Edna & Harvey: The Breakout

Daedalic Entertainment, once one of the torch bearers for classic point and click adventure games in the late 2000s and early 2010s, is not doing so great these days. In fact, they pretty much don’t exist as a developer anymore, if anything at all, and you can blame the death nail being the infamous Gollum disaster. The studio’s founder and creative lead also left around the time of the game’s development to go back into his old music work, which was probably the time it became clear the soul of the place was gone. Jan Müller-Michaelis, aka Jan Baumann, aka Poki, was one of the most interesting creative leads in the modern gaming world, for good and bad, and you could really tell when a script had his unique, if at times edgy white boy, touch. We’ve covered about all his gaming work before, with two exceptions: The first original series he would help steward is Edna & Harvey.

I always wanted to make a story about the inner feelings I've had during my mental health journey anyway, plus that kind of story sounds cool to me

Edna & Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes

Daedalic’s early years were busy. Plenty of games got released under their name, but Edna and Harvey didn’t get lost in the shuffle. Thing is, while they had an idea for revisiting the duo in some form, the idea wasn’t to make a sequel. The title the second game ultimately got was a marketing decision, specifically mentioning both Edna and Harvey instead of just the latter, who has a much larger role this time. Characters and story beats from the original game are present, and the game does act as a sequel for Dr. Marcel specifically, but the focus has shifted to explore the themes of the first game in a new, far more meta way. Harvey’s New Eyes is a strange experiment of a game that still follows the dark comedy roots, and you can see what was tried here to mixed results being utilized more effectively in later projects.

Nightmare Reaper

What even is Nightmare Reaper. Like, what is this. When the boomer shooter revival hit, you probably expected things to stay mostly nostalgic, tired and true formulas with some updates here and there. Project Warlock did this, DUSK did this, ect. Enter Nightmare Reaper, a little game that has been in early access for a few years that has finally reached full release at 1.0 and about a billion new features. It is a large beast that uses roguelike elements without going full roguelike. The classic FPS formula with about a hundred asterisks. A looter shooter where instead of minor number changes, you can potentially get a double barreled shotgun that spews exploding fire balls that turn every single room into a wildfire. It is a lot.

It might also be one of the most innovative and downright thrilling FPS games to see the light of day since ULTRAKILL first appeared with episode one.

Psychonauts 2

The original Psychonauts became a cult classic in quick order, and a sequel had been craved for years. Eventually, Schafer decided to try crowdfunding again after Broken Age to get a sequel made, though this time with the aim of drumming up interest from a possible publisher to fully fund development, even making a quick VR game called The Rhombus of Ruin meant to tie the first game and sequel together. It wasn’t anything special, mainly just gave supporting villain Dr. Loboto a backstory, and a sort of side attempt to secure needed funding with a lower effort project. Finally, Double Fine was sold to Microsoft, and while that decision is extremely questionable if you know about Schafer’s poor luck with large publishers, it did at least bring Psychonauts 2 over the finish line. 

Omori

Mental health is not a topic all that common in the gaming industry. Sure, you may see it sprinkled here and there, but it’s not actively picked up for gaming stories. Thanks to the work of indie developers, however, this particular issue has become far more prevalent with games like Yume Nikki, Celeste, Lisa: The Painful and more recently, Omori.

Of course, one can’t talk about Omori without mentioning its difficult development hell. Omocat, the creator, initially kickstarted her project in 2014 with its planned release date being May 2015. She intended it to be a video game version of her drawings and comics of a hikikomori character she named “Omori.” However, May 2015 turned to 2016. Then 2016 to 2017… Eventually, 2019 passed, and the game still hadn’t been launched. Then finally, on December 25th, 2020, Omocat released the game as her Christmas gift to all her Kickstarter backers. Now was this wait worth it?

Without going into too much depth, yes, it was.

Detention

Hey kids, who wants to read about the horrific nearly four decade long time period where China ran the nation of Taiwan under martial law!? Too bad sucker, it is literally unavoidable with this game! Red Candle’s Detention is a pretty big deal, even getting a live action film distributed by Warner Bros Taiwan (which should be released by the time you read this). It’s an indie game that got a lot of eyes on it in the team’s home country. It has also turned heads in the west, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a beautiful horror game in both style and substance, feeling like the sort of Silent Hill experience we’re definitely not getting from Konami ever again.