January 15, 2021 8:55am
by
Trilby Beresford
Toge Productions
Illustrator Brigitta Rena shares her inspiration for the hand-drawn interactive story, which features a young girl and her owl companion.
The Independent Gamer is a curated roundup of news from indie gaming, landing here every other Friday.
A new year has begun, and a recent title that has gained a following since its release in late 2020 is the adventure point-and-click title
When the Past Was Around from developer Mojiken Studio and publisher Toge Productions, both based in Indonesia. The game about a young girl and her owl companion is created and illustrated by artist Brigitta Rena, who set out to make a relatable and interactive story without any dialogue so that players could loosely interpret the game based on their own experience in life.
Indie World Showcase 12/15: Spelunky, Among Us, and Every Switch Game Nintendo Showed Off
Among Us’s console debut as well as
Spelunky 2 getting summer 2021 Switch release dates, but also packed in tons of other reveals. Of course, while it would have been nice to see
Hollow Knight: Silksong finally make another appearance, the 15-minute showcase did still shine with reveals for games like
Among Us, the survival social-deduction game that has taken outer space by storm.
Work together to complete tasks on a spaceship before the imposter sabotages or takes out the other players. Think a crewmate is acting strange? Call for emergency meetings and discuss who the suspected imposter is … but make sure you’re confident before you vote to eject someone into the cold reaches of space.
Print
The game “What Comes After” opens with a relatable nightmare. Vivi, wearing a face mask on the subway, is overly exhausted and stressed about the very thought of going home to another evening of absolutely nothing, presumably in our present-day pandemic. She doesn’t go home, however. She falls asleep on mass transit.
This is hellish.
No wonder Vivi is relieved, upon waking, to find out that she may in fact be dead and is now surrounded by ghosts some human, some cats and some plants. If this is the afterlife, she muses, she’s pretty lucky. “I didn’t feel pain. It cost me nothing. And I’ve been considering it for a while, anyway. You won the jackpot, Vivi!”
A beautiful meditation on love and loss
December 16, 2020 - 10:39am EST
One life lesson you learn quickly is that growing up kind of sucks. Sure, the freedom that comes with becoming an adult is nice, but the downsides are plentiful. The aches and pains that come as you get older. The bills that pile up week after week. And perhaps, most crushingly, the existential dread of trying to figure out what to do with your life. It s certainly something I have dealt with, and a lesson that can be seen in When The Past Was Around. Mojiken s graphic adventure is a slice of life story that recognizes that lessons are learned all the time, and some of them can be quite painful.