COMPLETE: The Raccoon Who Lost Their Shape

I went to itch.io to download another short little game I'll be writing about fairly soon, but this was in the related sidebar and looked intriguing. I figured it'd be a neat little half hour or so, and was right.

The Raccoon Who Lost Their Shape is a little in-browser game about a raccoon medium who runs a business summoning the spirits of shape people (as in sentient triangles and circles and such) and passing messages back and forth between them and the people who summoned them. Sometimes there are choices involved. (The summoner wants you to tell the ghost they said sorry. The ghost hates the summoner and emphatically does not forgive them for what they did. Tell the summoner that, or lie for closure?) There is also a slowly-building metaplot about a deceased crescent shape the racoon is trying to locate.

The gameplay is incredibly simple. Talk to the client, go into the summoning room, talk to the ghost, pass along the message (and also ask if they've seen a crescent while they're there,) come back, talk to the client again with the answer. Repeat a bunch of times until the game ends.

The main draw to this game is the incredibly clever writing. Every object in the raccoon's office has around five or six iterations of lines when you examine them, and every single one of them made me think of xyzzysqrl. This game is highly quotable. Also the raccoon himself looks very good. A+ pixels there.

Anyway I probably shouldn't spend longer writing this than I spent playing it, but yeah this was neat.

COMPLETE/ABANDONED: Bugs and Kisses

Not entirely sure how to classify this one. Bugs and Kisses was an in development visual novel that put out a demo, which I went through some time ago. And I loved it, and I would have been on board with playing the full thing, but... alas.

So, I went through the demo one more time just to refresh my memory, then set about writing this to officially lay the game to rest and cross it off my list, I guess.

Anyway, Bugs and Kisses is, or was shaping up to be, a visual novel dating sim type game only with bugs. The art looked fantastic. The cast was charming and endearing. I totally had a the hots for Hazel, the spooky grasshopper/mantis from the Occult Club. The author was "don't get them started"-level into entomology to the point that this demo almost felt like a vehicle for exploring their passion for bug knowledge, the same way Tolkien made books just so he could showcase his conlangs. (I'm sure if they were here, they would respond with a gigantic explanation about the difference between grasshoppers and mantises so I know exactly how to tell which one Hazel was.) All in all, I really liked where this was going! But then it wasn't going, after all. That's too bad.

Without a full game to come, the demo ends up kind of in the same spot as The Raccoon Who Lost Their Shape: "Well, that was a neat free way to be entertained for 20-30 minutes." Knowing that I won't get to lock mandibles with Hazel after all made the experience a little sad in retrospect, but, you know. Enjoy what's there.

(Sara adds: Psst, Celine, you still have options for mantis-smooching.)

... This is an excellent point. Also, Bug Fables is still coming.