I’m listening to the podcast. The one with the anime painting.
Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today we’re talking about Only If, which is a free PC Adventure game that dedicates itself to doing things that are strange and interesting. While the inexperience of the team holds the game back from completely accomplishing its goals, what this game does provide is a great snapshot of the things indie game developers were trying to accomplish at the time in a very accessible package. There are some really good ideas here, and some of the elements (using the keyboard to type responses, surreal landscapes, a unique mishmash of mechanics) are ones we have previously praised in other games because they do such a good job of keeping the player on their toes and subverting expectations. These combine with some genuine creativity to make something that is worth the low bar of investment to experience despite the game’s relative lack of polish and narrative shortcomings. We’re going to talk about the search for weird indie titles, characters that are both really good and really very bad, and we design a hypothetically really bad Metroidvania that’s all about green pots.
Thank you for joining us again this week! This game kind of represents a desire for us to tackle some smaller titles on Pocket and look at some of the weirder elements experimented with in games. In a similar vein, next time we’re talking about Device 6, a very much text-based puzzle game from the developer of Year Walk, so be sure to check us out then.
Did you like this episode and want us to do more in the same style? Did you think this was a stupid idea and we should go back to covering Game Boy games from the early 90’s? Are you still angry that we didn’t like Detective Pikachu? Let us know, and maybe drop us some suggestions for what you’d like to see us cover in our discord!
https://discord.gg/tRNNSJ6