Tag Archives: Steam

What Comes After Review: Get On The Train

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What Comes After is a collaboration between Indonesian Coffee Talk creator Mohammad Fahmi (editor’s note, who has sadly passed away) and studio Rolling Glory Jam about Vivi, a young women who falls asleep on the late night train while returning from work. When Vivi wakes up, she awakens onto a subway car filled with ghosts. Informed by the conductor that this situation was a mistake and she can leave when the train goes back in the morning, Vivi must pass the time by talking to other passengers until dawn.

The first thing to notice about What Comes After is that it’s a game set during Covid. All the living characters wear uniform cloth masks (looked up photos of Indonesia during covid and it would have been nice if at least a few people were wearing disposable medical mask to add to the realistic similitude) and stylistically, all the passing ghosts don’t have mouths. It’s the first time I’ve played something that’s even mentioned Covid, but thankfully it’s referenced in a way that’s respectful and is never mentioned in the narrative.

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Pizza Game Review: Not Half Baked…I’m Sorry…I’m Sorry

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Humor in video games often feels hit or miss. Like most fiction, humor shows up at least occasionally in all kinds of games. For example, the Uncharted games try and fail at humor by thinking that having each of their characters quip back and forth (or even to themselves) is funny and endearing. Possibly worse is when you have games, like the otherwise enjoyable Guacamelee!, where a lot of its humor was using super dated (even at the time) internet reaction memes. There are parody games, but parody can only go so far. Honestly, outside of Okage: Shadow King and its humor centered on how goofy a lot of JRPGs plots are, the only other true comedy game I can think of is the visual novel Pizza Game.

Developed mostly by writer and programmer Plasterbrain, with help by her brother JelloApocalypse who designed the characters and directed the voice acting, Pizza Game is described by Plasterbrain as “a shit-post game, but a fully sustainable shit-post game”. Basically, what if someone made a full-length nonsensical otome visual novel, with none of the nonsense of games like the hour-long KFC dating sim? Pizza Game prides itself on its intentionally misspelled sentences and its parade of pretty unpleasant smoochable men. From the top, there is passive aggressive coffee shop owner with a dark past named Chris, rude tech billionaire who is almost definitely a serial killer named Mr. Arimnaes, an ironic and twisted skater named Warped Lamp, a bland but otherwise harmless pizza shop owner named Keenarnor, and whatever the hell Sensei is.

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This entire exchange is magical.

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103 Review: Never Leaving The House

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103 is a Kickstarted walking simulator and puzzle game developed by Australian group Dystopia Interactive. First person seems to be Dystopia Interactive’s marmite and toast (hacky Australian joke is hacky), as both 103 and their only other game, Make A Killing, share this predilection for protagonists without faces. Mystery should be 103’s real title, because solving said mystery is half of playing 103. Lily is an overly imaginative individual whose night out with friends ends abruptly and the player must piece together what went on, and potentially what went wrong (I went into 103 narratively blind of this premise and now you know more than I).

Playing 103 involves walking through a cozy house, filled with stylish 1910’s Alphonse Mucha posters and adverts with drinking skeletons, in order to find…something? From the beginning, after quickly turning down the camera’s sensitivity because it was giving me motion sickness, 103 does not inform the player of anything. A blonde mannequin is present, often found finding value in staring at mirrors or enjoying the rain visible through the house’s sole window (which is honestly rather calming), and only she and the game’s patchwork bear mascot are the navigational devices. Those arrows drawn on the carpet? Totally worthless.

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Have they been here long?

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Maggie’s Apartment Review: Screw the Stairs!

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Maggie’s Apartment is a point and click adventure game from 2017 by designer and animator Anatola Howard and programmer Duncan Cross. The game centers on the titular Maggie Mallowne, an underwear-clad young women whose claim to fame is being the president of famous singer Randy Rosebud’s fan club. Maggie would argue her true biggest claim to fame is being Randy’s girlfriend, but she is not allowed to tell anyone this but her talking radish roommate Beauty. Over the course of Maggie’s Apartment’s short length, Maggie finds herself locked down in her 2000 story apartment, a bomb scare forcing her to really dwell on her relationship with her boyfriend Randy.

Maggie’s Apartment’s big draw is that it’s a point-and-click-adventure where the character stays in the same room for the entire game (Maggie does go out onto her patio a few times, but it could be argued that it is technically not leaving her apartment). Maggie lacks the usual point and click standard by not having a pocket/void world inventory system. Any object Maggie would normally collect instead stays fixed to the apartment floor until the plot decides, for example, Maggie no longer,  requires two T.V. antenna to perform a puzzle. However, the game maintains the genre standard wherein most of the puzzles involve combining X item with Y item to make some combination solution.

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Really wish the developers opened an Etsy shop just to sell this poster.

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Hateful Days Pair Review: It’s Such a Strong Word

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I have a system when it comes to playing video games in my personal backlog wherein I break up playing long games with shorter games. This system helps me to recover from potential burnout after playing lengthy games, and lets me pace myself. After recently finishing two Ace Attorney games back-to-back, I was in desperate need for a short “buffer” game, so I could later transition to something else. Luckily, fortune smiled upon me, and Steam  put the Hateful Days pair of games on sale. Were the games actually as good I hoped? Today, we’re going to find out.

The Hateful Days pair of games were written and developed from 2012 to 2013 by Christine Love, an indie developer from Canada. Love has created multiple visual novel games since 2007, including Digital: A Love Story (which is considered a spiritual predecessor to the Hateful Days games), don’t take it personally babe, it just ain’t your story, and her (as of this writing) currently in-progress work Ladykiller in Love.

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By ‘assistance’ she means giving you the archive files to actually read. That’s really it.

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