Eight Short Games on Itchio, Part Two
Oct. 31st, 2023 08:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingplease tell me you love me
https://ellisdex.itch.io/ptmylm
This isn’t so much a “game” as it is a short story in the form of a chat log. In the final minutes of an MMO before the server goes offline, the player-character reconnects with a girl they used to have a crush on when their guild did dungeon raids together. The game has a few dialog options but not much interactivity, and it took me seven minutes to read.
I think this story speaks to what was probably a fairly common teenage / college student experience of the 2000s, which was being a baby gay who didn’t have the language to describe your identity because you spent your evenings online instead of at clubs or bars or parties. The ending is bittersweet and ambiguous, and the “end of the world” narrative device works well, I think.
This game was a submission to the Dying MMO Game Jam in March 2022. I played some of the other submissions, and this is one I really like:
Marissa Is Now Idle
https://niandra.itch.io/marissa
Marissa Is Now Idle has the same premise as Please Tell Me You Love Me – it’s a chat between two girls reconnecting with each other in the last few minutes before an MMO server closes – but it’s more interactive. Also, the conceit is that you only have a limited number of dialog choices, so each run through the game lasts about a minute. There’s no time limit for you (the player) in the real world, but the format is kind of like a text-based roguelike. The game marks which dialog options you’ve already chosen, but I didn’t have the patience to exhaust all possible paths. As with Please Tell Me You Love Me, I’m not sure there’s a way to get a “good” ending.
What’s cool about the interface of Marissa Is Now Idle is that it has a bunch of fun easter eggs you can find by interacting with everything aside from the chat options, and I appreciate the mid-2000s aesthetic.
https://ellisdex.itch.io/ptmylm
This isn’t so much a “game” as it is a short story in the form of a chat log. In the final minutes of an MMO before the server goes offline, the player-character reconnects with a girl they used to have a crush on when their guild did dungeon raids together. The game has a few dialog options but not much interactivity, and it took me seven minutes to read.
I think this story speaks to what was probably a fairly common teenage / college student experience of the 2000s, which was being a baby gay who didn’t have the language to describe your identity because you spent your evenings online instead of at clubs or bars or parties. The ending is bittersweet and ambiguous, and the “end of the world” narrative device works well, I think.
This game was a submission to the Dying MMO Game Jam in March 2022. I played some of the other submissions, and this is one I really like:
Marissa Is Now Idle
https://niandra.itch.io/marissa
Marissa Is Now Idle has the same premise as Please Tell Me You Love Me – it’s a chat between two girls reconnecting with each other in the last few minutes before an MMO server closes – but it’s more interactive. Also, the conceit is that you only have a limited number of dialog choices, so each run through the game lasts about a minute. There’s no time limit for you (the player) in the real world, but the format is kind of like a text-based roguelike. The game marks which dialog options you’ve already chosen, but I didn’t have the patience to exhaust all possible paths. As with Please Tell Me You Love Me, I’m not sure there’s a way to get a “good” ending.
What’s cool about the interface of Marissa Is Now Idle is that it has a bunch of fun easter eggs you can find by interacting with everything aside from the chat options, and I appreciate the mid-2000s aesthetic.
