I have a bit of a history with magical girl media. Growing up, whether it was due to gender expectations or just a lack of interest, I wasn’t particularly drawn to shows like Sailor Moon, though I do recall watching occasional episodes of Cardcaptor Sakura when they came on TV. In high school, though, a friend introduced me to Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Madoka Magica for short), and everything changed. Seeing a magical girl story that delved into mature subject matter (along with having stunning animation and music) was like a cosmic shift in how I perceived a genre that I had once written off as “just those silly shows about girls in frilly outfits”. I showed it to my girlfriend at the time. Hell, I showed it to my dad. I got low-key obsessed with it for a while, and even now it stands as one of my favourite anime of all time.
Tag: Mystery
Boxes: Lost Fragments Review
I love a good virtual puzzle box. In reality, they’re wholly impractical devices: complex, expensive mechanisms interlinked with one another that you solve once and then either discard or bestow upon someone else to see how they fare. In the gaming space, though, they allow for layered, multi-stage puzzles that stay manageable due to the simple fact that everything you need to find the solution is right in front of you. You may have to rotate the box, recall an indentation that perfectly fits an item you obtained elsewhere, or recognize that one of the box’s legs looks slightly different from the others, but at the end of the day it’s all there in a contained, isolated environment. I got some enjoyment out of a couple of games in the The Room series on mobile way back when (no relation to Tommy Wiseau’s hilariously disastrous film of the same name), but eventually they started branching out in design directions I was less keen on. So when Boxes: Lost Fragments entered my Steam library, I was particularly intrigued to check it out and see if it could offer a compelling puzzle solving experience.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami Review
I was excited going into Duck Detective: The Secret Salami. Since it came out earlier this year, it’s a game that’s lived rent-free in the back of my mind, largely off the strength of its humorous title and fun premise. A cute little duck acting as a hard-boiled detective and interacting with a cast of colourful characters is the kind of thing that seems tailor-made for my tastes, and the fact that one of its primary mechanisms is a fill-in-the-blanks method of making deductions (sorry, “deducktions”) a la The Case of the Golden Idol (a game I haven’t played but thoroughly enjoyed watching a playthrough of) is the icing on the cake. Add in some great voice acting, solid writing, and a tightly-paced runtime, and you’ve got a recipe for a quality experience. And without burying the lede, while it didn’t blow me away, Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is still an entertaining mystery game that kept me engaged the whole time I played it.
Jill O’ Lantern: Final Cut Review
I’ve been playing a decent amount of visual novels recently, and a common throughline with them all has been romance. In some of them it’s been more benign, while in others it’s gotten decidedly … *ahem* … steamy. But generally speaking, the genres of dating simulator and visual novel tend to go hand in hand. That makes Jill O’ Lantern: Final Cut a bit of a standout from the get-go: it’s a murder mystery, plain and simple. There are interpersonal relationships that get built up as the game goes on, but the focus is on getting to the bottom of a spate of killings and finding a way to stop them. Add in a whole lot of queerness, and you’ve got a recipe for quite the entertaining ride.
Firewatch Review
Playing Firewatch was a rollercoaster of emotions. For starters, immediately after finishing the introduction, I had to quit out and go lay down. The game’s store page says that the protagonist, Henry, “has retreated from his messy life”, but I wasn’t prepared to learn just how messy that life was. It hit like a tonne of bricks, leaving my head spinning thinking of all the personal pain it brought to the surface. When I finally managed to sit back down with Firewatch, all of that raw emotion from the intro rapidly evaporated, to be replaced with a strange mystery and a gradually ratcheting tension that made me all but forget about the difficult opening. It felt like two separate stories had been smashed together into a strange homunculus of a narrative, and I couldn’t decide which one I hoped would win out to become the focal point. Eventually, though, questions were answered, the mystery was solved, and all the tension disappeared like a plume of smoke in the wind. All I was left with was a sort of hollowness, and the sense that, while captivating, Firewatch missed the mark to becoming truly special.
INSIDE Review
Following up on the success of their game LIMBO, developer Playdead released INSIDE, another game in the surprisingly extensive genre of, “small child tries to make their way through a big, scary world”. A relatively straightforward puzzle platformer at its core, what makes INSIDE stand out is its gradual descent into horror. As Jacob Geller points out in his excellent video essay “Fear of Depths”, this descent is not just metaphorical, but literal; geographically impossible as it may be, the game constantly sees you travelling down, deeper and deeper, with things getting more twisted as you proceed.
Debris Review
“Walking simulators” have become a notoriously divisive genre over the years, garnering both love for their way of telling an interactive story, and criticism for the general lack of purpose said interaction tends to involve. Branching off this, I like to consider Debris a “swimming simulator”; sure, you have the added ability to move vertically, but the gameplay still very much consists of, “Keep moving forward while being fed assorted storytelling bits”. This is by no means a bad thing, as ABZÛ – one of my favourite games in recent memory – arguably also falls into this category. Unfortunately, whereas ABZÛ was a consistently wondrous experience that left me practically begging for more, Debris is…well, we’ll get into that.
The Story So Far: The Council
Louis de Richet and Sarah – his mother – are members of the mysterious Golden Order. What exactly this entails is currently shrouded in mystery, though hints of backdoor art deals, occultism, and sleuthing abound. After Sarah pays a visit to the island of a Lord Mortimer, Louis receives a letter, claiming that his mother has disappeared. Eager to find out what’s going on, Louis makes his way to the island, where he finds that his mother was far from the only person summoned. In the absence of Lord Mortimer (whom everyone claims is “occupied”), Louis must interact with Mortimer’s enigmatic guests, in the hopes of discovering what fate befell his mother, who exactly their host is, and why personalities such as George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte have been gathered on the curious island.
Olive's Game Garden 