LudoNarraCon gave little ol’ me a press pass, and while I was not able to actively watch along with the show, I made it a point to play all of the demos I received access to until the end of the month. At least, the ones without a full game release yet. Incidentally, I liked a few of the full games I was also given access to so much that I bought them, and maybe someday I’ll write about those too.
A few of these games are ones that I was already waiting for, but I found a lot of lesser-known projects which I became instantly fascinated by. And if I’m someone whose reviews and features you keep up with even occasionally, you’ll know these are the kinds of games that I like to keep an eye on. This was a great opportunity to venture outside my box of comfortability and try some games that I might not have otherwise thought to play. This year’s LudoNarraCon-curated collection of games were mostly delightful, showing off such an abundance of remarkable narratives, art, music, etc. that I started to run out of ways to describe how much I liked them. So, please enjoy my best effort in doing so!
Psychotic Bathtub
D: natsha / P: natsha
A snug little unsettling experience from natsha with beautiful visuals and an honest portrayal of mental illness in a cathartic, sometimes funny kind of way. Each choice matters as they guide you to multiple endings; even this short demo had six of its own. These endings, presented simply, represent the kinds of pitfalls going through these kinds of episodes can entail – self-destruction, escapism, derealization, death, you know, fun stuff! The bright and sketchy art style welcomes you to this visceral portrayal, the straightforward narrative of psychosis, with intentionality and complements the subject matter rather than blunting any of the edges. Obviously I’m not a monolith of mental illness and can only speak for my own experiences with it, but Psychotic Bathtub was a soothing, interesting, relatable demo that has made me excited to get my hands on the full version.
inKonbini
D: Nagai Industries / P: Nagai Industries
I know inKonbini is going to consume however many precious days of my life once it comes out. There’s nothing like the reassuring calm of a routine to get me hooked on any game, and inKonbini is promising in that regard. Also, the graphics remind me of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life; bright and smooth and glowy like a dream.
The demo is brief, it gives you what I’m assuming right now is one encounter (perhaps one per day or a few per day, can’t yet say) where you take some time to set up the store by righting crooked items and stocking shelves. You have some freedom in what goes where and I would take a guess that there are variables in the full release that nudge you in certain ways, like the weather or whatever. This demo also features a customer: an older man who delights in finding a soda he used to drink as a kid and asks for help finding a special food for his cat, who’s been less cuddly as of late. If you’re not diligent enough during the opening setup, he also remarks upon how weird it is to have bread in the fridge.
It’s short and sweet, touching upon the deeper connections we can make with other people in the more ordinary moments. Chances are high that the throughline for inKonbini is something like “finding beauty in the mundane” or “the value of appreciating the short time you get with most people.” I will say, I don’t totally agree with the opening premise: “Some might say that a konbini worker’s life is devoid of any color or variety.” I don’t know about that! And neither does Sayaka Murata. Although, I can say that stumbling into a konbini after catching the last train around midnight and being flooded by those fluorescent lights is, though not devoid of color or variety, a little bit of a spirit-draining experience. Regardless, I eagerly await the full release.
Nirvana Noir
D: Feral Cat Den / P: Fellow Traveller
Wooooaaah shit this game looks so cool. The visuals are always going to be the first thing you see (haha) but these ones really took a swing at me. There’s light, color, sparkles, and graphical layering that gives everything a unique depth of texture. The writing is also very good, being a mixture of urban mysticism and ancap banter; it’s funny and whimsical. The textbox is an active participant in the delivery of humor, and dialogue comes in different forms. Oh wait hold up, I just noticed it’s a sequel to Genesis Noir, so before I say anything more I have to go play that.
Tiny Bookshop
D: neoludic games / P: Skystone Games
Cozy games, I finally understand you, because you understand me. There’s nothing I want more than to put little virtual books on a little virtual shelf and help little virtual people make their little virtual purchases. With a customizable cart and side quests, like icing on the cake. Don’t laugh at me when I say if they don’t come out with a Switch port of Tiny Bookshop, I might have to buy a Steam Deck just to play this in the park on a sunny day with a Dr. Pepper just like god intended.
Compensation Not Guaranteed
D: Team Project Lunch / P: Toge Productions
So far these games are hitting it out of the park with me, but I guess that makes sense. Who am I to deny that another’s carefully curated list of narrative-driven games is exactly what I’m looking for at all times. Compensation Not Guaranteed is yet another Papers, Please style puzzle game, but this time the premise is gentrification, relocation, and the ruthless efficiency of ambitious new governments – under the guise of social welfare, of course. The characters are all animals in an art style that feels a lot like woodcut, with the exaggerated faces and intricate details.
This demo had just enough packed into it to introduce me to the world and leave me wanting more, showing me the vision of transforming an old neighborhood into a bright and shiny new gray block of infrastructure, by offering its current tenants compensation to surrender their homes and relocate. They have no choice, except to be paid or not to be paid, based on the player’s judgment. With the undercurrent of tension between different species, clearly disparate cultural backgrounds, and looming government interference, I’m curious about how this narrative plays out. The ending of the demo implies a direction I genuinely didn’t see coming, and the overall cheeky tone is promising, but I’m eager to see what angles the devs take with the subject matter.
No, I’m not a Human
D: Trioskaz / P: CRITICAL REFLEX
This one was a short demo that covered a few days of the game’s day/night cycle (not much to do during the day unless you’ve taken people into your house, so quicker in the beginning) and it’s super promising. The premise is that the sun is going crazy, human-like creatures are emerging from the ground, and everyone more or less sleeps during the day and scavenges at night. You don’t want to be caught alone in your house, but you also can’t just let anyone in. All of the character designs are unnerving enough as to not be obvious who looks off (with a few notable exceptions) and the hints you get about what to look for can be context sensitive as well. No, I’m not a Human is genuinely creepy and unsettling, with thoughtful mechanics and an outside world I want to know more about.
Very analog horror type shit. Well crafted, well paced, can’t wait to play this in the middle of the day.
A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe
D: Quail Button LLC / P: Quail Button LLC
This one is pretty simple, and I didn’t get too much from the demo. You’re a giraffe trying to avoid social interaction at all costs, almost to an exhaustive degree. If you get caught in the whirling chaos of someone’s small talk, your head explodes. The interesting bit here is the puzzles are aligned with the purpose of avoiding attention from other people, whether that’s distracting them with another person or moving crowds around (cleverly.) It’s safe to say that from the classically ludonarrative angle it actually fits the bill really well, though I don’t know if this one’s for me in terms of a full game experience. It does make me wonder if it has any larger messages about the nature of social anxiety. Obviously, it’s harder to vibe with the premise as someone whose job is emails and can call anyone no problem, but whatever.
Scrabdackle
D: jakefriend / P: Fellow Traveller
Just based on the cover, I didn’t know what to expect – it honestly didn’t look like much. And I mean that like how I would describe my first impression of a book, jacket only, the art and assets didn’t inspire anything particularly exciting in me. However, this is my favorite moment to be wrong! And it’s kind of reflective of my entire experience with doing this LudoNarraCon Demo Playthrough, as it gets me out of that bubble of focusing on the games that look interesting to me at first glance.
Scrabdackle scratches the same part of my brain that 3D Dot Game Heroes did back in the day. Straightforward, kind of cutesy fantasy, with a tile-style map that’s fun to explore. The 8-bit music is bouncy and evocative of old fantasy games, and the sound design is satisfyingly fuzzy. The 2D art is simple but charming, the combat is classic sword-and-magic style, but the writing! It’s quick and witty, and lends a lot of depth to the world. I see that the focus in this game is the story, but it’s nice to see the heart in the rest of it. This is one I don’t want to see fall through the cracks, so I hope it doesn’t. I’ll be playing this when it comes out for sure.
The Berlin Apartment
D: btf / P: btf, ByteRockers’ Games
This demo consists of the same apartment in three time periods: a segment in modern times, where it seems you’re renovating the place which has been run down; a segment during the third reich, where you play as an old Jewish man who’s in the process of fleeing to France, reminiscing on his burned-down cinema; and a segment sometime while the Berlin Wall still stood, close to this apartment, as the player tends to a forest of houseplants and exchanges paper plane messages with someone in an apartment on the other side.
It’s a point-and-click where you play out stories and witness moments during a pretty historically crucial span of time, walking around this apartment connected by memory to a yet unknown end. For example, the demo is mostly spent as the old man, who’s packing up a small suitcase out of a pretty cluttered home, presumably leaving everything else behind. With each piece he picks, and many other objects in the house, he tells a story, or relates a memory, or otherwise describes the significance of it. You can find a camera with a single shot left, take a picture of the home however you see fit, and later find the photo under the floorboards during the modern-times segment. A promise that these different stories come together in more ways down the road.
It’s bright and beautiful, voiced well, and certain to be an emotional journey.
We Harvest Shadows
D: David Wehle / P: David Wehle
Another game I may play as long as it’s in the middle of the day. Actually, let me confess, I asked a friend of mine to watch me play through this demo as soon as the scary painting in the living room changed into a screaming ghostly visage. My threshold for horror games is that I’m kind of like a baby and I have a fear of being chased. And let me tell you, the first time I stayed out too close to sunset and heard those footsteps rushing up behind me, I just froze up.
However! We Harvest Shadows still pulls me in. When it’s not terrifying, it’s actually quite relaxing. The farming sim/open world aspect of it seems pretty fleshed out, and I do kind of want to see what the house and land look like once they’re completely renovated and the player character has made peace with what I can only assume is another dead wife. The environment is beautiful and the music is appropriately serene for a pastoral experience like this. The sound design and visuals are overall very well done, even if they are sometimes used for evil. The relaxing/terrifying contrast here is actually consistent and enjoyable.
A horror farming sim! See, I told you it was out here somewhere. I’ll probably still play it even though it scares the shit out of me.
Building Relationships
D: Tan Ant Games, Tanat Boozayaangool / P: Tan Ant Games
Building Relationships is so goddamn funny. You play as a house on an island looking for love with other sentient dwellings (so far the lighthouse caught my eye the hardest) whose language is familiar without being overblown (i.e. not beating a dead contemporary comedy horse) and the presentation of it all is absurd without being absurd just for the sake of it.
It’s also gorgeously low-poly, the colors and contrast between models are really bright and sharp, the music is groovy, the writing is excellent – the whole package feels nostalgic and unique at the same time; a rare quality. I want to play more of this so, so bad.
Schrödinger’s Call
D: Acrobatic Chirimenjako / P: SHUEISHA GAMES
Schrödinger’s Call is a visual novel in which you play a woman named Mary, who is the last person to speak to souls who cannot move on via a weird phone and a cat who explains to you that the moon crashed into the earth and obliterated everyone on it less than a second ago. I’m pretty sure, at least.
Through these conversations, you make notes about the details of why each soul can’t move on, their previous lives and relationships, prompting them into varying reactions and helping them recall their memory in order to ultimately save them. In the demo, you talk to a mother who lost contact with her son, desperately trying to reach him the moment the moon hit the earth, and you help to resolve her guilt and aimless yearning.
In a game like this, where resolution is achieved through rhetoric, I really look for depth in the conversations themselves, whether the resolution comes about in a way that makes sense, but not too easily as to be unrealistic. With this peek, I get a curiosity but I don’t yet have a confidence that it gets nuanced enough. Time will tell, and it’s an interesting enough premise on its own. Also, these gothic-cartoon visuals blend together in surreal little animations, a nice touch for the overall presentation.
Kill The Clock
D: Happy Slugs / P: Happy Slugs
I’ll be real with you, I’m not the target audience for visual novels. Kill The Clock is visually interesting and clean, even though the UI feels plain; it looks like something I would have seen ten years ago. The story is a murder mystery that evidently has a time-loop element to it, but I found the writing to be flat, nothing out of the ordinary or worth writing home about. You have stats, which modify dice rolls – the pathways through the story, within which there is a fair bit of player agency. There were some particular mechanics, like scrutinizing a suspected lie or finding the true emotion at the heart of a statement, that show a consideration for the slightly-roleplay narrative of it all. The pacing (and I feel this is where I fail to appropriately review many visual novels) was sluggish, but I gave it just enough playtime to be able to tell you honestly that Kill The Clock isn’t really something I’m interested in, but it may be for you!
Battle Suit Aces
D: Trinket Studios / P: Trinket Studios, Outersloth
I’ll put the two I didn’t really like next to each other, how about that? This, as with visual novels, isn’t a genre I seek out too often. Card battler/deckbuilders aren’t really my style, but I do appreciate some of the more RPG elements to Battle Suit Aces (again, this isn’t something I play a lot, I have no idea if that’s generally found amongst other card battlers) like the overmap of the USS Zephyr where you can chat with your crewmates and tend to other Battle Suit needs.
I feel like maybe Inscryption set the bar too high in my mind. Card battlers are great when there’s a strong story behind it, context around the pieces that make up the deck, some kind of compelling end goal in mind. From what I got with the Battle Suit Aces demo, it gave me the same lack of inspiration that Kill The Clock did, which is to say I don’t see much substance nor engaging writing, but also not enough style to get away with it – yet.
Usual June
D: Finji / P: Finji
The visuals here jump out immediately. Smooth, cel-shaded characters and bright environments with high contrast that relate well to what seems to be an urban fantasy/ghostly type of beat. I loved the sound design, from the music to the dialogue, which is that Banjo-Kazooie style mumbling that I adore so much, but with an implacable mixture of languages and other modulating, sometimes robotic touches that give each character a unique sound.
This demo didn’t dive in too deep. You’re thrown into the classic situation of helping a ghost boy find his way home, which also involves pursuing the man who’s preventing him from leaving, and who presumably killed him. This means going into a portal (obviously) and into a cavernous area full of buggy monsters and otherworldly crystals. That sort of thing.
It was fun! The story feels supernatural, strange, charming, very high-schooler-saves-the-day kind of vibes. And the combat is quick, easily challenging, but also satisfying. This was a well-rounded demo for a game that looks like it’ll offer something new to the genre.
Wander Stars
D: Paper Castle Games / P: Fellow Traveller
This! This!! This!!! I loved this.
Wander Stars is a turn-based RPG where you play a young fighter tasked with seeking all the pieces of the Wanderstar map – a map whose pieces will always point to one another – and find a long-lost brother. The combat involves a lot of punching and kicking. You can add adjective modifiers to your moves, like you can Kick, but you can also Super Fire Kick, or call in allies using their move words. You can also impress your opponents and get passive modifiers called Pep Ups, like resistance to certain elemental attacks.
It looks like Dragon Ball and sounds like an anime. You have a buff grandma and become allies with a wolf who’s being pursued by who I can only assume is his edgy yet emotionally conflicted ex-boyfriend. You traverse the world through points on a map, encountering opponents, riches, and other weird little incidents.
The story is some classic treasure-hunting and friend-making and enemy-redeeming type adventure with obvious inspirations, and the writing is charming and well-crafted. This is the kind of game that has a lot of heart on the sleeve, and it feels like one of those games that people end up making when you tell them to make the kind of game they want to play.
These were just some of the games featured in this year’s LudoNarraCon, I highly suggest anyone who has stuck with me to this point go check these demos out, plus the many others I didn’t get to. I have particular shout-outs to 1000xRESIST, Interstate 35, Until Then, Death of the Reprobate, and Judero, just to name a few full releases that really deserve the recognition.
