Games by Lu
Solo(?) dev Lu makes games driven by an aesthetic that may or may not do it for you. They aren't porn as such, but those animal girls are pretty specific sometimes, is all I'm saying. What they mostly end up being about, though, is people forming micro-communities of various kinds in worlds that aren't made for them, and I just think that's nice.
These are the ones I've most liked:
- I wish it was morning all the time is kind of a turn-based survival horror sim in VN form, which I didn't expect was something I'd be into, but a lot of the design decisions are good ones. Rather than lean on exposition and a verbose UI, it's content to let the visuals pull a lot of weight, to the point that all your status indicators are character and environment details rather than numbers. It's a nice way of taking advantage of the benefits a simple loop--you don't need hard numbers anyway, and omitting them lets you feel like you're figuring things out.
- HOLEHOLE manages to be a game about making games without forcing you to endure an irritating narrator or basically any unfunny asides about tropes or whatever. It's just a straightforward story revolving around one reason why games might matter to someone, building a game world as an extension of the process of carving out space in the "real" world for a relationship.
- MELLOWOLLEM is I guess my favorite of the more vibe-based games, the ones that drop you into a fairly simple science fiction or fantasy premise and mostly leave you to put the pieces together yourself. As the most straightforward of these, it's also the one that least requires you to fight against the controls while looking for things to do. It's, in a way, about collaborating to make the best of a bad situation. Assuming you don't read the POV character as the villain.
- Of course sometimes the little community you fall in with isn't a great one, and DINNERDINNNER is for my money the most interesting take on this because it focuses more on the situation than on Scary Lady Hot. No judgment if you think scary lady is hot, though.