harper gameblogging

background info i'm harper i'm 21 and i'm a handheld gamer. most of my games are being played on my new steam deck. my favourite genre is indie psychological horror but i'm open-minded. usually open to recommendations

for short games i'll just play through the whole thing and then post my thoughts. for longer games i'll post my early thoughts after playing the first bit of it and then after 100%ing it (or getting close enough to be sure i don't think it's worth 100%) i'll review the whole thing more thoroughly

i'll be using this rating system which i stole from this post by @/aromanticduck

"вже" is a basic ukrainian word, which directly translates to "already"; however, if you're a native english speaker and you start reading ukrainian writing, you will quickly notice that the word "вже" is simply used far more often than the word "already" is used in english, frequently in contexts where translating it as "already" would sound awkward in an english sentence. i first thought it must just have multiple meanings i wasn't aware of, but the wiktionary page reveals nothing more to me; eventually i was forced to accept that it was not just the definition that i was failing to understand, but the far more complex beast of practical usage.

my best guess, at the moment, is that in many sentences it means something equivalent to the english word "now", in contexts where the more literal translations for "now", words like зараз or тепер, would mean something different or sound awkward. it's a linguistic concept find fascinating: the way the literal translation of a word can give so little insight into how it's used in context; the existence of words that seem to have a straightforward translation and yet, like the clue that starts the detective down a rabbithole, they're far more commonly used than their other-language equivalent.

the word "вже" does not appear a single time in the game Museum of Monoliths. in fact, the game has no text at all in order to include that word, except in the settings. i just kind of figure it's such a surreal, disconnected experience that i might as well make my review a little surreal and disconnected as well.

Museum of Monoliths is a game that makes me regret putting a "you have to give a plot summary" rule on my game review blog. it's a walking simulator where you start off in a hallway and each room in the hallway offers a teleportation to a new, abstract area. there's no connection between these levels really, each one is a brand new location. you walk through the locations until interacting with a giant stone structure teleports you back to the main hub area, where a new level is unlocked. it's ... kind of like if The Beginner's Guide didn't have narration or a clear story.

it takes the term "walking simulator" to a new level, and a very literal one. there's no gameplay beyond walking and (rarely) clicking, and the walking and clicking doesn't seem to unlock a story. it feels more like an interactive museum than an actual game, so that at least explains some of the title - it feels like it's taking me through very vague concepts for games or game levels, while entirely lacking any game levels of itself.

i mean, it's fine as a museum! i like the environments and the art and the soundtrack. it's just very... hard to know what to make of it. it isn't long enough or tedious enough or frustrating enough to make me feel particularly upset about it being so nothing-y, but it also is very nothing-y; i don't know what any of these scenes mean. the only description that comes to mind is definitely "it's like if The Beginner's Guide didn't have narration or a clear story", and The Beginner's Guide was really depending on its story to keep me interested.

when i think about this game i kind of don't think about this game. i think about the word "monolith". i think about my unprovable conspiracy theory that there is some word in the ukrainian language that directly translates to "monolith", but that is used way more often than the english equivalent. like how вже is used more often than "already". i feel like genuinely, the vast majority of the time when i see the word "monolith" it's coming from an english translation of a ukrainian game. like i do not see that word often. it seemed a bit weird in stalker but now i'm almost convinced that there's some nuance in the usage that i may never fully grasp, some word that seems like a direct translation and yet appears far far more often.

We Know The Devil is a psychological horror visual novel about a summer camp where teenagers have to ward off and defeat the devil himself. it's mostly just a chore, like any other thing adults might force you to do. there's some hints at a wider universe, particularly lore references to magical girls existing in the world of this game, but most of the worldbuilding is light, narrowing down our focus to our three reluctant heroes.

the first thing you notice when you open We Know The Devil is the way it paints the camp group as a collective rather than as individuals. this is turned into a joke early on when we see another camp group - they're treated as one person for the sake of dialogue, three mismatched characters in one sprite with no known names, the same line of dialogue repeated to show them speaking at once. but it's taken more seriously with the main characters in the whole game, with the narration from a plural first person perspective - the constant casual references to "our" actions, the typical first-person teenage girl angst spoken from "we" instead of "i".

the second thing you notice when you open We Know The Devil is, of course, that your camp group is not a collective. the three main characters scarcely agree on any course of action, and every decision in the game revolves around them splitting up. time and time again, the three characters are squeezed into a situation clearly better suited for two or four people, and the plot mandates that one person waits behind while two people participate in something - the only type of choice the player can make here is choosing which characters go together, and that means that even if you're not meaning to, you always choose who is unfairly excluded.

it's such a strong combination of themes for the premise - it's the sort of thing that i would insist should be like, taught in English classes or something, except for the glaring problem. there isn't a third thing you notice, or at least not anything similarly profound. the dev had a brilliant idea for what themes they wanted to tackle in their story, and a brilliant idea for how to tackle those themes in the finest details with the very interface and narration, but somewhere in the middle the potential wasn't fully met, and as a result i find myself far more interested in the broad metaphorical story than i am in what's literally happening with these characters.

the characters are... fine. i don't dislike them in the slightest. you invariably get the sense that they exist as vehicles for delivering themes rather than as full people - something that is probably at least somewhat true about most characters in most media but it's probably not a good sign if your audience is actively thinking about it. there are a lot of dialogue sections that leave me thinking, this seems like a really meaningful and profound thing that you could say about some real people... but it's almost meaningless in the context of the game, as something this character is saying to the other character. i don't feel like i know these people well enough to be particularly moved by dramatic statements about their inner motivations, or like i understand the relationship between the characters in order to understand how they intuit all these truths about each other. in some way that adds to the experience - it's like the very real teenage experience of being stuck with other teenagers that you're constantly at odds with and never feeling sure if you're friends or enemies or something else - but in other ways it just feels like i need way more time with this story and these characters in order to understand and be invested in their arcs.

there's a lot of aspects of this story that i think could have benefitted from more time and explanation, really. the worldbuilding is very light, to the point that i'm not even sure what is meant by some of the words used to describe the items the kids use to fight off the devil. the storytelling is very dialogue-heavy, and the lack of narration of the characters' actions makes it harder to visualise what's happening.

the dialogue-heavy storytelling has its other drawbacks as well. the first-person plural narration has a lot of potential, but it's rarely used because the writing often defaults to characters describing what they're doing in dialogue for the audience's benefit rather than the narrator describing it. the characterisation has a lot of telling-not-showing, and sometimes it just leaves me unsure how the characters know this about each other. the dialogue is very often like.... written like text messages, eschewing grammar for a more authentc delivery. it's the sort of thing that would be funny if it was just reserved for an occasional joke, but gets old quickly.

this game is only about an hour to play through once, but most likely you aren't just playing once; there are 4 endings, and i think getting all of them is the intended experience. you'll be seeing a lot of scenes more than once, and there's no skip feature. this is where the flaws in the game's writing really become apparent.

do i like the overarching story in this game? yes, quite a lot - it's a story about queer self-acceptance, about trying so hard to follow all of society's impossible rules that you don't have time to think about whether you want to fit in, about what would happen if one day you just said "fuck it" and broke all the rules. it has a lot of memorable, impactful quotes. it's just that the characters saying those quotes seem to largely exist as mouthpieces for the author's profound thoughts, resulting in a visual novel that feels like it could have been a thought-provoking essay.

here's a very personal and very embarrassing story about this game and me: remember how i said a friend recommended this game to me back in 2023? yeah, this friend actually introduced me to this game in the context of showing me their fanfiction. you know those fics that like, take characters from one piece of fiction and put them in the setting/plot/etc of another piece of fiction. it was one of those, characters from another fandom but a plot stolen straight from WKTD... and for the first hour or so of playing the game, i could not remember who the characters were without relating them back to the other fandom characters that took their place in a 3-year-old unfinished AU.

at first, i thought this confusion was because i was chronically online. then, i thought it was because all three characters were named after planets - something that i'm sure has potential symbolism for audiences that care about planets, but for me it just meant that every time a character name showed up i just mentally pictured a Generic Unspecified Planet to associate their name with, and as a result i associated all three names with the same generic image. but after thinking about it, i feel strongly that this isn't just me being an idiot - it's because the story, tragically, works better as inspiration for fanfiction about other characters than it does as an original story with the original characters that it has.

i'll take one of my favourite quotes from the game as an example - "Venus, your problem is that you are very nice. But you want something. And you think being nice is going to give it to you. But it never will. And until you figure out what it is you want. Every kindness of yours will be full of that want." when i first saw this, i thought of fanfiction about totally unrelated characters, and i don't think that was just me being totally fandom-brained. i think this is a quote that could be meaningful, if it was Jax talking to Ragatha or Misha Bachynskyi talking to Constance Blackwood or some third fandom example that is, god willing, not so obscure that it automatically makes it very clear what non-video-game things the video game reviewer secretly likes. uh, skif talking to richter, maybe? that one's a real stretch.

but this quote, unfortunately, isn't terribly meaningful as something Neptune says to Venus, which is what it actually is. it's an out-of-context quote in a relationship, a summer camp, a whole in-game world that does not explain context to us. there isn't really anything in the dialogue or narration that tells us that Venus wants something before Neptune brings it up, let alone how Neptune intuits this oddly specific truth. the eventual explanation for what Venus wants is shown through subtext exclusively in some endings (endings you're less likely to get if you're even seeing this scene), and we're relying on statements from the author's social media to get a clear unambiguous explanation.

Dread Fields is a slow-burn horror game with farming simulator elements. You step into the shoes of someone who bought an isolated farm property in the ominously-named "dread fields" to escape from the stress of the city life. of course, you're familiar with the horror genre, so you know that the farm is probably going to be more stressful. the game takes an almost ddlc-esque approach, disguising the horror for the first few levels with simple mechanics around tending to your farm before the horror creeps in. i know there's already a very niche subgenre of "cozy games that have a psychological-horror-inspired atmosphere and art style, leading to a constant feeling of unease even if no true horror elements really appear", but i find dread fields to be just a bit more welcoming than that. the gorgeous art direction sits in the uncanny valley between cute and creepy, which gives the devs free reign to choose which of those to lean into at any given point - or, in short, just slap a layer of fog onto the farm in the creepy level and suddenly it's terrifying.

a farming simulator is always gonna be a rough game to sell me on, personally - no offense, it's just not a genre i normally go for. luckily everything here is simple enough and clearly explained enough to be welcoming to non-farming-savvy players. the levels are short enough to not feel tedious, the farm animals are surprisingly endearing, and of course, if you're truly heartless enough to not care about your cow or your cat, then the horror elements slowly creep in at just the right pace to keep you intrigued until the end.

it's rare for me to say this about a game i like, but i actually think Dread Fields would be a perfect stepping stone or introduction into horror - for the very real demographic of people saying "i want to get into horror games but if i think i'm going to die during fnaf i have to leave the room 5 minutes before i can get jumpscared". is it scary? sure, at points - but there's no real gore, no graphic or confronting violence, and the jumpscares aren't particularly strong. it's a rare feat for a horror game to be engaging all the way through without relying on gore or violence, though i admit that to those more desensitised to horror than me it probably wouldn't register as scary.

a combination of Stalker 2 and various unpolished indie games has gotten me used to the phenomenon of wandering around an area for long periods feeling like an idiot, not knowing how to proceed. none of that here! game design is one of those things that, when done right, is barely noticeable at all. just to get to the main ending, there's almost always clear instructions written in your in-game notebook, and when there isn't or when you want to uncover the game's secrets, there's always some sort of indication as to what you're supposed to do.

there is a bit of the typical Low-Budget Game Unpolish. there's one section where the collision was wonky and i kept falling through the ground, though this was a pretty minor issue because it would just take me back to where i was after a moment. i found the maze section to be a particularly frustrating piece of trial-and-error gameplay. still, this game does a lot with what it has, and it's one i can see myself going back and replaying - which is a really good sign coming from me.

the narration style really sticks out to me immediately. i'll try and spare the analysis for a full review, but First Person Plural POV Narration is a really unique and interesting choice, and i'm intrigued to see how it fits with the themes of the game.

i first learned about this game through a friend sending me their fanfiction where they took characters from a musical and put them in the plot of this game so now i cant stop thinking of the characters as being musical characters. such is life sometimes.

i've had some Mishaps with dread fields so far. first of all, when i got the demo it was apparently totally incompatible with the steam deck and refused to even open, breaking my heart. ages later i saw the store page again, saw that they were trying to make it deck-compatible, and decided to give it a scond chance. then i managed to delete the game from my deck accidentally while fucking around in my files and had to reinstall it. it took ages to reinstall even though it's less than a gig, i think i have a storage problem.

was it worth it, though? so far, actually, yes. the reason i stopped playing this was because i actually wanted to save it for later, it seemed like such a perfect game to play outside my staffroom before my shift starts. the atmosphere is great, the way the sky looks is proof that you don't actually need unreal engine 50000 and 1 william gigs of storage to make a game that can double as a stargazing simulator. of course the creators must have known that once the novelty of the atmosphere wears off i usually cannot stand Relaxing Games, so they made it spooky as well. great slowburn into horror going on here.

of course there is always always room for a horror game to fumble. but at the moment? ddlc walked so that cooking companions could speedwalk, and it looks like cooking companions may have speedwalked so that dread fields could run. somewhere along the way the baba yaga became canonically bisexual, which was a bit odd but i support her i suppose. bland 4 stars

Saihate Station (rough translation: "the station at the very end of the world") is "An exploration/horror/adventure game about the codependent, love-hate relationship between two men". the game does not mention this in its advertising, so I will now: the two men are coworkers. they're not in an established relationship, they're not even really friends. they're coworkers. there's more to it, of course, but there is something deeply funny to me about describing two coworkers as codependent. hey, man, the fact that you expect me to call during business hours if i can't show up is really needy...

i actually did like the horror here! always a big fan of when you go to a location and everything is fucked up. but the elephant in the room here was the toxic yaoi. during every scene between the two i was just waiting for them to shut up and move on so i could see something spooky. the dynamic between them was so profoundly uninteresting to me - okay, so the brown haired guy is sad and pessimistic and a loser, and the white haired guy is happy and optimistic and good at everything? is that really all we have?

there is a twist here, and it actually did take me by surprise. i still saw the general direction of the twist from a mile away, i just got the details wrong. you pretty quickly figure out that a certain character is either key to the twist or just a mary-sue.

there was an incident with a bundle and a sale, you know? sometimes things happen that we can't predict, and it's nobody's fault, particularly not mine.

Arcadia Cafe is a sort of nostalgia-horror game, I think, about a young woman working the night shift at a cafe in Ukraine in the early 2000s. you really step into her shoes, going through each part of your morning routine before your shift - or evening routine, i guess, I'm never sure how to refer to times of day for nightshift workers. as many nightshift customer service workers can attest to, there are certain hours of the day where things start to get odd, and among the other shift workers who have clear reasons to be out and looking for coffee, you start to find some disconcerting customers.

that is, very nearly, it. there are other elements, of course, but overall this game is a bit light on the horror for something marketed as a horror game. there's a couple of jumpscares, a couple of implications of some darker lore, one genuinely interesting scary sequence... but not much comes of it, in the end. there's no scary monster that chases you, just a series of unnerving-but-realistic encounters and a lingering feeling of unease. as a result it sort of ends up on the edge between horror and comedy a lot of the time. you're not sure whether to laugh at the absurdity of a situation with a customer, or be genuinely unnerved.

the game only allows you to work two shifts at the titular cafe before the ending. there are collectible discs to find in each section, which adds replay value, but all of the customers are scripted with seemingly no elements of randomness in what they order, so there isn't much reason to keep replaying after getting the discs. it's very short, to the point people in the reviews have compared it to a demo.

i normally don't like to bring up the price of a game when i'm reviewing it. it feels unfair; so many factors go into deciding a reasonable price for a game beyond "how good is it" or even "how much content is there", the money's just as gone from my account anyway whether i think it was a fair price or not, once you start playing the game of "X game is more expensive than Y game even though Y game is better, that means X game is bad!" then you might as well insist every game should be free because myhouse.wad is free. but in this case i feel obliged to bring up the price, even though it's really not that expensive, because in some ways this game does feel like i've just paid for a demo.

i don't just mean in terms of length, either. i'll try not to spoil, but the game ends rather... abruptly, and then it rather explicitly promotes an upcoming game by the same developers. it's... not really clear whether this is some sort of Lore Drop relating to the connection between the two games, or whether it's non-diegetic and is just the devs saying "we didn't finish this game, check out our next one instead!". i'm hoping the latter isn't the case, but even so, it feels somewhat unfair - either i'm playing a paid demo for another game, or i'm playing an unfinished game, and either way it feels like it should have been free.

i don't really care about the money, honestly, i just wish i understood more about what the game was supposed to be before buying it... and also after buying it, because i'm still not sure what the story of this game is or whether i need to wait for another game before i can find out. if your game is meant as some sort of Playable Teaser for another game, then i think the least you can do is make that clear. transparency is always good.

in the name of transparency, i must admit: while i see room for improvement here, i also see evidence of improvement. the devs have been responsive to criticism; my personal favorite section of the game seems to have been added in response to a review that criticised the lack of horror. there's also plans for an upcoming update that will expand the ending and the story . it is slightly odd to me, though, how quickly these fixes are coming, and how often they almost seem to be in response to specific criticisms from individual users. you can't really respond to half of your criticisms with "this is the experience we wanted to deliver, and our other game will have more of the elements you want" and the other half with "we added a new chapter to include this element, hope you like it!". i have a feeling that the devs need to work on their own confidence, and on recognizing and fixing issues before they make it into the final game and get criticism.

there are a couple of more minor issues as well. the english translation has some odd grammar that makes it clear it isn't their native language, though i feel that's quite forgivable given the target audience definitely seems to be ukrainians anyway. there's still some bugs, and it's upsettingly easy to accidentally softlock yourself (though this is a more minor issue, considering how short each section is and how little progress you can realistically lose at a time). overall, for a first game i can see the potential, but it also has the issues you'd expect from someone who hasn't entirely gotten comfortable yet with the process of making games.

there's something else that must also be said. a game series(?) with a low-poly, pixel-y art style, with the first game seeming to almost just be a playable demo for the second game while also having unclear continuity relation to it, and apparent themes of misogyny and sexual harassment? anyone else seen this film before? this game series(?) has the "short, confusing experience that may or may not just be a playable teaser for the net game" entry cost money, so it loses some points compared to the HFIM/mouthwashing duology. however, it makes back all those points and then some with the fact that it actually shows you a woman's internal thoughts, allows you to play from the perspective of the Woman Experiencing Scary Things during the horror segments (instead of some asshole man who i don't care about), and passes the bechdel test.

i wanted to write this review before the next big update, so that i can get down my thoughts on the game as it exists now and judge how much it improves. i see the potential here, but only time will tell if this game or the next one or the one after that can live up to it. i can't help but feel that a quote from the review before the recent big update, sadly, is still relevant: Чи шкода мені 5 евро на підтримку українського гейм дев? - Ні, купила би знов. Але чи згадаю я про цю гру через місяць-другий та чи буду її рекомендувати? - Нажаль точно ні.