Y'ALL, SCRATCH EVERYTHING ELSE - South Scrimshaw, Part One is genuinely one of the most engrossing pieces of video game storytelling I've played. It's also free.
The game presents itself as a nature documentary a la visual novel - with genuinely staggering art evoking a sense of place and groundedness to what is explicitly an alien world. The game specifies that, while this is an alien world, it's extremely similar to Earth's climate, and is hypothesized to be an example of panspermia - evolving from the same extrasolar seeds that birthed life on Earth. As such, the organisms represented are familiar, but altogether spectacular in their newness.
It's a take on science-fiction that I'm not sure I've seen before, wholly focused on familiar-ish xenobiology with nary a concern for the space-tech that brought humanity to another planet. Because, of course, that's outside the scope of the nature documentary.
Its story follows a young whale from birth to adolescence, across the first four chapters of the story. The structure of the narrative is indistinguishable from that which you might expect from the likes of a Blue Planet or Planet Earth, but the cast is completely new - and completely fascinating.
It is without a doubt going to be in contention for my Game of the Year, which I CANNOT believe I'm saying about a Visual Novel - a genre that I've previously held no real interest in.
The game presents itself as a nature documentary a la visual novel - with genuinely staggering art evoking a sense of place and groundedness to what is explicitly an alien world. The game specifies that, while this is an alien world, it's extremely similar to Earth's climate, and is hypothesized to be an example of panspermia - evolving from the same extrasolar seeds that birthed life on Earth. As such, the organisms represented are familiar, but altogether spectacular in their newness.
It's a take on science-fiction that I'm not sure I've seen before, wholly focused on familiar-ish xenobiology with nary a concern for the space-tech that brought humanity to another planet. Because, of course, that's outside the scope of the nature documentary.
Its story follows a young whale from birth to adolescence, across the first four chapters of the story. The structure of the narrative is indistinguishable from that which you might expect from the likes of a Blue Planet or Planet Earth, but the cast is completely new - and completely fascinating.
It is without a doubt going to be in contention for my Game of the Year, which I CANNOT believe I'm saying about a Visual Novel - a genre that I've previously held no real interest in.