The Indie Informer

Even in this crushing time of year where indies bear down like an avalanche, I couldn’t stop playing. With no time to play anything, I made time to get every achievement in the game, something I rarely ever do. And I would do it all over again if I could.

Woodo is a delight. Its five-hour runtime is skilfully paced and ends on the perfect bittersweet note. Selfishly, I wish it wasn’t over and I still had hours ahead of me to escape in its dappled dioramas. It’s not lost on me how that feeling both compliments the game’s fleeting narrative and highlights the pleasing gameplay.

It boggles my mind how many branching nexuses I personally encountered, let alone how many there must be in total. The narrative flows like a rocky river under an autumn tree. The falling leaves strike the once smooth surface, sending ripples across its entire span before the flow is disrupted by immovable forces sweeping you into the rapids.

What Big Walk truly offers is a place to just be a gaggle of silly friends in a world where it seems harder and harder to spend real, quality time with the people close to you. Every step across this bizarre island built us up to its final test. The new inside jokes in the form of wacky gestures, the understanding we gained of each other’s strengths, the tailor-made language we’d developed just for this game, they all became tools to help us finally succeed. And we all found ourselves unexpectedly misty-eyed as we said our last goodbyes to the experience.

Of those aspects of the game which may inspire love or loathing, I adore the ending. Like a ghostly tale told around a campfire, there are few satisfying answers to make players feel they’ve definitively concluded the experience. However, as in the grimmest of stories, the ending enables the game’s fearsome mysteries to fester in my imagination to live on longer than Scarlet Deer Inn‘s short runtime.

By the end of Mixtape, which takes only about four hours, I had felt the pure joy of living, the seething heat of betrayal, the confusion of unexpected rejection, and the bittersweet feeling of being on top for one single moment. Tears escaped my eyes walking away from it, even as I smiled.

I’m happy to have been introduced to new pieces of southeast Asian cuisine, but the biggest point against Dosa Divas is that it doesn’t come bundled with anything to snack on while you play. Who knows, maybe they’re saving that for the collector’s edition.

Fishbowl‘s complicated pool of grief and authentic, stumbling healing craft a deeply personal experience. So, when I was asked to make a choice about Alo’s future in the end, I was irreparably invested. Consequently, I finished the game feeling a little healed from my own tribulations alongside Alo.

Super Meat Boy 3D isn’t Shakespeare — it’s main antagonist is named Dr. Fetus, afterall — but I found its platforming puzzles to be largely solid across the board and I was impressed by its adherence to the idea that the game will happily beat you down, but the way back up from that is through perserverence. Perserverence that it’s happy to show you that you posses by watching your level replays.

Neva: Prologue‘s scale — with creativity and evocativeness on one side and restrictions and murkiness on the other — balances out to a solid experience.