Umurangi Generation is absolutely one of my GOTYs this year. Unsurprisingly given how much hype it’s gotten, but some games surpass the hype. Or the hype just can’t capture the actual feeling of playing the game. It’s way of story telling through photographing scenes during a societal collapse works seamlessly…

Lilian — the beginning of the end was a fun micro game, about 10 minutes I’d say? It was weird, quirky, gay, ended in a fun unexpected way. I love games like this because….they’re just art pieces? It’s so quick it’s like stopping at a museum and looking at a…

I replay Sayonara Wild Hearts somewhat regularly. It had been a while this time around and I hadn’t played it since 2020. It continues to be one of the most brilliant games I’ve ever played, I’m convinced it is an entirely new genre of media that is an album/game hybrid…

Wide Ocean Big Jacket rules. I expected to love it based on what I’d heard from people and, like all great games, it hit what I expected and surpassed it in interesting ways. This is another short story type visual novel. It has, at its core, the basics for what…

Last year I played and loved Subsurface Circular. It was one of my favorite games I played that year. Quarantine Circular didn’t quite hit me in the same way, but I still really enjoyed it. I think maybe I picked kind of a weird route? Some things didn’t quite line…

Adventures with Anxiety!, free on itch.io, is a short visual novel about a young girl and her anthropomorphized anxiety in the form of a dog. The choices in the dialogue are all anxious thoughts, the game encourages you to choose your own common anxieties while playing, and the dialogue progresses…

Eliza is an incredible visual novel about the ethical implications of apps and tech culture trying to commodify human health. I think that’s how I would put it. The topics it covers are complex and the writing is, overall very good, so it’s hard to really capture in a short…

Hand 2 Hand is a western-stylized dungeon crawler where you go through randomized (I think) dungeons that look like sparsely decorated cantinas and fight banditos via rock paper scissors and a pistol. The idea for this game is one of those simple but brilliant ones that feels so fun to…

Pom Gets Wi-Fi is a cute, funny, dog lovers kinda game by Brianna Lei. Pom, who is an asshole Pomeranian who just wants wi-fi, dies in a fire while surfing the internet and goes to dog heaven and proceeds to screw it up by trying to find a wif-fi signal…