My thoughts on games I've played from the Bundle for Ukraine charity bundle.
Games added as I get around to playing them! Please note that if I've already played a game that was also in the Racial Justice bundle, I won't be repeating those reviews over here.
Not at all the game I thought it would be—not even when it comes to genre!
I did expect it to deal with some serious themes, but it ended up getting so much heavier than I thought it would. I suspected it would be a game about grief and moving past that (based on the family photos on the wall, Ailsa's memory issues, and how we only ever hear from her mother in that opening chapter), but no, this is a heavier and more complicated game than that. I did enjoy it, but I admit that I probably wouldn't have picked it up had I known what it was actually about. I don't regret that I did, though.
As for gameplay: some of the puzzles were irritating, and I was very "oh no" when I realized that I'd have to redo some of my least favorite ones to get all of the endings, but overall it was fine.
It's cute and entertaining, and I was intrigued by the journal-collecting element, but around level 4 or 5 the game introduces this creepy-crawly critter that can devour your fossil pieces and can only be kept away by setting down lamps that will easily fall over when you walk into them (and thus allow the critters free-rein). I'm someone who really hates having to redo progress in video games, so I didn't have much patience for this and so decided to quit playing only a level or two after they were introduced.
A delightful concept paired with a delightful protagonist. It has its flaws, but ultimately I liked it.
A f/f horror visual novel where almost all the endings are bad endings. It was fine? The art (character sprites / CGs) worked for me, the music was on-point, and elements of the set-up were intriguing, but it failed to completely gel together for me. In particular, I would have liked to have known more about what was going on with Lilika. I do think unexplained elements can add a lot to horror, but in this case, there was just a little bit too much left unexplained, particularly once you get to events in Lilika's route, and it ended up making it feel more like creepiness without much substance.
Solid, but not remarkable. I figured out the truth about the island (or at least the broad strokes of it) very early into the game, and it's just not a concept I find very interesting. Piecing together the Lighthouse Keeper's backstory was probably my favorite part, and I did quite like the design of the character sprites.
While I love visual novels, I'm generally not much into kinetic novels, which is what Pale Cachexia is. But the summary intrigued me enough to give this one a try, and I'm glad I did, because it ended up being well worth it. The story is compelling, and the way it combines with the music and art serves to create such a vividly compelling gothic atmosphere. I do really want to highlight the music—the quality of the soundtrack really stood out to me. This was just such a bittersweet and lovely game.
Honestly a huge disappointment. The premise was intriguing, but the grammar and spelling are so bad that it's nearly unplayable, the characters are little more than tasteless caricatures, and the premise just doesn't really hold up.
I liked the gameplay, but the "story", if you could call it that, is so incredibly trite. This game uses a first person POV; all you know about the main character is that she's (presumably) female and an artist, and as you move from area to area, you find messages from a mysterious someone that prompts her to muse about philosophy and what it means to be an artist. This is a theme that comes up a lot in indie media, and this game really didn't bring anything new to the table. I think it was trying to be deep, but it came across as trite and even pretentious instead.
What did keep me playing for the whole 45 minutes it took to complete this game was the gameplay itself. I wouldn't say it was amazingly innovative, but I enjoyed it. You travel through several areas, and the main goal in each area is to "paint" the entryway into the next area. But in order to do so, you need to find supplies for your painting—including a source for the paint itself, which ends up being "ideas" rather than plants or other natural sources of paint color. I did find that + the concept of painting entryways to be interesting, but it was a pity that it ended up being attached to such an unimaginative story.
This was a fairly short game, taking me a little less than an hour to complete. There's very little actual gameplay—mostly, you're just running around and occasionally interacting with things, which tbh was just the level of exertion I was looking for when I picked up this game—and the graphics had a kind of charming, low polygon look that worked for me.
As for the story... that's the point where this game fell flat for me. In theory, there were the bones of a good story about compassion and coming of age within there, but the execution itself was so clumsily handled that none of it ever resonated with me.
