Joy

I've owned the physical board game, Calico, for a while and it's gotten a ton of play in my family. It's a low-interaction game where you are basically guaranteed to fuck yourself over with your own hubris. By the end of the game it is customary to wonder where it all went wrong and curse whoever was pulling tiles out of the bag for giving you the wrong ones.

The video game version plays just the same, but it's very pretty and you can have cats walking across your board while you play, so that's a huge improvement lol. The game also advertises cat character creation in the full version!!! And there's a campaign mode?? Hell yeah!

Go check out the demo if you like board games and/or cats!

A lot of the time when I play demos, I quit them early once I know for certain I either am or am not interested in playing the full game. But sometimes I get really drawn in even in a lengthy demo and I don't want to put it down. This is one of those times.

Honestly, I thought this VN was a bit boring at the start. Just unremarkable. The art is great and the writing was fine, there just wasn't much of anything happening... But once things did start happening, I came to appreciate the slow start, because I found myself really attached to the main character and trying to make choices that seemed "in-character" for her. Margo... I will get you a cute gf upon release I swear...

As far as spookiness goes, this is more along the lines of creepy. No jump scares to worry about, not even any really scary images, just textual descriptions. There's also a full content warning when you start the demo.

Decided to check out the demo for Nowhere Manor based on the art alone because, holy shit??? It's even better in motion. I love how many different sprites there are for the characters, and how they're used, how they're arranged on screen...

Plot-wise, I don't know what the fuck is going on here! But fortunately the soulless doll I'm playing is about as confused so at least we're in the same boat. I'm definitely very intrigued though.

The one thing I dislike is the lack of some "standard" VN features like being able to read a log of previously viewed text... the characters in this one speak very cryptically and it'd really help as far as trying to piece together what they mean.

Go check out the demo while Steam Next Fest is on!