What I'm Playing (March '25)

Visual novels are kind of a comfort genre for me. I think I get the same soothing effect from them that a lot of people get from games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. So it should come as no surprise that I've been playing a lot of VN or VN-adjacent games recently. Here's some stuff I've enjoyed over the past few weeks:

Citizen Sleeper 2: Builds on the solid base of the first game and adds some fun mechanical crunch with missions and the dice-breaking mechanic. I always really enjoy Gareth Damian Martin's games - tumblr-coded Disco Elysium-likes (positive) are how I usually describe them. I don't know that Sleeper 2 had quite as much emotional impact on me as 1 - it's a lot more of a traditional space heist thriller than the quiet, sad little game 1 was - but it's still a lot of fun. I do hope we continue to see visual novel-esque story games with a dice-rolling mechanic. Nothin' better than that, IMO.

Mouthwashing: The only one on this list that isn't a VN, but it is certainly a narrative-driven little adventure. There's a lot of fun (albeit nightmarish) UI choices being made here, which I really enjoyed - gating levels with hallucinatory text and having objectives like "TAKE RESPONSIBILITY" or "BE QUIET". Generally just a fun metatextual experiment that clearly has a lot of love for space horror while also having a lot of ideas about the expectations and genre norms and how they can be subverted. Add in some deeply sad characters - Swansea's rant about alcoholism is still sticking with me - and a minigame where you feed a guy his own leg and I'm sold.

The House In Fata Morgana: This is one of the definitive horror visual novels and I'm really glad I finally got around to it. Art and soundtrack are incredible, and it ties together an incredibly long and complex Rashomon-style narrative in a generally satisfying way. Also a 2012 Japanese game where a main character is intersex but it's handled in a pretty normal way and also not made the character's sole trait. You don't see that so much! This is another one that does really fun and interesting things with UI - there are a number of "false door" choices, or moments where you're given the choice interface with one option. I always love this method of playing with player agency: making them responsible without giving them any illusion that they have a choice. Sometimes that's how life works.

The Letter: Spent the last couple days housing this one. It is not, by and large, a particularly well-written game, nor is it doing anything particularly novel, but man, I dunno, it's a lot of fun and dear god there is an impressive amount of branching content crammed into this little indie game. I had a lot of fun but it's a bit of the VN equivalent of watching trash TV. I do think there's something really interesting about the granular way they track the potential routes - the mapping screen is massive - but often don't mark the cause for a specific branch, just showing that something different might have happened. I think given the degree to which this game seems to want you to be playing around with the tree some time given to make more of those nodes say something more explanatory than "story update" would have been nice but this does seem to be an already-overengineered labor of love from a small team, so, no shade.

I have also played a lot of Balatro lately but I don't really have much to say about it other than making the number go up is pretty fun.