#Visual Novel Village

[farvn]

"Geez! Haven't you learned not to scare people?" Part 6 of the demo for Student Union has been uploaded!

[nukbody]

Resident lover reminded me of my true priority in life which is pulling milfs

[neos-schlond-poofa]

i think all miranda fans haven’t actually encountered a real life miranda before and once they do, i think it’ll change their perspective

(art - @dead-finch-420)

[cr0wisgay]

im so fucking gay for lady dimitrescu. At first i didn't see the appeal (i was so far in the closet i didn't even know myself) but now? god i want her.

[team-avia]

Traveling the world and experiencing the breathtaking sights it has to offer is all well and good, but something in that little brain of yours is just itching to settle down again.

What better way is there than to take a blind trip to Romania to study at a school you've never even heard of? Really, what's the worst that could happen?

Join StalwartUrsa on Wednesday live over at Twitch for a college experience you'd absolutely die for! Be sure to check in with us for more Resident Lover streams!

(feel free to tag us with your schedule if you plan on streaming! we'll be sure to spread the word!)

[clownboymcchucklefuck]

If you told last year me that I would be reading smut for my theories I would have called you insane

[jurygarroth]

woahh you only started watching this year? how’d u get into aphmau if u dont mind me asking!

basically my twitter mutuals were streaming it in discord for nostalgia so I got curious and joined them

I actually experienced it through a twisted fucking cycle path watch order bc they were in the middle of season 1 when I jumped in, and I think we only backtracked to the start later, and I let them spoil a ton of things for me, but I thought it was such a charming storytelling medium to utilize and the character bonds were so easy to get invested in 😭 I feel sentimental now I love u MCD

[poorly-drawn-ace-attorney]

today: i think about pearl running all the way to court from kurain village a lot

[novustrad]

Downloaded the demo for Process of Elimination. I was having fun, game was going great... except I forgot to save regularly. And the fucking game crashed. And I lost over an hour of play.

But then I went and finally finished Howling Village: Echoes so that's something I guess

[iloveabunchofgames]

#JakeReviewsItch

A Normal Lost Phone

by Dear Villagers

Genre: Adventure, Interactive Fiction, Puzzle

Pitch: Look through text messages, photos, and more on a lost phone to learn about its owner.

My expectations: I've heard of this! I don't expect to have my mind blown, but this series is fairly well regarded, right? Is "normal" meant to be ironic, like I'm about to stumble upon some horrific mystery, or is this going to be a contemplative look at the hints at the life of an ordinary individual captured on a piece of consumer electronics? I hope it's the latter.

Review:

Content warnings are important. They are an encouraging sign of social progress, and I hope we never move backwards. It is awesome that we live in an era where it is common to respect each other’s sensitivities. I hate content warnings.

I hate when a well-crafted, slowly unfolding story—a story where all the mysteries would fall into place if you just knew that one crucial piece of missing information—gives away the whole game before it’s even begun. A Normal Lost Phone presents an absorbing slice of life, written with a masterful grasp of nonlinear storytelling and keenly observed characters, but I was on the lookout for the thing before I’d clicked past the title screen.

A content warning was the right call. No one who might be hurt by said content deserves to be caught off guard. I wish I had a better solution, but I don’t. I mean, I’m being as vague as I can, but I’ve already told you there’s a thing.

A single, admirable, necessary sentence tainted my experience, but it did not ruin it. The call to empathy and understanding still resonates. This story’s strength is not in its ending but its telling. Highly recommended.

+ Invites you into the life of a stranger. Spins an absorbing, painful, small-scale yarn within the confines of a phone, where all the disconnected, seemingly disconnected puzzle pieces click into place as the context is revealed. + Dreary indie pop from a surprising number of artists. It's not enough music to cover the game's total playtime, and I never found an option to make the playlist automatically repeat, but I found my fingers tapping along to the tunes often enough that I didn't mind having to manually reset it.

– Content warning gives away major themes too soon. The seemingly incongruous details that should be intriguing fall flat if you've already predicted where the story's going. (A content warning was still the right call.) – While I like the idea of the handful of password-cracking puzzles, and even felt satisfied with some of them in execution, it's a drag when you know you've seen the answer somewhere and have to dig through dozens of messages to get what you need. – SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! Are you playing a character? Are you playing as yourself? This question is left to your imagination, but whoever you are, there's no reason to believe you have any connection whatsoever to the phone's owner or any of the characters in the story. In order to progress, you must read personal message, send sensitive messages and even photographs—not as yourself, a stranger who picked up a stranger's phone, but as Sam, the phone's owner. It's incredibly invasive, and it serves no purpose except to satisfy your own curiosity. Now, if I could do the thing that I would realistically do in this situation (look for contact information and return the phone to its owner without invading anyone's privacy), we wouldn't have a game. I don't feel bad about playing a game in the way it was intended, but I do feel weird about it. It's a game about feeling empathy for a person who keeps secrets; a person who is right to keep those secrets; a person whose secrets should be respected. And the goal is simply to satisfy my own curiosity, no matter what violations that entails? Weird, weird choice.

🧡🧡🧡🧡🤍

#JakeReviewsTwitch is a series of daily game reviews. You can learn more here. You can also browse past reviews...

• By name • By rating • By genre

[kaistrashbin]

KORE YOU ARE SUCH A GENIUS FOR THIS AND I WANT THIS TO BE A THING SO BAD

capcom are you listening, capcom? are you listening? capcom? are you listening, capcom? capcom are you listening? are you listening-

RE8 Lord DLC concept

GONNA EXPAND ON THIS BECAUSE I LOVE THIS IDEA!!!

So basically this is just an idea of how i'd make a DLC about the RE8 lords cuz lets be honest THEY DESERVED ONE. So in my concept, instead of playing as the lords you'd play as one of the people in their lives (whether significant or insignificant) and experience the lords in a different perspective. Some are actual characters in the RE8 lore based off of the files, and some are just ocs i made

[farvn]

"It's not romance. It's like leading a child." Part 5 of the demo for Student Union has been uploaded!

[pretend-i-don-t-exist]

hm more heavenly demon!sy thoughts,,, i am invested

the system had an error bc sj's body and soul are still very much together bc he hasn't even experienced a single qi deviation yet, so it tries to find a good substitute to throw sy's soul in

when it can't find any, it decides to make a body that sy is most familiar with (it should be a human, but the system was impressed by sy's very passionate rants about lbh's heavenly demon abilities) so boom. heavenly demon sy

he wakes up in the endless abyss. the system has to hibernate bc the body has taken too much of its power so: here is sy, with an almost invincible body, alone in the endless abyss. oh, and he doesn't know about his heritage. all he knows is that he's in the abyss of pidw

ofc sy immediately geeks out over the demonic beasts and all the plants!!! look he could never visualize what a wyrm-mule looks like or how a porcupine-quail could possibly work, and now he gets to see them! irl!!

well not irl exactly, but if this isn't a very weird dream and he's really transmigrated into some background npc, then it's all well and good. his knowledge of the endless abyss should be enough to keep him safe

he does get very weird urges tho like wdym he's suddenly not squeamish with blood?? why is tearing off his arm now a good strategy to get out of the jaw of a black moon python rhinoceros??? sure his body weirdly could regenerate (tested and proven when he keeps tripping over roots that just keep popping up in his way somehow) but he should be a bit more against that, right?

he also gets the urge to bare his teeth when aggressive beasts crowd around him. his teeth are suspiciously pointy when he feels them, and somehow, the beasts are... intimidated? just like that? when he snarls at them. things also bend to his will for some reason? he was irritated with a swamp (he does not want to wade through that), and then the next time he looks back at it, it's gone???

the demons he came across are very polite, too. completely unlike his expectations. sy thinks he's lucky to meet civilized demons with human-like mannerisms, and does not notice that they're batshit terrified of this one heavenly demon conspiciously leaking out so much demonic qi that it's a miracle he hasn't passed out (which is even more scary bc that is a heck ton of qi)

then because sy is sy, he wifebeams the terrified demons. he talks so animatedly with them, asking questions about their customs without judgment! his smile is so pretty and charming! even in his dirty clothing and unkempt hair, he still looks like a beauty!

then sy takes a bath when he arrives at the demons' village and takes offer to wash up, notices his reflection, and promptly freaks out

is he tlj??? no, tlj does not look like this in pidw's official art, but demons can shapeshift, right? has he messed up the plot??? what date is it even?? is lbh even born yet?? is he lbh's grandfather?????

the demons are rightfully frightened but also worried when sy accidentally destroys a wall of the bath in his haste to get out and get some answers. luckily, this is the demon realm, or his tendency to wear only inner robes will be heavily scrutinized!

sy then plans to get into the human realm (he knows of a few ways) to change the plot! he can't possibly leave lbh to suffer like in pidw if he has the ability to change it...

except lbh is not even born yet.

he does meet tlj, and woooo the demon is so chill and has an entire library full of the worst novels sy has ever read in his entire life (still better than pidw). tlj seems like a sweetheart, how could he possibly wage a war against the human realm that led to his imprisonment? smth is fishy here!

(behind him, tlj kills an entire horde of demons for daring to plan to capture sy. sy is now his little brother. sy does not have the choice of refusing)

and so they travel to the human realm together. tlj immediately fucks off to the nearest bookstore, and sy would have loved to follow him except he has Seen the Plot. then he's suddenly trying to pass off as a wandering cultivator that forgot most of the human customs (very suspicious) bc he's spent most of the time researching plants and animals (ok, his infodumps make that believable) in front of cang qiong cultivators

and then cang qiong offers him to become a teacher in the beast taming peak bc why not (they heard of rumors of a kind wandering cultivator with incredibly accurate portrayals and info about demonic beasts, and also sy is acting Very Sus so they kinda want to keep an eye on him)

(tlj is laughing at him so hard he dislocates a shoulder)

look i just want sy to have the time of his life exploring the endless abyss without the system or the plot breathing down his neck and then i want to throw him into the most stressful situations of his life (coexisting with the disciple versions of the peak lords, and also not getting himself killed for being a heavenly demon, and also tlj's steadily increasing panic on how to court a cold human cultivator who could bodyslam him and throw him over her shoulder and walk off to the sunset)

[neos-schlond-poofa]

everyone thought miranda stole bela’s heart but they’re wrong it was mc who stole it #blessed #godbless

[failbettergames]

any games you'd recommend? could be for any reason! (similarity to fallen london, you know the people who made it, you just think it's neat, etc.) besides your own, of course, I already own all of those :)

Yes, here's a list of all of the games we talked about in our newsletter last year:

Birth: an adventure puzzle game about constructing a creature from spare bones & organs.

Scarlet Hollow: an immersive, episodic horror-mystery.

Egypt: Old Kingdom: a strategy simulator of the Great Pyramids period.

The Past Within is a fun, eerie way to spend an hour with a friend.

The Pale Beyond: high stakes on the frozen wastes, Sunless Sea feelings. 

King of the Castle: medieval monarch party game.

Stray Gods: an urban fantasy, musical visual novel featuring the gods of Greek myth.

Vampire Survivors: so moreish.

Knotwords: extremely satisfying crossword-anagram-puzzle game.

The Banished Vault: so gorgeous it actually makes us a bit cross.

Astronaut the Best: an anarchic comedy about assembling a team of hapless astronauts. 

El Paso, Elsewhere: supernatural neo-noir shooter, in which you must destroy the villain you loved - even if it means dying yourself.

Thank Goodness You're Here: may be the only game that’s more British than the ones we make.

The Fabulous Fear Machine: pulpy horror narrative strategy.

WORLD OF HORROR: Junji Ito-adjacent roguelike.

Lies of P: tickles your Fromsoft fancy. 

The Lamplighters League: essentially 1930s supernatural XCOM 

Tails Noir (formerly known as Backbone): gorgeous, bleak, compelling and unsatisfying in equal measure. 

Mediterrea Inferno: a spicy story about finding yourself after isolation.

DotAGE: manage a village where the Village Elder has helpfully precise visions of the future.

Slay the Princess: the princess is very bad and you have to kill her. 

VR remake of The 7th Guest: very fun, silly and far less punishing than the original. 

Astrea: Six-sided Oracles: interesting dice-and-deckbuilding system. 

Return of the Obra Dinn: truly a modern classic.

[requinoesis]

I would love it if you made a game with your sharks to get to know them more personally. They're just so cute! Maybe not a dating visual novel but more of animal crossing or something like that? Unless you want to make a dating game, I'm not against any idea you may have. I'm just in love with the lore you've created. You put a lot of love and care into your creations and it shows.

I'm flattered that you like the shark world I'm creating! There's so much to show but I still need to find the strength to create. But knowing that there are people who like what I do motivates me a lot! I just want to try to create something interesting and little explored about the image of sharks, something captivating.

I have the idea of showing the world of my shark folk through a comic or graphic novel, but I would need to make something like a patreon to be able to dedicate myself to it safely and pay the bills from where I live, I wonder if people would support me.

There's another “shark world” that I've created specifically to be a game idea in the style of animal crossing or stardew valley, you would manage a little shark cafe while helping to restore a old shark village to attract tourists. The art style would be similar to the dioramas of little sharks I've made over the course of a few SharkTobers, like this:

This is a test model I made in September 2022 of Reverie Hill, the sharks' haven. The main village where this game would take place and where you would manage your “Shark Café”. I don't think I've ever shown it.