this classic Starfleet-style sense of curiosity and goodwill, while the brief mention of conflict back on Earth presents it as a fleeting thing that was left behind in favor of this newfound focus on discovery and cooperation.

It's refreshing to be able to enjoy compelling, credibly optimistic sci-fi at a time when it's hard to have hope for the future. I'm also still almost haunted by South Scrimshaw's portrayal of vibrant, thriving ocean life at a time when our own biosphere is so grievously threatened.

The game seems like another small indie miracle. "Getting exposure for a weird art project like this has always been challenging," Marsh wrote in a comment on Alpha Beta Gamer's video. "I'm sitting in a restaurant dish pit right now having a moment reading all the kind comments."

Elsewhere, Marsh characterizes South Scrimshaw as a labor of love worked on between paying commissions and jobs. It really just doesn't feel fair that this thing is free.

Marsh continues to work on South Scrimshaw: Part Two, with chapters to be released piecemeal before being bundled together on Steam like Part One. You can follow Marsh on Twitter, support him on Ko-fi, and check out South Scrimshaw: Part One for yourself on Steam or itch.io.

Fortune tellers are cursed to be blamed for the prophecies they speak. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood's demo, part of Steam's Next Fest, has already left me yearning for its melancholy world. I'm certain it's going to snap my heart in two and then mend it with gold, much like the kintsugi-healed demon you'll spend much of its runtime with.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a narrative tarot game where you design your own cards and are saddled with the power of prophecy. The demo hammers this home with an ill omen at the save creation screen: "This game autosaves and overrides your progress as you go. You can't change slots mid-story to try different options," it warns. "After all, this is a game about fate."

You play as Fortuna, a witch exiled to a rock in space for the crime of warning your coven about their demise. It's a blend of modern and mystical aesthetics: one moment you're conversing with an enormous demon at the end of the world, the next you're driving a food truck on a roadtrip with your friends.

You enter into a pact with Abramar—a three-eyed behemoth as old as time itself—who empowers you to make a new deck of cards. The meat of the game revolves around making narrative decisions. What are you willing to sacrifice to escape your isolation?

You're able to design a bespoke deck with which to read the future. Seeing as your usual tarot has been swept away as punishment, the game allows you to kitbash together your own deck, spending energy—wind, water, earth, and fire—to assign meanings to them. You can then assemble your chosen images—a background, a figure, and an item—in a charming little editor. The game even has functionality for exporting your decks and cards to share with others.

Once you've made a card, it can show up whenever you make a reading. The tricky part comes when you're asked to interpret them: do you portend doom, soothe worries, or jab at your visitors with difficult questions? I already went soft on Fortuna's first visitor, given a choice between warning them of a violent injury and reassuring them it was all going to be alright. I'm still not sure whether I was being honest with myself, or with the card, and I get the sense that's the point.

What has me worried about weeping, though, are the implications at play here. Fortuna has never been wrong about the future, not even once, so every interpretation you make etches your friends' fate in stone. It reminds me of Papers, Please, which forced you to make life-changing decisions while staring into pixelated, hopeful eyes.

I already love the cast, despite how little time I've spent with them. Abramar in particular is a delight—oddly candid for a demon who has lived for millenia, yet clearly wounded by their past pacts. The writing is excellent, which isn't surprising considering the reception of Deconstructeam's past works such as Gods Will Be Watching and The Red Strings Club. They're in their element here.

Waiting for the full game has me bracing for impact. I know I'll grow far too attached to The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood's characters, and I know I'll be forced to seal their fate. You can play the demo on Steam right now, and I highly recommend giving it a shot.

It's hard for me to believe that it's taken Failbetter this long to try its hand at a visual novel. The studio has always had the most engrossing, amusing, and evocative writing in the business, but it's got an uncanny knack for hiding that writing behind mechanics that eventually wear on my nerves. Between browser games and roguelikes, the studio's wit keeps ending up blunted by repetitive gameplay loops. Only Sunless Skies, so far, has managed to strike a good balance.

So it must feel like Failbetter has finally found a perfect home with the visual novel genre, right? Well, kind of. London is as fascinating as ever, but while many of Mask of the Rose's mechanics are interesting ideas, they too often feel a touch underbaked, leaving me groping in the dark without a full understanding of the decisions I'm making.

London falling

Up to now, every game set in fallen London (including, ah, Fallen London) has taken place decades after the actual fall happened, but Mask of the Rose sits squarely in 1862, kicking off around 260 days after bats blackened the sky and absconded with the capital of the British Empire. This is where, and when, you find yourself.

Precisely who 'you' are in Mask of the Rose is open to elastic definition. Your background and gender are all pleasantly fluid. Plus, it might call itself a dating sim, but you can make it clear from the off just what kinds of relationships you're open to. You can keep everything strictly platonic, or physical but not romantic, or swing the doors wide open to anything that comes your way. You can, if you so choose, only involve yourself in romance by playing matchmaker, or breaker, with the rest of the game's cast. 

It's admirably open-ended, and should hopefully give anyone room to play without feeling uncomfortable. Even if you mark yourself as down for whatever on Victorian Tinder, the game will regularly check in about what kind of relationship you're pursuing, if any, with each of the game's individual characters, including the giant bat and the squid-man.

Your relationships, whether platonic, romantic, indifferent or hostile, with the game's cast are the heart of Mask of the Rose, so it's a good job they're rewarding to pursue. So soon after London's fall, all sorts of histories and identities are bumping up against each other in the city's shifting streets. Men and women, highborn and lowborn, Jewish, Hindu and Christian all rattle around trying to find stations for themselves in a new world, even as otherworldly newcomers start making appearances. 

It's richly textured and a pleasure to delve into, but your ability to do so is constrained by just how limited your time is in Mask of the Rose's London. You're constantly making choices—and every choice takes time—as the game progresses, even the clothes you wear to an encounter can alter how people react to you and the dialogue options you have during it, and Failbetter clearly wants you to go through them again and again to see the impacts your choices can have. 

You can get through a full run of the game in around three or four hours, but it means you'll inevitably leave plot-threads dangling and lots of relationships at a halfway point when you hit credits. Even going through with a new character background and some different choices, I ended up feeling like I was repeating certain sections of the game to get back to where I was previously.

Take, for example, what you can probably describe as Mask of the Rose's main plot. Much like real life, the game is part dating sim, part murder mystery, and a significant part of the game's midsection is taken up by trying to prove your friend and flatmate has been falsely accused of murder (don't worry, the victim got better).

My first time through, unaware of how little time I had, I accidentally left my friend to hang because I got distracted pursuing various other plotlines: Fomenting revolution, taking London's census, trying to woo someone attractive even though they're definitely a Tory. The second? I tried to balance my responsibilities and left them all half-finished. The third time through, I focused and finally managed to assemble one of many possible cases for why my boy was innocent.

The third time through was the most satisfying, narratively, even if I'm an execrable Phoenix Wright, but it felt like I had to laser-in on the murder case at the expense of everything else the game had to offer. I could have ignored it, like I accidentally did the first time, but it feels  a tad strange to leave my amiable Scottish chum to the gibbet's whims because I'm too busy trying to help a different friend with their writer's block.

Narrative Legos

You assemble your case using Mask of the Rose's storycrafting system, the jewel in its mechanical crown. It's essentially a kind of mad-libs that asks you to pick a protagonist, a motive, and an action from a list (you get new ones by deepening your relationships with the game's characters) to craft narrative solutions for various puzzles. 

So, for instance, the storycrafting section for the murder case required me to pick a culprit, their motive, and how they did it, plus some other stuff, and if I picked ones that made sense I got a new theory in my arsenal that I could go and harangue people about to further my investigation.

In theory, it's great, and lord knows it fits impeccably well with the themes of Failbetter's London and its entire vibe as a studio, but more often than not I found myself thwarted trying to use it. Either I'd input a narrative that I thought made sense but that didn't give me a new story to go and talk to people about, or I wouldn't quite have the building blocks necessary to construct the theory I had in my actual, real-life head. 

Certainly, I could go and chat to the relevant people, hoping the conversation gave me what I needed to construct my hypothesis, but sometimes a chat wouldn't yield any new storycrafting material at all, even when I felt like it should. Sometimes I would go to speak with someone only for the conversation to digress down some side-channel that meant I never got a chance to discuss what I wanted to talk about at all. With time so precious and the game constantly autosaving, I never wanted to waste time pursuing a lead unless I was almost certain it would give me something I could use. 

Amusingly, this meant I ended up pursuing someone I was almost certain didn't do the crime, but who I nevertheless thought the jury would find guilty and would give me lots of storycrafting material to make a case with. Perhaps that's a wry commentary on something.

Watch, listen, repeat

Failbetter's London is a treat to engage with as ever, but between the time pressure, the repetition, and the foibles of its storycrafting system, the game holding it up in Mask of the Rose never really coheres properly. It feels a bit like a first draft, the prelude to an excellent sequel that will come out in a few years with the kinks ironed out and an easier-to-grasp set of mechanics. It feels like Sunless Sea, basically.

I still enjoyed my time with it, mind you, just like I did with Sunless Sea. For anyone who likes this world as much as I do, Mask of the Rose is an easy recommendation, while its brevity and placement so early in the series' timeline makes it a pretty good place for newcomers to dip their toes in, too. As it is, though, Mask of the Rose feels like a foundation for something great, but not quite great itself.

Square Enix's AI Division released an updated version of adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case as "an educational demonstration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an AI technology," according to its announcement. The original 1983 game was a significant influence on visual novels and graphical adventures in Japan, as well as inspiring a generation of game designers. The 2023 version, which is available for free on Steam, doesn't seem likely to have the same effect. In fact, it currently has a user rating that's 92% negative.

The NEC PC-6001 version would respond to typed input in text adventure style, with the usual limitations. As Square Enix put it when announcing the release, those old parser input controls "did come with one common source of frustration: players knowing what action they wanted to perform but being unable to do so because they could not find the right wording. This problem was caused by the limitations of PC performance and NLP technology of the time."

The AI tech preview version of Portopia promises to solve that with the latest in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), which turns whatever you type into commands for your assistant, Yasu, who is assigned to help you investigate the murder of Kozo Yamakawa. In practice, it doesn't work great. Get used to seeing Yasu reply "I'm not sure what to say about that", "Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?" and "Hmm…" 

While trying to investigate a bar connected to Kozo's death, I got no response to "question bartender", "talk to bartender", "ask about murder", or "ask bartender about murder". It turned out I needed to type "ask about Kozo" to get a response, which sure felt like being unable to do something because I couldn't find the right wording—the problem the latest in AI tech is supposedly here to solve.

While questioning NPCs in Portopia, you can confront them with evidence you've found, so when the publican claimed not to know anything, I decided to show him a photo of the victim. Well, I tried to, but "show photograph", "show photograph to bartender", and "show photograph of Kozo to bartender" all came up with the usual "Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?" responses from my assistant. So I pressed pause to open up the NLU visualizer, which lets you see sentences the language algorithm thinks are similar to the one you entered. That let me see the sentence I needed to type, which was "Show the photograph of Kozo Yamakawa to the bartender".

Demands for that degree of precision don't make it feel like we've come real far in the 40 years since the original release. Portopia's new-fangled AI is often finicky, yet can't tell the difference between "light" and "lighter", and declared the input "Ask about Kawamura" to only be 98.4% similar to the identical sentence "Ask about Kawamura". Don't ask me how you get it to be 100% certain of anything. Simple actions like using a key to open a safe or looking behind a painting took multiple attempts to find the right words, and were as frustrating as any 1980s text adventure.

If anything, it feels like a step backward from previous attempts like Starship Titanic, which had a cast of robots you had to communicate with by typing sentences at them. While it was an annoying guessing game trying to figure out which words those robots were programmed to recognize, at least they were capable of occasional surprises, like when you asked one about the Spice Girls and it responded with an opinion on music. That was possible in 1998.

Steam's user reviews have similar complaints. "The AI stuff really does not help, especially when you ask 'WHERE is X' and your partner keeps telling you WHO they are instead", says one, while a fan of the original laments, "It's such a shame to see a classic, influential adventure game like Portopia be treated so horribly. This is the first official english version of the game, but it just doesn't work." Another says, "This has significantly worse text input processing than adventure games from the late 1980s / early 1990s. I do not think there is any reason to play this and I do not think there is any reason for Square Enix to try to pursue AI. This should never have been released."

If you're wondering why Square Enix didn't use the chatbot technology currently masquerading as AI to generate new responses to your input on the fly, at one point it did. "This tech preview originally included a function based on Natural Language Generation technology," the company's AI division said, "where the system would generate natural replies to questions that did not have a pre-written response. However, the NLG function is omitted in this release because there remains a risk of the AI generating unethical replies."

If you feel like bashing your head against a text input box for a while, you can do so by downloading AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case on Steam. At least it's free? 

In a shot heard around the world, Sonic the Hedgehog was murdered last week. The blue blur was found twisted and bloody in the dining car of the Mirage Express, his shocked expression mercifully masked by a jauntily placed sailor's hat. It all took place in The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, a Sega-made visual novel that was—despite its tragic and unconscionable subject matter—something of an April Fool's gag.

Well the joke goes on, because The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is now the highest-rated Sonic game on Steam. In fact, it's the 62nd highest-rated game on the entire platform (it was briefly 61st), and has netted itself over a million downloads since its release last week.

The game is sitting pretty with over 11,000 Steam user reviews at time of writing, 98% of which are positive. That puts it ahead of fan favourites like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed Collection (94% positive with over 10,000 reviews), Sonic Frontiers (94% with over 13,000), and Sonic Mania (93% with over 18,000).

It's pretty funny that Sega's best-received Sonic game in years is a jokey, Poirot-esque visual novel about the main character's brutal assassination (though whether Sonic is truly dead is a mystery you'll have to resolve for yourself), but it makes sense. The game is genuinely funny, and its writing goes far beyond what you'd generally expect of a quick April Fools' gag.

Plus, I defy anyone to say that they didn't do a double-take when a game titled "The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog" manifested on Steam with full Sega branding, and the fact that it's totally free meant our curiosity was easily sated. It's a quality product with a great hook, so no wonder it's won people over.

God willing, this will encourage Sega to pour effort into a new game in this mould. Let me investigate Tails for tax fraud, Sega, you just know that little guy is fiddling the figures somewhere along the line.

I have to wonder how Sega feels about its top-rated Sonic game being fundamentally a joke, and one that centres around its iconic mascot's murder, no less. There could be some mixed feelings there, but when it comes down to it, I imagine the company is just happy for Sonic to be getting so much positive buzz.

This won't be easy for Sonic the Hedgehog fans to hear, but he was murdered.

In The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, a free visual novel released by Sega today, Sonic is the victim in a murder mystery birthday party for Amy Rose. He's not just pretend murdered, though: he really gets knocked out.

But is he dead, for real? You'll have to play the game to find out. I did, and it's pretty good for a freebie. The detective work is just on-rails 'collect the evidence and then confront suspects with it' stuff, but the 2D ring-collecting minigame you play to 'think' is entertaining, and even slightly challenging near the end.

Regarding whether or not the game is canon, Sega says, "You know what they say: everything is canon," but adds that The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog "is not a Sonic Team title."

They "strongly believe in the power of headcanon," however, and I take that to mean that, whatever happens in the game (I'm not saying), Sonic can be dead if we want him to be dead.