Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £4.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Some games, you play for hours and hours, wondering why there’s that strange light outside that keeps coming and going. Some, you play in brief stints. Others… Well, others are like Tiny Bird Garden, in that you’re periodically checking in on your home for cute borbs, playing the odd game, filling out your garden, setting out seed, checking in on a wee chick…

…Oddly enough, that makes it a little hard to review, because it’s a game that you play in short segments (About three or four times a day, if you’re trying to raise a chick), but completion will take months. And some of those times are nice and relaxing (Getting nice letters from the sentient, oh-so-cute borbfolk, complimenting you and your garden), and some… Some feel a bit frustrating. At first, anyway.

For example, raising chicks. While it’s a side endeavour, its Tamagotchi like nature (MUST EAT. MUST SLEEP. CLEAN MY BIRDYPOOS!) could lead the genre weary to feel this is an obstacle to completion. Thankfully, it is not, to my knowledge, possible to screw this up, because, let’s face it, you would probably feel as bad as I would if my cute tiny birb died on me.

The other side content is minigames (Two of which, Stacking Birds and Bird Jump) appear to only give cosmetic items, and a story mode, about… Well, the staff of the Tiny Bird Garden, and the possibility that they might end up selling it off. It was nice that the Borbjewelled game led, after a little while, to enough bird toys in the shape of bird shaped trophies to get me seriously started.

In the end, though, while I find some aspects more fun than others, I only have two complaints and a bug to report. The complaints are both to do with the visuals, specifically, wanting a somewhat better windowed mode, and that the hearts on the Birb status screen (Where you get to see how much they love you, what toys/treats/hats they love the most, etcetera) is hard to distinguish due to a lack of colour/value disparity. The bug, meanwhile, isn’t game breaking, but it is slightly annoying: My flower in Tiny Bird Jump is now on the right side of the playing field rather than the centre, and, while this doesn’t significantly impact it, it is obviously unintended.

Beyond that, the birds are cute as heck (With some good descriptions), the game is tight, easy to understand, and you’re under much less pressure than at first appears to be the case. Enjoy the garden. Enjoy the light, kindly story. And take your time getting to know those Tiny Birds.

The Mad Welshman loves his borbular friends.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £3.99
Where To Get It: Steam

I do love me some Lovecraftian shenanigans. I also love party visual novels. So you can perhaps imagine my pleasure when I saw Fhtagn! (Pronounced Fuh-tagh-un, Fe-Tahh-gun, or Steve), which is both of these things, involving the summoning of Dread Lord Cthulhu (who sleeps and is dead in his island city until the Stars Are Right comes on the telly.)

It is, in its basics, a very familiar formula: There are up to four players in local co-op, eight locations, seven stats, six turns, and eight possible endings in the base game. With two tasks per location, each giving some combo of three stats (Except gambling at Madame Fufu’s), and only one player allowed per location, it’s up to the players to get their stats up to the major and minor requirements of their chosen ritual by succeeding in stat based events and upping stats with their chosen activity, while…

…Ah, now this is where it gets interesting. As I found out when streaming the game, just one of the players succeeding in their ritual isn’t enough for a victory… So there is a co-op element… It’s just, by its layout, you expect it to be competitive. Good trick!

In any case, this is one of those games where the writing is important, and is it good? It is! The humour in this game lands a lot more than it misses, like how a spicy burrito coming back to haunt your cultist can, in some circumstances, actually bring you closer to your goal… Whether that’s by successfully blaming your gastric upset on someone else, or by holding it in and inspiring the cult to greater eldritch dancing by your own tortured contortions. It’s a game aware of, and affectionately parodying its inspiration, while also sidestepping a lot of the stuff that makes liking Lovecraft’s work rather awkward (You know, like the fact that a lot of it is based on racism as well as the limitations of rationalism.)

Aesthetically, it also hits the shoggoth on the (nominal) noggin, with some lively, jazzy music to get you into that roaring 20s mood, some good animations, and, in the Mayor’s office, Himself rules over Arkham, perhaps for a Newer, Better Deal… Well, until we wreck the place and summon the Older, Awful Deal, anyway…

As to flaws, I can’t really pick anything out as more than a minor niggle, for two reasons: While the base game itself is quite short (In less than 2 hours, which includes a lengthy stream, I have 5 of the 8 endings), the developers are adding content quite soon to the game, and it has a content creation tool, which some folks have already added things, and you can, too (LINK)

As such… It’s tightly designed, fun to play with friends, got a lot of humour and charm, and you can make new content for it? That’s two squamous appendages up, Fhtagn!

The Mad Welshman has only two squamous appendages, so this is a hefty endorsement indeed!

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £4.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Austen Translation is an interestingly simple game: Spend four turns (plus some secret events) to try and get your stats (Wit, Ruthlessness, and Charm) close enough that your prospective hubby to be proposes to you, while sabotaging anyone else who might be after your beau (or… Well, just sabotage people so you’re the best match.) That is, beyond some twists and minigames, the whole thing, mechanically. Five players, local play only as far as I can tell, with randomly generated AI players if you don’t feel like filling the roster, and character generation with randomised stats, but you get to customise your lady’s looks.

Normally, this would get a “What it says on the tin”, some words about how, once again, Worthing & Moncrieff have nailed a clear, simple aesthetic with a good voice-actress for the round intros (Love the scandalised disgust in her voice when she asks “Did you really just interrupt me?” for clicking through an intro too fast), classical music fitting the theme of the piece…

…But I’ll freely admit, the narrative of the game doesn’t sit terribly well with me. See, Jane Austen was pretty good at critiquing the mores of the time, such as asking that dread question “Why can’t we marry for love, not money or standing?” in Pride and Prejudice… And Austen Translation, by parodying Austen, is almost as if Austen were playing it straight.

It’s pretty clear everyone’s competing, it’s definitely about the fat-stacks of cash the hubbies have, the losers “die in a rat-infested hovel” , and not even the odd winky asides and pleasant classical piano can really distract me from how uncomfortable it made me feel. It’s not played as being romantic, and from the outset, it’s made clear the women are going to be the dominant partners, but I still felt distinctly odd playing a narrative I’d kind of hoped we’d escaped a while back.

So, while I can’t personally recommend this, I will say again that it’s easy to pick up, tutorialises well, and has a good aesthetic going for it, with the minor niggle that maybe, just maybe, Wit and Charm could be different colours, or at least one could be made darker than the other so as to better differentiate them? It’s perhaps an interesting party game, albeit one with a narrative that, as noted, didn’t sit well with me.

The Mad Welshman politely sipped his tea, wallet empty, and thought to himself “Thank goodness I’m a babbage-card critic, and don’t have to get embroiled in such things…”

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