LudoNarraCon, the online convention for story-games, returns on May 5

Indie publisher Fellow Traveller is bringing back its digital convention for celebrating narrative games this year. LudoNarraCon 2022 will run from May 5–9 and feature 42 exhibiting games hosting livestreams on their Steam pages. There will be 33 game demos available, as well as more than 100 hours of video, and 12 live panels.

Games being featured with demos you can try include gambling scoundrel simulator Card Shark, café chat-em-up sequel Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly, grim ice-ship survival tale The Pale Beyond, and cosy village herbs-and-harvest grower Witchy Life Story.

One of the exhibiting games, dicey cyberpunk RPG Citizen Sleeper, will be launched in full on day one of LudoNarraCon. That's the game where you play a rogue AI working the gig economy on a space station, which Rachel Watts enjoyed when she previewed Citizen Sleeper back in October, calling its writing "incredibly vivid".

A couple of highlights from the scheduled panels: one on Innovating the Detective Genre in Narrative Games with Lucas Pope (Return of the Obra Dinn), Mark Brown (Game Maker's Toolkit on YouTube), Tim Sheinman (Family, Rivals), and Victor Breum (various real-life mystery hunts), as well as a panel on The Art of the Twist, with Sam Barlow (Her Story, Telling Lies), Tanya X. Short (Boyfriend Dungeon), Sarah Northway (I Was A Teenage Exocolonist), and Greg Lobanov (Chicory).

If previous LudaNarraCons are anything to go by, we can expect a Steam sale on narrative-rich indie games to run concurrently with the event. See the LudoNarraCon website for more information on the panels and exhibitors.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.