Category: Recommendations

Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan

  06/22/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

This is a cute kids’ game of the “experimenting with nonviolent gameplay” genre. It reminds me a lot of both UnderTale and my own Flawed Crystals. The overall structure is essentially, “What if when you spared enemies in UnderTale they joined your party?” A set of recruited enemies are drawn randomly from a deck in each round, and you can summon a certain number per turn. Outside of battle, you can level up your friendship through the standard video game relationship strategy of bribing them with gifts and food.

The plot is a standard Saturday-morning-cartoon-esque premise: An evil monster has drained all color from the world because he wants to remove the hero’s “rainbow heart” and make everything conform to normalcy. If that sounds like very queer subtext, you may be surprised to learn it is actually queer text; the protagonist is textually nonbinary, and many of the recruitable characters are gay or nonbinary and explicitly struggle with queerphobia. I’m pleased we have gotten to a point where kids’ media can discuss this stuff outright instead of needing to obfuscate everything behind metaphor and allegory.

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   Platformers, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

QuickRecs: Surgery Edition: Part 1

  10/22/2025       Act      4 Comments

I had the fortune to have to undergo a bilateral masectomy in June, so I’ve spent months barely able to do anything at all. I’ve played a lot of video games. Enjoy the forthcoming waves of game recs. Not a lot of pans though — the bad ones I played were mostly just boring and bland, not really bad in a way that was interesting (with one notable exception, which I may get to later). I may put up blurbs on the curator page later just to remind myself what they were. Anyway.

Also these got long and aren’t really “quick” anymore but whatever I’m not splitting them now.

Inside: Unholy Heights, Deiland, Wavetale, A Monster’s Expedition

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   Adventure, Farm Sim, Indie, Platformers, Precision Platformer, Puzzle, Recommendations, Sim, Sokoban, Tower Defense, Video Games      , , , ,

Crashlands

  10/24/2025       Act      Add Comment

Boxart for the Butterscotch Shenanigans game Crashlands

I did not expect to like this game. I found the visuals ugly and usually find “topical” humor to be juvenile and an excuse to not write real jokes. At first the world felt open and empty, and I worried it was yet another survival crafter with no thought given to plot or gameplay.

Slowly but surely, Crashlands won me over. It visual design was consistent and thoughtful, clearly purposeful and tone-consistent. The writing was good and often quite entertaining, with a self-aware tongue-in-cheekiness. The scale of the plot slowly ramps up in a way that feels natural and engaging. And more than anything else, the attention and care it put into its worldbuilding and characters was above and beyond any game I’ve played in a while.

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   Recommendations, Survival      ,

The Blackwell Series

  01/05/2026       Act      Add Comment

It’s such a treat to see a writer improve. It’s what I love about teaching stupid freshman, and it’s one of the reasons I also go through developer catalogues chronologically; it just makes me warm and fuzzy.

The remainder of the Blackwell games are pretty good. I’d actually rec just skipping the first one (or reading a plot summary) and playing the rest. The puzzle design is golden, the characters are compelling, and it’s just a great supernatural mystery series. I didn’t love the final conclusion which marred it a bit for me, but there’s definitely a lot of good stuff here.

CW, both in games and below reviews, for depression/suicide.

Spoilers abound inside, though I’ve tried to black out the more severe ones. I care less as time goes on though, sorry!

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   Point-and-Click, Recommendations, Video Games      , , ,

Tokyo Dark

  01/18/2026       Act      1 Comment

Split this from the group detective posts because I ended up having way more to say about it than I thought I would!

CW: Tons of mental health stuff in the game, including PTSD, sexual coercion, and suicide attempts. FWIW it’s not explicit and I think it’s handled pretty well, but it might be worth having someone screen it for you if those are normally triggers.

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   Point-and-Click, Recommendations, Visual Novels