Developer: Wurm Fud Publisher: Wurm Fud Year: 2024 Genre: Visual Novel
Backwater Eulogy is a very short (10-15 minutes) visual novel and autobiographical exploration of loss and the experience of grieving someone you had a complicated relationship with. I think this type of VN is described as a Kinetic Novel, since it is linear and there are no choices, with the interactive elements just being the user clicking to transition from one page to the next. I don’t have a problem with that! A game can just be a very well written story featuring lots of great pixel art, which is what this is. The music is very minimalist and low key but works well for the story the game is telling and helped with the immersion.
It hit me really hard as someone who has experienced a sudden and very upsetting loss lately. I didn’t have a complicated relationship with my aunt but I still think about things I wish I could have done to change the outcome, even though there’s nothing I could have actually done. The story is also strongly influenced by the developer living in the midwestern US and that also resonated with me. Sorry about this one being such a bummer. Sometimes you play a short game about a depressing topic but it’s exactly what you needed to play at the moment.
Backwater Eulogy is available on Steam and Itch.io.
Yesterday there was an article I read about the history of bisexuality in games, which I’ll always welcome, but it was a frustrating read because it left out so much and basically ignored anything before The Sims and anything that wasn’t a major hit. It was this quote specifically that I really didn’t care for:
Because when games started tentatively including queer representation in the late 00s, it began with playersexuality: the idea that characters would be attracted to the player, no matter who they were. You could marry someone of any gender in Skyrim or the later Harvest Moon games, for example. Liara in Mass Effect would want whichever Shepherd – male or female – you chose to be.
It’s very possible I’m misreading what it’s saying, but this isn’t true in any reading I could think of. The representation is certainly notable, but queer games go back all the way to the late 80s at least, with games like Caper in the Castro in 1989 and Gayblade in 1992. Both are games by developers who are part of the LGBTQ+ community and are about people in the community.
Even if you’re ignoring indie games (and why would you?), there’s plenty of examples from larger publishers in the 80s and 90s. If we’re just talking about video game characters, Infocom’s game Moonmist from 1986 has a Lesbian woman and a bisexual woman as NPCs. If the article means playersexuality, that goes back to at least 1992 with Ultima VII: The Black Gate. There’s also games with a big budget like Phantasmagoria 2 in 1996 that explicitly have a bisexual male protagonist if the subtext that’s basically text in Gabriel Knight 2 was too subtle for some people. There’s so many other examples listed too from a basic Wikipedia search. Granted, a lot of the examples listed are very homophobic and transphobic, but there’s positive representation in the 80s and 90s too and it’s just really frustrating to see this history get ignored. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it happen at a games outlet and it probably won’t be the last.
On a more positive note, I really liked this recent page listing games developed by trans people before 2010, which extends basically to the beginning of the games industry. Trans game developers have always been here and always will be.
Developer: Goloso Games & Julia Minamata Publisher: Panic Year: 2025 Genre: Adventure
I’m attempting to get caught up with all the games coming out each week as a part of the Playdate Season 2 package and saw that Goloso Games and Julia Minamata, two folks I’m a fan of, made a new point-and-click adventure for the system. This season surprisingly has a lot of adventure games (and also a FMV game) and I’m not sure why. I’m definitely not upset about it but I suspect Panic just happens to be big adventure game fans since they’ve published a few of them outside of the Playdate too.
You play as the dog Chance as you are called to help out a criminal mastermind but are delayed by a flat tire. What starts off as a simple tire change puzzle leads to a series of events where you are bailed out by Chance’s extremely good luck.
I loved this one. It’s just a really nice adventure game that lasts about 30 minutes and occasionally uses the Playdate’s built-in features as puzzle solving gimmicks. There’s maybe one chapter where using the crank felt a little clunky but this only stood out because it works most of the time and the game moves at a really nice pace. The game is divided into six chapter and each one is about 5 minutes long. I felt very satisfied doing the puzzles but they weren’t too difficult either. For the most part, the use of the Playdate’s crank and microphone were fun ways to add some variety to the puzzles.
As expected, Julia Minamata’s art is fantastic. It manages to cram in a lot of nice little animations on such a small screen but everything is very readable. The game is very funny too. I really love absurdist humor and the situations in each chapter get more ridiculous as you move from one puzzle to the next.
I also loved the music! It has this nice jazzy soundtrack you would expect from old noir films and Philip Aldous does a great job with that. I’m always surprised at how good the games on the Playdate sound since it’s so tiny and I guess my expectations are low?
Anyway, great stuff. If folks like this one then they should check out other games by the developers. Julia worked on the free Playdate game Recommendation Dog and created the excellent mystery adventure game The Crimson Diamond. Goloso Games made Spike II: The Great Emu War (Itch.io/Playdate store) for the Playdate and Inspector Waffles (Steam/Itch.io).
I saw Devo last night in Detroit and it was great! I had seen them 15 years ago in Ann Arbor but that was basically an eternity ago and they haven’t been in Michigan since then. They’re also coming back in September with the B-52s, who I had seen before about 8 years ago and were also very good. I’m surprised they’re here twice in one year after almost never coming here, that Ann Arbor concert was also their first time here in 15 years, but I think both bands are very close to wrapping things up so maybe they’re trying to hit all the places before stopping.
One day I’ll write about that Devo adventure game from the mid 90s. It’s an incredibly frustrating experience because I love Devo and the studio that made the game, it’s by the same folks that made The Dark Eye and The Residents: Bad Day on the Midway, but has a couple bits that kind of ruin the whole thing. Even removing the timer from it would do a lot to improve the game.
Oh well, people are probably more interested in blog posts I liked reading and not ramblings about Devo Presents: Adventures of the Smart Patrol, a 1996 adventure game that got poor reviews at release.
Unwinnable also had this very good article on the allure of the summer reading program. I am currently in TWO reading programs for different libraries. You’ve probably already seem my post on Ann Arbor’s Summer Game. Libraries are the best and so are reading programs. It’s not too late to join your local library’s summer reading program and get cool prizes.
It just made me happy to see Terry Cavanagh praise a mod someone made for his game VVVVVV. When game devs get excited about fan art, mods, etc that other folks have made for their game it’s the best.
Martijn Frazer has a very good post on Dutch snacks. I never even heard of most of these and want to try making some. I’m not a big mayo person (sorry) so that limits things a bit, but there’s still quite a bit for me to try.
That’s it for this week! There’s actually a bunch of blog posts I haven’t read yet just sitting in my RSS feed reader so next week may be longer. I just think blogs are neat!
Developer: Wales Interactive Publisher: Wales Interactive Year: 2023 Genre: Interactive Movie
Unfortunately I am on my FMV bullshit again, and that means looking through the games I have access to and playing as many as I can until I get burnt out on the medium and go back to playing normal games. This time it’s Mia and the Princess Dragon, an interactive movie by Wales Interactive. I’ve played one or two of these by the studio before and didn’t really enjoy them because I had felt you were making branching decisions with no idea how they would go, and then you get a bad ending and have to restart the whole game with no ability to skip what you had seen before. This was how Late Shift worked, a game a lot of people seemed to like from Steam reviews but I thought was pretty bad. However, I am sucker for FMV and Doctor Who, and this is a game starring the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann, so here I am playing this interactive movie.
On a side note, I will take every opportunity I can to recommend the 8th Doctor audio dramas by Big Finish. They’re fantastic and the Doctor gets to actually have character development. Storm Warning is the first one and a solid place to start, but Chimes of Midnight is fantastic and also a good first one. If you live in the US, you can also check out some of these for free through the Hoopla app if your library has it.
Seriously, it’s really good!
You play as Mia, a barmaid working at a dive bar, when a woman who is unable to speak English shows up and is on the run from a group of thugs led by Paul McGann. Pretty quickly it starts throwing decisions at you where you make binary choices. It will show you stats when making decisions but doesn’t give you context for it. You can pause it to see what the stats actually are. I never could tell what these were actually used for and as far as I could tell, they did not seem to have an impact on the story.
Some of the choices made no sense or felt meaningless. Early on in the game you can escape the bar you’re trapped at and leave with the mysterious woman, and get out before the more people arrive, and then your character decides to come back after eating and gets stuck in another situation and it felt like some very important context was missing because we weren’t there. At another point a cannon is aimed at someone and you can choose between warning the friend or stopping the person at the cannon. After you make this decision, someone walks up and stabs the friend anyway. I know this is something that is just going to happen with interactive stories that use FMV, because you can only film so much on a small budget and have to make compromises at certain points, but when it’s so transparent that the choice does not matter, don’t even offer it.
I’m dumping on the game quite a bit but there were parts I liked too. The game features a decision tree, which shows you what scenes you’ve seen before and the whole branching layout of the game. I actually liked the decision tree a lot. It’s probably a big spoiler if you looked at it before playing and it probably destroys the magic of how the game functions for some people but I found it to be really interesting. It showed me that there was more going on than I initially thought and was less linear than I had assumed. It was just interesting to look at and see how one of these games is laid out. The game actually lets you skip scenes you’ve seen before, unlike Late Shift. So I could actually replay the game without feeling frustrated. I will bag on Late Shift every chance I get, sorry. It also didn’t sort the choices into a good and bad decision. Well maybe it did a little, but it mostly tried to sort the game into two different but hopefully interesting choices for you to pick.
Mia and the Dragon Princess was also a lot lighter and more fun in tone than that game. It knew what kind of story it was and just felt like it was trying to have fun. The cast was perfectly fine. I’m sure it was a paycheck job for Paul McGann but he was fine. This wasn’t a Dennis Hopper in Black Dahlia situation.
So would I actually recommend it? I don’t know. I had a better time with it than some of the other interactive movies by the studio. It felt a lot sloppier than some other Wales games but also a lot less frustrating since the choices weren’t funneled between good and bad and it was easy to replay the game to try other branches. So far I feel like my impression with the studio’s games, the ones they’ve developed and weren’t just the publisher on, is that the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously are more fun to play and are maybe worth considering if you see them in a bundle or on sale and know that you’re getting yourself into An Interactive Movie that will last you an hour or two and that’s it. It’s not really a ringing endorsement but I’ve played worse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Mia and the Dragon Princess is available on a variety of platforms you can find on the developer’s site.
If you can believe it, it’s a Friday once again. This one is short. Maybe I missed a ton of big announcements or people are just holding off from releasing games during a Steam, or both. That’s fine, there’s still quite a few games that came out this week.
Video Games
Don’t Eat the Cat (Itch.io) is a free Bitsy game where you make an Important Choice in a video game.
Dino Sort (Itch.io) is a cute and free puzzle game made in PICO-8 where you sort dinosaurs into groups.
Quantum Witch (Steam) is a 2D fantasy adventure game heavily built around making decisions and multiple playthroughs to see how the game’s story changes.
Project Silverfish (Steam) is an open-world immersive sim with horror elements that just entered Early Access and may or may not be furry adjacent (I don’t know! I don’t know shit about anything). It looks very neat and maybe I’ll play it when I can stop being a baby.
Ruffy and the Riverside (Steam) is a 3D platformer, maybe one of those that counts as a collect-a-thon. I just really like how the 2D character art looks in a 3D world.
Tabletop RPGs
Break the Law (pdf on developer’s site) is a short uhhhhh roleplaying game that the dev linked to on their site about ways to subvert the system.
cutestpatoot had a birthday and celebrated by releasing a new game. Mixed Feelings (Itch.io) is a tabletop rpg that you play by making mix cds and playlists.
I am a big fan of Cezar Capacle’s solo ttrpgs and there’s a new one! Mausworn (Itch.io) is a ttrpg that combines the solo ttrpg mechanics with the Redwall and Mouse Guard inspired game Mausritter.
Developer: Digital Pictures Publisher: Digital Pictures Year: 1994 Genre: Arcade
Unfortunately I have the FMV bug again so I played through Corpse Killer, a rail shooter where you are a marine dropped onto an island to stop Dr. Hellman, an evil scientist who is bringing the dead back to life. On your quest you meet a woman reporter, who becomes your love interest at the end, and Rastafarian man who drives you around the island.
For the most part, the game is just rail shooter sequences where digitized sprites of people dressed as zombies walk around the screen and either try to get close to you or throw stuff at the screen. You do this for about an hour and then you’re done. They try to add some variety by giving you some powerups and choosing the order that you do the levels, but you have to do them all anyway so it ultimately doesn’t matter. For the most part you just repeat this sequence of levels and then fight a final boss and the game ends. One level type has you using a dart gun to shoot the zombies, I think to be stealthy. It’s not fun. There’s some optional side missions that give you a little bonus cutscene. They tried! I think there’s only so much you can do when a team films a bunch of zombies running around and then you’re told to make a rail shooter with it. I think it could have still been more fun to play by making the enemies feel less like bullet sponges and eliminating all the situations where there was an attack that was impossible to dodge.
Obviously the FMV is the reason why anyone would play this. Since I played the remaster from a few years ago, all the digitized sprites are now in a higher resolution and it just looks weird to me. They’re all much more crisp than the background they’re walking on. I think the original game actually looks better in a way, because the background and zombies are at the same quality level and it fits together better. I do like seeing the cutscenes at a higher quality than what it originally shipped at on the Sega CD. I’ll admit that I am a giant baby and some of the zombies creep me out a little, especially when they do the jump scares in front of the screen. I am not proud of this.
I wish I had enjoyed watching the cutscenes more. The tone is right, they’re intentionally doing a more campy approach, but there’s just not a whole lot going on other than the brief moments when you get to see Vincent Schiavelli do something as the evil doctor. It’s clearly just a paycheck job for him but he’s still trying to do something with the limited material he has and is the most fun to watch. I was surprised at how uninterested I became in the other cutscenes. I love garbage but they were mostly very boring. As you can guess, a game about voodoo and zombies may not be the greatest when it comes to race, even if the villain is a white guy. It could have been a lot worse but it still sucks.
The game then ends with you shooting zombies in front of a blurry photo of Vincent Schiavelli’s face and then it cuts to a scene of the woman reporter in a bikini at the beach, after she’s spent the entire game flirting with you. I guess they knew their market for this game. After the credits, it ends with a memorial to Vincent Schiavelli. Well, ok.
It’s not a great game and it’s boring, which is probably the worst thing a game with FMV can be. There isn’t even any gore. I understand why that’s not happening on a Sega CD game, especially after the whole Night Trap thing, but it’s still funny to see in a game with so many zombies.
Since it was the rerelease of the game, at least it has a lot of bonus stuff. The behind the scenes stuff is fun. I was surprised by how many videos were made and preserved since the making of this game. It’s goofy that you have to buy them with points that you earn from playing the game, but you can unlock everything after a single playthrough. At least it gave me these gems from someone interviewing the cast.
Talking with the lead actress: “Do you think kids will like this game?” “I think it’s going to be fabulous”
And interviewing Vincent: “Do you have a favorite moment in the script?” Laughs “What are you talking about?”
I get the impression he didn’t think very highly of the script but he’s very nice to the makeup crew while they work on him so there’s that. He did do at least one other video game though, one of the Dune RTS games. I didn’t realize the game had Bill Mosely as one of the soldiers until I watched the behind the scenes stuff.
There’s documents like a Corpse Killer 2 design doc. It looks like Virtua Cop is referenced in this one. There was also a pitch for a Cold War inspired Corpse Killer ‘53. I just think it’s funny they had multiple sequels in mind as they were making this one. Again, it’s fascinating that all this stuff got preserved when you see that other companies like Sierra basically threw out everything when they closed. I think this part of the remaster is great.
The remastered version also adds a new level where you shoot 3D models and also sprites of the two founders of Limited Run Games. It’s bad and I don’t know why they added it, other than to insert themselves into the game. It’s optional and just exists for points so it’s easy to ignore.
This is probably too many words about a rail shooter for the Sega CD. It’s not good but I’m glad that the rerelease has lots of bonus stuff because mediocre games should be preserved too. I don’t know if I would recommend actually buying it since the game itself is very tedious and Limited Run Games as a company is…well…..not great, but at least they didn’t half ass it?
Corpse Killer is available on Sega CD, Sega CD 32X, 3DO, Saturn, Windows, Macintosh, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.
Probably goes without saying but fuck war. No war with Iran or anywhere else. End the genocide in Palestine. Leave people the fuck alone. What the fuck. I don’t know how to seamlessly transition from all that to what I’ve been reading lately and just like using the beginnings of these and the indie game posts as my check in/diary, but there you go.
I’ve been reading Alex Rinehart’s blog, which has recently had interviews with ttrpg game designers like Aaron King and Jess Levine. I didn’t even think about how you can just have interviews on your blog but yeah, no shit? Anyway, now that I’ve interviewed two librarians for my grad school class, can I talk to you? (points finger towards the screen)
Rascal had an article today about how DriveThruRPG delisted a game because of its anti-fascist politics. I stopped buying anything from DriveThruRPG a long time ago because it’s a visual nightmare but the site sucks. I’m not going to tell people to not sell their stuff there because it’s the biggest site for ttrpgs, but please make your games available elsewhere. They have a history of crappy decisions like this and that 30-50% cut for selling your pdf is ridiculous.
Unwinnable had a good article about the recent RoboCop game. Ultimately I still ended up enjoying it, but agree with everything this article says in addition to the game being too safe and basing a lot of its beats off Robocop 2, a movie I don’t like that much (it has its fans) because it’s too similar to the first movie. It has its moments but still has the stink of Frank Miller on it (I’m sorry, I am a Frank Miller hater).
And finally, I’m just happy to see erysdren doing a dev log.
This is my first summer participating in the Summer Game at the Ann Arbor District Library and I’m hooked! It’s a yearly event organized by the library, and the 15th one in its current run, where you can get points through a variety of activities and use them to get prizes like shirts, little toys, stickers, etc.
Activities to get points can include:
Entering codes you find around the city on signs at buildings, front yards of people participating,
Codes can also be found at events held by the library
Getting badges, which are challenges like finding specific items in the library’s catalog and plugging in info from newspaper archives, which I believe will be used to help the library later.
And of course, reading
It’s turned my oldest and I into point goblins and we see a code on the side of a bus or at the top of a building and lose our shit. We just started a week ago and she already has the points for the flamingo stuffie at the shop that opens in the middle of July, so anything else is just a nice bonus for her. I’m hoping to get a nice t-shirt and poster. It’s just a really nice way to get you to explore the library’s branches, the city of Ann Arbor itself, encourages reading, and educates people on everything the library has available for checking out.
If you live in or around the city of Ann Arbor, I cannot recommend it enough. You do not need to be an Ann Arbor resident. I’m not, and I was encouraged to join by the director of the library. Many of the activities are virtual too so you don’t not need to drive into the city every time you want to participate.
