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.

The post My Modest LudoNarraCon Demo Marathon appeared first on Gamesline.

That’s what a project like Tax Heaven 3000 seems to be drawing attention to: a visual novel parody, by the New York City-based collective MSCHF, that claims it can assist and help you file your taxes through it. Of course, the game immediately garnered buzz for its ridiculous concept on top of the idea that one must provide compromising information to it, and both Steam and itchio have removed it from playability not that long after it was published. MSCHF has a history of doing various one-off marketing campaigns and stunts called “drops”, and claims that they wanted to criticize the US’s tax filing system and specifically point to TurboTax’s misleading and allegedly fraudulent services—which Tax Heaven 3000 itself anthropomorphizes as a character as well.

Ubisoft has developed an AI-writing tool named “Ghostwriter” that they claim hopes to mitigate and optimize some workload off of their writer. Although there is a lot of justifiable cause for concern, especially given Ubisoft’s own track record when it comes to the treatment of their workers, but representatives further clarify that the tool is supposed generate work based on in-house datasets.

CD Projekt has financially written off what is speculated to be a Witcher spinoff.

Atari acquires Nightdive Studios, a developer that was behind remasters for Quake, Doom 64, and the upcoming remake to System Shock.

Although no developer has been officially named, a representative at Paramount Global claims a dark, more mature Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game is in the works. The game will be based on The Last Ronin, set in a futuristic world where only one of the turtles of the titular four has survived and is set with the difficult task of continuing on to finish what must be done.

Valve announces Counter-Strike 2. The game is slated for release in the summer, and intends on hoping to replace Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Today we're excited to announce Counter-Strike 2. Counter-Strike 2 is an overhaul to every system, every piece of content, and every part of the C-S experience. First, let's talk about smoke grenades: pic.twitter.com/iTtguRHJ0S

— CS2 (@CounterStrike) March 22, 2023

Sonic Origins Plus is also announced for several platforms and consoles.

In the tabletop gaming world—the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Florida bundle on itchio is still live! Funds raised through the bundle will go towards organizations responding to the alarming anti-trans legislation in progress in Florida.

“The age of the ORC begins”, according to publisher Chaosium, who is set on releasing a new edition of Basic Roleplaying next month with the new Open RPG Creative License. The Paragon System is also now available for use with the Creative Commons license. This continues to be part of several moves being made in the tabletop publishing industry following the fallout of the leak of a potential new draft of the Open Game License earlier this year. Meanwhile, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is releasing theatrically next week.

The world of fantasy doesn’t stop there, as The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is finally getting a new release date on May 25—much to our relief. #GollumGame’s initial intended release had to be delayed, and we are joyous this gremlin is getting his time to shine.

The post The Bulletin: Yeah, Taxes Do Suck appeared first on Gamesline.

In the city of New Sieg — a very blatant pastiche to New York City — you play a young journalist named Teuta looking for the latest scoop. After witnessing the death of an infamous “crooked” lawyer, and through her mysteriously innate ability to briefly travel back in time, she gets intertwined in all sorts of other shady characters and shenanigans in an effort to prevent his murder. Teuta ends up becoming an honorary member of the “Fixers”, a group of covert vigilantes with all sorts of skills and specialities who commit crimes to solve crimes.

BUSTAFELLOWS is pretty episodic, and each section essentially revolves around one case. The game presents itself like a TV serial, each chapter beginning with a brief opener (including a legal disclaimer that asserts the story and its characters are fictional) and a closing with a preview of what is to come next.

As an otome game, BUSTAFELLOWS has the sort of dating sim elements you’d expect. You can romance each of your “dangerous fellows”, each with completely normal everyday American names like “Limbo Fitzgerald” and stable, working careers like being a “hitman that silently eliminates hitmen”. These character-focused portions are actually playable separate from the game’s main storyline, and further divided into individual routes. However, you may extract information and acquire items from the game’s main storyline portion that can be helpful and have a potential impact in these routes.

Like other games of this ilk, you read through various scenes with much of the gameplay influenced by the decisions you make across a roster of choices in dialogue or actions. Some of these moments are timed, and these prompts do have explicit right or wrong answers. They’re usually a simple question testing your comprehension of the progress of the game thus far. For instance, you may be asked what was a character’s favorite restaurant mentioned in dialogue several scenes ago. Like other visual novel games, these choices influence where things will go from there.

One disappointment is that the time-hopping abilities unfortunately never come into play as a literal mechanic you can control on your own accord, and only functions during purely scripted moments in the narrative. It is definitely a wasted opportunity to not explore the concept of limited time traveling in clever ways, especially for a genre so reliant on choice-branching and manipulation. The main character’s abilities and her justification in using them reminds me of the early 90s television series Quantum Leap. Critics have often referenced it as America’s answer to Doctor Who despite its only true similarity with the latter being with the time traveling aspect. That said, Quantum Leap is more similar to BUSTAFELLOWS than Doctor Who, yet unlike either series the game does not let you even try to experiment with the moral implications of what time traveling can do.

BUSTAFELLOWS’ visuals are solid and at times are far more artistically thought out compared to what other otomes may be willing to do. The striking detail put into the backgrounds of the game capture incredible accuracy for something aiming to be an emulation of New York City. From the townhouse style apartment buildings with stoops to the right amount of convoluted signage and lighting in the game’s own imitation of Times Square, it was clear research was done that makes the settings so distinguishably inspired by the “Big Apple”. Small, looping animated details, such as flickering lights, add depth to many scenes.

The game also does some very minute, but interesting things that add dimensionality to the basic visual novel format. Character portraits have more varied poses I have not typically seen used in regularity in other similar games, which typically offer only a frontal pose facing the viewer. Some poses have just an extra added element to them, like a slight turn, which helps give more dimension to an otherwise static scene, or to transition into full-on, animated video where it needs to.

As opposed to many other titles of this sort, where the young, female protagonist is more or less forced by circumstance or pure coincidence into a situation that Stockholm Syndromes her into eventually falling in love with a bunch of strangers, BUSTAFELLOWS’ Teuta feels more realistic. She is able to stand firmly on her own as to why she is choosing to work within an unfamiliar world through her own beliefs that it will lead to the answers to many questions, such as figuring out the origins of her powers. Since the dating sim elements of the game are mechanically separate from the main game, romance is not even the game’s main priority and never something that overshadows the core conflicts at hand. The banter between all of the characters and their personalities are great, and everyone cohesively fits in with the world without overstepping one over the other on equal footing.

BUSTAFELLOWS is a game about found families and other connections made through the microcosms of a city. It is not only refreshing to see a romance game prioritize friendships, but also the same game that romanticizes city life outside of the typical binary of idealism and cynicism. A lot of games taking place in a city either depict it as a horrible place to live in or as some utopic, hipster paradise, but BUSTAFELLOWS manages to strike a balance between those two ends that is much closer to reality. In spite of all the bad things that happen, there are still many incredible people you can meet in unexpected places who will have your back, especially when you need it in the streets.

The game is by far not saying anything deep and transgressive of any sort, but by already reveling in a premise that revolves around seeking alternatives to a broken legal system, it takes a few steps above other otome titles tapping into some social commentary. It’s certainly not revolutionary in saying that sometimes you need to take justice into your own hands, but I was definitely caught off guard when it seemed like Teuta was about to go off on her cop friend on how corruption is so ingrained in existing systems that people should not be surprised that others will try to do unorthodox things to do a better job— which was all right in the dialogue when you first meet said character in the beginning of the game.

These critical sentiments towards the world have even more support towards the climax of the game’s first chapter, where another character comments that, “The world is unfair and unreasonable[….] [and] sometimes, things just don’t sit well with [me]”. They are defending the Fixers purpose and that a group like theirs needs to exist to just “fix those things a teensy bit”. BUSTAFELLOWS may not be mind-blowing, and where it hits the strongest is nothing unique, but it definitely has the working parts to it that make a whole machine work. But what if that machine just sometimes does not want to work the way it was programmed to do?

While BUSTAFELLOWS was originally released just for the Nintendo Switch in Japan back in 2019, this English language iteration on the PC, was unfortunately released in a less than stellar way. The most glaring issue, present from the moment you open this port, is how it mistreats what should otherwise be very crisp, beautiful visuals. The game’s image quality is ridiculously compressed, and it looks even worse when a video starts playing with all sorts of artifacts and anomalies abound. There is no way to adjust or tamper with this in the settings. In fact, the settings have nothing in them at all; you cannot do anything substantial besides playing around with sound.

So firstly, there are no display options. The game is not system DPI aware, which refers to its ability to scale and render according to the primary monitor settings I am using. It became problematic when it struggled to responsively adapt to my very square, unconventional monitor resolution. In spite of messing around with many things outside of the game to respond to issues that should be resolved in-game, I had numerous playthroughs where the game’s screen was extremely blown out because I have no idea how to fix it until it randomly does it itself at some point.

Secondly, you cannot remap the controls. Playing this game with a keyboard and mouse setup, I have also quickly learned that sometimes the game is not consistent about when I should be using my cursor or the arrow keys to navigate a screen. It does not give the cues on when to do so, let alone never providing what its default controls are. I also struggled with doing basic things at first, such as pulling up the menu and panicking over how to save the game, because the game has such an unconventional control schematic compared to other visual novels I had played, like using the Windows Function keys and or the navigation keys, like Home, End, and the Page Up and Down buttons. These are used to return to do things like return the menu screen, skip text, and save. (So if you don’t have those, or don’t have a Steam Link to override these, good luck!)

BUSTAFELLOWS on the PC is pretty busted. This is a game that was specifically developed for the Nintendo Switch in mind, and it is questionable whether there was any effort put into any proper optimization for a port, especially for a major international release. These ills do not override all the good parts of BUSTAFELLOWS, but it certainly makes a recommendation of the PC port impossible. This is especially upsetting to the spirit of visual novels, a genre of games that are often played and designed to be on a computer.

Although these grating issues are specific to the PC port, there was also some disservice made to the overall English language release of the game. BUSTAFELLOWS has remained faithful in keeping the Japanese language voice acting, which at times has been left untranslated for some reason. The dialogue has some ad libbing and improvisational lines performed by the seiyuu which are now at odds with the flow of the dialogue text on screen. As I am not fluent in Japanese, I have no way of knowing what the hell is going on or if I missed something significant that was added to a character’s performance. Whether this is a huge oversight or a deeply misguided idea, it is nevertheless an obstacle to accessibility.

This problem was especially egregious in the game’s prologue, where your main character is speaking with two completely different voices before you learn she was speaking through someone else’s body. At that point in time, you probably would not yet know she was time hopping. You have to go back in the game’s text logs to find out what has been actually said, so it is clear that these lines have been indeed translated, but they for some reason were not considered in the programming in the on-screen dialogue scenes they belong to.

Judging this game on the merit of what it actually has to offer, and not how it was presented on a platform that was not intended for it, BUSTAFELLOWS can be a bombastic blast. It romanticizes all these weird ideas of what an “American” aesthetic is with a fake American city, rooted in all these tropes from noir fiction applied to a contemporary setting. If you’re someone who likes anime series like Baccano!, Bungou Stray Dogs, and Blood Blockade Battlefront — in which case you likely also want to date some boys —  this game is for you. But if you also want a text-heavy game with just good character dynamics, straightforward mysteries, and a sweet found family narrative, this game is also for you!

BUSTAFELLOWS adds to the recent wave of otome games that continue the tradition of wallowing in cheesy tropes while being reminded that their audience will not stop aging: Past the cusps of cruel adulthood and more than willing to take in mature storylines, the otome game audience is now more than ever deserving of something more beyond the fantasy of a high school setting. In BUSTAFELLOWS’ case, why not fall in love with some weirdos while you’re trying to unveil the dark underbelly of the big city? After all, as crooked as the system is, you’ll be bound to run into some pretty freaks that intend on trying to fix it.

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