#evospec

I played through tonight, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who loves speculative evolution, visual novels, aliens, nature documentaries, and/or whales. It's a visual novel about the calfhood and adolescence of an alien whale.

It's on the very low-interaction side of the visual novel scale. Most interaction is clicking to advance the story, but there are, essentially, footnotes that you can click on to learn more about the wider world and universe this little whale lives in.

The hints at what humanity is like at this is just enough to whet the appetite for more, written to an in-universe audience that doesn't bother to explain things everyone should know. Reminds me pleasantly of The Crucible of Time, in that sense. But even more tantalizing for me is the beautifully detailed speculative biology, centred of course on my favourite animal group, the cetaceans. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it.

It made me cry really hard at The Usual Trigger and I had to take a breather in the middle because of that, but it was well worth it. I've listed some content warnings under the cut. Give it a try! It's free on Steam and won't take more than an hour or two!

Halloween is “over” for some of you, but it’s only 11 pm on my end, and I’ve spent much of my Halloween finishing up what’s a deeply special article to me.

Learn about SOME - just some - of the most terrifying and surprising alien wildlife from Alan Dean Foster’s “Midworld” setting: one of my biggest inspirations from childhood to today.