Juniper Bug

dee

my current theory is that the reason we're seeing a big surge in like, anime and anime adjacent stuiff with plots that are like "what if the idol girl/musician/vtuber/whatever was a kinda dorky loser or a weird problematic girl or she sucked" or such is due to the recent vtuber explosion

vtubers are, to the shitty managment people wanting to make infinite money, kinda the best parts of like... online vocaloid "obsession with 2d girls" kinda fandom and idol fandom combined. you get the power of having an actual person behind it but they aren't "real", you can make up a character and do animations and do anime/video game shit with them

however, the problem is the dominant form of vtuber entertainment is... streaming video games, and that requires endless improv and a genuine appreciation for videogames. so there HAS to be a little bit of the real person there. you can't JUST have the image, the fantasy, the reality that there's a real person behind it leaking through is part of why people like it, and if you try to remove that you just sterilize it into something nobody wants to watch

so now we have a wave of stuff that is engaging with that desire, for just a litttttle bit of real weirdo energy in the fantasy anime girl

Hey! there's a new steam next fest going on, and i've played a FUCKTON of demos! I'm here to post about some of the coolest/most interesting ones to show them to you. Maybe you'll find a new indie game to be excited about! Or maybe you'll just see me dunk on a company's logo (moire on that later). I'll be doing about 5-10 per post, and will give a brief description beforehand if you just want to scroll past. I'll also be sorting them into a few different genres for my different posts.

IN THIS EDITION: TACTICS GAMES, ROGUELIKES, CARD GAMES, AND PLATFORMERS

TACTICAL BREACH WIZARDS

Arranger

Quick thoughts: MY SECOND BEST IN SHOW. What an awesome puzzle game

Holy fuck I love this one. The art (by David Hellman, of A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible) isn't just great little drawings of guys, it's some beautiful ideas of how to tell story behind the puzzles themselves. The puzzles are also fantastic, an amazing mix of simple sokoban style stuff and larger "wait i didn't even realize i could TRY that" puzzles that had me smiling the whole time. I am absolutely picking this up as soon as it comes out.

after playing Arranger Juniper specifically called me up to stream me the demo, cause she was so excited about some of the comic storytelling the game employs. A Lesson Is Learned is, like, the Velvet Underground of hypercomics, and Braid to me is always going to be "that game David Hellman did art for", so the game was an easy sell generally for me, but it's REALLY exciting to see just how much clever panelwork is integrated into the game, and how much it's employing visual storytelling techniques that I've... never really seen anywhere else?

I'm really excited for a full release of the game, not the least because it'll be a lot of fun to do a Hey Look At This Comic post about what is, technically, a video game.