This is not a video game review, or even specifically about the games industry – it’s more of a rumination on hobby spaces in general. I hope you’ll read it anyway.

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Over the last year or so, I’ve been expanding the hobby content I consume and share beyond just video games to include books as well. Reading and gaming have been my ride or die hobbies basically my whole life, and while I’ve been consuming and creating video game content for years, reading has always just been reading.

However, I started to discover a few BookTubers last year, and a few expanded into several, and soon, alongside the let’s plays and analysis videos about games, I was also watching a lot of content about books. I started a reading journal, which has been delightful, as well as sharing my reads on Instagram.

Unfortunately, I did pretty quickly notice a problem that has led me to unsubscribe from quite a few BookTubers, and that is rooted in a certain degree of hypocrisy that I couldn’t look past.

BookTube is meant to be a place of shared love of reading. Some channels focus on certain genres, and some cover a broad range of books. If you asked any of these creators, they’d almost certainly say that anyone is welcome in their community, particularly those who have book clubs or Patreon community spaces like Discord servers. Reading is for everyone is a common maxim.

And yet, as a trans person in these spaces, it is clear to me that these creators are just paying lip service to inclusion, and I do not feel safe or welcome. That is almost entirely down to JK Rowling. Platforming a transphobe is incompatible with a safe and inclusive space.

I’m not going to be calling anyone out by name in this post, but the specific examples I mention below are from actual videos or channels I have watched.

Platforming J K Rowling actively harms trans people

I want to make it clear right here – J K Rowling has explicitly stated that people continuing to spend money on her properties emboldens her, and she believes that people are in support of her views when they do so. She has also stated that she spends her money in deliberate ways that support transphobic and harmful legislation in the UK, going so far as to launch a new organisation dedicated to removing trans people’s rights. People platforming Harry Potter and Rowling’s other works do material harm to trans people in Britain.

A lot of creators own Harry Potter books. I’m not saying that people need to throw away something that was a big part of their childhood – it took me quite a long time to get to grips with that and it’s absolutely not my business if someone wants to hold on to something that has meant a lot to them. However, if you are claiming to have a welcoming community, there are things you can do to mitigate the impact of this on your audience.

The barest minimum thing you can do is not display the books or talk about them at all. The Harry Potter books have very distinctive spines and stand out on shelves, causing me psychic damage when I have to see them. So just put them away! Talk about other books, do not dedicate time and space and energy to this series and this author. You’re meant to be book reviewers – if you need a touchstone for that genre or that time period, read something else. And if you absolutely must refer to them, acknowledge the actual harm done by the author, make your own stance clear and stand firm against bigotry and transphobia. Do that every single time. Caveat your references in the real-world impact.

It’s nuanced, sure, but creators can and should do better

There are some Bookish creators who are doing well in this. Actively covering diverse authors of all kinds of backgrounds; specifically calling out that JKR and Harry Potter have no place on their channel because of the transphobia; explicitly stating that they do not display or recommend works by transphobic authors, no matter how good those works are or important they are to the creator; acknowledging personal and complex reasons for keeping hold of some of the books.

It must be understood that this is a nuanced issue, and even though I think there’s a correct way of doing things, it could just as easily be argued that another approach is better. I’m not really interested in litigating the details when so many people haven’t even made the most minimal of efforts. I don’t think it’s useful to immediately condemn people without trying to understand where they are coming from. Still, there are instances where a lack of caring, wilful ignorance, or even deliberate actions are evident.

As a consumer of content, I can vote with both my time and my money. I’ve unsubscribed from creators who have done things like saying they are rereading the books, or in some cases reading them for the first time (you have even less of an excuse!) or have talked about the books in a positive way without addressing the harm J K Rowling has caused. Even this year, some creators have rearranged their shelves to give more prominence to the Harry Potter book, or have said that they are reading and enjoying the books at the moment.

These things in particular feel very much like deliberate acts of planting a flag in their content. I do not understand how someone can claim to welcome all comers to their channel and then do this. It is a physical and emotional kind of shock each time it happens.

You cannot reason your way out of this

People have tried to justify or defend this behaviour. An argument I have seen is that women content creators, especially those who favour romance or romantasy genres, are denigrated as less worthy in some way than people who read classics or literary fiction. The reasons given are things like ‘reading should challenge you’ and ‘books should have a message or something to say about the world’ or equally ridiculous things. We all know that it’s because romance is a genre favoured by women, and women aren’t allowed to like things.

This is absolutely a real thing that creators have to deal with. However, transphobes often see any increase in trans rights as a degradation of women’s rights, or even causing actual harm to women, and one thing becomes an extension of the other. My expectation that they support trans rights (or are at the minimum not actively platforming transphobia) becomes an attack on women. Having to do anything to acquiesce to anyone’s requests triggers a long-held defensiveness which is being misdirected. It is not trans people who are causing harm here, and it is bizarre and foolish to think so. The villain is the patriarchy (it’s always the patriarchy).

I’m also sure there are probably people out there who simply support JKR and her transphobia.

Video games and board games also need to contend with this topic

Gaming doesn’t get away with this either, but I’ve spoken a lot before about the issues surrounding Hogwarts Legacy so I don’t really want to dwell too much on it here other than to simply state for the record – if you platformed Hogwarts Legacy or any other Harry Potter games, you cannot claim to have a safe and inclusive community space. The video game press was massively disappointing in this regard, too, continuing to platform and review the game.

But while I have been composing and considering this post, another industry that I care a lot about has come out swinging for trans inclusivity.

As well as being a big video gamer, I am a huge fan of board games. It’s one of my favourite things to do with friends. Rarely do issues of trans rights come up in the board game industry (aside from aggressively gendered language in game rulebooks), but last month, CGE (a huge publisher) announced a new Harry Potter licensed game. Disappointing news. Frustrating, even. Harry Potter has been over for 18 years. Find something new to make games about. Not necessarily surprising, though.

What I didn’t expect, however, was the incredible response by the board game criticism community. Starting with No Pun Included, reviewer after reviewer made statements that not only were they not going to cover the new Harry Potter-themed game, but they were also no longer going to cover any games by the publisher in question.

I want to highlight what Efka from No Pun Included said about their decision: “Boycotting someone sounds like a big thing, but we want to make it clear, from our side it isn’t. We’re simply choosing to no longer cover an established publisher who made business decisions that are resulting in harm to a marginalized community.” His whole statement is great, as are the ones from other creators, such as Tom from Shut Up and Sit Down.

It’s that easy, folks! The ease with which the board game community rallied around this issue threw other hobby spaces’ failures into relief. I was already working on this article, but having a different community that I care about do so much better made the bookish and video game communities' lack of action feel so much worse.

Creators need to reckon with the dissonance that results from claiming to be inclusive while promoting and funding franchises that have caused huge harm to marginalised communities.

Ali’s Update Corner

Hey everyone! I had actually started a game to review (The Rise of the Golden Idol), but it is taking me way longer than 10 hours to finish! It’s just like an expanded version of the first game, The Case of the Golden Idol, though, so if you enjoyed that, you’ll enjoy Rise. I will be back with a more traditional post soon.

I hope you found this piece interesting. I know it doesn’t really fit with what I usually publish here, but I had a lot to say about the topic and it just felt like it was getting increasingly relevant. I also wasn’t sure I would be able to think about anything else if I didn’t excise this from my brain space. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experience, but more than anything, I’d love it if you could share this post. It means so much to me as an issue and I’d love to see other creators think about it and make improvements.

PS - a huge thank you to my friend Dan, who helped with making the structure of this piece come together and telling me off for having too many examples.

Spilled! is in the same family tree as games like Power Wash Simulator or Viscera Clean Up Detail. You go around in an area and clean up a mess that someone else has made. Traditionally, I enjoy these games very much because they occupy a really important niche for me. While I am studying at university (or even just existing in this modern world), sometimes my brain is just…tired. Thus, I need to occupy my time in a restorative way, and for me, this means watching YouTube and cleaning up digital mess or doing Picross.

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In Spilled! you’re a little clean-up boat sailing around, sucking up spilled oil and pollution. You gain coins for making progress, and you can use the coins to improve your boat in one of three ways. I upgraded my ship in a very even way across the board, but it would be fun to see what would happen if you put all your coins into one thing. Would you be able to create a little speed machine by pumping everything into speed, or is there an upper limit? Who knows.

While I did enjoy Spilled! as far as it goes, unfortunately I don’t feel like it went far enough, and a lot of that is how I like to consume games like this. The art and audio, especially, are exactly as good as you can see from the trailers and images that publicise the game, and if they appeal to you then give it a go, you won’t be disappointed.

However, I’ve racked up nearly 100 hours of Power Wash Simulator while I unwind. Spilled! lasted just 80 minutes, and about ten of those were taken up by the very strange and unnecessary boss fight. As you all know, I really strongly believe that short games can be just as wonderful and occupy as much space in our culture as their much longer counterparts. Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve found something that makes me go “well, maybe not 100% of the time.”

I really want to emphasise that Spilled! is worth getting if you’re looking for a bite-sized version of one of these clean-up games. Sucking up the oil spills is satisfying, and the game is gorgeous to look at – it has clearly been made with love. But this really cemented to me that, at least for me personally, some genres or types of games don’t get a chance to shine in my eyes as a short experience.

Sadly, not even the 1.5 hours you do get with Spilled! are flawless. I found the controls to be a bit of a problem and didn’t really enjoy piloting my little boat, which is a bummer because that’s the entire game. A bit of finessing would really help here. It doesn’t make the game unplayable by any means, but it introduced a bit of frustration into what should have been a very cosy experience.

I backed Spilled! on Kickstarter quite a while ago and was really looking forward to playing it, so perhaps the excitement of the process artificially inflated my expectations. The solo-developer Lente was so passionate about the project. It also feels great to know that some money from every sale on Steam gets donated to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation charity.

Personally, I don’t think I’ll be getting any more clean-up or ‘brain off’ games that are quite this short. Especially given Spilled! ends with a frustrating boss battle, I wasn’t fully done with my wind-down session when the game just ended, and that didn’t feel super great for what I was looking for from a game of this nature.

However, if you can reckon with the length of the game before diving in (something you might think I would be more practised with at this point) and don’t mind the janky controls, Spilled! is an easy recommend for the artwork and audio alone, plus the charity donation.

• Game: Spilled!

• Developer: Lente

• Publisher: Lente

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch

• Time to complete: 75 minutes

Ali’s update corner

I don’t have much of an update for you folks, just a bit of a complaint. Even though I write my content in Microsoft Word, its spellcheck seems to be useless, so I use Grammarly for a final pass at spelling, grammar, and whatnot, but I think I’m going to have to stop. It keeps trying to change my sentences enough that they don’t feel like my writing anymore. If anyone can suggest a good browser plugin that doesn’t think it knows better, please let me know!

Also, a few folks have suggested a few games for me to cover, which I love and appreciate. However, money is very tight at the moment, so I am restricted to games I already own. I do hope to get to your suggestions in the future, but while my paid subscriber count is very low, I can’t invest money into this blog. I really hope you understand <3

I come to you today a little trepidatious. People love The Stanley Parable, and having a dissenting opinion to the popular consensus is tricky sometimes – I’m sure most people reading have been told at least once that their personal subjective opinion is wrong somehow, as if there’s a “correct” way to feel. In fact, I think that pushes against what The Stanley Parable is trying to accomplish.

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Sorry, I’ve started out a little defensive, but bear with me. I am very much the sort of person who is “supposed” to like The Stanley Parable. I’m interested in narrative and form, how game mechanics can intersect with story, and the ludonarrative dissonance that occurs when they seem to work across each other. I’m also interested in media criticism and close examination and evaluation of the media we consume and how it is shaped, the expectations and norms it is constrained by, and the clever, subversive ways various things challenge those norms.

But the game just doesn’t hit for me. I thought it might be another case of me being an idiot when I was younger, but when I replayed it for QuickPlay, I still didn’t like it. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s very clever. I’m sure many many words have been spent dissecting the game, extolling its virtues and teasing out all its snarky commentary on the medium of video games.

And boy howdy does it have a lot to say about the nature of video games and the relationship between player and creator. It’s much more of an exploratory artefact, a dissertation made into an interactive experience, than it is a game (though it’s indisputably a game still – we won’t tolerate any “walking simulators aren’t games” here).

The Stanley Parable demands that you reckon with the antagonistic-yet-collaborative relationship between the player and the designer. It strips away the traditional trappings of a game, with theme and story and environmental design, and starkly zooms in on a single element of gaming – player choice and agency.

We can all acknowledge that video games are finite, constructed things which often try to masquerade as bastions of decision making, idolising the concept of choosing your own path. When we sit down and boot up a game, we have a mutual understanding with the designer that we won’t be able to do literally anything as players, but they will allow us to explore some options. (Ok, not all games are like this – some narrative games are at peace with their lack of player involvement aside from as a vessel to experience the story).

In most games, because a developer has to program every single thing and an artist has to bring it to life, there is an absolute upper limit on what the player can do. Doors are locked, slopes are too steep, or most egregiously, there are invisible walls and notes that “You cannot go that way.” It pervades across interactions with NPCs and items you can find and enemies you fight, and quests you do. This is something you just have to accept when you start playing a game. It might result in a bit of friction occasionally (such as when you don’t want to choose any of the available dialogue options, or you’re strolling down a road, and the game just tells you that you can’t continue).

Depending on the size and scope of the game, the quantity of options and the scope of the world will change. Something like Skyrim is huge, and not every choice will have any bearing on your experience. Do you go left or right? It probably doesn't matter that much because that single decision represents such a small percentage of your overall gameplay experience. On the other hand, smaller games such as Gone Home also have choices that don’t really matter, because they are inconsequential – you can go in whichever door you fancy first, because you’ll eventually visit every room in the house, and the order doesn’t matter. On the third hand (just go with me on this), there are games where certain choices are designed to matter – the Telltale games, for example. And then there’s the secret fourth hand, with games like Mass Effect that have some extremely impactful choices and some that don’t matter at all.

Choice is so important in games, and something that developers and designers have to consider every single outcome of. It’s such a core part of video games that Galactic Café has created a video game about it.

In The Stanley Parable, as you guide Stanley around his creepily empty office block, the omnipresent Narrator has something to say about everything you do. Whether you do as he tells you or utterly flout the directions, The Narrator responds. In fact, every single choice the player character makes elicits a response. It’s an exceptionally clever way to draw attention to the construct of video games and the usually inconsequential choices that layer up to create your individual experience with it.

The Narrator’s frustration with Stanley going and standing in the broom cupboard is a clear mirror of the inherent tension between the player’s desire to explore every nook and cranny and the designer’s desire to funnel them towards the plot that has been created and is the central focus of the game.

I think the game is extremely clever. My main issue with it is that it really knows it’s clever, to the point that I find the narrator smug and grating. This is very much a personal thing – most people find the game very funny. It’s not that I don’t think it is, more that I think the humour doesn’t land for me personally. As such, this game will never rank especially highly for me, despite the fact that I can appreciate on a craft and commentary level what it’s doing. I don’t think it could be any better than it is at what it’s extremely deliberately trying to do.

I think anyone with an interest in storytelling formats, particularly in games as a medium, should play The Stanley Parable. It’s extremely instructive, and you’ll learn a lot in the 5-7 hours it takes to experience all of the content. Most people think it’s hilarious on top of that, so don’t let my “eh” feelings about the game put you off.

• Game: The Stanley Parable (just the base version, not the Ultra Deluxe one)

• Developer: Galactic Cafe

• Publisher: Galactic Cafe

• Platforms: PC

• Time to complete: 1-8 hours, depending on how many endings you want to find.

Don’t forget, if you want to support me but don’t want to subscribe through Substack (which I recognise is a very morally questionable platform), you can leave a one-off or recurring donation over at my Ko-fi page here :)

Deliver Us the Moon is a narrative sci-fi action puzzle game. You play as a lonely protagonist sent to the moon to discover the answers behind why the big laser has stopped sending energy back to Earth and to get it started again.

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I’ve been very lucky so far with Quick Play – almost all the games I’ve written about in the 18 months since starting have been games I’ve loved, or they’ve taught me something (I’m looking at you, Hotline Miami). You can call me easy to please and you’re probably right. I go into games wanting and hoping to love them and have a nice time. Yes, as a critic, I do have my eyes open for other details, but I am primarily concerned with two things: how did this game make me feel, and did I have fun?

So in cases like this, when an experience was just…fine…I feel somewhat on the back foot. Writing about something you love or something you hate – usually pretty easy, the main challenge is teasing out why you felt that way (something I am still learning how to do effectively). It’s really hard to write about why something didn’t make you feel much at all.

Unfortunately, that was my experience with Deliver Us the Moon. If anything, I found it to be a little disappointing. Back in 2020 or 2021, one of my favourite streamers (Psyche) played this game, and while I didn’t really remember much from her playthrough (my memories of those years are patchy at best), I remember her emotional response being quite strong.

Maybe it’s a factor of time. Deliver Us the Moon came out in 2018, which is somehow seven years ago. Technology and what we expect from it change pretty rapidly, especially within video games. There are some (like Portal) that do something so inventive and stand out that they feel good to play years later, but Deliver Us the Moon didn’t do anything innovative, new, or particularly interesting to me. It didn’t iterate on what had come before; it just emulated them.

I also think that some reviews have done me dirty here, casually describing this as an exploration game on multiple occasions. It very definitely is not an exploration game. It’s extremely linear and you are given almost nothing to explore. This is not a mark against the game generally, but I had been looking forward to exploring a space base, an experience which I was denied on this occasion.

I do try to give the benefit of the doubt to indie games, but I think the developers were asking things of Deliver Us the Moon that it couldn’t quite support technologically. The controls were fairly floaty, making you feel like a sedan and making some fiddly bits annoying and exasperating. The hologram segments flickered and distorted in what looked like an unintentional way (maybe this was on purpose – that doesn’t really make me look any more kindly on it). At one point, my robot buddy got clipped out of the space station and I could look at it from the outside, which was neat but didn’t help me unlock the door I was stuck behind. Sure, not every indie game can be Hollow Knight, but I think a six-hour game should run well enough that you don’t need to restart it partway through to fix issues like this.

I am usually quite a big fan of this style of narrative adventure, one step up from a walking sim but stripped of many traditional elements of gamification. There’s no health bar or inventory or combat or stealth. You can only interact with the world when you’re meant to. This is fine, let me experience your interactive fiction. Deliver Us the Moon was a kind of chimera – predominantly you’re walking through rooms moving wheeled things to stand on (most of the time it isn’t even subtle, and you’re left literally dragging stairs into place) or using your little robot buddy to zip through a tight space and activate a lock. But sometimes, there’s no oxygen and you have to do something BUT FAST.

Moments like this are meant to cause tension and excitement, but I was just frustrated and annoyed by them. There was absolutely no penalty for failure aside from having to re-do a small segment of the game since the last autosave. A lot of the time (the vast majority), I am strongly in favour of low-to-no penalty failure states. Don’t punish me for being slow or bad at the game, please, I am here to enjoy myself. But in the instances in Deliver Us the Moon, I found myself grumbling, “Why make it timed at all then?” Maybe it’s because I don’t think solving puzzles under time pressure is fun, but if any of you reading this know the ludic psychology behind my dissonance here, I’d love to hear about it. I hope I’m not just contrary.

Oftentimes, the story will be enough to smooth over these rough edges for me, but Deliver Us the Moon falls flat in that aspect, too, at least in my opinion. I found it did quite a lot of telling rather than showing, which made the environmental disaster we were dealing with feel extremely heavy-handed and moralistic. The story played out through low-resolution abstract hologram recordings and voice notes, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, but when combined with the wooden voice acting, made the characters feel flat and disconnected and meant that emotional moments didn’t land as intended.

Even the little floating robot buddy didn’t work for me, and I am usually an absolute sucker for a little robot buddy. There’s never any conversation between the player and the robot; it doesn’t emote at all, not even with little beeps. There is no personality in it, despite the game going to some lengths to drive home that this one has been modified to have a personality! Saying it’s so doesn’t make it true!! I think the protagonist is silent throughout because it’s meant to be ambiguous who you’re playing as, but (oblique spoilers I guess, skip to the next paragraph if you like) when it does eventually get revealed who you are, it’s the most obvious person for it to be! Even after the reveal, there’s no interaction from the player character, and I just can’t figure out the point of withholding this information for an absolute wet squib of a reveal. Having the character be silent and of mysterious identity wasn’t interesting, and finding out who it was wasn’t interesting.

I also found it deeply dissatisfying how the game ends. I guess this gets into spoiler territory again, so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you need to. On a micro-level, the post-credits scene shows a future astronaut finding the spot where your character dies at the end, implying that you solved the problems on Earth by repairing the big energy laser. But the big energy laser had been running for years and humanity had not got its shit together to halt or reverse the intense environmental disaster befalling our planet. Nothing suggests a lesson learned, a long-term improvement. So, you’ve solved the immediate energy crisis, but for what?? Humanity to continue polluting the planet and making it increasingly unliveable? Getting energy from the moon will not halt or fix the extreme desertification described at the beginning of the game. It’s enough to make me wonder if I didn’t get it somehow??

I feel like this game had all the ingredients to make a cake. It had a sack of flour and a carton of eggs, and all the rest of it. But it didn’t measure them out or mix them up or preheat the oven. It just dumped a bit of each in a pan and cooked it for a bit, and tried to present the sad, flat mess as a cake.

OK, I’ve done a lot of complaining despite saying I think the game is fine, so what did I like about it? I enjoyed its ambition and scale. Some of the external shots, especially, do a great job of portraying the world that has been built to contain this story. I love existing in a well-realised world, especially a sci-fi space one like this. I love the broad arcs of the story – go to an abandoned space base on the moon to try and save the world.

I don’t think I’ll be replaying Deliver Us the Moon, and I’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone, but I feel like a bit of an outlier in this instance. It has received a lot of praise and a lot of love, particularly from audiences, with a ‘Very Positive’ average on Steam. I guess I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone, but I wouldn’t warn them off it, either. At least I wasn’t bored.

• Game: Deliver Us the Moon

• Developer: KeokeN Interactive

• Publisher: Wired Productions

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox

• Time to complete: 6 hours

Sayonara Wild Hearts is the experience of heartbreak as a 20-year-old. Everything is bright, loud, coming at you faster than you think you’ll be able to handle. And then suddenly you realise that this can be done, actually. It isn’t too much, it’s exactly as much as you can cope with.

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I suppose, more concretely, it’s a rhythm action game that can be played through in less than two hours for the main story. You zoom inexorably forward, dodging, weaving, spinning, taking leaps of faith. The neon colours bring the distinct and arresting environments into sharp relief, giving everything a certain quality - something like a cross between a dream and a rave.

If I had to describe Sayonara Wild Hearts in one word, it would be extremely easy and obvious to say ‘stylish’, because that’s what the game wears on its sleeve. The designers knew exactly what they were trying to achieve with the visuals, and they did it with aplomb. Its every element is coordinated and cohesive. You can feel how stylish this game is in your chest, like a heavy bassline.

It has become a bit of a trend, especially in indie games, to do away with cutscenes and trailers, and create everything within the game engine. It’s an effective way of bringing players into the story – everything is consistent and you aren’t jerked out of the experience by two drastically divergent styles. Simogo has taken this a step further by making Sayonara Wild Hearts feel like a trailer from start to finish.

It’s fast paced, exuberant, colourful. Every moment feels pulse-pounding. An action film shows off its most exciting and impressive stunts in the trailer – any second of Sayonara Wild Hearts, plucked from any point in the game, is exciting.

You might be zipping along a road when it suddenly has delusions of grandeur and does a loop-de-loop. Giant robotic wolves rear up out of the woods, firing missiles at you. Neon geometric tarot cards carry you along an abstract tunnel.

Regardless of how ethereal and singular, the (wild) heart of the rhythm game is its soundtrack, and as well as this game does in other areas, its strongest part is the incredible audio. The story of Sayonara Wild Hearts is one of heartbreak, though deeply open to interpretation. There are no concrete answers, only the intoxicating turmoil created by the combination of the soundtrack, which, while varied, is steeped in emotion down to the last note, and the visuals, which are striking and impactful.

The soundtrack is of the sort that could transcend its origins as a video game soundtrack. It would surely find a following on its own merits amongst the fans of Chvrches, Tegan & Sara, and other synthpop and hyperpop offerings. When I closed the game and opened a new document to begin writing this review, I also opened Spotify and put the soundtrack on immediately. In fact, when it ended and Spotify auto-played something similar, it gave me a Chvrches track.

It also does many other smart and sophisticated things that really elevate the experience to one that I am sure I will revisit time and again. There’s very little punishment for failure; you just instantly respawn at the start of that segment rather than at the beginning of the level. It works extremely well to maintain the breakneck tempo of the game. Returning to the start of the level would be like slamming the brakes on, so the game ensures continued momentum by taking you back just a few seconds. And, if you keep on butchering the same section repeatedly, the game will gently ask if you want to skip this part. Despite getting this option a few times, I persevered through each challenge, so I don’t know how much you skip when choosing this option.

Sayonara Wild Hearts has a lot of ideas, which it is not afraid to try out. However, they never outstay their welcome. Appearing for a level, or perhaps just a section of one, each new challenge, whether it be side-scrolling or parallel dimensions, appears only once. The developers clearly trusted that players would get what they were doing and didn’t feel compelled to overegg the pudding with novelty. There is no aspect of the game that treads on its own toes.

The story told across these propulsive experiences is somewhat metaphorical and could, undoubtedly, be interpreted in multiple ways. For me, it was the story of a girl whose heart is broken and the journey of anger, doubt, confusion, and finally, healing that goes along with that. It is told in a deeply untraditional way that could only be achieved through video games.

Hopefully this has been clear, but I think it’s worth stating outright: I absolutely loved this game. Despite being unmusical at a bone-deep level, I have a fondness for rhythm games, and this hit the spot. I love how it looked, how it sounded, how it made me feel.

Long after the story has faded and the soundtrack is a memory, what will stick with me is the emotional weight this game carried. Every single aspect came together to wow me, to exhilarate and take my breath away, to soaring highs and gliding lows. Very few pieces of media have the same degree of vision and resulting precise execution as Sayonara Wild Hearts. In 90 minutes, it has turned me into a lifelong champion of its vivid neon.

• Game: Sayonara Wild Hearts

• Developer: Simogo

• Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS

• Time to complete: 90 mins (though I did not count the challenges, etc. in this time, just the main story)

Hey folks, Ali here :) I am working my way through my backlog of games for QuickPlay and haven’t been able to secure any new ones from publishers recently. If you could consider subscribing or kicking a few bucks my way over at Ko-fi it would be hugely appreciated and will help me get some newer games to cover.

Hope you’re all enjoying the summer (or the winter if you’re reading from the southern hemisphere!)!

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I am going to spoil Portal – you have been warned, but you’ve also had 17 years to play it. If you haven’t played it, please stop wasting your time on my website and play it. If nothing else, I would be fascinated to know how it feels to play it for the first time now.

For anyone who doesn’t already possess an intimate familiarity with the game Portal, it’s a short (easily completable in four hours) game wherein you have a portal gun. You go in the blue one and come out the orange one, or vice versa, and through this you solve a variety of puzzles.

The ‘test chambers’ that comprise the levels in Portal are white, sterile, and clinical. There is no sign of any other person at the Aperture Science testing facility, apart from the disembodied voice of GlaDOS, an all-seeing robot who offers helpful advice such as "If you become lightheaded from thirst, feel free to pass out.”

The combination of the empty rooms, echoing solitude, and weird AI lady achieves a deeply immersive, unsettling atmosphere extremely frugally. The one-way windows in some of the rooms only add to the sense of unease. When you start to discover messages left behind by a previous test subject hidden behind wall panels, Portal does a very good impression of a horror game.

Test chambers 1-16 or so are quick to solve, but the last few really open up to provide some more challenging puzzles. Even so, none of the game’s levels are particularly difficult – I am notoriously bad at puzzles (as documented extensively on this website) and still only took an average length of time on the game.

When it emerges that GlaDOS’s promises of cake were somewhat exaggerated and you make a daring escape outside the bounds of the test chambers, the environments change drastically. The first hour of the game, spent in the dispassionate rooms with the same padded lift between each one, is extremely iconic and extremely recognisable – but for me, it’s the latter half of the game, spent amongst offices and pipes and dilapidated rooms of pipes that remain the most memorable. I found these environments transportive, returning me to playing this game for the first time. They are also creepy and ominous, dotted about with markings directing you towards the exit (daubed in red – paint, or something more sinister?).

Portal is more devious than you thought, and betrayal is layered atop betrayal. Not only was GlaDOS lying about the cake, but your secret unseen guide was not leading you towards the exit, but instead to GlaDOS’s throne room, where she is mounted intimidatingly above you.

The boss fight is fairly typical – figure out the thing to do and do it three times. It was intuitive and not too challenging, and rather than trying to introduce any combat elements, you are using the mechanics the game has taught you over the runtime. Use portals to take a thing from where it is to where you want it to be.

Then, at the end, the iconic song. At once funny and threatening, with its promise of retribution, Still Alive is just such a peak of nerd-dom.

Portal came out in 2007, when I was 17. It was one of the first games I remember being aware of before its release, and excited to check out. I played it at my sixth form boyfriend’s house (I didn’t have broadband or a Steam account) immediately after him, and the speed at which it entered our lexicon as a cultural touchpoint was (and remains) unmatched.

I’m struggling to put into words (not a good look for a writer) just how vast the effect Portal had on the world. “The cake is a lie” became something people said to each other to test the waters – “do we understand each other?” it meant. Weighted Companion Cubes became the must-have accessory (I’m still sad I never had a big plushie one). My brother received a Portal cake at a subsequent birthday.

Replaying it for this review felt like when I watched Jurassic Park for the first time when I was about 29, but more of a remembering than a discovering. Every line GlaDOS came out with was familiar to me, not because I have that good a memory to know it from my first playthrough, but because these words are part of culture now. I was concerned that it would feel tired in 2025 – I am especially prone to becoming disenchanted with old games – but it really still shone. Even the humour, which I do think can be hit and miss, still really works.

I firmly believe that everyone should play Portal. If you haven’t played it, doing so will contextualise so much culture, and if you don’t like it, a) it only lasts a couple of hours, so no worries, and b) don’t tell me, just keep that to yourself.

It was so fun to go back and revisit this all-time classic. I’d love to hear about your experiences with the game, so leave me a comment below.

Somehow, despite having this game in my Steam library since shortly after its release in 2017, I’ve never played it and have never been spoiled on it, which is great stuff. I’d strongly recommend going and playing the game before reading this if you haven’t – it’s only 2.5 hours. I’ll wait.

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Okay, so, What Remains of Edith Finch. First things first, it’s beautiful. Even so many years after its release, it still looks fantastic. As well as the story vignettes that make up most of the game, it also leans really hard into the environmental storytelling. It was a pleasure to look around and be in the world.

You play as a child returning to the home your mother grew up in…but actually you play as that child’s mother going back to the house for the first time since leaving…but actually you play as a variety of family members as they meet their untimely ends. It’s tricky to pick apart the different layers of player character but it is worth doing, because it adds to the overall tapestry of the game, which I’ll get to.

Edith Finch’s family is cursed. Or at least, that’s what Edie (Edith Sr.) wants everyone to believe. Starting with Odin, the family’s grandsire, who, in an attempt to escape the curse, put his house on a boat and sailed to Orcas Island from Norway. The boat and Odin sank just offshore, but Edie and her husband, Sven, made it to land.

From there, they began the construction of the new Finch home, starting, of course, with the graveyard. Yeah, weird choice. But the house sprouts up over time, starting as something fairly normal and then protruding oddly as more rooms are added when space is needed, becoming labyrinthine and unsettling in the process. As cliché as it is to say ‘the house feels like the other main character’, in What Remains of Edith Finch, the house certainly looms large over the whole game. It is full of rooms, empty but for the dead’s furniture and shrines to them, but they are sealed up, forcing the expansion.

The bulk of the gameplay is spent inside short vignettes where Edith discovers the fates of her forebearers, from her siblings to her uncles, up through grandparents and great-grandparents. The game is never particularly honest about what actually happened to each person – a lot is left up to the player to figure out. The blend of fiction and fantasy gives the whole game a dreamlike quality, feeling like you are having death explained to you as a child by a well-meaning but misguided old person.

Molly’s story, the first vignette, is emblematic of that. Locked in her bedroom without supper (perhaps for misbehaving, though we’re never told), Molly scours her room for something to eat. An old carrot from the gerbil cage, a tube of toothpaste, and some berries from a Christmas decoration are all she can find. Things take a strange turn from here - according to the diary entry we are inside of, she transforms into a cat and chases a bird, then an owl to hunt rabbits, a shark to hunt seals, and then into a sea monster to eat a ship’s worth of sailors before crawling up a toilet and closing in on Molly herself.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a game set, ultimately, in our world, so how does a ten-year-old become a cat or a sea monster? Well, she doesn’t. The berries Molly eats are Holly berries, which are poisonous. Presumably, this results in fever and hallucinations before her eventual death. She couldn’t get help because the door was locked.

We can begin to tease out the actual story that underpins the Finch family curse from here. The Finches are not cursed; they are reckless and negligent. It’s much easier as a parent to tell yourself that your family is cursed than to admit that you caused your own child’s death.

Calvin’s death story highlights both of these traits. He dies by swinging all the way around the branch and being thrown off the swing, off a cliff, and into the sea below. In the scene, he has one leg in a plaster cast. Swinging all the way around a swing that is precariously positioned at the edge of a cliff whilst recovering from a broken leg is undoubtedly reckless, but it was also incredibly negligent of the parents to put it there in the first place.

Nowhere is the negligence more exemplified than during Gregory’s death scene. Gregory is left alone in the bath as a one-year-old and drowns. This scene was brutal to play through, and I can’t imagine how it would feel as a parent. The horrible, inexorable knowledge of what’s about to happen comes on immediately, but it’s heightened by the bright colours and crescendoing music.

When you peel apart each of the stories, you can see that this recklessness and negligence are at the heart of almost every death, with a couple of exceptions.

Dawn, Edith’s mum, dies of an illness at just 48. It’s heavily implied that the stress and anxiety of her family’s deterioration caused or exacerbated this. We never learn what happened to Milton. And Lewis’ death scene, possibly the most poignant and certainly the most in-depth of the game, shows us that he ended his own life.

Stuck in the monotony and drudgery of working in a cannery, Lewis began to imagine fantastical things, but if you strip this away to its rawest, he was a man struggling to deal with addiction whose younger brother had gone missing and was presumed dead, and who likely didn’t feel that he could live up to either the expectations his mother (who was a successful teacher and author) had, or to the legacy of the cursed family, who all had interesting and strange things happen to them.

By far the biggest criticism I’ve seen of this game is that it isn’t really a game; there are no choices to be made, you’re just experiencing some fiction. However, I’m inclined to disagree. Games are the only format that can use the environment to tell so much of a story. Films move too fast, books have to spell everything out. In a game, you can stop and really take in the environment in a uniquely patient way.

Through this, we learn that Edie wanted to believe in the curse so badly that she went down a tunnel of conspiracy theories. She longed to be the centre of attention. And she created all the little shrines to the dead Finches. What Remains of Edith Finch spells out very little for the player – the mode of storytelling through a game is vital to get the full experience.

I can’t believe I held off on such an exquisite experience for so long. Don’t be like me, make sure you make the time to play it – it only takes a little over two hours and is worth every minute.

• Game: What Remains of Edith Finch

• Developer: Giant Sparrow

• Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS

• Time to complete: 2.5 hours

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Before I dive into this Mouthwashing review, let me stop you. If you even slightly think you might play it, I would encourage you to go away and come back later, after playing. If psychological horror is your cup of tea, go play the game. I’m not going to spoil much, but I truly believe this game benefits from going in with as little information as possible.

So. Mouthwashing. What a game. It’s a truly horrific way to spend three hours, in the best possible way. Like an onion, there are so many layers which allow players to engage with the game on whatever level they want. Fancy some surface level stranded-in-space horror? Fill your boots. Want to explore the psychological torture of capitalism? Dig a little deeper. And there is more and more that you can find if you look deeper and deeper.

I think Mouthwashing is a brilliant example of a game that really embraces being a game. So much of the horror is interlinked with action or inaction, forcing the player to do things that are deeply unsavoury to put yourself through.

This really stands out right from the very start of the game. The control console blinks green, inviting you to make a small directional shift to the left. You turn to the controls, expecting to do as instructed, but the only option is to steer right. The way Mouthwashing immediately subverts game player agency sets a tone of lack-of-control and a heavy feeling of accountability regarding the bleak state of affairs through the game.

The game also does a fantastic job of ensuring that over time, as you come to understand what has happened in the lead up to and after the crash, you truly hate the player character. As I said, I don’t really want to spoil anything, but the deeper you unpeel the layers of this game, the more you will grow to despise Jimmy.

The way Mouthwashing is constructed, completely out of chronological order, really adds to the experience of going out of your mind. It’s so hard to pin down causality and trace the relationships between crew members. The ship also phases in and out of different states of repair and maintenance and while that helps cement you within a certain timeframe, it does make things feel a bit unravelled.

It would be a disservice to review Mouthwashing without mentioning the incredible low-poly PlayStation 1 era graphics. The characters are so…characterful. Incredibly distinctive with just a splash of weird vibes and uncanny valley in each face. Polle, the mascot of Pony Express, is deeply chilling. It’s boring and played out to describe a location as the other main character, but the space ship The Tulpar is such an incredible environment. The actual space you can explore and occupy is relatively small and contained, but it’s so well put together. The pipes, the screens, the atmosphere.

Some of the sequences really play with the space of the ship, with the cargo hold especially seeming to stretch out into the distance, far larger than physics should allow. You are also frequently placed into familiar hallways that distend and warp into non-Euclidian mazes that wrap around into themselves. So many of the spaces have that liminal quality that is inherently unsettling that you never get a moment of peace during the game.

The music and sound effects are also exceptional in Mouthwashing. The soundscape really contributes to the sense of unreality and unravelling that pervades the game. I use speakers to play games, but I strongly recommend using headphones to shut out the chatter of life and really allow the music and sounds of the game to close in on you and unsettle you as intended.

It isn’t a perfect game, because nothing ever is. There were a couple of instant-reset fail state segments that weren’t clearly explained and wound up being frustrating and for one of them I had to look up what exactly I was meant to be doing, because I thought I was following the directions the game had given me.

All in all, I think Mouthwashing is an incredibly traumatic, deeply nuanced, highly horrible game. I think essays are going to be written about it. There’s so much I could say about what happens and the symbolism and imagery in this game. It’s the kind of game that reaffirms my assertion that games deserve the same kind of deep dive criticism and exploration as books and films. I either had to give a fairly surface level summary, or write a 10,000 word thesis, there was no possible in-between.

If you are a fan of horror in any form, you deserve to treat yourself to the diabolical, heinous spectacle that is Mouthwashing.

• Game: Mouthwashing

• Developer: Wrong Organ

• Publisher: Critical Reflex

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox

• Time to complete: 3 hours

Ali’s Update Corner

Whew, it has been a while. I hope you’re all still out there. The last semester of university somehow really got away from me and I probably did the least amount of gaming in a 4-month span than I ever have before.

I am actively making plans to not let this website suffer during busy periods of my life again. I’ll be spending the summer creating a backlog that I can draw from in pinch points.

Unfortunately, alongside university work I also have to have a part time job because my body demands food and shelter. If you want me to dedicate more time to keeping this blog going, please consider signing up for a paid subscription.

I know my writing is good - this year I won the Student Publication Association’s Best Culture Writer of the Year award - so it’s worth a few bucks a month, right? ;)

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All image credits: Hilltop Studios/tinyBuild/Versus Evil

Lil' Guardsman is a seven-hour game that’s bursting at the seams with heart and humour. For all intents and purposes, it’s a point-and-click adventure game that cribs heavily from Papers, Please, but lightens the tone several degrees and wraps it up in a fantasy setting. Mix in colourful and extremely well-done graphics and deservedly award-winning voice performances, and you’ve got a game that is absolutely worth your time.

When loveable rascal Hamish wants to skive off work at the guard house to go gamble on the Goblinball game, he subs in his 12-year-old daughter, Lilian (aka Lil, aka the eponymous Lil’ guardsman) to go and do his shift for him. A zany set-up to be sure, and the game makes sure you know that it knows how silly it is. The humour is irreverent throughout and if that’s not your cup of tea you will likely bounce off Lil’ Guardsman, but if you do, then the game really stands out as a best-in-class example of it.

The gameplay loop consists of Lil doing shifts at the guard house. You set up your tools with a limited number of energy crystals and either admit or deny entry to the gaggle of applicants, using your tools to determine whether they are who they claim, and whether the Royal Advisors have any rules about their admittance. If you’re not happy with your decision when the results come in, you can rewind to the start of the encounter and change your actions using the handy dandy Chronometer3000. Yes, it’s perfectly safe for a 12-year-old to have a time-control device, why do you ask?

In between shifts, you can travel to different parts of the city and talk to its inhabitants, from Signor Cappello Fantastico, a man on a quest for a hat so fantastic it’ll live up to his old fantastic hat, to Mrs Abernathy, who won’t stop gambling away her pension. Sometimes you’ll encounter the folks you allowed entry to the city, and sometimes, you’ll get embroiled in the factional conflict that’s bringing strife to The Sprawl.

The overarching story is interesting and engaging. Princess Desdemona has run away, right as she is expected to make a political marriage to an heir from one of two nearby nations. Will you do what you can to bring harmony to the city or will you sow malcontent amongst its residents? Lil’ Guardsman manages to make your choices really feel like they matter by returning to them frequently with references or recurring characters. Every time the message popped up letting me know that my actions would have consequences, I felt a thrill – what consequences? What will the Scary Tree Monster do after I tell him he should go into politics? Will the Duchess of Scarborough ever get over the untimely passing of her beloved cat, Sprankles? Will Signor Fantastico ever find a new hat??

Lil’ as a main character is a delight to play. She’s sassy, funny, and has just enough attitude to make her interesting to embody. The relationships between characters are also very well-crafted, particularly the one between Lil’ and her dad Hamish. He’s not winning any Father of the Year awards but he loves Lil’ very much, and she loves him, too. Everyone is interesting and memorable and getting to know them and their stories is a huge part of what makes the game enjoyable. The fact that everyone is voice-acted is icing on the cake – many games with this much writing would not be as ambitious, but Lil’ Guardsman knocks it out of the park, performance-wise, with Jillian Welsh as Lil especially.

I do have some small criticisms about Lil’ Guardsman, but before I get to them I want to underscore a few things. Firstly, if you like what I’ve said so far then you’ll definitely have a great time with the game, niggles aside. Don’t let my minor complaints sway you. I really enjoyed Lil’ Guardsman. Additionally, I don’t really play this kind of point-and-click puzzle game that much. I have a decent time when I do, and pretty much never regret diving in, but I’m more of an action gamer, and I think that skewed my perspective on some things. As with everything on QuickPlay, I am but one little goblin and my points of view and opinions are very personal – take my words with a grain of salt. For Lil’ Guardsman, my criticisms revolve around three things – pacing, gameplay, and story. None of them are drastic but they all tripped me up in small ways.

I think the game’s pacing is a little off – I know that’s not very scientific, but it felt simultaneously like it dragged a bit and simultaneously didn’t let the story breathe. Walking around the areas feels very slow and there are only so many times I can appreciate how well an area has been drawn before I tire of it. Every character you encounter at the guard house has an epilogue after that shift is complete. At first, I thought this was fun, and the writing was excellent, but by the end of the game, I was tempted to start skipping through them because several characters would get two or three pages of text to read about their misadventures. In Papers, Please, there are very few ‘interesting encounters’ dotted through the drudgery of your work day, making them shine all the more brightly. In Lil’ Guardsman, it felt like 75% of the people I encountered were plot-relevant. I know it makes sense to do it this way because you engage much more with each person in this game than in Lucas Pope’s bleak border simulator, but it was a little jarring that everyone had a part to play. I definitely think this could be a plus if you’ve got a different brain than me, which you most certainly do.

Gameplay-wise, I really enjoyed the interrogative, puzzling nature of the guard duties. Following that day’s Royal Writ to make sure the right people are admitted to The Sprawl was a nifty challenge, but there are two main ways it fell down for me. Firstly, you have to add power crystals to your tools before the start of your shift but there’s no way of knowing what you’ll need (I put a crystal in the Bull Whip about four times before deciding I’d never need it) on any given day. It felt entirely like that was down to luck. If I was missing my metal detector on a day I needed it, tough luck. You’re not allowed to pop a crystal in on the fly. Likewise, if you need two squirts of truth potion but only loaded up one, too bad. I found this needlessly frustrating.

My second gameplay gripe is also connected to the tools, tangentially. You’re only allowed to perform three actions on each applicant, and it truly felt to me like there was often no way to know whether I should be using one tool or the other, or just questioning them. The difference between needing the metal detector and the x-ray machine especially seemed like a coinflip situation. There are definitely some instances where you can work out what you need to do, but way more that were just guesswork. This was probably the game’s biggest flaw in my eyes – and I honestly don’t even know if I was just unable to figure it out in some places (I do have a track record of being Bad But Enthusiastic when it comes to puzzle games).

The third and final gripe is about how the gameplay and the story interact. When you choose what to do with an applicant, you get a rating out of four stars (you can only get the fourth star by figuring out the story behind each person through the correct application of your tools). In-game, this is granted by the Royal Advisors, so you get more stars for following their directives. However, that’s a mask over a more traditional “how well did you do this puzzle” grading system, and therein lies the rub. You can’t really exercise Lil’s autonomy to let in the Goblins in the face of a racist doctrine because you get marked down for going against the letter of the law. Of course, you get fined in Papers, Please for the same thing, but having an overall rating for the day can mitigate this – you can still ace the day even with a few indiscretions. In Lil’ Guardsman, you’re graded person by person – there’s a black-and-white right or wrong thing to do which meant that no matter how sympathetic I was to Chuck and the Goblin Liberation Army, I didn’t let them in when I was told not to. Again, maybe this is a me thing, but I think the subtle differences between how these systems have been designed, despite being really similar on the face of it, made me behave differently as a player in a way that I didn’t prefer.

All that aside, I really liked Lil’ Guardsman and I’m glad I played it. It definitely feels like a bit of a sleeper hit that loads more people have played given how much work and love clearly went into it. It’s a diamond in the rough and I will be watching closely to see what the team releases next because I definitely want to see where they go.

• Game: Lil’ Guardsman

• Developer: Hilltop Studios

• Publisher: tinyBuild/Versus Evil

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox

• Time to complete: 7 hours

• Note - I received the key for this game for free to write this review

Ali’s update corner

Hey everyone! Long time no see, I’m sorry! The last two months of 2024 were absolutely brutal for me. I was working, doing university assignments (I feel vindicated for how much time I put into them because I did pretty well last semester), and generally trying to keep my head above water. My mental health was pretty poor during December too for a variety of reasons and I hardly played anything. A lot of this is due to my work situation becoming pretty unstable, so if you can afford to subscribe to this blog or send some funds my way on Ko-fi if you like what I do, I’d be so grateful. I hope you all had a wonderful festive period and are keeping warm during this chilly weather. See you next time, hopefully a bit sooner than the last.

Hidden in my Paradise is a hidden object game with a cute aesthetic and some nifty extra features that make it stand out in a crowded market. When you’re spending the whole game scouring the levels in detail looking for the last thing you need to find, the game has to look good, and HIMP delivery well on that front.

In a huge plus for the game, it can be played entirely with just the mouse. I suffer with recurring wrist issues on my left hand so having something I could play and enjoy whilst resting the troubled hand was great.

The design of the levels and the characters is really cute. The game is populated with a gaggle of little creatures including axolotls (a personal favourite), little bunny-adjacent creatures with luxurious tails, dogs, cats, frogs, and a bunch more too. The design is really appealing and seeing the little critters on swings and in tractors brought a smile to my face.

The environments are also charming. You spend a few levels in each area including a farm, a beach, a city, and a forest. You get to see a lot of them but they don’t get boring – the pace of the progression from place to place is pitched really well.

I think hidden object games can be very cosy when you’re having a nice time and there’s a decent level of challenge to find items, but it’s so easy for them to fall into the camp of frustratingly difficult, and there’s no way of knowing what an individual person will experience as particularly fiendish to find. Luckily, HIMP has a good hint system. It’s not limited in any way and it never makes you feel guilty about using it. Just click on the item you can’t find and the camera will swoop over to its general area so you know where to focus your attention. For me, this is a great balance of actually helping without doing the game for me.

As well as the finding hidden objects part of the game, HIMP levels have two additional features that add to the overall experience really nicely, expanding on the game’s main schtick without being something else entirely.

Each level has four fairies that you can’t see, but you find by spotting a little pink sparkly particle effect. There are also several treasure chests in each level, though the number is not given to the player. When I finished the last level having found every item and every faerie I was certain I’d completed the game, but the achievement for the treasure chests didn’t trigger. I do wish I knew which levels I’d missed them in. I am a bit of a completionist but not enough to go back through every level to find a hidden chest.

The second thing that the game does that I really liked was providing you with little scenes to recreate, positioning certain animals and objects as directed and taking a photo of them. It plays on the hidden object formula well but provides a little extra something to do in each level.

HIMP has something else going for it on top of cute design and interesting spins on the formula though. Through the levels you earn coins and tokens by opening chests and completing objectives. You then use these to unlock items that you can use to create your own hidden object levels in the sandbox level maker. These can then be uploaded and played by others, and you can in turn download levels made by other players so the game can keep going after the official levels are over.

It’s such a simple idea. There’s nothing complex about the level design in the game – it’s intricate in places, and there’s a lot of thought behind them, but it’s totally achievable with some time and thought, and the fact that they have opened it up to players in this way is extremely cool. It’s the kind of thing where if they hadn’t done it, nobody would be mad because it’s a good hidden object game on its own merits, but the fact that they have makes perfect sense and will prolong the enjoyment of the game for many players. Future games in the genre take note!

I firmly believe that games like this – extremely casual, low commitment, gentle, fun – deserve our attention just as much as the big hitter heavy story games do. There’s still to this day a sense of elitism in gaming that makes people think anyone who primarily plays games like this aren’t really gamers or somehow don’t count, but I vehemently disagree with that sentiment. Hidden in my Paradise is as much a game as Baldur’s Gate 3 is, it’s just a different one. And that’s fine. Let people enjoy things even if they are things you don’t like. It’s fine.

• Game: Hidden in my Paradise

• Developer: Ogre Pixel

• Publisher: Ogre Pixel

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch

• Time to complete: 3.5 hours

• Note - I received the key for this game for free to write this review

Farewell North is a profoundly, spectacularly emotional game. Normally if a piece of media makes me cry, I shed a few polite tears, dab my cheeks with a tissue, and move on. Not this game though: Farewell North’s climax had me fully scrunched up face, nose running, eyes red, shuddering breath crying. It’s one of those cases where, just because you can see it coming a mile off doesn’t make it hit less hard. I am going to try and avoid explicit spoilers here aside from in one paragraph that I will flag at the start, but you may be able to guess what happens after reading.

You play as Chesley, a border collie, but the main character of the game is your owner, Cailey. She accompanies you as you make your way on a grand adventure through a world inspired by the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Canoe between skerries and islands to relive Cailey’s memories of growing up in the isolated far north, remember song lyrics, sit on benches, and explore solitude.

Cailey moved away from the highlands as soon as she could, seeking the vibrancy of the mainland and Scotland’s capital. Her mum stayed in the north as a shepherd with Chesley as a working companion. Her mum gets sick, and Cailey returns to the area to keep up the shepherding duties for a month or so, waiting for a recovery that never materialises. After her mum’s death, Cailey has no choice but to take Chesley back to Edinburgh. The game takes place some years after this as Cailey makes one last inevitable trip to say farewell to the north.

Cailey’s world is bleak and dark with all the colour sucked out of the environment. Since going back to university and starting to look more closely at things, I have really become fascinated with how media conveys grief beyond scripts and actions. The desaturated colours and grey palate are really effective at conveying a sense of overwhelming grief, the sort that does make the world drab. Chesley can bring colour back to Cailey’s world, briefly, and so can canoeing. But as beautiful and bright and vibrant as these moments are (usually after reliving a memory), they are temporary – drops of glorious life in an ocean of sadness, colouring just a small wisp of water before being diffused in the gloom. The tenderness of the game highlights how personal a story this must be to Kyle Banks, its creator.

And there are so many moments of tenderness. You as Chesley have to engage with small puzzles and challenges to restore the colour to the islands. Cailey’s memories of her mum, Chesley, life on the islands, herding sheep, canoeing, and more, are all portrayed with care and detail. Farewell North is a beautiful game when the colours bloom. There are some fantastic scenes that abstract things too – as a dog, the swift-moving traffic of the city is just an un-crossable stream of red and yellow lights; Cailey’s friends are faceless strangers who can morph into giant, grabbing hands as you try to sneak past.

As well as this love and exploration, the game also looks at something really familiar to me personally, and that’s what the passage of time does to rural communities. I grew up in a village, in an old sweet shop. The house was weird and wonky and our family had turned rooms into other rooms, and previous families had turned a corner into a kitchen. It was cold, and anyone taller than 5 ft 4 was bound to band their head, but it was home. After my mum moved out (it was too big for a single person and it knew too much, in that way that homes do), it was gutted and turned into three tiny holiday lets – perfect for a seaside village but seeing the photos was like a gut punch. Urban folk will know this too, the phenomenon of a much loved local shop or establishment falling into disrepair or being bought out by glossy businesspeople with MBAs and no heart. Farewell North captures this time and time again. Your childhood home is dilapidated, with a hole in the wall and encroaching ivy. The old Campbell farm, locked off and owned by an energy company. Neglect and the passage of time, always moving forward and leaving so much behind. It’s not the game’s primary focus but it’s another layer of sadness adding texture to an already sad tapestry.

The soundtrack is something special too. Quiet and thoughtful at times, huge and emotive, and reaching an inescapable crescendo at others, it is the perfect accompaniment to the game. The voice acting too is authentic and full of emotion. I don’t know that I’d listen to it separate from the game, but I can’t imagine the game without it.

THIS IS THE PARAGRAPH WITH SPOILERS.

The reason for Cailey’s one-last trip to the islands is a horribly sad one. Dogs are faithful, wonderful companions and their lives are tragically much shorter than our own human ones. Some years after her mum dies and Cailey takes Chesley back to Edinburgh, Chesley follows mum off the mortal coil. Cailey is taking him back to all his favourite places, to eventually spread his ashes where his true home was. They visit mum’s grave, they climb mountains, they canoe together. She says that it feels like losing her mum all over again. Anyone who has been in this position, where a truly beloved pet is the last link to a person who meant so much, will understand this precarity. The joy of love and the pain of revisited endings. This game is an absolutely beautiful, poignant, devastating, heart-aching exploration of that experience. There is simply nothing else like it. No, you’re crying onto your keyboard.

OK NO MORE SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT.

Games can encourage us to reflect on our own worlds, but they can also tell us the stories of others, people who have lived differently from us. They can also bring us together with deeply felt, universal emotions – almost everyone will eventually feel the loss of a parent. That experience is beyond language. Of course, every individual experience is unique and people grieve and experience grief in different ways, but Farewell North takes a common experience and treats it with care as it presents it to the player; “it feels like your world is ending, and that’s okay. It’s not strange to feel like that, here are your emotions, your pain and sadness and crushing darkness represented in a video game. Your despair is valid and understood and seen.”

Farewell North was made by a tiny team, so the only real issues I faced can be forgiven easily. There were a few glitches and bugs here and there but nothing so frustrating that I was mad about it. My main criticism is even about something where I can see the logic behind how they did it – to get from island to island you have to canoe, and the controls are very fiddly. I even turned on the simplified mode and found the navigation quite annoying and it really slowed the pace of the game. Of course, the tricky rhythmic controls can be said to connect the player more directly to the experience of paddling a canoe, and they did give you a way to make it easier. The pacing too – I think it’s an easy argument to make that everyone should take a little bit of time and just connect to their bodies and movements and what they are doing, and to take slower moments of peace and serenity in between the more intense ones. I can see where the game was going. But the slowness and fiddlyness of the canoeing meant that there were a few optional islands I skipped, which was a shame because the ones I did go to were worth seeing.

All in all, Farewell North is a game about some pretty universal experiences that won’t appeal to everyone because not everyone wants their video games to induce multiple episodes of sobbing. However, anyone who is keen for a more emotional journey, particularly anyone who feels alone in their grief and wants to be seen and acknowledged by someone else, should absolutely give it a go. It is so terribly sad, but there are moments of joy to be found, and the sadness serves a purpose rather than just being tragic for the sake of it.

• Game: Farewell North

• Developer: Kyle Banks

• Publisher: Mooneye Studios

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox

• Time to complete: 5.5 hours

• Note - I received the key for this game for free to write this review

The ‘Ali Updates’ Section

Hey folks, thanks for your patience on this. I wanted to get it out much sooner but it has been tough. I started back at university in early September and I’ve been working as much as I can because we have a leaking roof and no money to fix it with. Unfortunately, because I don’t make any money from this project (well, shout out to my two paid subscribers) it can’t take priority over work that does pay. If you enjoy it and want me to keep doing it and would like to see me devote a bit more time to it, please consider subscribing for even a few bucks a month, it helps out so much. But for the time being, updates will be slower than I’d like them to be - I hope you can be patient.

The story of how I came to review Paper Trail is an interesting one. I’d seen some stuff about it during the last Wholesome Direct, and while the game looks absolutely gorgeous, I have so many games on my list right now that I’m trying not to add any to it, so I didn’t really take note. One of those “I’ll probably get to this next year” kind of things. My list is so long, pals.

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I might write in more detail about the precise events that led to this review in a separate article (I don’t want to shine a light on this at the expense of highlighting the actual game), but essentially, it got review bombed from an 8.0 to a 5.4 which really ground my gears. So here we are.

Paper Trail is a puzzle game with a really neat premise and some of the most beautiful and charming art I’ve seen in ages. In the game, you are guiding Paige on her journey to university to study astrophysics by folding the screens at the corners or sides to create paths. There are nine chapters and each one has a slight variation on this folding theme. Early in the game, there will just be one square piece of paper to fold to guide Paige along but as the game progresses, there will be more pieces of paper in a puzzle, in different shapes, and with different mechanics.

The chapters are relatively short so there’s never an opportunity for a new mechanic to really outstay its welcome, and the difficulty can only ever escalate to a point before you move on to a new area and things get a little simpler again while they introduce a new mechanic. There was a point early on when I did feel a creeping sense of dread that the complexity of the puzzles was going to climb to dizzying heights, leaving me on the ground and confused, and it did do that, but that’s because I am bad at puzzle games, not because it got disproportionately more difficult.

There’s so much about Paper Trail that I wanted to love but that’s the truth of it, y’all. I’m really really bad at whatever kind of lateral thinking is required to be good at or derive any sense of satisfaction from these puzzles. I really want to underline the fact that this is a me problem, not the game. I can see how they are meant to be satisfying to solve, my brain just seems to lack that satisfaction trigger.

If you look the game up and read some of the genuine reviews (not the ones from the anti-woke brigade) one of the chief complaints is that there is an extremely accessible hint button that people found it hard not to lean on when they became even slightly stuck, which undermines the point of a puzzle game (to get stuck and then figure out the answer). I too, leaned heavily on this button, which told you which folds to make and in what order. However, I frequently had to look up a YouTube guide for help because the in-game hint button doesn’t show you where to move Paige and all the objects required to solve the puzzles, just the folds needed. So it managed to make the game too easy for some people but didn’t provide enough guidance for the true idiots like me.

Again, this is a me problem. I think I am broadly speaking worse at these kinds of puzzles than the average person who would buy this game. I kind of realised a few things while playing Paper Trail. Firstly, I desperately want to be the kind of person who plays and loves puzzle games, who can look at something abstract and solve it. I want to get that “aha moment” and feel briefly smug and then humbled by the next, even more complex puzzle. But I just don’t think I am! I really very much want to be, and I know part of this is that my closest friends are all exceptionally clever people and I feel constantly outclassed by them. It really feels like in order to fit in with these incredible people, I should be a puzzle solver, a smart thinker of some kind. As with many things in this review, this is a me problem. They have never made me feel inferior or like I am not smart enough to be friends with them. I get frustrated too quickly, I can’t change how I think about something, and I can never figure out the points when I am allowed, nay expected, to think outside the pre-existing rules a game has set for me. I have seen some of the later levels of Baba Is You (I only ever got to the second area) and I cannot imagine how anyone can come to the conclusions that the game demands of you. Not only can I not solve the puzzles, I can’t even imagine how they can be solvable. I think I am the sort of person who plays and loves puzzle games. But that’s not really true – I want to be this kind of person but I’m not. And yet I keep trying – this is not a new revelation to me! I have always lacked patience and been easily frustrated, and yet I keep buying puzzle games.

All that being said, I don’t actually think it’s all puzzle games that are a problem for me. I like a certain degree of logical deduction. I really enjoyed The Case of the Golden Idol even though that game also made me feel very out of my depth. It’s not even that I want to be able to brute force answers, which you can’t realistically do in Paper Trail because there are so many permutations of folding and moving Paige. I really don’t think I’ve learned anything from this, to be quite honest with you. I am still going to keep trying out new puzzle games, not least because I am always so impressed with the cool mechanics that puzzle games include. I think the mechanics behind Paper Trail are really cool and it does a great job of mixing things up as you progress.

I also came to realise how much weight the art and sound design of a game can carry. At about the halfway point, a large part of me reasoned that I had played enough to get a sense of the game and that I could probably write a reasonable thorough review without subjecting myself to three more hours of feeling really stupid. My own brain handily provided two counterarguments to its own request to clock off early though. Firstly, the only game I didn’t finish for this blog was Hotline Miami and while I actually believe quite strongly in the joy of being done with things, I feel a different sense of obligation when reviewing something, particularly when it’s based on how long that thing is. How could I slot it into my directory without a completed playtime? The second argument that was frankly pretty unexpected (even to me, and this conversation was happening inside my own brain), was that I really wanted to see the later areas of the game. It is absolutely gorgeous and has a soundtrack to match, to the point that I wanted to battle through the struggle and see what the later areas looked like. I don’t think my screenshots do justice to just how good this game looks. It is abundantly clear that a lot of love went into the creation of this game.

I will say that one area that the game is somewhat lacking is the story. The overarching plot of “guiding Paige to university” is fine, but it’s intercut with flashbacks to her brother going missing as a child which didn’t really work at all in the cute cartoon art style, and also didn’t really go anywhere! If you’ll forgive me a story spoiler, the game was setting it up for Paige to use her magical paper-turning abilities to locate her missing brother, but it’s later revealed that he drowned. I was absolutely bamboozled by this choice, honestly. It would have made a ton of sense if Paige’s brother went missing in a fold of space-time and she was able to use her abilities and knowledge gained from her journey or her degree to find him, but no. This was so far out of left field to me that I am still reeling.

I don’t actually think the plot is that important in a puzzle game. It’s nice to have the levels linked together by some kind of narrative, and the “Paige is going to university” does that well, but the flashbacks and cutscenes were just unnecessary in my opinion. I don’t know what they were trying to achieve with them in terms of the point they wanted to make, which makes me think they must have missed the mark for me at least.

I think overall anyone who likes puzzle games, doubly so if they also enjoy cute art and beautiful soundtracks, will love Paper Trail. The story doesn’t land for me personally, but I generally rate that as pretty unimportant in a puzzle game like this. The concept behind the puzzles is really cool and not something I’ve seen before, it builds on the core concept with interesting takes for each new area and it never escalates too far in terms of difficulty before you move on to the next challenge. And I’ve learned nothing and will continue to try to play puzzle games.

• Game: Paper Trail

• Developer: Newfangled Games

• Publisher: Newfangled Games

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, Mobile

• Note - I receive the key for this game for free to write this review

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Everyone has something that will affect them emotionally more than other things. For many parents, that thing will be children, or parent-child relationships (which I think is part of why The Last of Us plucked so many heartstrings), for other people it will be situations or events. If you want to get an emotional reaction out of me, separate some friends or put an animal in some peril. So, naturally, Stray occupies a very special place in my heart.

Stray is almost too good at eliciting an emotional reaction at the start and at the end of the game – there are two particular moments that make me cry with a 100% guarantee, though I won’t talk about the one at the end, for fear that you might not yet have played it. Most of you will know at the very least that Stray is the cat game. You are a little orange cat with black tufts and stripes, kinda like a tiny tiger, with a pink nose and toes. The game has a dedicated button to meow, which I pressed constantly (sometimes to my detriment as there are occasional stealth sections) and joyfully. Well, your little cat has some cat friends, and the first few minutes of introduction and tutorial has you and your friends (is it a pack when it’s cats??) traversing a world that is clearly long abandoned. Suddenly, a pipe breaks and you slip, away from your friends and down into the dark, dank city. When you come to, you can hear the frantic cries of the other cats as you limp forward, your back leg clearly injured from the tumble. When I tell you that I sobbed, I am not exaggerating. I’m teary-eyed just thinking about it.

The game leads you around by your emotions as if they were they were reins. It is extremely effective in creating emotional connections through the game, even to characters we only spend short periods of time with. But B-12 is the robot buddy you meet at the beginning of the game and for me at least, I found myself becoming very attached to them. There’s a scene at one point in the game where B-12 realises that their family is long dead and they might be the only remaining human (they are a human’s consciousness uploaded to a cute little drone). This naturally weighs pretty heavily on them, and they retreat into themselves for a short period of time. B-12 is the medium through which you interact with the game. As a cat, you can’t understand what the Companions (the game’s robot inhabitants) are saying, you need B-12 to translate, and you need them to access your inventory (you’re a cat, you don’t have pockets). So your pal’s emotional distress has a direct impact on your ability to engage with the world, and I found this to be a clever device by which the game makes you feel extremely alien and extremely dependent on B-12. I don’t want to read too deeply into a very short section of the game, but it echoed a lot of familiar emotions I’ve experienced in my life, too. The way it can feel when someone you care deeply about is going through something and you are utterly incapable of helping – in Stray, it’s worse because you’re a cat and B-12 is a drone and you can’t provide a comforting hug when they might need it.

I think on first look, many people would be inclined to describe Stray as a puzzle platformer, but I think it’s actually much more of a straight-up story-driven action-adventure game. You do do some platforming, but it’s not freeform at all, you can’t just leap to wherever you like. The developers have mapped out every “jumpable” surface in the game and you can only go where you’re allowed. There are rarely any puzzles to solve, and certainly no platforming puzzles – there’s usually just one direction to go, one ledge to get to next, then the next, and so on. I think this is fine, personally, but worth mentioning in case any of you haven’t played yet. For me, this didn’t detract from the experience at all – in fact, I think it was a deliberate decision made by the developers, because it allows them to more tightly control the camera angles through which you see certain sights, and it’s extremely worthwhile. I took approximately eleventy billion screenshots of Stray because there are so many moments that are composed like shots from a movie. The game is absolutely gorgeous. I could go on and on about how the environments are some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game and how the characters show an incredible amount of personality and emotion given that they are robots. I could go on about how unbearably cute the cat protagonist is and how beautifully rendered the plants are. It’s stunning. There are moments where you can direct the cat to curl up and go to sleep, and in a few of these the camera will slowly zoom out to show a huge shot of the environment and it’s so clever and they are so beautiful. Phenomenal.

I also utterly adore the way the game uses diegetic means of directing the player around, from signs with arrows on them to dark areas with a single point of light drawing you forward. There are no quest markers in Stray so you have to be able to navigate the world on its own merits, and you can. This is another part of it not being a puzzle game. It allows the developers to use these in-game methods, some subtle and some less so, to direct you around. It also means there doesn’t have to be yellow gamer paint on every surface you can jump on (though to be clear I am actually a pro-yellow-paint gamer in almost every case).

The cat feels so very cat-like, too. Curling up to sleep, tripping people up, leaving a trail of painty paw prints, knocking things off tables. The game absolutely delights in you performing these actions. When you shove your little head into a paper bag and get it stuck, the controls get inverted – a tiny but impactful touch. When B-12 puts a little backpack on you, the cat reacts exactly like my cat did when we put a little onesie on her to stop her over-grooming – she went absolutely stiff and still and just toppled over sideways as though paralyzed. I laughed out loud.

I might be about to get a little bit philosophy 101 on you here, and you’ll have to bear with me because it feels like I am the wrong person to be having and exploring these thoughts. I wish someone more educated was doing this but sadly, this is my blog and thus my task to write. I’ve picked the thread loose, someone else might be better placed to unwind the sweater, so to speak. Anyway, we try.

So in Stray, the player character is a cat. You direct the cat around and meow and scratch the carpet, and it’s lovely. You might get lulled into the natural next thought which is, I am interacting with the world as a cat, or like a cat would. However, I don’t think this is actually the case. We’re doing cat things, performing cat actions, but we are still people at the end of the day. I believe this is referred to as the mind-body problem and relates to the relationship between thought and consciousness, and I didn’t understand it very clearly. When I was looking around online to try and make these vague wisps of thought coalesce into a blog post, I found some stuff about a paper written in 1974 by philosopher Thomas Hagel called “What is it like to be a bat?”. I didn’t manage to read the paper itself but I read some summaries, and this quote on Wikipedia summarises it nicely: “Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking ‘the bat's point of view’, it would still be impossible ‘to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.’” Interacting with the world as a human versus as a bat or (in the case of Stray) a cat, are completely different ballparks. They probably aren’t even both ballparks. We bring a human eye and a human’s understanding and experience of the world to our interactions, even if we are controlling a cat. And besides, even if you, dear reader, were able to truly embody the emotionality and consciousness of the cat in Stray, the developers who made the game were still humans (as far as we know) and are designing the cat’s interactions with the world through that lens.

Well, that’s all well and good, but what does it matter, I hear you cry. You’ll have to keep bearing with me for a little while but I am getting there, I promise. There are no humans in Stray, but there are the Companions. Originally created as simple cleaning robots, hundreds of years without humans have led them to try and fill the void left behind by them. The robots perform ritualistic, human-like behaviours, they water the plants and decorate their homes and have families. They are trying to interact with the world as though they themselves are human, but they run into the same problem that we do when we play the game as a cat. They are not and can never be humans because to be a human and to be a robot are fundamentally different experiences. Please don’t take this as me saying that I don’t deeply love the Companion robots just as much as I would were they humans instead. I am not dismissing or diminishing the very real emotions they clearly feel, the bonds they forge. A heart will appear on their facial display if you nuzzle up to them, and an angry face will take its place when you leap onto their game of mahjong, scattering the pieces.

But to be human, to be robot, and to be cat – these are different.

In trying to imagine why any of that matters, the conclusion I reached is that the game wants its players to consider legacy and what that means and whether it matters. Even hundreds of years later the robots emulate and mourn the humans that were there before, despite the fact that the humans fled the city and sealed the Companions inside to fend for themselves. What do we leave behind us when we’re gone? I think these ideas all come together here – Stray is trying to imagine and depict a post-human future but through the lens of humanity.

That is until we get to the game’s “bad guys”, a highly evolved bacteria designed for eating rubbish. Zurks resemble head crabs with big, glowing yellow eyes, and they will straight-up murder you. As we descend into the areas more heavily infested, like the sewers, we start to see something truly post-human, something unimagined and alien, but unequivocally the baddies. I won’t spoil the surprise but believe me when I say that it is in sharp relief next to the neatly decorated homes of the Companions.

I don’t really have a good way to tie up those thoughts on the nature of consciousness and legacy. I certainly didn’t expect a 7-hour game where there’s a dedicated meow button to stir up such complex thoughts. It’s truly one of the most beautiful things about video games to me, their ability to convey such complex and challenging ideas and themes through something so cute and fun.

I truly think everyone should play Stray. It made me cry, it made me laugh. It made me think. There is fairly conclusive evidence that it ends extremely hopefully (this short YouTube video explains why it’s likely the orange cat was reunited with its pack). The nature of how we engage with the world, and the nature of legacy and a post-human world are topics worth thinking about. Or just lay on a pillow and hammer the meow button. Get you a game that can do both.

• Game: Stray

• Developer: BlueTwelve Studios

• Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

• Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S, Nintendo Switch (coming later this year)

Quick Play is fully self-funded and reader-supported, so any encouragement or contributions are most welcome. Subscribe on Substack or donate on Ko-fi. Thank you.

Gone Home is a classic of the “walking sim” genre and has also been the centre (or at least part of) a number of debates, right down to “What even is a video game, and is this one?” It was also in the unenviable position of being a target of the anti-woke brigade of the time (it came out in 2013), the angry tendrils of which became GamerGate just a year or so later.

I think it’s probably impossible to discuss Gone Home, at least how I want to, without spoilers, so consider this your warning. It has been out for over a decade now, so what’s your excuse anyway?

Despite telling a familiar story, Gone Home is a subversion in almost every other significant way. The first main way it subverts expectations is that it is not about the player character. The character you play as is Kaitlin Greenbriar, newly returned from a year abroad, but the story isn’t about you. Your younger sister Sam is the star of the story, with your mum and dad as secondary characters. Your year in Europe doesn’t matter at all – all we learn about that is a handful of postcards scattered across the house, and what we discover about Katie aren’t the things that make you hold a game character in your heart long after the fact.

We pick up as Katie (as she is known to her family) arrives home fresh off her trip to Europe in the summer of 1995. It was a short-notice flight, so her parents aren’t home to greet her – they are away for an anniversary trip. Sam is meant to be there to welcome her home, but you soon discover that the house is empty. In fact, you are greeted by a note on the door from Sam, warning you not to try to find her.

What follows is about two hours of exploring your family’s new home that they moved into while you were away. It’s very much as though the team at The Fulbright Company wanted to make a demo reel of the power of environmental storytelling. There’s no traditional narrative aside from a few diary entries narrated by Sam as you find various items, you’re just expected to piece together what’s going on through the objects in the home. Letters, appointment slips, ticket stubs, receipts – a collage of three lives there for you to piece together.

The story, told briefly, is that when the family moved, Sam had to move to a new high school. The house dad Terry inherited has a reputation in the neighbourhood as the “psycho house” because the elderly uncle from whom they inherited it was not liked societally, and this reputation makes it hard t for Sam to make new friends. Until she meets Lonnie that is.

Lonnie is a “bad influence”. They start an anti-patriarchal Zine, shoplift, smoke, and generally do things that bored teens do. Despite singing in a punk band and being generally a ‘bad girl’, Lonnie plans on joining the army after school. The girls fall in love and when Lonnie is meant to deploy to basic training camp, she can’t do it – she and Sam pack Sam’s car with as much as they can and drive off together into the sunset, to find somewhere just for them.

On the peripherals of the swirling vortex of teenage angst are the parents. Jan and Terry are having problems. Terry’s writing career has been stalled for some time and he’s struggling in his day job. He’s become distant and as a result, Jan is unhappy. She reads intentions into a new colleague that don’t exist, looking to find a new kind of spark, but we learn that her crush is committed to his girlfriend from a wedding invitation on the fridge. The anniversary trip is actually a couple’s counselling retreat as they try to save their failing marriage. There are hints that Terry suffered some horrible trauma at the hands of his uncle as a child.

The root of the conflict in the game is that Sam is a lesbian – her teenage antics are by-the-by really. In a diary entry, she says to Katie “You’ve known, right? I mean, I’ve known since She-Ra.” We discover that whatever sister Katie thinks about Sam’s sexuality, their parents are not happy. They give Sam all the classic lines – “You haven’t met the right boy yet, it’s just a phase.” Sam intones that it’s going to be a very long phase. The parents dictate that Sam can no longer have her bedroom door closed when Lonnie is over. Sam is most upset that they do not respect her enough to know she knows her own mind and heart; surely a relatable feeling to so many.

The main theme of the game is homophobia, both overt and covert. While we never get into the territory of hate crimes and that kind of aggressive bigotry, Gone Home explores the kind of everyday at-home homophobia that queer people have to deal with, day in and day out. “It feels like every minute that I don’t spend with Lonnie, I spend worrying about them finding out about us,” discloses Sam in a diary entry. That kind of life, hiding who you are and understanding the possible ramifications of discovery, will be familiar to many people who went through a fraught period of self-discovery, especially in the 90s.

Sam also discusses the hypocrisy of Lonnie’s plan to join the army in an era of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and her frustration at Lonnie’s laissez-faire attitude in a diary narration. This is, to me, Gone Home’s major failing, and I don’t think it’s even fair to call it that, really. It strives to tell the minutia of someone’s life and existence in this world of societal homophobia, and it does so superbly – my complaint is that I want so much more about this topic, but doing that would make it a different game. Gone Home does what it wants to do exceptionally well – I don’t want to change it; I want other game makers to explore these topics that matter to me.

A key characteristic of any game that earns the sometimes-derisive title of ‘walking simulator’ is that there is no combat. There isn’t anything to fight in Gone Home, you don’t carry a weapon. However, I do think it would be disingenuous to say that there’s no violence in the game. It’s just not the sort of violence we’ve come to expect from games, no blood splatter or bombast. It’s an everyday sort of violence, mundane and insidious, the kind of violence that leads to two teenage girls running away rather than turning to their parents or any authority figures in their lives. The violence of sadness. This isn’t unique to Gone Home, but even more than a decade after its release it remains just as applicable.

It also manages to subvert themes and tropes by masking itself as a horror game. Red hair dye looks like blood, thunder crashes, and the lighting is ominous. But it never follows through on the promise of terror. Whether you think the game ends with hope or sadness (or both), it eschews fear. But I played the game with my heart in my mouth, terrified of what I might find in the attic, terrified of what the outcome of Sam’s parents’ dismissive response to their daughter’s sexuality might be. This story can end in so many ways and while it’s not a horror story, not knowing which ending we’re building up to is scary. It also plays with the kind of inexplicable horror inherent in Katie’s ‘going home’ to a place that is never and will never truly be home to her – her family moved into this big old house when she was away in Europe and now ‘going home’ means going somewhere unfamiliar and alien. Of course, it could be argued that home is family, but the horror is compounded by the fact that none of them are here.

I want to talk about the second of the subversions I mentioned earlier. In the 1940s, Joseph Campbell popularised the theory of the monomyth, aka the Hero’s Journey. This idea suggests that at the heart of storytelling, there is one story wherein the hero of any tale leaves home, faces challenges, and comes home changed. The Lord of the Rings is a good example of this, and Tolkien explores deeply how Frodo will never be the same after his journey. Gone Home flips this on its head and Katie returns home seemingly unchanged to a world that is different to that which she left. What was is unrecoverable not due to the growth of the player character, but due to the very real changes of what she left behind. I don’t have an in-depth understanding of this literary device so this thought feels underdeveloped, but nonetheless worth mentioning. Maybe someone out there can run with this idea.

Gone Home invokes so much emotion in me. I grew up in the aftermath of Section 28 in Wales (I turned 13 the year it was abolished) and didn’t have the words to describe my identity until my 20s – it was even longer until I felt comfortable using them. I guess I was ‘lucky’ that as a bisexual/pansexual, I had mainly straight-passing relationships. But that doesn’t negate how it felt, the confusion and worry, the sense of what might happen if I was discovered. Gone Home brings it all back. It’s really hard to describe it as enjoyable to revisit, but it’s very easy to describe the game as important and to say that it is masterful in what it achieves.

I feel like it would be remiss of me not to mention the weird place Gone Home occupies in the gaming pantheon. It has been on the receiving end of a lot of negative attention, from people decrying it as “not really a game” to people who have no empathy for the experience it is trying to portray. It’s sad that when I went looking for analysis videos on the game, I wasn’t able to find any by queer theorists or even queer gamers – the YouTube feed was dominated by people decrying it as woke propaganda. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but it’s part of the trouble with the gaming industry as a whole – the loudest voices are not always the ones with the most nuanced opinions. If anyone knows of any good videos about Gone Home, please drop them in the comments.

There are a lot of pieces of media that strive to make the person engaging in it experience teenage nostalgia. There’s huge money in making people feel things about their youth. Gone Home does it so effortlessly. Anyone who grew up as a person on the edges of society will be transported. Naturally, it will hit home especially hard for anyone who had to hide who they were as a teen, but I recommend it wholeheartedly to everyone.

• Game: Gone Home

• Developer: The Fullbright Company (now just Fullbright)

• Publisher: The Fullbright Company

• Platforms: PC, mobile, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Her Story is a unique experience as a game and as a piece of storytelling. In essence (though it’s doing it a disservice to describe it as such) the game involves watching seven police interviews (the answers only – we never see or hear the detective or their questions) and piecing together what has happened. The fact that the story has been chopped up into confetti, with 271 pieces lasting from a word or two to a minute of talking, feels extremely believable in the construct of a police database that has metadata consisting of the transcripts, broken down into discrete answers to each question.

It's easy to get a bit breathless about a story that works as confetti, experienced in pieces and out of order, summoned up as responses to a prompt word, but I think doing that distracts from how much effort it must have taken the writer (Sam Barlow) to ensure it all works as a game. Essentially, when you type in a query word the database provides you with a list of video clips that match that search term, but with the restriction that you can only watch the first five of them, and they are ordered chronologically, so if a search term brings up a bunch of results, you can only see the clips that come from the first few interviews. If a theme carries across all seven interviews, you’ll have to dig deeper to see the later clips. As a result, the script is structured extremely cleverly. Knowing that there’s more to know about a topic but that you’ll have to find another way to call up those clips is tantalizing. Barlow had to balance the words used with how he wanted the story to unfold.

When you open the game for the first time, the word “Murder” is entered into the search box, inviting you into its mystery and setting expectations. Naturally, none of the returned clips tells you terribly much about the murder, and none of the clips that actually describe the murder include the word murder (or dead, killed, death, etc. OR the names of the victim or killer). You must find another way to them.

At first, after playing Her Story, I was left a little unsatisfied, but I think that was my own problem to work around. There is no definitive answer to the questions raised by the game, and many hundreds of thousands of words have been written trying to prove this hypothesis or that one. I’m always a little put out initially when I have been denied resolution. However, I think that the fact that there are at least two extremely creditable and supportable outcomes that people believe with equal and opposite fervour is a testament to the game’s storytelling. Just because I might want to know definitively what actually happened, doesn’t mean the game would be improved if it gave me that resolution.

And as much as I say that, the more I think about it and turn things over in my mind, I’m extremely reluctant to choose an answer as the “correct” one because so much of the game’s intrigue is tied up in that dichotomy.

Her Story came out in 2015 but I didn’t play it until this year. I wish I’d played it much sooner. I have a bit of an aversion to hype and the excitement that surrounded Her Story was in many cases a kind of open-mouthed shock that a game could tell a story like that, could have a performance like that, be art like that, in all its ambiguity and aversion to truth. In my high-mindedness, I decided that I didn’t need this one game that critics had found to demonstrate to me that games could be art and tell stories. I was both right and wrong of course, as I’ve come to realise. I can now belatedly understand that Her Story’s success doesn’t diminish what other games have achieved, and now having played it, I can see that the game deserved the excitement and accolades. It’s interesting to see my own growth and development from idiot to slightly-less-idiot. I bet in ten years’ time I’ll think this article awfully shallow and naïve, but it’s what I can do for now and I hope it made you think.

• Game: Her Story

• Developer: Sam Barlow

• Publisher: Sam Barlow

• Platforms: PC, mobile

Garage Sale is an extremely sweet game where you play as young Juniper, allowed to explore town on your own for the first time for the annual Garage Sale Day. At a little over two hours, it felt just long enough to do what I think the developers were trying to do with it.

It treads pretty familiar ground for anyone familiar with the ‘cosy games’ genre – wander around Lettuce Village and talk to the residents. Some of them will need your help with various tasks like recovering lost carrots or soothing a crying baby, which you obligingly assist with.

The characters are a quirky bunch, some nice, some sympathetic, some irritating – so just like any real group of people, really. I think the game is working hard to be extremely approachable and I daresay it would be suitable for children, so nobody has any rough edges, they just pull on loose threads in my brain, evocative of people I know (forgetful guy, irritating gamer preteen, anxious kid, guy who’s weirdly enthusiastic about produce, amongst others).

There were some visitors to the village from nearby Salad City who were all a little heavy-handed in the part they play – to tell you that village life is great by telling you how bad the city is. The Mayor of Salad City has stopped funding public transport in favour of highways, someone has a cough from the city smog. I wouldn’t have had any issue with this if it went anywhere, but there’s nothing to do with this information that’s coming at you from all angles. Another person talks about not knowing his neighbours. I get it, I grew up in a village and now live in one in my 30s, but without anywhere to take it (I will forgive this if they bring out a sequel where you convince the Salad City Mayor to plant some trees or something), it felt needlessly preachy.

The puzzles mainly take the form of ‘this person needs something that fulfils this criterion’ and off you go around Lettuce Village and its garage sales to find the perfect item. One person wants a snack the same colour as the sword of a video game protagonist, so off you go to buy him some cucumber slices. It’s not particularly deep, but that’s fine – I think asking every game to have intricate deep quest lines and really heavy plot is misguided at best. There’s infinite space in the world for games that do anything the developers want to do with them, which is one of my favourite things about being in this space.

Besides, there are a few interesting themes that get touched on. Juniper’s parents have just separated and her mum has moved into a new house; one of the kids doesn’t want to be the seeker in hide and seek because she’s worried she won’t be able to find everyone; one boy is super upset that school is closed and this day isn’t like the other days, and so on. Naturally, with a runtime as short as Garage Sale’s, none of the themes get explored in any more depth beyond the characters and the traits existing, but I think the handling of them really should be applauded. Nobody makes fun of the clearly autistic Charlie for wanting to go to school today, no one insists that because it’s Catherine’s turn to seek then she must seek, Nadia’s moms have cute matching t-shirts. Media like this is taking a vital step towards normalising various marginalised identities, mental illnesses, and life situations. Yeah, other games delve into these issues, unpacking and exploring them with nuance, but media is a huge tapestry, and this kind of inclusion is a crucial step along the path to acceptance.

Overall, Garage Sale is a short narrative experience about the benefits of community and accepting our neighbours, no matter how much they love bugs. It’s gentle and sweet, the characters are well-realised, and it was a peaceful and enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. The art is engaging and really well done and the soundtrack perfectly matches the game.

• Game: Garage Sale

• Developer: Bug Burrow

• Publisher: Bug Burrow

• Platforms: PC

• Note - I receive the key for this game for free to write this review

Still Wakes the Deep is a four-to-five-hour horror experience from developers The Chinese Room (the people behind Dear Esther, amongst titles). On the spectrum of Ubisoft-open-world-collectathon to literally-watching-a-movie, Still Wakes the Deep is definitely on the ‘interactive story experience’ end of things, but it does it confidently and with aplomb.

You play as Cameron “Caz” McLeary, an electrician trying to escape his poor decision-making aboard the Beira D oil rig in the North Sea. Caz and most of the other crew of the Beira are Scottish and the superb voice acting coupled with the intricately detailed environment of the rig make this one of the most atmospheric games I’ve played in a long time. The ‘Scottishness’ of it all is really accurate too. I’ve lived in Scotland for around seven years and the characterisation is extremely authentic, it truly feels like wandering around Glasgow.

My favourite thing about this game is how it utilises both the environment and the monsters to scare the player. Being out at sea, confined and unable to escape is inherently frightening; an oil rig is an unfamiliar setting (to me and probably to most people) laced with fear (you could just! fall into the sea! there’s a huge drill! industrial equipment everywhere! When everything goes tits up, the rig starts breaking down and losing stability, and mere traversal becomes a nightmare. Add onto that the strange monsters who were once your crewmates and the…thing spiralling through the entire rig, and there’s rarely a moment where your death isn’t imminent.

I found the moment-to-moment gameplay paced really nicely, which is important for a horror game in my opinion. A few minutes of stressful, vertigo-inducing traversal, scrambling around over catwalks made even more perilous and makeshift ladders as the rig disintegrates, followed by heart-stopping chase sequences with a Chthonic monster talking with your friends’ voice. There’s no let-up, just different kinds of fear – the only breaks are the scant seconds when you get a phone call from another crew member, or the loading screens between areas.

I really loved Caz as a horror game protagonist. So often in these games, the NPCs will say something like “We need to go reset the generator! You’re the player character, you go and do it,” and off you go with little to no pushback over the fact that they get to hide in the safe room and you have to face the danger again and again. But in Still Wakes the Deep, Caz calls people out repeatedly or goes headfirst into peril while someone else goes and does something equally as perilous. There’s a cool segment where an action has to be performed four times, once in each leg of the rig, and you and an NPC take on two each. It’s a relatively small thing but I found that it really made a difference to the believability of the situations. Caz also swears up a storm if you nearly fall off the edge of something or slip off a ladder, which I applaud.

Caz can’t fight, either. He’s good with the leccy but he’s here to escape his brawling. Besides, no punch is stopping whatever those monsters are. It’s a classic but made interesting because Caz is exactly the type of protagonist one might expect to pick up a shotgun and start blasting monsters. However, he has no interest in becoming an action hero – he just wants to get home to his family before Christmas.

Fear isn’t the only string on Still Wakes the Deep’s bow, either. There are some surprisingly emotional, heartfelt scenes between the characters, alongside some memories of Caz’s wife Suze. I was genuinely surprised at how sad some of the scenes were and how effective they were – I think the really excellent voice acting carried a ton of weight here, the performances were exceptional.

Still Wakes the Deep is an extremely linear experience, and it tells its entire story through the game. Being set in a real-time and place means no worldbuilding is required, and as soon as the game’s precipitating event does occur, there’s no time for there to be any notes or tape recorders to get in the way of the game. I found it extremely refreshing that the game let me just be in the game the entire time. I was never looking out for bits of paper or anyone’s discarded diaries – outside the intro, there’s nothing there to find, and as much of a sucker as I am for worldbuilding, I really liked this decision. There are also no collectables at all, which I was extremely on board with. It’s so easy to just put something in because it’s expected. There absolutely could have been collectables. ID cards on dead crewmates, post-it note conversations, trinkets of some kind, but Still Wakes the Deep acknowledges through their omission that it would not be a normal human response to what’s happening to Caz. The game oozes humanity, and let’s face it, if you were faced with an eldritch doom, you wouldn’t be reading the notes in your dead crewmate’s pockets.

If I had to dredge up any criticisms, about Still Wakes the Deep, they are terribly minor things. It leans heavily on genre tropes and while it still does things well enough that it’s not egregious or irritating, it is noticeable. Caz is running away from his problems, the starting point of too many horror stories to count. You receive an internal phone call from someone who can’t possibly be calling. You split the party. There are perhaps two legitimate complaints aside from this. One, the extremely overzealous use of yellow paint to show the player where to go – the stuff is everywhere, and I think it must be because the game can be quite inconsistent in what you can climb/interact with. At one point another character tells you the locked gate can be opened with a solid kick, and I thought we’d be kicking our way through gates left and right, but that’s the only time it ever comes up, despite that exact locked gate being used to funnel the player in the right direction repeatedly. The second complaint is that (and this is personal, really) I didn’t find the tension escalated enough after about the midway point. The monsters didn’t get any worse – once you’ve sneaked past one, the experience doesn’t really change. The environmental terror does keep rising as the rig descends into chaos and collapse, but I’d have loved just a little more from the creatures and your encounters with them.

That being said, Still Wakes the Deep is, in my mind, an instant classic. It will be extremely easy to keep recommending it to horror game fans for a long time from now. The game makes elegant and admirable use of its setting, and the voice acting and character work are really top-of-the-pile. The atmosphere and gameplay work in concert to produce fear, and the story is effective and touching. It also has a Scottish Gaelic language option for the subtitles, which is extremely cool. It really is scary though – not one for the faint of heart.

• Game: Still Wakes the Deep

• Developer: The Chinese Room

• Publisher: Secret Mode

• Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox

• Note - I receive the key for this game for free to write this review

I’ve gone back and forth on how much, if any, of the story it would be okay for me to spoil in this review, and I think I’ve come down on the side of – this game came out in 2016, costs about £15, and only takes 4 hours to complete. If you want to avoid spoilers from 8-year-late reviews, you can. So I will be touching on story elements that are best experienced fresh – if you haven’t, here’s your encouragement to do so.

Firewatch is described by many as a walking simulator, but the more I think about it, the more I think that descriptor is lacking. Like, yes. You do walk around a lot. The whole game is a 3-month long hike. But that’s not really the point. It’s much more of a character experience, that’s where the heart of the game is. There are, by and large, two characters for the entire game. Henry, that’s you, and Delilah, your boss. You never get to meet Delilah, she’s a disembodied voice on your little walkie-talkie radio, but she’s part of the game in the way that someone would be part of your life if they were your only human contact for months on end.

The intro segment to Firewatch is like the writers at Campo Santo sat down and tried to figure out “how much mundane, human sadness can we cram into a three-minute text adventure?” It’s a lot, by the way. You go along with Henry as he meets Julia, courts her, and marries her. You see how plans can be derailed by other plans that seem just as important in the moment – Henry and Julia never have children, their careers get in the way. You hear about how chance doesn’t care what you want. Julia is diagnosed with early onset dementia after a series of truly upsetting to read-about incidents, and despite trying his best, Henry starts to drown under the ocean of responsibility. Julia’s parents whisk her away to Melbourne and Henry too escapes Boulder for the Shoshone National Park in Wyoming – escapes the home that was supposed to keep his family safe, the guilt that he could not care for her, the empty hole shaped like his wife.

It’s on this upsetting, sobering foundation that the whole game is built. Several times the dialogue options in-game give you the chance to acknowledge the truth hanging over you – “I shouldn’t be here,” says Henry. And you agree with him, how can you not? But it isn’t that simple. The game slowly, uncomfortably unpicks this – Henry knows he should be there, in Melbourne, with his dying wife. But he grapples with the pain of what they have lost, that she won’t recognise him. You know what the right thing to do is, but it’s impossible not to both empathise and sympathise with why Henry is doing the wrong thing. The question of what the player would do in the given circumstances never comes up – this is Henry’s story and this is a choice he has made.

This makes him a really interesting protagonist. Flawed, like the most fascinating ones are, and deeply, inescapably human. The two sides of the coin he’s holding are clearly visible. Characters in a lot of RPGs are a product of the choices made by the player (choices range between nice, nasty, sarcastic, and silent), or they are blank slates so players can project themselves into the world. Playing a defined character (in this case Henry, but maybe Aloy from Horizon: Zero Dawn, or Miles Morales in Spider-Man) is a very interesting part of gaming. They sit at an intersection that movies can’t reach, and that books can go deeper with inner monologues and internal worlds. Games put you inside a character in a very active way: you are performing the actions, making them speech choices, interacting with the world. It’s a very special medium.

One of the most interesting parts of this kind of characterisation is dialogue choices. You make a lot of dialogue choices in Firewatch, and while they will result in Worried Henry, or Funny Henry, or Quiet Henry, they are still all unmistakably Henry. It echoes real life in this way. You might have several things you could say in response to something, but you pick one and the conversation flows from there, like a river.

I think, having played it twice now, that Firewatch is a game about avoidance and the different ways that can resolve, or not. Henry’s avoidance of the life that won’t do what he wants leads him to Wyoming. Delilah repeatedly avoids, or talks about avoiding responsibility, resulting in tragedy. She tells the police that no one has seen the missing teenage girls (that Henry has most certainly seen) so she doesn’t have to deal with the fallout, she deflects questions about her personal life like she’s parrying swords, and she never told anyone about Brian Goodwin, despite the fact that he shouldn’t have been at the lookout with his dad Ned. She continues this throughout the entire game. She never tells Henry how she feels about him, she doesn’t even stay and face him when they are evacuated at the end of the game.

All these acts of avoidance, deflection, and evasion have their own outcomes. Sometimes it’s fine – the missing girls weren’t missing and Henry won’t get accused of murdering and hiding their bodies in the Shoshone. Sometimes, people are angry or disappointed – you can be either at the end when you learn she didn’t wait like she promised. Sometimes, there are tragic consequences – if Delilah had done her job and reported Brian Goodwin, he might not have died in a climbing accident. Sometimes, even if you run all the way from Colorado to Wyoming you can’t actually avoid the thing you’re running from – when Henry escapes the wildfire, where else can he go but back to the life he left behind?

From start to finish, Firewatch is a thing of beauty in so many ways. The voice acting is absolutely superb – Cissy Jones (Delilah) and Rich Sommer (Henry) work with a very restricted medium where no characters are ever actually shown on screen, but they convey emotion through the walkie talkie that’s more effective than many full acting performances. It would be remiss of me not to mention the art and how the game looks too. I have never been walking through a national park in the Rockies, but I feel like I have, thanks to Firewatch. Because the game takes place at various times of day they can play with colour palettes from bright, vibrant greens to vivid ochre and orange sunsets, to dark and mysterious nights. I took about 100 screenshots for this review where I will probably use three. The score fits perfectly, at times tranquil and gentle, at times urging you on to uncover the truth.

Firewatch is one of the games that drove me to create this blog, along with other favourites like Venba, and What Remains of Edith Finch. I had a lot of thoughts and feelings from revisiting the game, and I’d love to hear what you think about the game and its themes – am I right, or did I miss something glaring?

And before I go – Firewatch was developed by Campo Santo, a studio where Nels Anderson works. At the time of the game’s development, Nels ran a podcast called Terminal 7, about the card game Android: Netrunner. It came to an end in 2018 and was missed by the community at large and me specifically, so it was really neat to find a book in the game referencing the podcast. It made me smile – I’m so rarely on the inside of inside jokes, and this was one that warmed my heart.

Donut County is an extremely silly, deeply irreverent game. Donut County is plagued by errant holes that keep gobbling up plants and buildings and people. You play as the holes.

I hope that brief introduction set the scene for you. Donut Country landed on a fun idea and ran with it. In a Katamari-esque loop, you start by slurping down small items – bits of wood, small potted plants, maybe a squirrel or two. This serves to expand your gaping maw, enabling higher-stakes consumption: a motorbike, a caravan, a whole house. Your neighbours – they didn’t like it very much. There are occasionally nifty little single-level gimmicks; you might have to ingest a fire in order to use hot air to open a trap door in order to consume what’s within. My personal favourite is the level where you guzzle up a pair of rabbits, and the rabbits do what the rabbits do. Your hole becomes a cannon of baby rabbits that you can direct as needed. Superbly silly.

Gameplay this silly calls for a plot of equal silliness magnitudes, and Donut County delivers.  Your best friend, the racoon BK, is operating a donut delivery service with nefarious ulterior motives, causing holes to slurp up the residents of the town. He’s desperate to impress the Trash King, truly stopping at nothing to make a name for himself. It would be nice if I could say that BK learned his lesson and your friendship came out the other side of this trouble stronger and better than ever, but it’s pretty open to interpretation whether he learns anything at all.

The game has an absolute bucketload of charm, too. The characters are all a variety of animals with distinct personalities and stories of how they came to be living at the bottom of BK’s hole, and the writing is good enough that you get a sense of distinct personalities, which is highly enjoyable. The writing also shines in the “Trashopedia”, an in-game encyclopaedia of all the things you hoover up throughout the game. ‘Megaphone – if you swear into this, everyone will know.’ It’s witty, sarcastic, and droll, and I get the sense the writers had a great time putting it together, which shines through. The music and sound effects are great, and the art style is really effective too. Nothing feels out of place in Donut County – except for all the residents, who are at the bottom of a hole.

The developers didn’t ever let anything get in the way of their extremely silly story, and the story always serves to facilitate the gameplay. And I think that is glorious. One of the best things to come out of starting this blog is that I feel freer to play games that are purely for fun. Yeah, games are art. Games can tell beautiful, haunting, sad, uplifting stories. But they can also exist just as a means for you to enjoy yourself. It’s like any form of media – some films are serious, effective, and touching, and some are the Fast and Furious series. I truly suffer from the millennial plague of hustle culture and find it hard to do things that are “just” fun, carrying a lot of unnecessary guilt with me. It’s a habit I need to break out of, and Donut County helped by being extremely enjoyable. I played it first a few years ago but replayed it to write this and was reminded of a lesson that is easy to forget. Adults are notoriously bad at play, so here’s my message to you, dear reader – allow yourself the time to goof off and do something just because it’s fun.

Before I go, I want to say a few things in defence of the word ‘silly’. It can be used as quite the put down – I’m sure your ex is just a silly person (lacks common sense, childish, unserious). However, when I say silly, I think of the times my partner makes a face and we both laugh – yes, it’s unserious, but it’s also joyful and unpretentious and fun. So it’s with that definition in mind that I want you to consider that Donut County is an unapologetically silly game, well worth the two to three hours of your time it will take to play it. Give yourself that much.

• Game: Donut County

• Developer: Ben Esposito

• Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

• Platforms: PC, Switch, Mobile, PlayStation, Xbox

Okay, first things first – this is the CASE of the Golden Idol – if I refer to it as the Curse of the Golden Idol I am terribly sorry, I have just had Covid (hence the slight delay in this issue of Quick Play) and my brain has really struggled with the words. Plus, Curse would be a totally appropriate word in the title in my opinion – nothing good happens to anyone who touches that thing.

Secondly – I am going to try and write this review without giving anything away, spoilers-wise. This game is way better if you go in with no preconceptions and no answers to any of your bubbling questions. The game took me around four and a half hours but I didn’t play the DLC, just the base game.

So, The Curse Case of the Golden Idol. It’s a mystery game where the player takes the role of a detective attempting to figure out what has happened in each scene presented. Many words have already been written comparing it to the Return of the Obra Dinn, and now it’s my turn to add to them. There’s no way to disagree: as much as I do like to try and make my own comparisons, this game truly is in the vein of Return of the Obra Dinn. You look at a static scene and have to answer a batch of questions. After you’ve answered a small section you get confirmation, and that helps you with the rest of the scene.

I really love how Color Gray Games have taken what they liked from Return of the Obra Dinn and turned it into their own game. It doesn’t feel like mimicry or empty copying – The Case of the Golden Idol is to Return of the Obra Dinn what Hollow Knight is to Castlevania. Well, maybe they’re a bit more similar than that but you know what I mean. It just feels like another game in a genre which was revolutionised by Return of the Obra Dinn.

I also think it’s worth saying that while the comparison is inevitable, The Curse Case of the Golden Idol does not suffer for it. We all know the saying “comparison is the thief of joy” but it’s such a useful shorthand to be able to say ‘if you enjoyed X you might like Y’ or even ‘if you disliked this thing about A, you might want to steer clear of B’. I think people get very hung up on certain things when it comes to comparison and inspiration and I am sure there are folks out there who think The Case of the Golden Idol is somehow too similar to Return of the Obra Dinn, and I really have to wonder – do they just play one game per genre and then stop, dismissing hundreds of excellent experiences because they are too much like something that came before? I think people would benefit from considering that when a game takes inspiration from a game you love, it might actually build and improve on the experience, or change it into something new. One of my first favourite games was Thief, but I didn’t dismiss Dishonoured on-sight, and thank god, because that’s also now one of my favourite games because it took something I loved and changed and added to it. Is it better? That’s a false dichotomy – it’s different, and I love them both. So let yourself enjoy things, you might find a new favourite. (I am sure this is the paragraph the editor would cut if I had one – how is this relevant to the game, they’d say in exasperation – but I’d need a lot more subscribers before I could hire an editor! So it stays.)

The gameplay is divided into two parts – exploring and thinking. In the ‘exploring’ screen, you survey a scene (of a death) and gather information – you click on items, various words, and people (helpfully illuminated – you can turn off the shiny prompt but the game strongly recommends you keep it on, lest it become an exercise in pixel hunting) and when you do, they float down into your thought cabinet. When you’ve collected everything, you flick over into ‘thinking’ mode, which is kind of a weird mad-libs-esque puzzle (I think – being Welsh, I’ve never encountered a mad-lib in the wild, but they are pretty common as a cultural reference point) and fill in the blanks. You might need to label the pictures of the characters with the correct names, or label icons on a ritual, but all of the levels have a large block of text where you need to essentially establish the gist of the scene before you.

So listen. I absolutely adore puzzle games and mysteries like this. I like escape rooms and those little grid-based logic puzzles in old puzzle magazines. But reader, here’s a confession: I am fucking garbage at them. And so it was with The Curse of the Golden Idol. I would really like to be able to say, definitively, that all the information you need to solve every puzzle is there, as long as you can use a little deductive reasoning, but I can’t – I used a little bit of trial and error, and then I had to look up some hints for the last two levels. They both required you to pull together threads of information from all across the game to answer some pretty overarching questions, which was unfortunately just beyond me. I had to focus so hard on the puzzles as individual pieces that I never managed to zoom out and get a sense of the story as a whole.

Which is a shame, and a failing on my part as a puzzle solver rather than the game, because when I “solved” the epilogue with the help of an online guide and looked at the story, it was really cool! I was able to appreciate each individual scene at least. I think it’s very easy for games like this to skimp on the story and preference the puzzles but in The Case of the Golden Idol it doesn’t feel like one thing suffers in the aid of the other. You’ve got murder! You’ve got the occult! You’ve got party politics! There is a very limited hint system but I never actually found it to be very useful – it was usually the case that I could solve the puzzles or I was so stumped that the hints provided were insufficient. But I’m glad they tried!

Aesthetically, the game has an incredible sense of itself. It’s really stylized, entirely 2D drawings with small touches of movement added, but it’s extremely effective. As well as the mystery-detective mechanics of Return of the Obra Dinn, it strongly invokes the old-school point-and-click adventure games of the past. The people especially are all horribly gruesome with bulging eyes, hooked noses, and other extremely distinctive features that make it possible to remember them from chapter to chapter.

The score is quite minimal but really effective. It’s ominous, foreboding, and highly atmospheric. I really liked it. I will frequently listen to Spotify when I’m gaming – music if there’s a lot of dialogue or other words to follow, or podcasts if it’s a game like Minecraft or something, but I was so engrossed, I listened to the game music all the way through.

Overall, I highly recommend The Curse Case of the Golden Idol to anyone who enjoys puzzle games, but I will caveat that you absolutely do have to use your brain to solve the puzzles. You’re not just looking to find the right item – you will have to infer, deduce, and generally figure things out. And don’t look anything else up before you dive in.

• Game: The Case of the Golden Idol

• Developer: Color Gray Games

• Publisher: Playstack

• Platforms: PC, Switch