My entry for the Folio Society Book Illustration Award ☠️🌸🔪
This one was very personal. I'm a longtime fan of @neilhimself, possibly the nicest man on the planet and an astonishingly good writer.
So many artists and illustrators who have influenced me went into this. There's a lot of me in in two, parts of it are old art I drew nearly 2 decades ago.
Trying to learn more about color, edges, mood, etc. Attempting to teach myself more through trial and error, studying work by artists I admire. I hope to get good at this someday. There's a long way to go, but perhaps this process will keep me sane(ish) and--at least--channel not-so-productive energies into something interesting and well-crafted...eventually.
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
TOEM is a cozy black-and-white hand-drawn photography isometric photography game.
It doesn't sound like much when described like that, but it's absolutely lovely, particularly when coming off a couple of days of horror games.
You wake up in your grandmother's house, on the day of going to see the TOEM. Not sure what the TOEM is exactly, but it appears to be a coming-of-age journey within this world.
You explore the game, and you're given quests which are things to find and take photos of.
That's it. That's the gameplay loop.
Within the game there are also collectibles, and cassettes which you can play in your in-game tape player.
It was exactly the tonic I needed yesterday, and a great wind-down game.
October 31, 2023 - Day 303 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 323
Game: TSIOQUE
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Nov 8, 2018
Installation Date: Oct 21, 2023
Unplayed: 10d
Playtime: 17m
TSIOQUE is a 2.5D hand drawn point and click adventure.
You play as young princess Tsioque, who has been left behind in the castle by her mother, the Queen, who has ridden off to fight an existential threat to her kingdom (queendom?)
While the Queen is away, the wizard will play. He's evil, takes over the castle, imprisons the princess, she has to escape, yada yada yada.
There are point-and-click adventures where the puzzles are creative brainteasers, and obvious in hindsight.
There are others where you just randomly click on crap until something happens.
Given the complete lack of tutorial, and the single-pocket inventory, IF you actually have one item, it may not be entirely obvious how to use it.
By "may not be", it's actually "good luck working out the UI!"
A later puzzle presented me with an "invisibility blanket". Often a point-and-click will say "you can't use that now" when you try to use something at the wrong time.
TSIOQUE doesn't. Nothing happens. There's no feedback whatsoever.
Turns out that on the next screen, you need to use it to evade some enemies. How? No idea. I tried to run back to the previous room and use the blanket?
Nope.
Click in the wrong place, the item is returned to the pocket.
Turns out that when you can use it, you kind of drag it towards Tsioque and it's removed from the pocket, and she can use it.
How do you put it away afterwards?
You can't.
Tsioque finds herself standing in the dark. Clicking does nothing. The invisibility blanket is back in the pocket. She's also wearing it, and it cannot be removed.
Take one step forward, she trips, the guards throw the lights on, the wind blows the blanket away and she gets captured.
Over and over.
I gave up in frustration - I'm ten minutes into the game at this point, with a further five minutes of being stuck on this "puzzle", and search for a walkthrough.
Turns out that above the light switch is a spider. I'd seen the spider in previous scenes, but there was nothing you could do with him.
However, NOW he's clickable (not that there's anything to indicate this); his relative size is that of a tap-target on a full-screen mobile ad, and clicking on him will turn the lights off, and all the guards plummet to their death.
Obviously.
Unlike last night with Tales of the Neon Sea's artwork to draw me in, TSIOQUE doesn't even offer that. Do I want to keep playing?:
If Found... is a 2D hand-drawn visual novel, that's telling two seemingly disconnected stories.
One is the story of an astronaut, Cassiopeia, and her entry into a black hole.
The other is the story of Kasio, a young Irish trans woman in the 1990's, and the fallout of her coming out as trans.
The UI is unique in my experience; you only have an eraser. You move through the story, partly as presented in Kasio's journal, by erasing your way through Kasio's life, and experiencing different memories as you go.
Sci-fi? A trans woman's coming out story? It's very much right up my alley, thematically.
I just wish I enjoyed it. There's a story there I want to engage with, but I wonder if it's the autistic part of my brain that's just struggling to connect with the story of a early-20's trans woman in a queer share house in Dublin (I think?).
The metaphor inherent in the UI is lovely, but it starts to get frustrating after a while.
I appreciate the love that's gone into the story, but I just found myself struggling to remain engaged, and that's something I often experience with visual novel style games, so I found that particularly disappointing in this regard.
I wonder if it's the kind of game that I could play in a different context and would be more enjoyable (perhaps remote Steam on the iPad).
In the end, I would say that for me If Found... is: