masters side blog (practice)

Coffee Talk is a visual novel by Indonesian studio Toge Productions about having heart-to-heart conversations and making people coffee. 

It’s a visual novel, so most of the experience consists of learning things about the characters through their dialogue. A lot of the characters have a lot of pain and emotional issues, and they briefly discuss their feelings with you as you make them coffee and talk to them. 

Spiritfarer is a very chill 2D indie title by Thunder Lotus games about death, loss and resource management.

The gorgeous art style and serene vibes reported by reviewers drew my interest initially, and the surprisingly insightful writing really hit me where I lived. We live in a world of performative social action, so to have a game call out the motives of the player (through the character) was really impactful and clever. 

It’s emotionally impactful without exploitation of suffering or torture porn, which it achieves through the strength of its writing and compelling mechanics. Also it’s a pretty solid resource management sim. 

Even I am not immune to the charms of the co-op early access game.

Something I played a little bit during the less stressfilled weeks leading up my own game’s submission was Phasmophobia. Little known fact about me, I’m a big fan of ghost hunting/paranormal type content, so when I saw a game that actually went into the specifics of what thing works in which way to determing the type of spectre, I was immediately here for it.

One thing I really enjoyed with speech input as an aspect of the game - I think yelling at ghosts is hilarious so I often got very aggressive when it came to ghost investigations with my friends. They always prompt you to call out its name, so I ended up yelling “(ghost name)!! COME FUCK ME UP!!!” a lot, it was really fun.