Recent reviews by SaberKat

A deep and mind-bending mystery where nothing is what it seems on the face, a lovable and quirky cast of flawed and eccentric characters, a very odd but endearing sense of humour, and a lot of heart. This game is a lot and some things land better than others, but it's always confident and unashamed of itself, and I love it for that!

The way the mystery unfolds is really clever and rewards you for paying a lot of attention and thinking far, far outside and around the box, but it's as much about the mystery as the characters and their relationships, struggles and hidden depths. This was completely my jam and a real gem ^^

I loved this story, a real descent into madness as the protagonist ends up stranded in a remote and superstitious rural village infiltrated by werewolves. Each day they perform a ritual vote to decide on a villager to hang to try to purge the werewolves, but things can't really stay that simple for long.

I really enjoyed the different characters and their hidden depths and relationships, and trying to figure out who the werewolves are before they're revealed. There is a lot of reading and exposition to get through about the history of the village and its unique religion, but the story is very well put together and full of details and oddities that you can pick up on if you're observant. Everything is the way it is for a reason, even the things that don't seem to make sense.

The daily ritual the game focuses on is more or less the Werewolf game, and a lot of the main character's narration is about him trying to figure out the logical moves or predict what others will do based on the voting situation and status in the village. The different personalities and relationships of the characters affect the way they act in interesting ways, so it's never quite as simple as acting on pure logic.

There are some choices to make which can feel very tense as you try to figure out what the smart play really is, although the story is mostly linear with incorrect choices usually leading directly to bad endings rather than branching paths. Even along the good paths, the story gets into some very dark situations with bloody murders and betrayals among the dwindling cast as the ritual slowly delves deeper into insanity...

This is definitely a story worth experiencing!

As someone with a long history of mental health issues and a lot of little struggles, I absolutely love this game. I don't know if game is even the right word, it's just a beautiful little slice of the universe. Everyone I've written to or gotten a reply from has been genuinely supportive, and I've seen exactly one troll letter in five hours with it which seemed to vanish promptly. I start it up every once in a while if I'm feeling sad, and it's just a warm little place that I'm glad exists.

This game was a really interesting experience. You're set in front of an old pc with recorded interviews of a suspect in a murder case. The records are dated from 1994, and are split into lots of very short videos which are each her answer to a question she's asked, although you don't have the questions. Thanks to the old and fiddly software the database is running on, you can only select videos to watch by searching for words, and you'll bring up the first five videos in which she says the word you searched for. Watching these videos, you might notice she mentions a name or place or other thing that piques your interest, which you can search for to see if she mentions it in other videos, and watching those you might think of something else to search for...

What do you do from there? You can try to solve the murder if you want, make lots of notes and cross-reference all her testimony. Or perhaps you'll find something else you want to explore.

It's a very short mystery, it took me about an hour to really get to the heart of the story, and I carried on for another hour to fill out more of the database and answer a few lingering questions. What's great about this game is how absolutely fascinating the character you're watching is. She's very well constructed, and as you watch the videos, you'll get to know the way she thinks, the things that provoke her, the little strange quirks in her personality, the things that are important to her, and watch the way she changes each day she's brought in for interviews as the case takes its turns. There's no real ending to the game, and you'll have figured things out long before you watch every video, but it's a very rewarding experience and it left me thinking about the story for a long time afterwards.

I was kind of turned off from this game at first by the way the main character looks, but I decided to give it a shot and I ended up completely loving it!

Disco Elysium is a super unique game, I promise you have never played anything like this. Your character is a detective who is in his own mental post-apocalypse, after waking up in his trashed hotel room he realises he has no idea who he is, where he is, or just any information about the world in general. As it turns out, he's there to solve a mystery, but it's as much about learning who he is, and about the strange world he has woken up in, as it is about finding the killer.

This game throws the rules about RPGs out of the window. There's no combat, there's only one party member, and instead of skills you have 24 facets of your own shattered brain which you can level up. Empathy, Rhetoric, Hand-Eye Coordination, Logic, and Pain Surpression are a few, as well as some more out-there ones like Visual Calculus which is your detective vision, and Inland Empire which is your own imagination and delusion applied to nearby objects. The more you level up a skill, the more likely you are to hear from it when you're in conversations or interacting with an object - each skill is its own NPC voice in your head. Drama will interject to tell you when someone is lying, Rhetoric will help you figure out what to say to best entrap your suspects. But they aren't always helpful - Encyclopedia will bombard you with useless trivia, Electrochemistry will urge you to give in to your addictions. Sometimes you can converse with your own sense of Logic. Sometimes your Volition and Rhetoric will debate with eachother on what to do next.

In some RPGs you might get upset when you pick a line for your character to say but they say something you didn't expect. In Disco Elysium, you can try to use your Empathy to offer someone a gift, fail your Empathy roll, and end up going off-track into a berserk tirade as your emotions fly out of control. This is a game about failures, and there are a lot of spectacular ones to see.

I loved everything about this, it definitely won't be for everyone though. The playable area is very small, but dense, and it's mostly going to be reading text and wandering around. But everything is packed with character, every choice has consequences, and your hot mess of a terrible yet somehow brilliant detective will feel unique thanks to the way the skills and thought cupboard work. There's no combat, and there were only two times in my playthrough that anyone fired a gun, but the second of those was one of the most intense scenes I've ever played through.

It's definitely best to go in knowing as little as possible, and if you do fail at something, embrace it and carry on! And try to listen to your partner.

A sci-fi-ish detective thriller comedy visual novel game from the writer of Zero Escape! If you've played 999 or Virtue's Last Reward a lot of things will probably feel familiar, but AI has its own voice and style to it to set it apart. If you're like me and didn't enjoy Zero Time Dilemma at all, you'll be relieved to hear this doesn't have the same problems.

You play as the duo of Kaname Date, an amnesiac detective on the trail of a serial killer, and Aiba, his AI parter who lives in his cybernetic eyeball. The killer takes an eye from each of his victims, and Date is missing an eyeball... as you can imagine, eyes play a big role. Date drives around Tokyo investigating like a normal detective, but he and Aiba can also use the Psync device to enter people's dreams and uncover the secrets locked away in their memories.

The story is mostly quite light-hearted and comedic, but there's plenty of darker moments, seriousness and tension, and some really genuine emotional moments to discover. Like Zero Escape, the story branches at certain points which can lead you to some very drastically different routes and endings. The cast is quite small and there are a few locations that you'll keep revisiting, but everything is very intricately woven together, and slowly uncovering everyone's relationships to eachother and the mystery at the heart of the story is a lot of fun.

You'll have to be willing to put up with a lot of anime weirdness, otaku culture, and especially weirdly perverted humour which it definitely leans too hard on at times. The tone can shift quite drastically very quickly, which is sometimes fun but sometimes misses the mark leading to some very immersion breaking moments. But for me it was all worth it for the more emotional scenes and the fun of solving the mystery.

The characters are great fun, with really eye-catching designs and a lot of hidden depths to discover as you get to know them. There are some really genuine emotions along some of the routes which are well worth experiencing. Aiba was my favourite, and Date and Aiba have a very Sigma/Phi dynamic, so if you liked VLR you'll be right at home!

I didn't expect it but there are a few quite well-handled LGBT themes. Mama is a stereotype, which everyone in this story is to a degree, but she's a wonderful and confident character and it doesn't feel like she's there to be made fun of, she has a role to play as Date's friend and confidant.

One thing I really enjoyed was unravelling the mystery. There are some science-fantasy concepts like the Psync technology in general, but the game sticks to its own rules and gives you all the clues you need to solve the case yourself if you're attentive to detail. Some things are obvious, some will take more thinking, and no one is quite what they seem...

In the end, you have a game that really isn't afraid to be itself, and you have to respect that!

An amazing suspense thriller story packed into a visual novel. This game is amazing, the writing is great, the story and characters are full of personality and charm, there's mystery, suspense, action, comedy, a little of everything and it shifts between it all so well.

It is a visual novel so you'll mostly be reading text over images, but that isn't to say there isn't a game to play. You play through the day an hour at a time, with five different characters to play as, and frequently you have to stop and make a decision in the story to change what happens next. Your goal is to guide them all to the end of the hour without running into any of the many, many premature bad endings. But since their stories are happening concurrently and overlapping in certain parts, a decision one character makes can affect things that happen to another, often in unintended ways. So you'll be going back to other characters to pull on the threads of fate just right to keep others out of (or in) trouble later on!

Maybe you run into a bad end because the detective ran into his girlfriend's father and got dragged away from the case. He can't get himself out of that, but perhaps there's something you can do as another character to make sure the girlfriend and father are kept out of the detective's path...

It's not always logical, but the fun is in seeing all the ways things can go horribly wrong, and poking and prodding at each story to figure out how to get all of them aligned just right to unlock the next step. It feels a lot like having a puzzle box to play with, lots of pieces to shift and slide around, until eventually it all clicks together.

The characters are wonderful and full of heart, everything about Tama and her quest to make money at her part time job selling dubious diet drinks is hilarious, but I ended up loving all of the cast, including the minor characters whose stories unfold throughout the day, popping up in different characters' routes. The writing is great, with each of the five main characters' stories having its own style and tone, and it's all brought together in satisfying and surprising ways.

You'll have to save a failing magazine, escape kidnappers and assassins, unravel an international conspiracy, perform a sales pitch to a room of middle-aged women and clean up the streets of Shibuya, and that's just a little of what happens. If you have any interest at all in visual novels I can't recommend this enough!

This is a game about a girl who has to climb a mountain. The platforming is lots of fun and each level has something fresh to add to it, it can get quite challenging but the checkpoints are generous and it's never unfair. You really can do it!

The graphics and music are wonderful, and it feels great to play. This is a game with a message about perseverance and how you might just be able to do things you never thought you'd be able to manage. Give it a try!

This is a really, really interesting game that I think everyone should play. I don't know if there's anything else quite like it. You really have to use your head and make deductions to work your way through the mystery, there's no multiple choices to save you here!

The atmosphere and gameplay are super unique, I think it's probably best to go in knowing as little as possible. But if you can set aside a whole evening to just sit down and work your way through the mystery of the Obra Dinn you won't regret it!

A short, cute and charming game about befriending people to recruit for your high school club. It's like the social link elements of Persona; as you go through the month, each day has a few time slots that you can spend on building up your social skills or hanging out with the different characters in order to build your friendships and eventually recruit them to the comedy club!

You have a repertoire of different conversation subjects which you can level up, and each possible recruit has their own likes or dislikes, so you'll have to use your judgement not to spend your time boring them! As you build up your friendships, each character has a little story line of their everyday troubles to progress through. There's no branching paths or romance, just a fun little slice of life story.

You only need three of the six possible recruits to complete the game, but you can go back and replay with your levelled up skills, as well as your knowledge of what each character likes, and try to get them all into the club before the deadline is up!