The God of Crawling Eyes starts off well and just slides downward slowly. In the end, it’s a moderately fun very short game that doesn’t take advantage of its premise and has some gender issues. (more…)
Paranoiac resembles Mermaid Swamp a lot, but is much simpler (and has a much smaller area you have to search, which I liked). It’s okay, but nothing unusual.
Re: Kinder is very much a what the fuck sort of game. The story is all over the place, the message is at once blatant and confusing, and it’s got an interesting battle system held back by the fact it’s got almost no battles and interacts poorly with the horror adventure game aspects. (more…)
Three short games! Hello? Hell…o? and Ghost Party were quite fun, while The Desolate Hospital was surprisingly blah for such a pretty game. (more…)
Killer Bear is a waste of time, while Lisa and Skinwalker are flawed but do have things to recommend them for.
Dear Red has some amazing graphics and atmosphere. The banner, the game’s description…
Red had grown, she understood what happened, why he always mentioned those words although she couldn’t stand watching and being overwhelmed by the old memories all the time. Now that he’s dead, it doesn’t have to be so anymore…
Then there’s the art within the game, which is similarly lovely. (more…)
The only good thing about Be the Slender Man is it only takes a few minutes to play, and frankly, it’s a few minutes too many. (more…)
HOME is a fangame of OFF, an RPG Maker game Farla has already reviewed. According to the description, it’s a fix fic where you play as the Judge and prevent the Batter from destroying the zones. It also claims to improve the gameplay, which was an infamously weak area of OFF. It fails utterly on both fronts.
(Spoilers, by the way, for both OFF and this game.) (more…)
The illustrious illhousen graciously volunteered to take this one off our collective plate. Enjoy! (more…)
A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky is a pretty standard jRPG that starts strong, meanders for a while, then ends with a whimper. It contains some interesting ideas, but it can’t fit them together into a coherent whole. Much like The Reconstruction, it’s less than the sum of its parts. (more…)
The Drop is a roguelike, and the sequel to The Reconstruction. It is cute and funny and wonderful and you should absolutely go play it, even if you disliked The Reconstruction.
Two things you probably won’t mind checking out. (more…)
It Moves has skin-crawlingly eerie sounds and beautifully unsettling graphics. It is not much of a game, however, nor is it much of a semi-interactive story, which is what I think it was aiming for. (more…)
Middens is an unsettling, surreal game that it turns out I can’t play. (more…)
This is a really intriguing little thing that doesn’t seem to live up to its potential. Gamewise, it’s a(n incomplete) horror Harvest Moon.
I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly. I really loved the idea and the setting and atmosphere is just great, but the mashup only works for a bit before you start seeing problems. But it’s pretty short and you don’t even need to complete it to see what it has to offer. (more…)
The Sandman is very sort of a sequel to The Crooked Man. It’s is pretty solid in story terms. There’s some stuff in the initial setup that seems clumsy, but it actually pays off very nicely in the second half. It rerminded me of The Witch’s House in that there actually was a reason for seemingly incongruous stuff like putting the frog in the slot.
Designwise, eh, random RPGmaker style flaws. There’s cutscenes where actual gameplay stuff is accomplished and “gameplay” that is figuring out what part of what room she needs to stand in her house to get the next thing to happen. Also one of the puzzles requires numbers and you’re supposed to look at your phone and use the time despite that having nothing to do with anything as far as I can tell, they just share letters involved.
But wow, the story was really worth it.
(If you play, make an extra save right before showing the pink gem, that’s one of the two decision points for the endings.)