Misthold Welcomes You

Secret Little Haven (2018) is a visual novel (with some puzzles) set in 1999. You play as Alex Cole, a teenage trans girl stuck in an unhappy situation with only her computer for a creative outlet.

If you're a fen who grew up in the late 90s/early 00s then this will hit HARD on the nostalgia feels. Alex and her friends are fans of a Sailor Moon-esque magical girl show and Alex spends most of her time hanging out on a fan forum and chatting in ICQ-style program. There's also a doll maker, a desktop pet, and other early 00s computer stuff that sent me right back to my early teen years.

There's some really clever little things in this game. At one point you have to use terminal commands to do a little hacking past some parental controls! Another puzzle put a text file on my ACTUAL computer (not the game computer), breaking the fourth wall in a neat way.

Gameplay is basically clicking and reading text, centered on interaction between Alex and her friends (and father). You can choose certain dialogue, and depending on how the conversation goes you'll end up with more or less friends at the end of the game-- important because ( spoiler ).

Massive warning for flashing lights/jiggling screen when chatting with Dad. There's an option to turn off the worst of it, but it's till pretty jittery even then. Also, a content warning for parental abuse, gaslighting, emotional abuse, etc.

Took about 3 hours to beat. I very much enjoyed it and recommend it for people who like both visual novels and odes to early Sailor Moon fandom.

Price: $5

Available for Windows, macOS, Linux. I played the Mac version.

Anodyne (2013) is an action/adventure game. I specifically downloaded it because of its comparison to Legend of Zelda, and in style it's definitely reminiscent of the early GBA Zelda games. You play as human male Young, who is tasked with saving the world but doesn't seem all that prepared as his main weapon is a broom.

The main goal is to collect keys (and gems) to open portals to new places in the world, and then...do something. Fight boss monsters, maybe. Eventually you pick up new tools/power-ups, unlock new locations, and meet new characters (who do nothing). It's pretty straight-forward except for the stuff that's just a little...off. There's a pervasive sense of dread and unease throughout the game, and it makes for a really interesting playing experience.

So, I never actually finished playing this. Something's slightly iffy with the fighting element-- like, it's off by a few pixels, so attacking a thing meant missing it most of the time-- it was very frustrating actually trying to kill things. (Maybe that's the point?)

I also got lost, all the time. I'd make it to a new section of the world, then had no idea what to do, where to go, or how to move forward. The priests would just tell me to look for keys, but actually finding a key was VERY difficult. Routes were blocked by something, like a boulder, that needed a power-up skill to get past, but I had no clue where to get that power-up which meant more wandering around. Unfortunately, there's no walkthroughs for this game, so I couldn't even muddle my way through with instructions.

I played for about two hours and then put it down, and just never picked it back up. I do think people who like to really explore and dig deep into a game with little guidance would enjoy Anodyne. For me, I don't particularly enjoy wandering around the same three areas trying to figure out how to open something for an hour. I liked the music and the art style, and the game concept is cool, but I needed a Navi or something.

Price: $9.99

Available for Windows, macOS, Linux and mobile. I played the Mac version.

The Novelist (2015) is a narrative adventure game with visual novel leanings. You play as a ghost who interferes with a family's life to try and move them towards making better decisions over the course of one summer. The father's a novelist (hence the title), the mother is an artist, and the kid is being bullied at school (maybe because of a learning disability?).

Gameplay is: you wander through the house trying not to be seen by the family while looking for clues on what they're worried about. Then you pick one narrative choice and one compromise choice per session. So, for instance, the dad might be worried about finishing his novel on time, the mom's concerned with networking with local artists, and the kid wants his dad to pay attention to him. You can pick one of those concerns to resolve, which then blocks the other characters' concerns from being resolved. But you can choice a "compromise," where one of the non-picked choices is only a LITTLE messed up, instead of a lot.

The story alters depending on what you choose for the family, and every choice has good and "bad" outcomes. I suppose it's more realistic that way, but I felt so bad for every member of this non-communicating little family that I really tried to choose the most positive outcomes for everybody, which mostly worked.

Added difficulties are: if you get spotted more than once by the same family member they get "spooked" and you can't choose their option for the compromise, which might make it suck more. Also, you move through lamps and some lamps get turned off at different times, making it nearly impossible to get into some rooms safely. Otherwise it's a pretty easy gameplay, just looking for glowing items and hovering behind people to read their memories, etc.

I think it was an interesting idea and the characters were well-written, but I was also a little bored after about 30 minutes because it was so simplistic. It took about 2 hours to get through the first run and most of that was just trying to dodge the family members. If I had turned on the "don't need to dodge" option it would've been closer to an hour, maybe?

Price: $4.99

Available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I played the Mac OS version.

Orion Trail (2015) is an adventure/interactive fiction game that's basically Oregon Trail but set in space! And it's just as difficult to NOT die as the original game!

So, you play as a spaceship captain trying to fly across the galaxy to a particular space hub. You pick your crew, who each have different skills (science, fighting, diplomacy, etc.), and you have to manage your resources while making your way through stars, planets, meteors, aliens, etc. Your resources are: crew members, food, fuel, and hull pieces. Get to zero on any of your resources and you fail the mission.


At each stop, and sometimes between stops (and away missions!), you have encounters where you can either gain or lose resources through basically random chance. You choose an action, and then the probability engine randomly selects an outcome. You can try to win the outcome by picking an action where you have extra skills, but it's not guaranteed you'll win. And if you lose, you lose a LOT of resources.

On my first mission I ran out of hull pieces and my ship exploded. The second mission I kept running out of fuel, had to send an SOS signal, bartered to re-fuel with my BLOOD, ran out of HP and died. On my third time, the ship exploded again.

I do think it's a LITTLE suspicious how the probability engine spins, slowS down, then SPEEDS UP again to round a corner and pick some other square than what it originally looked like it would stop on. Also, super frustrating when I loaded that thing up with skill points but still managed to crit fail MULTIPLE times in a row.

Still, I definitely enjoyed playing this! I really like the retro pixel art, the scifi setting, and the funny dialogue. Played about an hour and didn't manage to live to the end ONCE. The only thing I'd want changed is the stars/planets you stop at; they mostly don't have names or interesting descriptions, and that part could've been flushed out more.

Price: $9.99

Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. I played the Mac OS version.

One-Eyed Lee and the Dinner Party (2019) is a puzzle/visual novel game set in a fantasy world where spirits exist and, sometimes, merge with living humans to become...something else. One-Eyed Lee is a something else, and Beracus is the doctor trying to figure out how to change him back. Or at least make him less volatile...

Beracus and Lee get tipped off about a whole heap of spirits in an abandoned bunker-- only to become trapped inside with a family of living skeletons. You (playing as Beracus) must solve puzzles, talk to the skeletons (whether they like it or not), and keep Lee alive to get out of the bunker!

I had heaps of fun playing this game. The art is fantastic, Beracus and Lee have a very interesting partnership, and the bunker-skeleton family setting was great. It starts off uncanny, as a post-apocolyptic bunker without an apocalypse to go with it, and then gets super creepy by the time you leave and find out wtf really happened.


The puzzles are solved through finding clues (e.g. clicking on everything), talking to the skeletons, and matching clue to mystery in a specific order. I'm not sure if it was just my computer or if it's part of the game, but there was a small amount of lag between hovering over a clue and the highlight turning on, which mean I had to go a little slower than I usually do. Also, the highlight was a dark red color, which was a little difficult to see even for a non-colorblind person like me. (The whole bunker is heavy on red/orange tones.)

Side note that you can click on objects multiple times, and some of them lead to funny interactions! Or new clues! So that's cool.

Because you're also talking to people, you have some choices on how to proceed through the puzzles. For instance, there's some tricky situations where you could lock yourself out of a set of dialogue cues that change interactions between Beracus and Lee. Or you could leave behind an item that would come in handy at the very end! There are 8 total endings, so it's worth going back and trying different routes to try and get them all.

To make it easier to get the different endings, the game has a History option (to read back through the text), a Skip option (to zoom past text you've already seen), and a Back button if you immediately regret choosing a specific option. There's also a Journal tab, which keeps short notes about the story/clues, and even gives a few subtle hints on where to go next if you're a little stuck.

It took me about 3 hours to get all 8 endings; I used some hints from the dev (on the Itch.io page) to figure out what I needed to do at the end, and made sure to try different options than I did the first time. The last part is very tricky! I did notice that once I got the happiest ending, the loading screen illustration was also happy! When I got the bummer ending(s), it was super sad. Such a nice little touch in an already detail-filled game.

Great characters, good writing, humorous moments and spooky ones, too: I really enjoyed playing this and highly recommend checking it out!

Price: $4.99

This is apparently the first of a series of games the dev is planning on making with Beracus and Lee, and I can't wait to play them!

Available for Windows, Mac and Linux. I played the Mac OS version.