Bento Smile made this great little interactive visual novel for the recent Ludum Dare competition called Vixen, in which you pick on a teenage girl (for those who don't know, Ludum Dare is a regularly held 48-hour game competition. Most of the entries are rough, but some really inspiring work is produced from time to time. You Will Probably Lose Your Job was originally going to be a LD competition entry, but then it sort of... grew). Bento Smile also made another great visual novel a while back called Air Pressure that is really good; I highly recommend it.
I really love it when game devs like Bento make non-violent, accessible, and inspired games about the human experience instead of meaningless tales about space marines saving the world*. There's a place in our culture for the latter, certainly, but they do over-saturate the games medium, and its because of the former that I write this blog and am a hobbyist developer myself. If you're the rare family member or friend of mine who doesn't play games but reads this blog just because you're a nice bloke, play one of the games above, or play one of the interactive stories that I linked to in other posts. All of them are accessible and appeal to a broader audience than most games are, so give one of them a try.
* And that isn't to say that stories about space marines saving the world can't be meaningful. It's just that, 9 times out of 10, they're not.
EDIT: Bah, just replayed Air Pressure, it's good, but not quite good as I remember. Considering the subject matter, it makes sense that it made a bigger impression on me in the midst of my teenage years than it does now that I'm leaving them. Oh well.
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