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Doodle Date

Не ждите большой любви — нарисуйте её. В Doodle Date вы создаёте облик своей мечты прямо в игре: лицо, причёску, одежду партнёра, фильмы в кинотеатре, блюда в ресторане и многое другое. Ваши каракули оживают и становятся частью истории. Сюжет ведёт от первых неловких флиртов через свидания и драматические повороты к свадьбе. Два любовных интереса предлагают разные жизненные пути, а несколько концовок и секретный финал добавляют поводов вернуться. Длительность около часа — Doodle Date задуман как короткая, тёплая и слегка абсурдная романтическая зарисовка, где юмор и авторский скетч-стиль важнее серьёзной симуляции отношений.

Tags
SingleplayerIndie2DStory RichSimulatorCasualHorrorFunny
Release date
Developer
Nicholas Lives
Publisher
Nicholas Lives
Rating
star9.4
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Bustafellows

Bustafellows — стильная отоме-новелла от студии eXtend, смешивающая романтику, нуар и детектив про убийство. Действие разворачивается в вымышленном американском городе New Sieg, где вы играете Teuta — молодую журналистку с необычным даром: на короткие промежутки времени она способна прыгать в прошлое, оказываясь в теле другого человека. Сюжет запускает убийство. Teuta становится свидетелем гибели «крив­ого» адвоката Limbo Fitzgerald и решает использовать свой дар, чтобы вернуться в прошлое и его предупредить. С этого и начинается основная история: вы собираете улики, распутываете пазлы и аккуратно балансируете между пятью «опасными парнями» — Limbo, наёмником Shu, пластическим хирургом Helvetica, судмедэкспертом Mozu и хакером Scarecrow. У каждого свой маршрут, своя side story и свой стиль, а решения по ходу игры приводят к разным концовкам. В наличии — полноценная японская озвучка с сильным актёрским составом (KENN, Yoshimasa Hosoya и другие), детально прорисованные интерфейсы, анимации и гостевые появления персонажей из Side Kicks!. Bustafellows — не просто «девчачья новелла», а плотный мистический детектив с чётко прописанной романтической линией; важно быть готовым к сложным и местами жестоким темам, которые серия eXtend обычно не смягчает.

Tags
SingleplayerActionAdventureStory RichSimulatorCasualPuzzleShooter
Release date
Publisher
PQube
Rating
star9.2
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Doctor Who The Lonely Assassins

Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins builds on the terrifying legacy of the Weeping Angels first encountered in the iconic episode 'Blink'. From the award-winning creators of Sara Is Missing and SIMULACRA, this thrilling found-phone mystery places you at the center of a sinister series of events at a seemingly abandoned house in London where someone goes missing and you find their phone. When the phone begins to self-destruct, ex-UNIT scientist Petronella Osgood (played by Ingrid Oliver) enlists your help to uncover hidden clues and solve cryptic puzzles. Finlay Robertson reprises Larry Nightingale from the original Blink episode, and Jodie Whittaker makes a special appearance as the voice of the Doctor. The narrative picks up directly where Blink left off. The gameplay covers searching through messages, emails, videos, photographs, and more to uncover clues and reveal the truth behind the disappearance. The familiar advice applies: don't turn your back, don't look away, and DON'T BLINK.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndie2DCasualPuzzleSci-fiHorror
Release date
Developer
Kaigan Games OÜ
Publisher
Kaigan Games OÜ
Rating
star8.9
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Stories Untold

Stories Untold is a narrative anthology that bends adventure-game conventions into something unique. Four short stories combine text adventure, point-and-click, radio transmission processing, and physical-experiment puzzles into a single mysterious compilation. The opening episode, The House Abandon (now also available free as a demo), was originally released as a standalone hit before being remastered into this collection. The 80s retro aesthetic and synth-wave horror soundtrack are not just nostalgia: they are the structural language of the puzzles. The tactile chunks of working with cassette tapes, terminal commands, and bulky equipment carry the atmosphere as much as the writing. Telegraph rated it 5/5 as a fascinating example of interactive visual storytelling; GameSpew rated it 9/10. Developed by No Code, a Glasgow-based ex-AAA team led by Jon McKellan (Alien: Isolation) and Omar Khan. Four stories, one nightmare, with achievements to unlock and narrative secrets to discover across all of them. macOS support recommends a dedicated graphics card.

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SingleplayerAdventureIndieAtmosphericPoint & ClickStory RichPuzzleShooter
Release date
Developer
No Code
Publisher
No Code
Rating
star8.9
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Citizen Sleeper

Citizen Sleeper is a tabletop-inspired narrative RPG set on Erlin's Eye, a ruined space station that is home to thousands of people trying to survive on the edges of an interstellar capitalist society. You play a Sleeper — a digitized human consciousness in an artificial body, owned by a corporation that wants you back — and the question the game asks across its runtime is whether you can build a life out of the wreckage of the system you've escaped. The gameplay is built around dice, clocks and drives. Each cycle (a day in the station's life), you roll dice and assign them to a vast range of actions across the station. Clocks track progress on both your actions and the actions happening around you. Drives — your character's motivations — replace traditional quest logs and let you pick and choose the stories and activities that matter to you. The system is genuinely TTRPG-flavored and feels like sitting at a table with a thoughtful GM. The station hosts characters from every walk of life — salvagers, engineers, hackers, bartenders, street-food vendors — each with a history that brought them to the Eye. Their stories intersect with yours through choices you make about who to help, who to trust, and who to align with. Eventually you'll learn to use your dice to hack into the station's cloud, accessing decades of digital data, uncovering new areas, and unlocking corporate secrets, rogue AIs and troves of lost information. The political framing is sharp. Essen-Arp, your owners, see you as property — one more asset in a portfolio that stretches across the stars. The universe is one where humanity's expansion is marked by exploitation and extraction, and the question of personhood, precarity and freedom sits at the heart of the writing. This Steam edition includes all three post-launch DLC episodes — FLUX, REFUGE and PURGE — which expand the game with additional characters, locations and a new late-game storyline. Jump Over the Age is a one-person studio founded by Gareth Damian Martin, and Citizen Sleeper has earned awards and nominations across the GDC, IGF, Games Award and BAFTA circuits.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndieAtmosphericRPGStory RichShooterSci-fi
Release date
Developer
Jump Over The Age
Publisher
Jump Over The Age
Rating
star8.9
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Heads Will Roll Reforged

Heads Will Roll: Reforged places you as an ordinary medieval soldier in the legendary Hundred Years War between England and France. You start as a simple footman whose sole ambition is to survive, but with skill, cunning, or sheer preservation you might rise to become one of the most famous knights of your time, or perish in the chaos. The sophisticated turn-based combat system uses character stats and attributes, weapon familiarity and proficiency, weapon length, fatigue, traumas and injuries, and hundreds of items and consumables. The game offers more than 200 lootable items spanning medieval weaponry and armor, trinkets with unique effects, poisons, medical supplies, and crafting materials. NPCs change their opinions based on how you treat them, enabling or disabling future interactions and triggering special events. Dozens of weapons (swords, axes, maces, spears, throwing knives, crossbows) each have distinct movesets relying on different stats and skills. Authentic medieval defensive equipment, romance with several beauties of varying personalities, Roguelike mode for permadeath progression unlocking starting items between deaths, and Story mode with quick save/load for those after the plot more than the survival challenge.

Tags
SingleplayerAtmosphericRPG2DStory RichDifficultDarkHistorical
Release date
Developer
1917 Studios
Publisher
1917 Studios
Rating
star8.8
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Wednesdays

Wednesdays — гибрид игры и графической новеллы, посвящённый теме сексуального насилия над детьми. Главный герой — Тим, в детстве переживший насилие; двадцать лет спустя он запускает Orco Park — игрушку из своего детства — и вместе с ней на него обрушиваются воспоминания и вопросы: как это вообще могло произойти, кто знал, как это сформировало его, что вообще такое «нормально». Сценарий написал Пьер Корбине (Haven, Road 96: Prologue, Bury Me, My Love), и фокус истории — не на самом насилии, а на доверии, надежде и постепенном выздоровлении. История собрана как мозаика. В Orco Park вы строите аттракционы и украшения, чтобы открыть воспоминания Тима в любом удобном порядке. Параллельно вы примеряете на себя его близких и пытаетесь сложить запутанные обрывки прошлого в общую картину. Графически проект соединяет два визуальных стиля: воспоминания Тима оживают в работе автора комиксов Exaheva (Mekka Nikki, Still Heroes), Orco Park нарисован пиксельным художником Nico Nowak (There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension) в эстетике классических игр 90-х. Игра намеренно открыта для всех: широкий набор настроек, поддержка мыши, клавиатуры и геймпада, регулируемый размер текста и читаемый альтернативный шрифт Luciole, ручная и автоматическая прокрутка диалогов, отсутствие реакционных и сложных эпизодов. Никакой графической репрезентации насилия в игре нет, и вся подача аккуратно сделана, чтобы ни сама тема, ни форма не превратились в провокацию. Подробности по доступности доступны на сайте ARTE.

Tags
SingleplayerIndiePoint & Click2DStory RichCasualShooterPixel Graphics
Release date
Publisher
ARTE France
Rating
star8.7
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Emily is Away Too

Emily is Away Too is the spiritual successor to the critically acclaimed original Emily is Away, and significantly expands the formula. You message both Emily and Evelyn — two friends with their own personalities, histories and storylines — as you determine the outcome of your senior year of high school. Multiple endings are triggered by your dialogue decisions, and the choices accumulate across the entire game rather than just affecting individual moments. The interface is a meticulous recreation of 2006-era instant messaging. Buddy icons, customizable profiles, away messages, the specific texture of a chat window from a forgotten era of online communication — every detail is calibrated to evoke that particular cultural moment. The game extends the story past the chat window with embedded YouTube links, Facebook profiles, and file transfers between you and your friends, creating a fuller picture of late-2000s online life than the original game attempted. Independent IM conversations with Emily and Evelyn run in parallel, and the relationship dynamics between them — and between you and each of them — depend on what you say to whom. Branching paths produce wildly different runs, and the option to change your text color to lime green so everyone knows you're the coolest kid in school is treated with the seriousness it deserves. The game's Emily Online feature lets you chat with your Steam friends like it's 2006, layering social functionality onto the nostalgic interface. For anyone who lived through the AIM/MSN/Yahoo Messenger era and remembers the specific emotional weight of late-night IM conversations with people who mattered to them, Emily is Away Too is the kind of game that hits closer to home than expected.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndieAtmosphericRPGStory RichSimulatorCasual
Release date
Developer
Kyle Seeley
Publisher
Kyle Seeley
Rating
star8.7
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Needy Streamer Overload

Needy Streamer Overload — визуальная новелла-«multi-ending ADV» от WSS playground, рассказывающая о жизни стримерши OMGkawaiiAngel. Ame — внешне тихая, но крайне эгоистичная и зависимая от одобрения девушка, которая мечтает стать №1 в интернете в образе «интернет-ангела». Вы играете за её парня-«продюсера» P-chan и помогаете ей стать суперпопулярной звездой. Геймплей разделён на дневные и ночные циклы. Днём нужно искать темы для стримов, ходить на свидания, устраивать небольшие шалости и давать Ame «таблетки» для снятия стресса. Ночью идут стримы, комменты, донаты и фирменные SuperChat'ы от одержимых фанатов. Между этим — переписка через соцсети, ответы стикерами и наблюдение за тем, как общественное и приватное мнения о вас расходятся. Всё это быстро выходит за рамки милой работы: в зависимости от ваших решений «уровень болезни» Ame меняется, и игра ведёт к множеству концовок — от оптимистичных до откровенно тёмных. Это жёсткая, язвительная и одновременно очень нежная история про психику, стриминговую культуру и границы одобрения.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndiePoint & Click2DStory RichShooterHorror
Release date
Developer
WSS playground
Publisher
WSS playground
Rating
star8.6
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Z.A.T.O.: I Love the World and Everything In It

Z.A.T.O.: I Love the World and Everything In It — линейная визуальная новелла на 7–8 часов прохождения. Действие — СССР, 1986 год, закрытый город Воркута-5. В городе пропадает девочка по имени Ира Грачевская, и никто, по всей видимости, об этом не беспокоится — кроме тихой девочки-изгоя Аси Шубиной, через чьи глаза вы и проживаете эту историю. Каст компактный и плотный. Ира — проблемный ребёнок и прогульщица с не самой блестящей репутацией; ходят слухи, что она встречается со взрослым мужчиной. Марина — популярная и беззаботная одноклассница, циничнее, чем кажется; взрослые её не очень любят, явно не из-за оценок. Леша — мальчик с грубым чувством юмора, любящий унижать слабых, в том числе и героиню. Сама Ася — нелегко рассказывать о себе сама, и игра аккуратно подводит к тому, кто она на самом деле. Здесь нет выборов и развилок: финал предопределён. Игра не симулятор, а медленный, сосредоточенный рассказ о городе, которого по идее не существует, и сигнале, который героиня в конце концов отправит во вселенную. Авторы предупреждают: нецензурная лексика, громкие звуки и мерцающие изображения внутри присутствуют.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndieAtmospheric2DStory RichShooterSci-fi
Release date
Developer
Ferry Nopanamaman
Publisher
Ferry Nopanamaman
Rating
star8.6
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Omen Exitio Plague

Omen Exitio: Plague is a Lovecraftian tale told in the style of the choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks that filled the 1980s and 90s. You play a military doctor charged with investigating a plague poised to wipe out all of humankind, one whose origins may be anything but natural. It is a desperate contest against time and reason that strains your sanity to breaking. The year is 1896 and the place is Zanzibar. You play Dr. Jake Huntington, newly signed into the army and trying to forget the death of his wife, Helen, when an ancient evil overturns his life. Every clue points the same way: a terrifying plague stands ready to exterminate humanity. To understand and stop it, you venture into the shadows at the edge of the human mind, unraveling intrigues and machinations, all while one question gnaws at you: is something truly supernatural at work, or are you simply losing your mind? Your choices steer how events play out, with multiple ways past every obstacle and consequences for each decision. An RPG-style character sheet lets you develop your doctor in countless directions, shaping different endings. The original story runs over 140,000 words, with more than 300 hand-drawn images and original music crafted to make you feel inside an H.P. Lovecraft tale. No choice is simply right or wrong, and death here is purely a story beat rather than a defeat screen, while some consequences may prove worse than death itself.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndieAtmosphericRPGStory RichCasualHorror
Release date
Developer
Tiny Bull Studios
Publisher
Tiny Bull Studios
Rating
star8.6
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A Date with Death

A Date with Death — сверхъестественная романтическая чат-симулятор в духе визуальной новеллы о недельном пари с Жнецом за собственную душу. Вы думали, что вы обычный человек, но всю жизнь каким-то чудом избегали смерти; а может, чудо здесь ни при чём? На вашем компьютере внезапно появляется странная программа, и некто, называющий себя Жнецом, заявляет, что пришёл за вашей душой. Чем глубже вы разбираетесь в этом загадочном собеседнике, тем сильнее ощущение, что судьба свела вас не случайно. Сможете ли вы устоять перед его обаянием или влюбитесь в того, кому предначертано забрать вашу душу? Создавайте собственного персонажа — от внешности до местоимений и имени — и обновляйте его по ходу игры, обустраивайте квартиру и превращайте её в уютное пространство, куда приятно возвращаться. Общение идёт через полностью озвученные видеозвонки, переписку и голосовые сообщения. Решения влияют на судьбу и ведут к одной из нескольких концовок: какими будут ваши отношения со Жнецом — спойлер зависит только от вас. По ходу прохождения коллекция красивых CG, фоновых артов и скетчей пополняется, а рядом всегда есть мохнатый (или чешуйчатый?) питомец, которого можно погладить между диалогами.

Tags
SingleplayerIndieStory RichSimulatorShooterFunnyComedyAnime
Release date
Developer
Two and a Half Studios
Publisher
Two and a Half Studios
Rating
star8.6
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The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante is a narrative-driven RPG that follows the entire lifespan of a single protagonist in a gritty fantasy world where social class — the Lot — is determined at birth and the gods are real, watching over and judging mortals. The campaign is structured as a philosophical parable about a seemingly insignificant little man set against the backdrop of a worldwide empire's collapse under a deepening social crisis. The game traces Brante's life from childhood through old age, with decisions at each stage shaping who he becomes and what the world becomes around him. You can pursue careers as a judge, as an inquisitor, or as a conspirator against the old order — and the path you choose has weight, consequence, and the kind of moral complexity that doesn't resolve into clean heroism. The writing is the central pleasure. The world is built on theological systems with real metaphysical stakes, the social order responds to your decisions in ways that feel structurally honest, and the deeper themes — class, faith, agency under systems larger than yourself — carry through every act. The game owes more to literary fiction than to standard fantasy RPG plotting, which is the entire appeal.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndieAtmosphericRPGStrategy2DStory Rich
Release date
Developer
Sever
Publisher
Sever
Rating
star8.6
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The Dark Room

The Dark Room is a mean, addictive comedy puzzler in a retro style, sadism with jokes, as it cheerfully describes itself. A throwback to 1980s text adventures, it throws your hopeless little brain at one brutal deathtrap after another, all for a shot at freedom, with a deep, buried story that only skill, patience and a lot of poking around will reveal. It cheerfully calls itself the polar opposite of an open-world game, packed with swearing, comedy, body horror, puzzles and logic gone sideways, and carrying more than three and a half hours of recorded material. Level One alone holds an hour of specially motion-captured dialogue and acting, with more across levels 2, 3 and Darkest, and together they unfold who Darren really is. The money you spend feeds straight into making it bigger, louder and more lethal. The game adapts comedian John Robertson's live interactive stage show, which shares its name. Play the game, then, when the live show rolls through your area, meet up with everyone else who endured it. Just remember: ya die, ya die, ya die.

Tags
AdventureIndieAtmosphericRPGPuzzleComedyRetroGore
Release date
Developer
Developers At Large
Publisher
Developers At Large
Rating
star8.5
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Football Manager 2022

Football Manager 2022 is Sports Interactive's annual update to the closest thing to real football management. The premise is the franchise's familiar one — take over a club, manage tactics, scout players, run the transfer market, develop young talent, and try to either win at the level you're at or climb to a level that lets you win bigger. 123 leagues are available, with budgets ranging from massive to almost nothing depending on the club you choose. This year's headline addition is the Data Hub. Craft a custom dashboard packed with the same statistics and reporting methods real clubs use, helping you make smarter tactical and player-development decisions. The level of detail in the underlying simulation has always been one of the franchise's identifiers; the Data Hub finally exposes that depth in a way that lets dedicated managers exploit it. On-pitch authenticity improves through a revamped animation engine — players look more like themselves in motion, with showcased skills rendered in better detail than previous entries. A revamped pressing system and player-sharpness changes mean you can press from the first whistle and benefit from a more authentic passing flow during matches. The Wide Centre-Back role lets you implement one of the top tactical trends of recent seasons, opening new possibilities for three-at-the-back formations and innovative defensive structures. Deadline Day drama is reworked — the unpredictability of the transfer window's climax now plays out in more recognizable ways, with last-minute deals, agent involvement and rival manoeuvers all simulated more thoroughly. New true-to-life staff meetings combine weekly Coaching, Recruitment, Player Development and Staffing reports into a more cohesive backroom experience. A redesigned manager creator, improved scouting toolkit, and an upgraded Fantasy Draft mode round out the year's changes. For the genre's defining annual release, FM22 brings substantial refinement to systems most management games never attempt at this depth.

Tags
SingleplayerMultiplayerPoint & ClickStrategy2DSimulatorShooter3D
Release date
Developer
Sports Interactive
Publisher
Sports Interactive
Rating
star8.5
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Suzerain

Suzerain is a deep political-drama narrative game set in the fictional nation of Sordland, where you take the role of President Anton Rayne navigating a pivotal first term. Sordland is emerging from a traditionalist regime, wrestling with economic recession during a difficult transition to liberalization, and the populace is demanding democratic reform. Neighboring superpowers are watching closely. Military threats sit on the horizon. The job is yours. The gameplay is conversation, decision and consequence. Over a million words of branching political saga cover deeply layered dialogues with more than fifty characters — cabinet members, advisors, ambassadors, family, party officials, and the various people across the country whose lives your policies affect. Each conversation tests your values against the political necessities of the situation; each decision changes what becomes possible in subsequent ones. Policy decisions span security, economy, welfare and diplomacy. You set the direction of major reforms, negotiate trade agreements, manage defense posture, and choose which campaign promises to keep. Nine unique major endings and more than 25 sub-endings track the consequences of your accumulated choices. Stay informed through interactable city tokens, policy summaries, situational updates, news feeds and reports — the impact of every decision is visible if you care to look. The drama isn't only public. Your duty to the nation and your commitments to your family pull against each other across the campaign. Can you lead a nation through transformation while remaining a good parent? The personal-versus-political balance is the test the design returns to most often, and the choices it asks you to make are the kind that have no clean answers. The Suzerain universe — its codex articles, its world events, the broader fictional geopolitics around Sordland — is dense enough to reward genuine attention from players who want to dig in.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndieRPGPoint & ClickStrategyStory RichSimulator
Release date
Developer
Torpor Games
Publisher
Torpor Games
Rating
star8.5
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Quarantine Circular

Quarantine Circular is a text-based adventure set during a global, world-ending pandemic, when an unknown entity arrives on Earth. A small group of humans must decide, on behalf of the whole planet, whether to trust the stranger from the stars. The fate of a vulnerable human race rests on your dialogue choices, both with your fellow scientists and with the off-world visitor. Working as a team, you try to determine whether the alien has come to help or plans to strike while the planet is weak, and your conversations decide how the story ends. The self-contained tale runs about two hours, split into chapters you can finish in one sitting or in smaller pieces. The game comes from the award-winning team behind Thomas Was Alone, Volume, and Subsurface Circular, drawing on classic adventure games and modern dialogue systems. No prior Bithell game is needed to follow it. Extras include a responsive soundtrack by Dan Le Sac, an art gallery, and an unlockable interactive developer commentary called Mr Commentary.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndiePoint & ClickStory RichCasualPuzzleShooter
Release date
Developer
Bithell Games
Publisher
Bithell Games
Rating
star8.5
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The Darkside Detective A Fumble in the Dark

The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark is the second entry in Spooky Doorway's pixel-art paranormal point-and-click series, set once again in Twin Lakes — America's 34th most haunted city. The premise is familiar to anyone who played the first game: when something cursed happens in Twin Lakes, Detective Francis McQueen and his usually-present (in body, if not mind) sidekick Officer Dooley are dispatched to handle it. Twin Lakes is roughly mid-spectrum cursed — bad enough to be a nuisance, not bad enough that anyone treats it as an emergency. The sequel picks up after the events of the first game, with McQueen needing to extract Dooley from the Darkside before the duo can get back to their actual case load. Nine standalone investigations make up the campaign, each a self-contained chapter with its own setting and supporting cast. The cases take the detectives to a carnival, the local retirement home, an amateur wrestling circuit, and even all the way out to Ireland, with the small-town paranormal tone consistent across the whole spread. The writing is the game's signature asset. Spooky Doorway's particular brand of dry, character-driven humour carries the puzzles even when the puzzles themselves are conventional point-and-click chains, and the rapport between McQueen and Dooley does most of the comedic work in the background as you investigate increasingly weird situations. The pixel art is restrained and consistent, the puzzles fair without being trivial, and the chapter-based structure makes the game ideal for shorter sessions across multiple sittings.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureIndieAtmosphericPoint & Click2DStory RichCasual
Release date
Developer
Spooky Doorway
Publisher
Spooky Doorway
Rating
star8.4
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Forgotten Realms The Archives - Collection One

Forgotten Realms: The Archives - Collection One gathers the Eye of the Beholder trilogy, a set of first-person, real-time role-playing games set in the Dungeons & Dragons world of the Forgotten Realms. All three run on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rules. In the first game, a hidden evil called Xanathar preys on the city of Waterdeep from the sewers below, and the Lords of Waterdeep send your party down to root it out. The second, The Legend of Darkmoon, follows a letter from Khelben Blackstaff into the Northern and Western regions and the troubles surrounding the Temple Darkmoon. The third, Assault on Myth Drannor, sends your adventurers to free a ruined city from the grip of a Lich. You assemble a party across races and classes, from human to dwarf and cleric to thief, then rely on weapons, magic, and grit to survive. A party can be transferred across all three titles to keep the same band together to the very end, exploring the Waterdeep Sewers, Temple Darkmoon, and Myth Drannor while fighting a wide array of monsters.

Tags
SingleplayerAdventureRPGStory RichFantasyPuzzleFirst-PersonAction-Adventure
Release date
Developer
Westwood Associates
Publisher
Westwood Associates
Rating
star8.4

MetaHuman Inc.

MetaHuman, Inc. casts you as the CEO of a multinational that sells superpowers to the highest bidder, the finest money can buy. To keep shareholders satisfied, you cast potent magic, invent futuristic technology and manipulate the company's stock price by whatever means work. It is a fully text-based interactive novel of roughly 260,000 words, written by Paul Gresty of The ORPHEUS Ruse, with no graphics or sound, so the story runs entirely on your choices and imagination. Will you staff the company with mad scientists, warlocks or a blend of both? Will you destroy your rivals, buy them out or seduce them? Will you clean up the messes your business creates, or embezzle a fortune and flee the country? You can choose a male or female lead, gay or straight, pursue one of three romances, travel through time, negotiate with aliens, and climb to become the most powerful person alive.

Tags
IndieRPGChoose Your Own AdventureText-Based
Release date
Developer
Choice of Games
Publisher
Choice of Games
Rating
star8.4
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About Text-Based

Text-Based — поджанр игр, в которых главный канал передачи смысла — текст, а не графика. Игрок читает описания мира, ситуаций и персонажей, а действия совершает выбором из вариантов или вводом команд. Жанр восходит к interactive fiction 1970-х (Zork, Adventure) и сегодня живёт в нескольких ветвях — от choice-based проектов до сложных нарративных RPG.

В text-based игре <b>экран — это страница</b>, и каждое решение читается как фраза. Это переворачивает работу с информацией: вместо визуальных подсказок (значок над врагом, цвет интерфейса, анимация удара) всё описывается словами, и качество прозы становится определяющим. Поверх этого работают системы — статы персонажа, инвентарь, репутация, отношения с NPC — но без героя на экране и без боёв в реальном времени. Третий слой — разветвлённость: text-based игра почти всегда строится как граф решений, в котором каждый выбор закрывает одни ветки и открывает другие, и полное прохождение требует нескольких заходов.

Citizen Sleeper от Jump Over The Age — современный канон жанра: герой-беглый-клон выживает на захолустной космической станции, а каждое действие — бросок кубика плюс текст с тяжёлыми последствиями. Suzerain ставит игрока на пост президента вымышленной восточноевропейской республики 1950-х — все решения принимаются через диалоги с министрами, и геополитический кризис разрешается переговорами. The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante — сюжетная RPG в декорациях вымышленного теократического государства: за десятки лет жизни героя игрок собирает портрет общества и собственной судьбы. Choice of Robots — длинная text-only игра про инженера-робототехника на 50 лет вперёд, написанная в формате ChoiceScript. Heads Will Roll: Reforged переносит формулу в средневековые битвы: текстовое описание боя плюс карта поля. Wednesdays — экзистенциальная text-инди про ребёнка в провинции 90-х, в которой каждый эпизод занимает один четверг.

Прямой родственник text-based — Visual Novel: соседний жанр, в котором текст усилен портретами персонажей и фоновыми иллюстрациями. Чистый text-based от него отличается отсутствием изображений или их минимальной ролью. Interactive Fiction — родительская форма всего жанра, к которой сегодняшние text-based проекты возвращаются регулярно через инструменты вроде Twine и ChoiceScript.