Game Reviews -- 2025

02/16/2025 -- Nikita Kryukov

Price: Varies

Platform: Itch, Steam

This review is for the various games created by the developer Nikita Kryukov. They specialize in short, atmospheric visual novels which tend to revolve around someone experiencing mental illness or otherwise an altered perception of reality. They're probably most known for their games Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk and its sequel.

The dev states that they're inspired by Yume Nikki, and you can really feel that with the surreal nature and atmosphere of their games. Milk in particular, with its focus on a tormented young girl, really feels like the visual novel answer to something like Yume Nikki. Their other series, Daiku no Medium and its sequel, feel more directly retro-inspired with their pixel graphics and NES-esque sound effects.

When it comes to games that focus on mental illness, it's easy to find works where the insanity is done for shock value and feels exploitative. However, I feel that Kryukov's works avoid the cliches and make their protagonists feel deeply human, their experiences extreme but relatable to people who've gone through mental illness themselves. It can be uncomfortable to read, but while there are horror trappings I wouldn't say these are scary games so much as disquieting.

Each individual game is short--some have multiple endings, but you can easily finish any of them in an afternoon. Even hunting achievements in Milk outside of a bag of milk should only take a couple hours. And each feels reasonably priced. So if the subject matter interests you, I highly recommend playing these games. If you're looking for a place to start, I'd suggest Milk inside a bag of milk. My sole suggestion is that, according to reviews, the game loses some of its impact in English compared to the original Russian. So if you know Russian, perhaps consider playing in that language. For my part, aside from a few typos, I didn't feel like I was playing an inferior translation of something at all.

02/10/2025 -- Mandrake Sanctuary

Price: $5.00 PDF, $13.00 Softcover

Platform: Itch, DrivethruRPG

Have you tried those habit-building methods or apps, but found they didn't work for you? You may want to try Mandrake Sanctuary, a relaxing solo LARP that tasks you with caring for magical plant-creatures that grow in response to your real-life habits.

The game is divided into turns meant to represent one IRL day. Each turn, you may transplant a new mandrake seedling to one of your garden plots, and possibly trigger the growth of any current seedlings. What grows depends on the soil type you've chosen for the plant--said soils can be activated by socializing, exercising, self-care and more. You track the growth of your mandrakes by drawing a bit of them, or if you're not artistically inclined, the book provides the idea of journalling their growth instead.

All the language in the book is very forgiving and gentle--it stresses that there is no pressure to grow every mandrake every day, and that if you need to step away from the game for a while, everything will be there for you to come back to. The game wants to meet you where you're at, while providing a framework for you to gamify habits you want to build.

As someone who's tried other means of tracking habits, I appreciate Mandrake Sanctuary's gentle approach. If I had one criticism of the game, it's that the suggested method of managing your garden plots--by cutting out and pasting rectangles of paper into a larger page--seems a bit cumbersome and messy. This is likely intentional, as the book wants to simulate transplanting plots in a real garden. But I decided to follow the lead of some commenters on the Itch.io page and just use index cards instead. Still, it's a very nice, contemplative sort of game, the sort I can see playing over a long period of time. I can't wait to see how my mandrakes turn out.

02/06/2025 -- Heroic Archivist

Price: Pay What You Want

Platform: Itch

Did you know that the historical Library Of Alexandria employed mages? When the infamous fire claimed the library, said mages managed to spirit away most of the collection to a pocket dimension, creating the Shin Mecha Library of Alexandria II. Ever since then, mages have been popping into various eras to find rare and obsure texts to preserve in the library, annotating them for posterity. But the Roman legionnaires responsible for the burning are still lurking around...

Thus the setup for Heroic Archivist, which isn't so much a game as a pretext for getting you to read and engage with your indie TTRPG collection. There's a few scraps of a levelling mechanic and a rising threat to take care of, and of course the ultimate reward: a personal-sized pizza from the author if you meet them at a con or something. But ultimately, this is just a thin gamification of the TTRPG hobby.

In fact, the author freely states at the end of the rules that you're free to take the mechanics and apply them to your other hobbies, like novels, fanfics or even video games. Their one suggestion is that you stick to logging indie stuff, as larger publishers' works are less vulnerable to being lost forever.

As someone who's acquired far too many indie rpgs, video games and the like from Itch.io's famous bundles, I can appreciate any incentive to further engage with my collection. There's so much drive and creativity in the indie scene, and every day on the internet we lose works to the ravages of server failures, cyber attacks and other forms of link rot. The dressing up reading TTRPGs as something like continuing the Library of Alexandria may seem a bit grandiose to some, but at the same time, I think art of any kind is valuable to someone. And preserving it is a worthwhile endeavor.

If you're interested in using Heroic Archivist to log your indie collection, the author has links to several forms of recordkeeping on the game's Itch.io page. There's a copyable spreadsheet, and a notebook too. Check the comments for other inspiration, like one person's log kept on their personal website.

This review would earn me 25 Archivist Points.