Firebird is a choice-based visual novel that takes about an hour and a half to play. The story is set in the northern borderlands of contemporary Russia, where a Hungarian migrant named Mariska makes her living as a freight trucker.
Since she’s in the country illegally, Mariska had to take out the loan for her truck, the Firebird, from a local mob boss. When she’s caught after trying to flee the boss’s territory without paying the interest on her loan, Mariska crosses paths with a strange girl in traditional clothing named Vassilissa, who promises great riches if Mariska will deliver food to her village in the far north.
Your job as the player is to navigate between points on the map as Mariska and Vassilissa head steadily northward. There’s no backtracking, so you’ll have to choose between multiple routes while ensuring that the Firebird doesn’t run out of gas. The game is entirely text-based, and the elements of resource management are fairly chill.
More than anything, the gameplay is about roleplaying as you explore the dialogue options. It’s possible to die, but doing so will simply restart the game at a crucial choice. As the player, you’re mostly just along for the ride. And what an incredible ride it is.
At each point on the map along her route, Mariska is able to leave her truck and search for gasoline or money (which can occasionally be used to buy gas). The road is littered with the ruins of old villages and Soviet outposts, but a few of the waystations are still populated. The humans Mariska and Vassilissa meet are friendly, but the wolves and bears are another story entirely. To make matters worse, the mob boss has sent his henchman Ivan to pursue Mariska in his truck, the Gray Wolf.
As you might have guessed from the character names, which are drawn from Slavic folklore, there are supernatural forces at play. Over the course of her journey, Mariska encounters various legendary characters, from the crafty witch Baba Yaga to the warrior princess Maria Morevna. The gradual shift from gritty realism into the realm of a fairy tale is a lot of fun, especially when the seemingly absurd advice offered by characters along the way begins to make perfect sense. Thankfully, Mariska is nothing if not pragmatic, and her no-nonsense attitude is exactly what she needs to get the job done.
Firebird’s developers, Ludogram, are based in France, but they’ve devoted love and care to bringing the Russian setting to life. The luminous ligne claire artwork of Quentin Vijoux invites the player onto the northern tundra while conveying a strong sense of lingering twilight and freezing cold. Despite Firebird’s celebration of Slavic folklore, the game’s narrative makes no attempt to hide its criticism of the Russian state, especially the collusion between government and organized crime. There’s also a haunting scene with Soviet ghosts that I found genuinely chilling.
Although it’s possible to see an entirely different variation of the game’s story during a second playthrough by having Mariska drive through a different set of points on the map, the destination is always the same. No matter what path you choose, Firebird connects to universal themes as it acknowledges the cycles of nature – between winter and summer, and hardship and plenty, and faith and hard work. The bad times won’t last forever, Firebird suggests, and Mariska will keep on trucking.
Blackout is a Halloween-themed point-and-click adventure game that you can play in your browser or download for free.
You play as a teenage witch who falls from the roof of a house while trying to snatch a feather from a crow. She loses her memory during her tumble to a second-floor balcony, and she’s surprised to find that the house is filled with corpses. The electricity seems to have been cut, and it’s too dark to see anything clearly. Your job as the player is to guide the witch through the haunted house and get the lights on so she can figure out what happened.
Once the lights are back on, you’re free to explore the house a second time to see what’s actually going on. This is a super fun twist, and it’s what really sells the game for me. The tone completely shifts, and the ending is fantastic. I hope it doesn’t spoil the story to say that it’s just as much comedy as it is horror.
Even though your character is in the dark, the game’s 16-bit pixel art is bright and colorful. Each room of the house is a pleasure to explore. There are enough points of interest to provide flavor, but the graphics are designed to help the important puzzle pieces stand out. The puzzles are mostly self-explanatory – use the footstool to reach the key on the shelf, etc. – but some are silly and surprising. The writing in this game is just as charming as the art, and I really enjoyed the time I spent in this weird little house.
Blackout probably takes twenty minutes to play if you know what you’re doing. Since there’s not much guidance, I got stuck a few times, and it took me about 45 minutes to finish the game. I’m grateful to ( this ) short video walkthrough on YouTube for helping me figure out the endgame puzzle, which is very clever but only makes sense in retrospect once the lights are back on.
Don’t Let Her In is a free ten-minute horror game that you can play on a Game Boy Color emulator (such as mGBA) or directly in your browser on Itch.io.
You play as a teenager who hasn’t set foot outside the house in several weeks. Their father left a note on the kitchen table with a simple warning: Don’t let her in. As the player, you move through the house while interacting with various objects. You have one job, but you won’t be able to keep yourself safe forever.
Alternatively, you can ignore your father’s warning and invite the creepy woman inside the house as soon as she knocks on the kitchen window. This also leads to a satisfying story, although I’d recommend playing the game straight the first time around. The slow lead to the twist ending is wonderful, and having already experienced this twist makes the second ending much more satisfying.
The game’s graphics are simple but effective, and you might be surprised by how much body horror a few pixels can generate. The subtle worldbuilding is quite intriguing as well. There’s no good ending to this story, and its tone is bleak – there’s no irony or campiness, just horror. Don’t Let Her In may be short, but it’s remarkably effective at creating an atmosphere of loneliness and dread.
I Am Setsuna, which was published by Square Enix in 2016, is a twenty-hour JRPG set in a beautiful fantasy world blanketed by snow.
You play as a young man named Endir, a member of a secretive tribe of masked warriors. Endir has been hired by a mysterious third party to assassinate Setsuna, a young woman who has been chosen as the sacrifice whose death will hold back the tide of ice and monsters plaguing the world for another decade. When Endir finds and confronts Setsuna, she tells him that she is willing to die, but she requests that he accompany her on her journey to the sacrificial grounds so that her death will have meaning.
The structure of the game follows a standard JRPG progression. As he follows Setsuna on her pilgrimage, Endir travels between an alternating series of towns and dungeons. Each new town has slightly nicer weapons, and the money gained while fighting monsters allows these weapons to be purchased. The player can also purchase accessories that can be customized with various materials dropped by defeated monsters, thus granting characters new and improved battle abilities and magic spells.
I am Setsuna takes its inspiration in equal parts from Final Fantasy X and Chrono Trigger, meaning that its combat system is simple, easy to pick up, and fun to experiment with. Your characters gain levels quickly, so you’ll never have to worry about grinding. To help keep battles engaging, the combat employs an optional system of timed button presses that enable attack bonuses.
About ten hours in, the game becomes more challenging. Enemies take longer to defeat and often damage your characters before they die, while the dungeons become twisting labyrinths of indistinguishable corridors. It shames me to admit this, but I had to buy the Japanese strategy guide to find my way through an endgame dungeon filled with teleporter traps. In addition, I’d have to say that the game’s story begins to lose its threads well before the ending, which is remarkably unsatisfying.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that I care far less about finishing any given video game. The moment a game stops being fun, I put it down and move on to something else. This is less about frustration and more about appreciation. Even if I never beat a game’s final boss, I can still be grateful for the parts of it that I enjoyed. Once I’ve seen everything I want to see, I can feel satisfied.
For me, I am Setsuna is a perfect example of a game that’s wonderful to play until it stops being fun. Although I’ve finished the story twice in the past, I was happy to enjoy about a dozen hours during my most recent playthrough. I suppose that I could keep going and power through the segments that necessitate a walkthrough, but I don’t particularly want to. And that’s okay.
Over the course of the first twelve hours of I am Setsuna, you’ll traverse snow-covered forests, venture into mountain villages beset by blizzards, and explore sparkling ice caves. Along the way, you’ll fight winter-themed creatures such as snow rabbits, arctic foxes, walruses, and bears. All of your characters are bundled up in warm and comfortable clothing, and it’s a pleasure to spend time in the villages chatting with NPCs by the fire while admiring the dried herbs and patterned quilts hanging from the walls.
I’m a fan of I am Setsuna, but I’d recommend it in the same way I’d recommend an actual retro game like Ocarina of Time. It’s absolutely worth playing I am Setsuna to experience its atmosphere and charm, but no one should feel bad about walking away when it becomes difficult and awkward.
Crow Country is a retro-styled 32-bit survival horror game that takes about four hours to play. What I love about Crow Country is its Story Mode, which removes all enemies and allows you to enjoy the game as an atmospheric adventure in an abandoned amusement park.
The year is 1990, and you (ostensibly) play as a police detective named Mara Forest. Mara is investigating the disappearance of Edward Crow, the owner of a small amusement park called Crow Country. Crow Country shut down and closed to the public two years ago after a girl named Elaine Marshall was severely injured in an accident.
Although Elaine’s family sued Edward Crow for the hospital fees, he never responded to court summons, and now the park sits boarded up and abandoned. Mara has reason to believe that Crow has holed up on the property, so she breaks in and begins searching for clues pertaining to his whereabouts.
Unfortunately for Mara, there are zombies about. Thankfully, she has a gun and a car trunk full of ammo. There’s also ample ammo scattered throughout the park, as well as various types of guns (and grenades) for Mara to pick up and experiment with. I’ve heard that the zombies aren’t particularly aggressive, and that shooting them isn’t particularly difficult, but I wouldn’t know. I didn’t bother with combat, and I have no regrets.
Even in Story Mode, Crow Country is a dense game with a lot to do. The map isn’t actually that big, but every “room” has multiple points of interaction. Most of this interaction provides atmosphere and flavor text, but Mara also needs to solve environmental puzzles in order to find the tools she needs to progress deeper into the park.
Mara can collect bits and pieces of brochures that she assembles into a map that proves to be extremely useful, as locked doors and unsolved puzzles are clearly marked. Although I did have to look up one or two solutions for optional challenge puzzles, I was never lost or confused about what I needed to do next. Unlike many puzzle-based adventure games, Crow Country is entirely possible to play without a guide.
In terms of its PlayStation-era retro graphics, Crow Country looks exactly like Final Fantasy VII. All of the character models are composed of charmingly blocky polygons, and the environments are pre-rendered and gradient shaded. Points of interaction are easy to distinguish, and you can rotate the camera a full 360 degrees. It’s a joy to move through this environment, especially once you begin to open Dark Souls style shortcuts.
Crow Country isn’t a cozy horror game; there’s no learning or friendship or beautiful autumn leaves. That being said, the horror elements are very mild, especially in Story Mode. Despite the atmospheric creepiness of its setting, Crow Country is less of a horror story about zombies and more of a speculative fiction story about how humans process the reality of climate change – or rather, how we will do anything to avoid processing this reality. The game’s conclusion is fantastic, as is the foreshadowing leading to its final reveals.
I wasn’t expecting Crow Country to be so fun to play, or for its environment to be so creatively designed, or for its story to hit so hard. I have zero patience for “intentionally inaccessible” retro game nonsense at this point in my life, but Crow Country wants to be experienced. Since it’s so short and accessible, I’d recommend the game to anyone who’s interested in the premise, even if you’re not typically a fan of survival horror.
I recently had the opportunity to write a review of Loving, Ohio, a graphic novel about a small town shadowed by the secrets of a cult. Here’s an excerpt…
Loving, Ohio is a powerful work of contemporary horror guided by a tense mystery that unravels against the backdrop of eerily evocative scenery. What makes this story truly disturbing is its resonance with the current cultural climate, in which exploitative religious organizations have become more mainstream while conspiracy theories are taken seriously by people looking for connection on social media. Loving, Ohio tells a compelling story that’s all the more haunting because of how critically relevant it is to the hidden monsters of contemporary American society.
You can read the full review on Women Write About Comics (here). You can read more about Matthew Erman on his website (here) and check out more of Sam Beck’s art (here). As always, I’d like to express my appreciation for my amazing and brilliant editor at WWAC, Kat Overland, who is admirably fearless and as sharp as ten knives.
I had the opportunity to review Geneva Bowers’s amazing graphic novel HoverGirls for Women Write About Comics. Here’s an excerpt…
HoverGirls includes a few battle scenes, but most of the story’s action takes place across the dialogue between characters. This type of interpersonal character drama is the element of action-oriented magical girl manga I always loved. As in Sailor Moon, the fighting is all well and good, but it mostly serves as a backdrop to what’s really important – character development. Each character has a distinct voice and motivations, and their conversations are augmented by humor and just the right amount of tension.
You can read the full review on WWAC (here). If you’re interested, you can read the comic online (here), check out the book’s official page (here), and see more of the artist’s work on her webpage (here). And, as always, I have nothing but gratitude for my brilliant editor, Kat Overland.
Norco is a cross between a visual novel and a point-and-click adventure game that takes seven hours to play. The game is set in a near-future version of New Orleans and its surrounding bayou. Despite its lowkey cyberpunk elements, the future envisioned by the game isn’t all that different from the present. Norco is gorgeously well-written and intriguingly grounded in the specificity of its setting, and the various small stories it encompasses are filled with fascinating characters and meaningful human drama.
I want to focus on what’s interesting about this game. That being said, Norco can be frustrating, so let me get this out of the way: most of the adventure game elements of Norco are bad. The puzzles (such as they are) are poorly executed and annoying. There’s at least one instance of turn-based combat per act, and it’s not great. Also, the game takes a weird turn toward cosmic horror in the third and final act; and, in order to unlock a slightly more satisfying ending, you have to do a minor random thing in the second act that’s extremely easy to miss.
None of this is a deal breaker. Rather, I think it’s good to set expectations. Specifically, you should expect to use a walkthrough at some point. I actually ended up using three walkthroughs, as I found some of the adventure game sequences to be difficult to piece together. They’re not complicated; they’re just opaque. Thankfully, the more frustrating puzzles are few and far between, and you can play the vast majority of the game just fine on your own.
You begin Norco as a woman named Kay who returns home after her mother dies of cancer and her brother Blake stops replying to texts. Although Blake is nowhere to be found in or around the house, Kay is greeted by the family robot Million, a fugitive from the skirmishes between armed militias that have broken out across the southwest. Million suggests that she and Kay talk to people in the neighborhood to figure out where Blake has run off to.
The search for Blake is interrupted by extended flashback sequences in which you play as Kay’s mother Catherine. While her cancer is in remission, Catherine takes odd jobs on a Fivver-like platform called Superduck in order to pay off loans so her kids can keep the house after she dies. These jobs take Catherine across New Orleans and eventually lead her to an abandoned mall colonized by the teenage disciples of an internet demagogue by the name of Kenner John.
We’re introduced to Catherine as she allows a blandly anonymous tech corporation to make a neural map of her brain. In theory, the experimental procedure is compensated by the generation of an AI personality intended to help Catherine’s family process her death. In reality, Catherine needs the money. Immediately after her brain imaging session, she’s out in the city after dark running errands via the Superduck app.
Oddly enough, Superduck ends up being a real “person,” a branch of an AI personality based on Catherine’s friend Duck. Based on a story Catherine once told Duck, Superduck has figured out that an alien entity resides in the estuary of Lake Pontchartrain, and that it was captured by Kenner John.
Although the cyberpunk elements of Norco’s plot are fun, they’re not the real story. As Catherine, you play as a tired and washed-up adult using a rideshare service to get around town while trying to gather information from other tired adults who are just trying to make a living. It’s through these conversations that the player gets a sense of what New Orleans is like as a city, as well as a sense of how not even wealthy people who seem to be major players have any control over the environment. There are going to be hurricanes, and there are going to be floods, and neither oil companies nor tech companies can do anything about it.
What I appreciate about Norco is how realistic and grounded it is. As someone dealing with cancer, Catherine gets winded climbing stairs during one of the adventure game segments, and she’s okay with telling people that no, actually, she’s not fine and she needs a minute. Kenner John’s cultists are dumb kids (affectionate) who just want to hang out in an abandoned mall and smoke weed while playing video games. Even the MAGA-style militia members who make a brief appearance in the last act are heroic in their own deranged way, and the poor harassed public official who stays late in City Hall dealing with paperwork delivers a monologue about how you can’t save everyone that’s worthy of Shakespeare.
Despite the gritty setting of a city on its last legs and Norco’s complete lack of sentimentality, all of the characters are intensely human and sympathetic. They’re also quite funny, even when they’re at their lowest and most morally dubious. There’s one story about a guy who eats a hotdog from a food cart in a downtown tourist area that made me laugh so hard I cried. Norco tackles challenging themes, but it also manages to be pitch-perfect comedy storytelling. I really can’t overemphasize how brilliant the writing is.
Also, this is worth saying: As someone who grew up in the Deep South, I’m truly and deeply grateful that the script of this game uses an accurate representation of Southern AAVE. My promise to myself about Norco was that I would put the game down and walk away the second anyone said “y’all” or pulled some sort of X-Men Gambit bullshit, but I didn’t need to worry. Everyone talks like a normal person.
The basic gameplay of Norco consists of conversation-based fetch quests. Someone will tell you to talk to someone else, and you have to go find them. You do this by driving (or ordering an off-brand Uber) to take you to a point on a map of New Orleans, and from there you’ll navigate between four or five screens by clicking on various points of interest. Your objective is always clear, but there’s a lot of non-essential content to interact with. And it’s good to talk with everyone! What you’ll get as a reward for being curious is some of the best stand-up comedy you’ll ever read.
The adventure game puzzles are so deeply embedded in the action of the story that they’re difficult to describe without extensive plot summary. What makes the worst of them annoying is that they expect you to leave the game and write something down in real life. One of the more obnoxious of these puzzles involves numerology. I understand that this is a play on the weird Christian-themed numerology cults that have sprung up on YouTube and Facebook – one of my aunts got really into this during the pandemic, true story, and it’s batshit insane – but it’s still a pain to put down the game and go get a piece of paper.
One of the interactive elements of the game that actually works well occupies a large portion of the third act. The Surprise Big Bad antagonist has gotten an offshoot of the Kenner John cult to build a spaceship on the bayou, and Kay needs to go out and find the site by navigating through the swamp in a small boat on a 4-bit pixelated sonar screen. There are all sorts of fun things to find out on the water, and this segment is enhanced by an atmospheric lead-up that includes an interesting lesson in natural history concerning why the topography of the bayou is so treacherous even though it looks like open water.
At the conclusion of the end credits, Norco provides a list of books and documentaries that the developers used as references. I was so drawn into the real-world history presented by Norco that I immediately screencapped this list. I got started on following up with these references by watching a documentary called Mossville: When the Great Trees Fall, and it’s almost painfully apparent that the creators of Norco were pulling inspiration from serious ongoing issues. It’s amazing that they were able to take such heavy material and transform it into something so gorgeously strange and entertaining.
Although Norco isn’t as mechanically robust as Disco Elysium, it’s easily in the same category of excellent writing and unique visual stylization. I somehow got the impression that this game would be all doom and gloom about poverty and injustice, but it’s actually a genuinely funny dark comedy about a cast of characters whom I grew to love despite (and often because of) their flaws and bad behavior.
Castaway is a tribute to Link’s Awakening whose story campaign takes about 35 minutes to play. This campaign functions as a tutorial to the game’s Death Tower, in which you have one life to climb fifty simple and static floors with very few health drops and no permanent upgrades. The Death Tower is not for me, but the story campaign was a pocket of pure and unadulterated joy.
You play as a young boy whose escape pod lands on a deserted island after his spaceship blows up. After the crash, pterodactyls steal the boy’s survival tools and his dog, so it’s up to him to unsheathe his trusty sword and explore the island to get everything back.
The island is very small, as are each of the three dungeons. There’s no one to talk to, and there are only four types of enemies. The only aspects of the environment you can interact with are two types of rocks, so all of the puzzles involve sokoban-style block pushing. The two tools you find in the first two dungeons are a pickaxe that allows you to break rocks and a hookshot that allows you to latch onto rocks to cross gaps. If you use your tools to backtrack, you can collect three additional hearts to bolster your health.
The overworld map and dungeons are all tight and precise. More than a true imitation of a Zelda game, Castaway’s story campaign seems to be a stage for speedrunning, and there’s a special Speedrun Mode that allows you to see the clock onscreen. I tend not to care about such things, but the Speedrun Mode was a nice excuse to give the game a second playthrough with a bit more challenge.
The music and sound effects of Castaway are forgettable, but the graphics manage to achieve the trick of using modern technology to reproduce what you thought Game Boy Color games looked like when you were younger. The pixel art of the opening and closing animations is gorgeous, and the interstitial illustrations are lovely as well.
Whether this tiny game is worth $8 is debatable, especially if you’re not interested in speedruns or gauntlet survival challenges. I love Link’s Awakening beyond all reason, so I was happy to put down the money to support indie developers while spending an hour in nostalgia heaven. Still, it would have been nice if Castaway had more substance.
If you’re interested in the concept of Castaway but don’t want to spend money on something that feels like it should be a free demo of a larger game, please consider the alternative of Ocean’s Heart, a beautiful and robust Zeldalike game that’s honestly better than most actual Zelda games. If you’re interested, you can check out my review of Ocean’s Heart (here).
Animal Well is a no-combat puzzle platformer with an open-world Metroidvania structure. You play as a small seed navigating a mossy system of underground tunnels. The game has no dialogue or diegetic text, nor does it need any. Your job is simply to explore.
Because this is a video game, however, the player needs objectives. Early on in the game, the little seed arrives in what appears to be a central hub with statues of four animals. Each animal’s flame is sealed in a themed quadrant of the map. Although your map is mostly blank at the beginning, the location of each flame is marked, giving you four goals to work toward. Navigation is anything but simple, however, and figuring out where you’re supposed to go is just as much of a puzzle as any of the one-room set pieces.
Since Animal Well gives you so many paths to choose from, the beginning can be confusing. In many ways, this game reminds me of Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter, which are similarly cagey about where the critical path might lie. Thankfully, there’s no wrong way to play Animal Well, so you’ll be fine if you simply choose a direction and start walking. Once you make your way into a level proper, the path forward becomes much easier to follow.
As you might guess from the title, the vast underground well that serves as the setting of the game is filled with animals that theme the puzzles. In the dog level, for example, you’ll need to find a frisbee that you can throw to distract the dogs that chase after you. In the seahorse level, fish blow bubbles into the air that you can use to reach higher platforms. In the chameleon level, you’ll need to adjust the path of wall-climbing hedgehogs so that they hit otherwise inaccessible switches.
Animal Well offers the player a beautiful and evocative environment to get lost in, and it’s nice to see such a well-designed game that focuses on exploration instead of combat. Most of the platforming puzzles are relatively easy but still very clever, which I appreciate. The pixel art is gorgeous and atmospheric, and each area manages to express its theme while still maintaining a unified aesthetic that ties the various ecosystems together. There’s not much music, but the sound design is fantastic.
If I have one complaint about Animal Well, it’s that the map is riddled with secret passageways that are completely unmarked. In addition, you can only make it so far into each level without the aid of a tool from another level. In theory, this means that there are eight levels instead of four. In practice, it can be frustrating not to know whether you can’t proceed because you need a tool from a different level or whether you simply missed a hidden path. Unless you happen to be either very good (or very patient) with this sort of thing, I’d strongly recommend playing Animal Well with a walkthrough.
It’s impossible to say how long Animal Well takes to play. According to reviews, it has the potential to be a five-hour game, but I get the feeling that the majority of players aren’t going to have such a smooth experience. If I had to guess, I’d say that most first-time players should expect to spend at least six or seven hours getting to the end. After that, there’s potentially another ten hours of exploration enabled by the tools you find at the end of the final area.
Is the cleverness and charm of Animal Well worth the aggravation of getting lost and not knowing what you’re supposed to do? That depends on the player, of course, and it’s worth saying that this isn’t a casual game. Still, although I wish Animal Well were less opaque, I appreciate that it’s not actually difficult. Exploration is always rewarded, and I never stopped being surprised and amazed by each new bit of the game I managed to find. Every single screen in Animal Well is a work of art.
After finishing Animal Well, I read the TV Tropes page to see if there’s an actual story to the game. Perhaps you can unlock a different ending if you can manage to find all the collectables? From what I can tell, there’s no real story no matter what you do, but there are collectables underneath collectables underneath collectables. There’s also an ARG. None of that is any of my business, but it’s cool I guess. I always appreciate when the people who created a game were living their best lives, and I’m happy to have an excuse to spend more time poking around the beautiful mossy tunnels of Animal Well.
Digital Fantasy Diary 