Leftovers

Leftovers
https://realmpact.itch.io/leftovers

Leftovers is a free narrative horror game that takes about 20 to 25 minutes to play. Your mother has ten servings of leftover food, and she wants you to deliver them to the other tenants of your rundown apartment building. As you might imagine, each of these tenants is super creepy.

You can answer the tenants’ questions by nodding or shaking your head, and “failing” the interaction will cause you to run home to the top floor. Your mother will get progressively angrier each time you return, and you’ll have to walk down all the flights of stairs again. My recommendation would be to set the camera at max speed before starting the game, as this can potentially save several minutes of stair climbing.   

The concept of Leftovers is great; but, as this was created for a game jam, it was made under time constraints. The 3D space of the apartment building is about as basic as it could be. There’s no background music, and there are only two or three instances of sound effects. Since you have to start over from the beginning so often, I wish there had been a few changes to the environment between runs.

Still, I had a lot of fun with Leftovers. The hand-drawn 2D character designs are great, as is the writing. I was impressed by how much story fit into just a few lines of dialog, and I really enjoyed how the individual tenant stories gradually began to fit together into a cohesive narrative. It’s definitely worth playing the game a second time in order to appreciate the story details and foreshadowing.

Leftovers stands well enough on its own as an experimental prototype, but I would love to see the developers return to the game and polish it into something stranger and gorier and even more disturbing.