Story Telling

Sweet Agatha is an ambitious product in many ways. It's a two-player, limited scope, narrativist RPG; it's a literarily ambitious attempt to marry themes of love and loss to an interactive product; it's a beautifully designed (from a graphic perspective) product that gets destroyed in play.

MS Paint Adventures is not a game. Except that it is a game, absolutely.

The current game in progress is Problem Sleuth, but two previous games have been completed, and are archived. If you check out the first page of Problem Sleuth, you'll see a crudely-drawn private eye standing in his apartment, with the canonical things present you might expect to see if this were a graphic adventure -- a gun, a desk, a phone, a wall safe, a door from the office. Below is a blinking > cursor, which you might reasonably think is an invitation for you to type in text. It isn't.

In Awesome Women Kicking Ass, each player takes the role of a great Heroine of mythology, defending the land of Herstoria against an attack by the pernicious forces of the Patriarchy, who wish to reduce all women to subordination. An indie RPG with (like My Life With Master) a fixed narrative arc, Awesome Women is essentially structured as a conversation.

It is 1928, the kulaks are starving by the millions, and the collectivization of agriculture is proving to be a disaster. Careworn by his awesome responsibilities, our beloved leader, Comrade Stalin, wishes to have a pleasant evening with the other valiant leaders of the CCCP, and be told a folk tale similar to those he was told in his youth. Naturally, Comrade Stalin being who he is, at least one of the rest of us will be executed before the evening is out. And try to stay off the subject of agriculture.

Are you a megalomaniac who gets pleasure from the misfortune of others? Would you love to steer people into a direction that will cause their lives to come tumbling down? Then Gloom is the game for you. The object of the game, in fact, is to make your characters as miserable as you possibly can. Each player has a family, a group of characters that they then play event cards on. There are both good and bad event cards in your hand. The good events are played on your opponent’s characters to heighten their over-all self-worth points; the bad event cards are played on your own characters to lower their self-esteem. In your hand, there are also death cards and action cards. The death cards are very important, because at the end of the game, only your dead characters self-worth scores are added to your final score, and the player with the lowest score wins.