Misthold Welcomes You

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.

Serre (2017) is a romantic visual novel between a lonely gardener (serre means greenhouse!) and a space alien who looks like a huge bee! Harold, they're lesbians. I played the Mac OS version.

Nice colors, nice hand drawn art, adorable background music. Funny and sweet dialogue/characters, with some hurt/comfort thrown in. It's a very basic story; the dialogue choices all lead to the same plot points, so it doesn't matter what you pick. A bit of a bummer, since part of the fun of visual novels is seeing where your choices take you.

Some dialogue choices lead to cuter scenes than others. You can go back and replay the other dialogue choices, skipping past scenes you've already seen. Super quick to play, maybe 10-20 minutes if you're a fast reader. (For THAT short of a game, wait until it goes on sale or buy it in a bundle.)

Price: $5 CAD

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

If you pay extra (or got the Bundle) it comes with a cute artbook with behind-the-scenes sketches and bonus post-game comics, all of which are adorable and funny.

Content notes: Hints of past bullying, one character says a mean thing which is tonally very different from the rest of the game.