It has been an entire year since I last joined in with Krikket et al’s Humble Choice round up! I didn’t mean it to be, I’ve continued keeping an eye on things and seeing if I felt up to it and just… haven’t had the spoons. But this month! I’ve been blogging, consistently even! And a couple games stood out to me in August’s offerings, so I threw my name in the ring. I still don’t really have the spoons, don’t get me wrong, I just love seeing what Humble Choice offers each month. If there’s a good game or two in there, it’s a great month, and if there isn’t I pause. I find it a great deal for money and end up with a few games I may not have otherwise picked up or even heard of, and a lot of them end up being pretty fun. Besides, I adore community events. I am a sucker for them, even, and I will get involved whether it’s a good idea for me or not. Ask me how many I joined in August. It’s 6, and I have the energy for none of it. But anywho!

For the uninitiated, each month a group of bloggers take a look at what Choice has to offer and each pick at least one game to play through and write up a few thoughts on. The idea is to work out whether or not that month’s games present a good deal for your money, as several people were already doing a look at each month anyway. Krikket pulls each person’s posts together with a quote to bring forward the group’s overall feeling of the bundle. It’s a neat little thing, I definitely recommend you keep an eye out for everybody’s posts in the coming week or two! And if you’re a blogger and it sounds interesting, it’s open to new folk who’d like to join in each month on the Blaugust Discord.

August 2024’s Games

This month’s bundle of games in Humble Choice is a bit of a mixed bag for me personally. Though worth it for two of the games alone: Blacktail, a Slavic folklore inspired dark fantasy RPG I am excited to check out. And Universe For Sale, an indie point and click adventure game set on Jupiter where somebody has a universe for sale.

Obviously, I’m taking a look at Universe For Sale. I’m in the market for a little extra-dimensional space to store all of my books and tea, why not!

Anybody Wanna Buy a Universe?

So I am a pretty big fan of visual novels and point and click adventure games. They’re wonderful games when you fancy an interactive story but don’t have the energy to faff around with combat and puzzles and platforming and whatever else video games come with. However they are very slow in nature, there isn’t a lot of action. The stories can get pretty intense, not tied down by game mechanics, but I don’t know if you all get this too but when you go in to play a game, you expect a little action, excitment, whatever. Even if you’re just logging into your MMO of choice to check your auctions or heading over to Stardew Valley to work on romancing your favourite villager, there’s an expectation of gameplay, right? And I know going in what a visual novel or point and click plays like, but I do have to point out that they will likely feel slow. Or maybe that’s not a thing for you and I’m talking out of my arse. Either way! I felt it was important to get this part down and out of the way, because this is one of my issues with the game. Okay it’s not really an “issue”, more of a mood thing, but I disgress.

This is the section of the blog I wrote out and saved… and then discovered had just gone. Left. Vamooshed. I was not a happy bunny. But anyway here’s the rewritten lost section.

Why do I mention visual novel? Because it is one, really. Yes it’s also a point and click game, but the story is delivered through stationary cards and talking heads as you get in a visual novel. It also is not voiced, though the sound design is really nice. The music and ambience is fairly gentle but also sets the scene well. I actually found a video on Akupara Games’¹ Youtube channel of the game’s soundtrack with the Lo-fi girl scene, though instead it’s Lila working on a universe blueprint and one of the lomri watching over the slums of Jupiter from the window. I love it.

The animation style of the game feels very much like… well like an animated storybook, I’m not sure how else I can describe it. It’s beautiful, and charismatic. And the world feels so vibrant. Not necessarily in a literal sense, there’s just a lot of depth to it. The setting feels like a bazaar full of colourful characters on an alien planet, they did a fantastic job of presenting it in my opinion.

The story itself is the important factor in Universe For Sale. I was immediately charmed.

We begin in the bedroom of a little girl. Her mother (presumably) walks across the room – a nightlight projecting rotating stars across the walls as rain pours outside – to her daughter, telling her it’s time for sleep. The little girl, however, demands a story. And of course it is the same book they have read over and over. It put me in mind of being a kid wanting the exact same thing. The way this game evoked such nostalgic memories in me was really quite cool. The story they are reading is a kind of dark folktale about a shadow child.

And then we’re on Jupiter. It’s raining and we wake up, swathed in cloth, walking through the elements until we stand in front of a teahouse. We enter and this is where Universe For Sale really begins. As we talk to each character we unlock some incredible worldbuilding. There’s clearly a lot of thought and effort put into this setting and I adore it. There’s opposing religious forces, and a fairly modern cult that has people literally cut themselves into pieces to attain enlightenment – our guy’s head is floating off of his body, there’s a lady with floating ears, it’s fascinating. There’s the storms that plague Jupiter and how people shield themselves, all sorts of alien folk and flora and fauna, and a lady with tentacles for hair creates tiny universes and sells them. There is some setup to the world and its concepts, and hints of some kind of intrigue, though the latter I haven’t actually gotten to yet in my own playthrough. It is slow getting there, but I think this is a good thing. It gives you time to build up the world and learn who the characters are so that the story can comfortably flow. A story needs time in the oven to cook, after all, else it comes out feeling rushed and unsatisfying. Personally, I have to be in the right mood for this style of game, and I’m not sure I am right now, but I do like it.

If I have any issues with the game, it’s in its autosave feature and moving between scenes.

The first day I played, I got to the teahouse and spoke to the people sitting around and then ended the game for the day. I couldn’t find a save option so I figured it autosaved. And when I loaded it back up, it wouldn’t let me sit down and continue the story without once again going through the conversations with all the different people in the teahouse. So I suppose it autosaved on a scene change, though I never saw the game tell me this.

A little later in the game I had spoken to one of the characters and we were going to walk together. As I walked out, I was alone again and asking where they were. This was a little jarring, though when I went into the right alleyway, they were with me once again. Though not before I took a “wrong” turning and reached a dead end. I did get a Steam achievement for my tiny side adventure, but I discovered you had to walk manually to the edge of the screen to be able to move across to the next scene, and I found that a bit unintuitive.

Universe For Sale just has a lot of charisma. It has its issues, sure, but I didn’t come across anything that was gamebreaking, just a couple minor nuisances. There was a story here that I know I haven’t got to yet and I’m pretty intrigued to see where it goes. Maybe it’ll be fun, maybe it won’t, but I’m charmed enough by the worldbuilding and my desire to understand certain things that I will definitely be continuing my playthrough. The Steam reviews are pretty favourable. Some aren’t wholly impressed but on the whole, it seems that people’s thoughts align with what I’m already deducing. That this is a lovely game for those who just want to take in an intriguing little scifi story. It’s a point and click visual novel of sorts, not an action adventure game, so expect to take your time. That said, it doesn’t look like the game takes too long to complete, depending on how slow or fast you read, I guess, and how often you get distracted by other things. Now if you excuse me, World of Warcraft has a new expansion in a few hours!

1. Universe For Sale’s game publisher [↩]