#dinnes

[thestuffedalligator]

Cooking horror game where you play as a cook working in the galley of a ship in the 1800s. There’s some kind of supernatural nautical horror story going on in the background but you barely notice this because you spend all day cooking in the galley.

[jennaflare]

So Disco Elysium is the only game you've ever really liked

I get it! It's a phenomenal game with superb art and writing, and its themes are consistent and deeply explored. It sets a high bar for video games. But there are other really, really fantastic games out there. This is a list that is 100% my own taste of things that aren't necessarily similar, other than the fact that they're really fucking good. (A lot of these are on sale for the Steam Summer Sale until July 11 2024!)

In Stars and Time

In Stars and Time is a time loop game where you play as Siffrin, the rogue of a party at the end of their quest to save the day by defeating the King, who is freezing everybody in time! But something is wrong: every time you die, you loop back to the day before you fight the King. You're the only one who remembers the loops, so it's up to you to figure out why it's happening, and how to break out.

In Stars and Time is a heart-wrenching dive into mental health, friendship, and love. It's about feeling alone, and how awful it is when the people who love you don't notice (and how awful it is when they do). It's about falling deeper and deeper into your worst self and your worst tendencies, and how to come back from it.

The creator also did one of my favorite Disco Elysium comics ever, which is only tangentially relevant but worth mentioning.

Roadwarden

In Roadwarden, you play as the titular Roadwarden for an undeveloped and "wild" part of the kingdom. Monsters roam the forests and roads, and it's your job to keep people safe. On paper, anyway. Your real mission is to find out what is of value in the area, and how to take it from its people. How well you perform this task is up to you. It's an oldschool text-based RPG, and I take a lot of notes by hand when I play.

Roadwarden explores exploitation and industrialization by making you look in the face of your potential victims. You can only learn what your bosses want you to report on by getting close to the residents, after all. There are mysteries to be solved, secrets to be gathered, and hearts to win.

The Longing

The Longing is an adventure-idle game where you play as the solitary servant of a sleeping king. Your task is to wait for him, for four hundred days. Time in the game passes in realtime (for the most part). There are caves to explore, books to be read, and drawings to make.

The Longing is about loneliness and depression. It's about whether or not you decide to stay in that hole, and if you do, what you do with yourself while you're there. Maybe you'll wander. Maybe you'll stare at a wall. Maybe you'll just sleep until it's all over.

Papers, Please

Papers, Please casts you as a newly hired customs officer in a country that is rapidly tightening its borders as its fascist government tightens its fist. This game is stressful. Sometimes you intend to help out the revolutionaries when they asked, but then you got so stressed out trying to make your quota so you can feed your family and pay your bills that you didn't notice the name of the person they were hoping to contact while going through their papers. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in front of you and expects you to defuse it. Sometimes someone suggests you steal people's passports so you can get your family out, and with the horror you see daily, the idea tempts you more than you'd like.

Papers, Please is all about hard choices and testing your moral fortitude. Everything you do has consequences. Being a good person in this game is hardly ever rewarded, but not in a way that feels overly cynical. Papers, Please asks you what kind of person you want to be and what you're willing to sacrifice to get there.

The Return of the Obra Dinn

From the creator of Papers, Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Trading Company. The ship the Obra Dinn has just floated back into port, its entire crew missing or dead. It's your job to figure out what happened aboard the vessel. For insurance reasons.

I don't know how to go into the themes of this too deeply without giving away too much, but the mechanics of the game itself make the game worth playing. You have a magic stopwatch that allows you to go back to the moment of a person's death, allowing you to try and figure out who (or what) killed them, and how. And the soundtrack is extremely good.

Outer Wilds

In Outer Wilds you play as an unnamed alien, and it's your first day going to space! Your planet's space program is pretty new still, so there's still lots to explore and discover on the planets within your system. There are ancient ruins from a mysterious race that once lived in your system, long before your species began to record history. Why were they here? Where did they go? How are they connected to the weird thing that keeps happening to you?

The fun of Outer Wilds is in the discovery and answering your own questions. The game never tells you where to go, and it never outright tells you anything. There are clues scattered through the system, and it's up to you to put them together and figure out your next steps. It's about the way that life always goes on, no matter what, even when it seems like the end of everything, forever. I'd recommend NOT reading anything else about this game. Just go play it. Seriously, the less you know, the more fun this is.

If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers

In If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers, you explore the circumstances of the deaths of four individuals.

This is a short one that took me about two and a half hours to play. If for no other reason, play it for the stunning pixel art. The game explores sexism, racism, and homophobia in the Victorian era and leans heavily into horror themes. Best of all: it's completely free!

Pentiment

Pentiment takes you to the 16th century, where you take the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working on his masterwork in the scriptorium of an abbey. When someone is murdered, Andreas takes responsibility for finding the culprit.

The game is set over 20~ years and you get to watch how Andreas' actions affect the village in various ways (who's alive the next time you come by, have people gotten married and had children...). It's an exploration of how the past affects the future, and what parts of that past we choose to keep or discard. It has beautiful art, and fans of both Disco and Pentiment often compare them.

Other games you might wanna check out

Night in the Woods, Dredge, Oxenfree, A House of Many Doors, Inscryption, Slay the Princess, Citizen Sleeper, Chants of Sennar, Loop Hero, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, The Pale Beyond, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Elsinore, Her Story, Before Your Eyes, Pathologic (not delved into above because the venn diagram of Pathologic fans and Disco fans is basically a circle)

[dunmeshistash]

A post from Kui's blog I think people might find interesting (Commentary is google translated)

"Game Drawings

Game-related doodles drawn from 2014 to 2022

Divinity2 (Does this elf have sixteen pack abs...?)

Pokémon Shield (Imagine Wooloo's pupils becoming parallel to the ground and it's sheared appearance)

Wierd West

Return of the Obra Dinn

Her story

Triangle Strategy

Witcher3

Jibanyan

Cuphead "

[dekaja]

GOD • DUTY • BEAUTY • TRANSFORMATION • EXILE

CHANTS OF SENNAAR (2023) • dev. Rundisc

[good-fwiend-in-wome]

this would work much better with a third naissancee-ultrakill axis but that's beyond my graphing capabilities

[edeer]

RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN

[foone]

Bad idea: Return of the Obra Dinn, but instead of about death, it's about sex.

You're not using your magic watch to figure out how everyone died, you're trying to figure out who fucked who after a multi-polycule orgy went down.

You're armed with only your Magic Wand: a special sex toy that let's you see the moment of orgasm for a past sex act.

Now you have to work out who is who based on the clues in that scene.

"well, this could be Paul, but not Darren. We saw in the previous chapter (Kinky Fun In The Basement) that he's a pre/non op trans man, and this person is topping. And that's not a strap, right? Nope. It's probably not Caleb, because he's bottoming in every scene we see him in, he doesn't seem to ever top. And at this time I think George is upstairs at this time, doing petplay with the identical drones (I have no idea how I'll ever figure them out). Okay, I'm gonna put this in. Menus, [PAUL] [FUCKED] [An UNKNOWN VAGINA-HAVING FEMININE PERSON] in the [VAGINA], in the [LIVING ROOM]. OK. And that means the person in the other room doing the wax play is... [SARAH] [DRIPPED WAX ON] [CALEB] in the [CONSERVATORY]"

(Sarah's a professor. Her last name is Plum. THAT'S RIGHT THIS IS A CLUE REFERENCE BABIES!!!)

[wurdulart]

watching the terror after playing return of the obra dinn

[sunnova-art]

~The Fate of the Obra Dinn~

[sappho-ilmarinen]

The connetions I'm making...

[sketchywasteland]

remember how i said i would start artfight refs? very funny!

i finished this instead. some of the art here is old, some is brand new. i just wanted to celebrate some of my favorite indie games :]

[sapphicfolch]

my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “memento mortem” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

me: yeah whatever. i don’t feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude i swear i just saw a ghost crab set charles on fire

my buddy brennan pacing: the captain is lying to us

[tentacle-therapissed]

Not enough slander in the Obra Dinn fandom for that dumbass glowing watch trail thing that consistently tries to send you on a wild goose chase over a memory corpse that was found like 5 feet away from where you’re currently standing. Stop doing loop de loops in the fucking air 60 people have died

[grebity-greb]

I want to show you this Disco Elysium x Return Of The Obra Dinn mashup I made in Blender a while back :>

[disregardandfelicity]

louis couldn't join the coven for hunts. he was too busy hunting with the ghost of his ex-husband