reading playing tunes watching
The final one I'll talk about for now is re:curse. re:curse is a game by devpalmer. It's endlessly interesting- to the point of me wanting to get VX Ace so I can go through the project files. It features Caroline, who appeals to me, a Glados lover (it makes sense if you play.) She's a virus in the shape of pierrot. At some point she explains why she took her form and says something along the lines of 'does the jingling of a pierrot's bells not please you?' SO REAL AND TRUE. Lots of really good lines in this game really.
I think it's fun and it features Joan (heart eyes). There's two endings. Both of them caused me to feel extreme amounts of sadness, especially after experiencing Caroline House, which is an executable that displays content based on some files in your game. This game makes me gooo brrrBRRRBRRRR... I highly recommend it.. And umm.. The door puzzles...... Well... There's not many, and they're pretty easy to do- provided you don't get a headache!
Next is Married In Red. I think Married in Red is the only other Studio Investigrave game I've played so far as the other ones are visual novels, and due to reading many vns recently, I'm taking a bit of a break from them. Married in Red was honestly fantastic. The art is spectacular, and I really enjoy the gameplay. It also reminded me of old gameshed games. The games UI is really beautiful, and I love Bok-su Go. The story is pretty predictable, but that doesn't take away from the fun of it. It's 2010s RPG horror in peak form to me. Fun art, cool sprites, murder, puzzles, memorization! Yay!
I'll probably replay it in the future when my memory of it has faded. I truly did have such a good time. I think it's also an interesting study in making a game that takes place in a smaller environment, as Married in Red takes place in a wedding venue with just a few rooms and a backyard.
Hello! It's been a while since I updated here. I had to read a lot of entries for the menhera vn jam, and originally I was going to write stuff down for all of them but by the end my brain had melted LOL. In the last weeks, my body also started having a series of strange health issues that made doing anything that required energy impossible, so now I've been playing video games. I'll log a few of them here and some I've played in the past because I've played many games since checks date... 11.21.23 lol. Probably not all tonight though. I'm super tired lately.
Since I've been in an RPG Maker mood and RPZinemaker is back, I've decided to check out games that were brought up among applicants. Games by Studio Investigrave were mentioned a lot,so I went to their itch.io page and looked through their things. I'm working pn two games that take place in winter, so I decided to play Cold Front for sweet inspiration. It was a fun game with cool mechanics. I don't think I've played an RPG Maker game with QTEs before. I looked through the files and saw she didn't even use a plugin for it, just used events and pictures, which is pretty awesome. There was also some 2.5D stuff which was nice to look at. Visually it was a very beautiful game.
The writing was fun. The characters were pretty over the top in a way that reminded me of webtoons I read when I was younger. It made me nostalgic. Actually the entire experience kind of reminded me of horror games I'd play as a kid on gameshed... The QTEs.. the big borders.. 2.5D.. It was nice. I could tell it was a gamejam game, but I'm still happy it was my first studio investigrave game.
It's really weird that it took me so long to sit down and play all of .flow. It might've been because one of my first exposures to Yume Nikki fangames was the wonderful but Large game Yume 2kki. I did play .flow once or twice at various times, but never got very far in either session. I was always worried about how difficult the maps were to navigate since the nexus only have four doors. I worried there were long interconnected worlds that I'd get lost in only for a chaser to wake me up.
I am happy to say .flow is designed in a wonderful way. I find the worlds mostly easy to navigate. Rainbow Maze almost made me quit as I found it rather headache inducing, but luckily I managed to find most everything I needed because I spent so long trying to find every place in it. I checked the wiki only to find that I'd done everything there was to do there.
Anyway, .flow is pretty gory and gross at times so be aware. I really liked that the lolrust (the dev) did not shy away from it, and it really inspired me in my own game dev endevours. It is also one of the few RPG Maker games that managed to make me scream haha. Corrupted Schoolhouse.
The concepts in it are really good and exploring Sabitsuki's/Rust's consciousness leaves a lot of questions. Who is Smile and why (redacted)? Who is Rust? Why the fuck am I being attacked by fetuses? What/who are the cleaners? These questions were fun to discover even if they don't have concrete answers.
11.21.23
I found Swollen to Bursting Until I am Disappearing on Purpose while scrolling through the RPG Maker tag on Tumblr. While I didn't promptly forget about it, it faded to the back of my mind as it wasn't completely finished when I laid my eyes on it. I saw the release trailer, but it faded to the back of my mind again. Finally, my friend Kail sang its praises and I decided to run it on my Steam Deck while skipping classes.
I really liked Swollen to Bursting though I think it has an esoteric quality to it. It has aspects of Yume Nikki fangames, elements of ps2 era games such as Chulip, and it has a lot of bizarre elements that I really enjoyed such as a cow you mix for effects or a party of rats witnessing a murder. The bizarre elements did appeal to me, but I was mostly focused on bits of the characters I could understand. As you milk effects, you can use these effects to solve puzzles or make some parts of the game easier, and more things about the protagonist are revealed to you over time.
I really enjoyed Husband. I wish we knew more about him. There's a readme file (that I actually didn't see for a bit because I wasn't played in a desktop environment) that gives you some details on the characters. It made some things more satisfactory while I wish I'd learned about certain aspects of these characters in game itself.
All in all, I really did like Swollen to Bursting. Just a warning, the game may not work on slower computers as it is really pushing RPG Maker to its limits. I am really curious as to what causes it to chug at times. Perhaps it's the 2.5D plugin? It's the first RPG Maker game I've played that uses the 2.5D plugin. I'd really like to play more.
11.21.2023
