One game stood out in a satisfyingly crowded field of narrative-driven titles at the recent PAX West: Vivid Foundry’s Solace State.
It isn’t easy and it isn’t intuitive, but it’s like real life socializing under late capitalism in that way.
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The game excels by allowing you to find that hidden path toward humanity and equality between driver and passenger. There’s a brief respite when you choose how Lina replies to some pax queries, each bathed in tension and the artifice of emotional labor.
There’s no time for a breath it feels all too real in that regard. The animation of each ride is continuous and, especially when looking out the windshield, you can’t pause the words. But unlike so many others, it doesn’t wait on you. Should you please this passenger by parking illegally or risk losing a precious star? Get gas or another pax (aka passenger)? Answer your mercurial friend’s call for help or get another passenger and hope he’s going your way?Īs always, text is central, even in these arrestingly visual games. This is a game about agonizing choices and limits, accurately capturing the grim, gamified realities that confront your Uber or Lyft driver in real life. In Uber-simulator and bisexual-lighting paragon Neo Cab, Lina is the last human ride-share driver in Los Ojos, a city increasingly under the thumb of the Capra Corporation, whose driverless taxis dominate the streetscape. That’s truer now than ever, thanks to a raft of new games - either visual novels or titles influenced by them - that demonstrate the possibilities of the format and signal a sea change that asks us to reconsider what a visual novel is. There’s a lot more to visual novels than some people expect based on stereotypes about the genre. My earlier game Analogue was the first visual novel on Steam, and frankly, I think Get in the Car, Loser! would be a pretty lifeless game if not for all the visual novel influences in its design.” “I don’t think I’m the developer you want to hold up if you don’t like visual novels. And while their non-traditional, often queer and erotic stories have earned them a devoted fandom, some gamers dismiss the clicky text-and-sprite affairs as barely worthy of the label “game.” Not every critic of visual novels is a stereotypical gamer bro, however.īack in July, Adam Koebel, the award-winning creator of the tabletop RPG Dungeon World, tweeted, “can we please have more queer games that aren’t visual novels? signed, a queer person who does not like visual novels.” He held up the punky road-trip combat game Get in the Car, Loser! as an example of a video game that met his requirements, only for its creative lead Christine Love, an award-winning developer, to pop in and say:
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All they needed was the free RenPy engine and some art.īut visual novels are also controversial their unmistakably feminine mien both attracts and repels. Even before programs like Twine democratized game design, visual novels were more accessible to marginalized creators because they offered a lightweight process for development that allowed lone creators to put together a playable story. A genre-cum-medium of interactive stories that often feature static anime-influenced art, they also tend to be more diverse than more mainstream titles - including how they depict queer relationships. Visual novels have long ventured to places that more mainstream games avoid.
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