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Edith Finch shows them to be just as much in love with experimentation, while also getting bolder, more self-assured in the cornucopia of mechanics they offer up. Giant Sparrow proves to have matured in the intervening years. Some were brilliant, some less so, but they were all stuck together into a visually cohesive but not-always-smooth end product. Giant Sparrow’s debut game The Unfinished Swan (2012) contained a bunch of gameplay experiments.

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It’s still well-realized, though, another showcase of just how well Barksdale can suffuse virtual spaces with his dark, weird perspective.īucket Detective is available for Windows and macOS on itch (DRM-free) and on Steam. With its bigger budget, Bucket Detective tells more of its story through the form of voice-acted audio recordings, which unfortunately robs it of some of the extraordinarily precise and economical environmental storytelling that Static showed. There are laugh-out-loud moments tucked into journal entries, laugh-out-loud moments relating to gameplay objectives … I even guffawed a few times at nothing more than the way I was asked to guide my player-character through virtual space, which is quite an accomplishment. Once you’ve gotten past the basic setup of our selfish, moronic player-character doing odd jobs for an apocalyptic cult, the game misses no opportunity to inject humor into absolutely everything. Despite the obvious budgetary limitations on display, however, the game remains thoroughly suffused by Barksdale’s pitch-black brand of absurdist humor. In terms of graphical presentation, Bucket Detective is miles ahead of the extremely lo-fi Static, although there’s still no mistaking it for anything but a game cobbled together from pre-made Unity assets. Barksdale stayed on my radar based on the strength of Static, and Bucket Detective doesn’t disappoint.

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Its weird, dark humor was so thoroughly infused within the nooks and crannies of its spaces that it made for a good free alternative to Gone Home when teaching the concept of environmental storytelling. I was a big fan of Jesse “The Whale Husband” Barksdale’s first game, The Static Speaks My Name (2015). Below the fold are my six favorite releases that followed up on the promise of something a developer made before.

Whichever the case, 2017 was a very good year for promising indie developers releasing something new after a couple years of silence (or, heck, three or four or five years of silence), and having that new release not disappoint. Among the inordinate number of truly superb games released in 2017 were some hotly-anticipated (by me, anyway) follow-ups to indie games of past years.