Publisher: Astronauts
Developer: Astronauts
Year: 2014
Platform: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

Rating: 6

Upon starting The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you are told that this horror-lite narrative adventure will not be holding your hand. And boy it ain’t kidding. While I can squint and see a reason why the designers made this choice, it honestly put me off the game for years. But after looking up a brief tutorial on-line, everything clicked and I breezed through the game in one day and I quite enjoyed the experience.

Narration opens the game as you, paranormal investigator Paul Prospero, walk out of a tunnel into the fictional mining town of Red Creek Valley, Wisconsin. Paul says he’s there to help out a young boy named Ethan Carter who had been writing to him for a while and has asked for his help. And that’s as much as you’re told before you’re set free to fumble around.

Red Creek Valley is realized in full 3D from a first-person point of view. The game is open world as you explore the woods, a broken rail, dilapidated homes, a graveyard, a mine, and a hydroelectric station. While the graphics won’t blow your mind (which, per the designers, was intentional), the town is immersive and genuinely feels like a real place (indeed, it is based off a real Polish area in the Karkonosze Mountains). The soundtrack by Mikolai Stroinski is fantastic, each section of the game having its own mysterious, haunting, monster of the week track. Individual moments are not punctuated with scares; you’re allowed to just be in the mood of the music.

Reviewing the rest of the game without spoilers is impossible, so if you plan to play blind as the designers intended you should hit the road (with Paul Prospero).

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Publisher: orangutan matter
Developer: orangutan matter
Year: 2024
Platform: Windows, Mac

Rating: 4

I don’t much care for poetry, and most uses of allegory annoy me. That’s not a critique, but rather my bias I carried with me as I played Unleaving, the first game by indie developer orangutan matter. But despite my predilection to avoid artsy stuff, I couldn’t help but be drawn in by how gorgeous it looked. A puzzle-platformer in the vein of Limbo, this short and relatively easy adventure, while clumsily struggling with pathos, should please fans of the genre with its stunning art style and eclectic puzzles.

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Publisher: Klabater SA
Developer: Warsaw Film School
Year: 2022
Platform: Windows, XBox One, Xbox Series, Switch, PS4

Rating: 1

Best Month Ever!, a product of the Warsaw Film School in Poland, tells the story of a single white mom in the 1960s USA who, after discovering she has a terminal diagnosis, decides to quit her job at the diner for a road trip to help reunite her eight-year-old black son with family who will take care of him after she’s gone. This utterly gorgeous game has some fun mechanics that work well enough in delivering a narrative; sadly, this specific narrative could have been a poignant tale about trauma and love, but instead approaches its adult themes with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and makes several missteps in its handling of racism.

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Publisher: Ogre Pixel
Developer: Ogre Pixel
Year: 2023
Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, Switch

Rating: 5

A Tiny Sticker Tale from Ogre Pixel is a colorfully child-friendly fable about Flynn the donkey, whose father has left him with words of wisdom and a world to explore with help from a magical sticker album. While a very short and a very relaxed experience, the intuitive gameplay and clever puzzles elevate it above your standard casual game. And besides, you get to play with stickers! Which was a decent lure for me but a major draw for my six-year-old daughter, who has gleefully played this game to completion five times in the past month.  

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Publisher: Croqutea Asesina
Developer: Croqutea Asesina
Year: 2024
Platform: Windows

Rating: 5

The Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis are two of the most beloved adventures games out there, and many indie designers have paid homage to them over the past twenty years. Croqueta Asesina, a new studio hailing from Málaga, Spain, takes it one step further with their first game by writing what is essentially a gushing love letter to the LucasArts favorites. The Adventures of the Black Hawk is so much like these games that at first one could be convinced they were playing a long lost LucasArts title, at least for a little while. That illusion doesn’t last, as Black Hawk contains several missteps that prevent it from being considered a must play by the fans the game was made for, but there is much to like here, including an amusing script, silly characters, and fun puzzles.

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