December has provided a bounty of games at the long-awaited death of a hideous year, but its greatest and most unexpected treasure is already clear to me.
Suzerain is the modern successor to Hidden Agenda, an ancient political simulator I once described as “possibly the greatest political simulator ever made”. A fictional nation still bleeding from civil war has just overthrown a dictator, and elected you to lead it into whatever future you think is right, just as the world begins to light up with the countless devastating proxy wars of the 1950s. It is superb. The game, I mean. Not the wars. Those are very bad.
I’ll always make it my business to check out a game if music is meaningfully integrated. From Crypt Of The NecroDancer‘s beat-hopping and Vib-Ribbon’s path-generating, to the Rock Bands and DJ Heros that clogged up all of our attics with plastic instruments, I love it all. Well… not all.
I don’t need to tell you that Harmonix are the superstars of this world. They’re the ones that gifted us the cultural phenomenon of toy guitars, so you better believe I’ll be paying attention to whatever they release. It’s like that chart-topping act you had plastered all over your walls 20 years ago: they don’t get radio play anymore, but you’ll always give their new stuff a spin.
I’ll always make it my business to check out a game if music is meaningfully integrated. From Crypt Of The NecroDancer‘s beat-hopping and Vib-Ribbon’s path-generating, to the Rock Bands and DJ Heros that clogged up all of our attics with plastic instruments, I love it all. Well… not all.
I don’t need to tell you that Harmonix are the superstars of this world. They’re the ones that gifted us the cultural phenomenon of toy guitars, so you better believe I’ll be paying attention to whatever they release. It’s like that chart-topping act you had plastered all over your walls 20 years ago: they don’t get radio play anymore, but you’ll always give their new stuff a spin.
We are living, we are constantly told, through unprecedented times. Years like 2020 are the kind of years that make me think things like “woah, we are living through history, like, all the time“, like a stoned 20-year-old gap year dude coming to self awareness for the first time in his life.
In Mesmer you get to be the history maker, in an old-world, European-esque city that is ruled over by a corrupt monarchy. Leading a revolution and storming the castle is, as it turns out, quite difficult, and requires a complex balancing act.
When Kirby inhales an enemy, he’s able to steal that character’s famous moves as well as a bit of their appearance. Now imagine a group of Kirbys, all attached to one another like some pink frog spawn, inhaling every popular game that released over the last couple of years. Then the violent eruption as Multi-Kirby belches out the result: Craftopia.
Playing Milky Way Prince made me think about people I would rather forget, and memories that will never quite stop hurting. You know, the ones about the intense, dysfunctional relationships you sometimes end up in when you’re stupid and young.
It’s a game that feels young at its core – the first commercial work of a solo developer, Lorenzo “eyeguys” Redaelli, and the first work published by developer Santa Ragione, of Wheels Of Aurelia fame. Like many young adults, it’s rough around the edges and entirely too sincere.
Milky Way Prince tells the story of Nuki, a bright lad with a passion for astronomy who meets the mysterious, charming Sune while chasing a shooting star. The chemistry between the two young men is immediate, and the chance meeting quickly turns into a doomed romance narrated through text and pictures.
You can call Milky Way Prince a visual novel if you like, though that description usually evokes pictures of static pictures hovering over endless dialogue boxes. This game opts for a more stylish approach, mixing 2D sprites and stylized 3D backgrounds to create something more akin to an interactive comic. You click around to scroll text and select the occasional dialog option, but there are also more interactive scenes, like the moments spent in the bathroom grooming yourself before an appointment. I especially liked the way the game depicts sex scenes, with icons representing the five senses that offer you details glanced in the heat of passion. A whiff of perfume. The warmth of Sune’s flesh. The pale mark of a scar on a wrist, quickly concealed.
There are a few of these abstract sex scenes, and the first one happens almost too fast, with Nuki and Sune declaring themselves to be linked by fate only minutes after meeting. I’d slam the script as cringey and unrealistic, if it weren’t a little too close to things I uttered myself when I was young.
“The brightest stars are always the most unstable ones,” says Nuki after his first encounter with Sune. And I’m 16 again, skipping school to travel halfway across Italy to rescue a friend. “I’m dating a shooting star. I’m an interesting person now.” I remember how it feels, to be close to someone like that. I remember how it can be dazzling at first, before becoming terrifying.
Games about relationships and mental health aren’t exactly uncommon, though the topic is seldom treated with the necessary grace. Milky Way Prince manages to avoid conflating mental illness with cartoonish malice, presenting a nuanced, all too realistic portrait of a toxic relationship and all the different ways it can fail.
Despite its bleak charms, Milky Way Prince is not a game I would easily recommend to others, for I suspect its impact is dependent on how much it reflects your own experiences. If you can’t see yourself in it, at least a little, you might not be able to stand the melodrama.
But if you, too, have found yourself in the very specific situation of trying to save someone who enjoys revelling in their own misery, then I hope Milky Way Prince will help you realise that you are not alone.
Q: Which legendary American character actor starred in films such as The Deer Hunter, Catch Me If You Can, and Antz, while simultaneously hacking and slashing his way through a shattered and corrupted RPG world with no class restrictions?
The castaways are a ragtag crew of teens: Lily is smart, Jaimie is athletic, and Oliver is charming. Sure, there’s Audrey, but she’s such a rebel and her crush on Joshua is making it tough for her to get anything done. And on the night of Day 8, Lily seems to have remembered seeing a documentary about a ritual to scare evil spirits and convinced everyone else on the island that it would be a great idea to burn all the leftover wood in the shape of an idol. Great. Now how are we going to get home?
This is Teen Island Simulator, a zero-player adaptation of the GMless pen-and-paper game, Teen Island, by Chris McDowell.
