High Impact Quarterly Q1 2026

I've been watching Iron Pineapple's "Souls-Like games you've never heard of" series, an excuse to recommend and provide feedback to relatively unknown games. I've found games like Pseudoregalia through him, and I figured that people might appreciate me doing more curation work than just remembering to add stuff on my Steam curator page or my Itch collection.

For the High Impact Quarterly, I want to focus on titles I like that I have not written about, whether on my main blogs, as kaorukofan1993 on Backloggd, or in other publications (including those that have not been published yet). In keeping with my scope and my revived affection for minimalist aesthetics, the maximum word count for any entry must be 300 words.

I am also highly inspired by the British Film Institute's approach to listicles (here's an essay film example), which are more like mini-essays sent in by directors and critics. I've read a few websites that are, well, recommendations. But I find their lack of context make for uninteresting reading material. This is my attempt to go beyond dumping some links and telling the reader to go play them.

The works covered in this issue may include extreme adult themes, which I have not bothered CW-ing. There may also be spoilers. People might take umbrage with this approach, but my experience interacting with readers suggests that my audience wants something more than a detailed synopsis. They are also all works that I have finished or covered all the content that exist so far, just so I can be lazy and save Labyrinth of Touhou Tri for the next quarterly.

BLACK SHEEP TOWN

Paid | Visual Novel | 2022

I can only paint broad strokes on what this visual novel sees as the limitations of the narrative form. The way we tell stories is perhaps our most accessible approach to history, but there are so many loose ties and ends to this never-ending grand drama that we will never be able to formulate objective statements.

The setting is ostensibly a Japanese Chinatown of outsiders, psychics, and Chinese triads abandoned by the world at large, but it also talks about regime change, ableism, class war, and some more. The scale is so large that I can only think of modernist novels. But unlike your Ulysses and Miss Dalloway, it is not about an individual who acts as a microcosm of an enlightened society but a set of figures who represent different facets of society: a college student is reluctant to be the successor of the ruling mafia elite, a journalist living with a sex worker works with a dog cop to investigate serial killings, a nurse loved by the asylum patients struggles to justify her occupation to her mother...

As the story meandered, I often found myself thinking there was a misanthropic thesis about how history repeats only to read a heartwarming passage about care and affection in this dystopian society. Despite the bleak atmosphere and the pressures of historical forces, many of these characters remain compassionate for each other. The few glimmers of hope and humor taught me that the tragedy of BLACK SHEEP TOWN is that Marx dictum: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please."

History continues to be indeterminate as long as life exists. The secular Buddhist in me wants to exit it altogether. But until then, the narrative form must not distract us from complexity of life.

This game can be found on Steam.

For the GHOSTs

Paid | Visual Novel | 2024

In an age of solipsistic-inducing LLM chatbots and misanthropic metafiction, the kindness of For the GHOSTs stands out. The game invites the player into a network of blogs to connect with fictional characters who express their personalities through their environments and dialog boxes. You can also start up your own channel featuring your own music and poetry, like creating a Neocities blog.

But the characters also recognize their limitations as pieces of software. Their files are isolated into their own folders, and the characters cannot meaningfully communicate with each other. They thus depend on you to be the messenger -- a few puzzles play with the file structure. In the meanwhile, the characters teach you the syntax of the scripting language if you want to modify existing scenes. They are after all unencrypted code simulating characters, and there is no stopping the player to rewrite the scenario at will. Yet, the visual novel trusts you: it believes that you are someone who is willing to listen to the anxieties of these fictional characters.

The gambit is the point as communication is a matter of good faith. While fiction can be manipulative and meaning may never be fully conveyed, we are all trying our best to understand each other. We create things for one another even if our assumptions that everyone is kindhearted are unfounded. When the characters confide in me about their feelings for others, it felt like a two-way communication. I cannot be a bystander; I must mend their relationships.

By the end, the characters danced around in photographic backgrounds and I saw them as people who might like or resist my interests. I had to revise my definition of metafiction -- a synonym for diegetic satire on reader fantasies -- to something that may invite compassion and empathy.

The game can be found on Steam.

Stella of the End

Paid | Visual Novel | 2022

"Even if humanity dies," the logo subtitle reads, "the machines we have created will inherit our love and create the future". This visual novel is part of an ongoing journey by Tanaka Romeo to push the boundaries of what he values in sentience. The game checks off many standard tropes in post-apocalyptic stories between (human) father figure and adopted (robot) daughter, but it uses the relationship to interrogate the contributions of humanity and technology.

In one chapter, the protagonists encounter a city modelled after class hierarchies: the bottom rungs are the proletariats and the upper the rich and privileged. The android daughter understandably cannot comprehend the layers of societal oppression as she had to reassess her own ideals of what being human means. Surely, there must be a humanism that isn't delimited by the horrors of late capitalism, right?

The narrative explicitly goes against the enlightened hubris of Silicon Valley. It is critical of the computer scientists who believe they have mastery over the black boxes they don't even understand. Intelligent life cannot be discovered by happenstance but forged through the struggles of life -- in other words, it needs to be raised and nurtured like a proper child. Superintelligence, if it ever exists, must be earned.

While I find the narrative too rudimentary for my taste, I found it more palatable than many stories (positive or negative) about AI. It understands that anyone embarking a project on AI is negotiating the values we place on ourselves. The misanthropic bent we've been seeing is a reflection of our devaluation of human labor. At the moment, I have a hard time imagining the machines inheriting the little love we have. But perhaps, we need an android girl to tell us that despite our mistakes we actually helped her grow up.

This game can be found on Steam.

Veggie Quest: The Puzzle Game

Paid | Puzzle | 2024

I learned about this game from a talk delivered by the developer of Gentoo Rescue, and the premise of making terrible MMO dungeons to extract time and labor from players seemed interesting enough that I gave this game a whirl.

Your job is to place obstacles to impede dungeon completion. Alas, you cannot do what real developers do and create un-playable areas. The dungeons must be solvable for the path-finding AI.

The comedy of the game is finding out how not-so-robust your solutions actually are. I've spent a few sessions creating mazes only for the AI to simply ignore them and dash straight for the goalpost. The difficulty of these puzzles is rather high -- truth be told, I'm still stuck in the earlygame. But I prefer being humbled by games these days: I don't need another power fantasy after playing so many of them recently.

My only complaint is the UI: the buttons feel mismatched for their purposes, and I find myself skipping to the next level instead of testing my solution. The developer seems to have noticed this, hence a box asking if you want to do this and the option of ignoring the tooltip altogether. But I find this hacky solution unwieldy and wish the game had a total UI redesign.

This game can be found on Steam.

One Turn Kill

Paid | Deckbuilder | 2026

As the title suggests, your protagonist must buff her cards and deal enough damage to bosses in one turn. The only obstacle between her and the goal is how attentive you are in deckbuilding.

The deterministic nature of the game is refreshing: your cards may be shuffled, but you know exactly how many types of cards you've put in. I enjoyed hunting for synergies and crafting theories on how to exploit the boss gimmicks for even more damage. The slick animation makes the huge damage numbers so satisfying to watch.

This is not a difficult nor long game by any stretch, but I found One Turn Kill rewarding regardless. The puzzles it lays out are fun to figure out by yourself, and the character dialogs are surprisingly memorable. It might be the perfect game to play for a weekend.

This game can be found on Steam.

95 Theses

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

The alienation I feel as a Chinese Indonesian participating in queer communities is hard to explain. I find myself grating my teeth whenever I watch people discuss diversity in exclusionary spaces. Do I subject myself to white queer people performing eclectic appropriations of Japanese media or avoid them entirely? This question, as one can imagine, is something I think a lot when I write any article for this blog or elsewhere.

95 Theses bravely puts us in the eyes of a puppygirl aware of the Orientalist harms. But crucially, the narrative is framed as if she's Martin Luther pinning the 95 Theses that would later cause the Reformation. She sees herself as having higher moral ground than the rest, but the irony is that she too exoticizes the first Chinese trans woman she sees: ah, she wishes to be her so badly because she's suffering from actual prejudice.

The visual novel takes aim at the self-flagellation techniques of white people who realize that being queer or/and disabled is still not "enough" to be considered a racialized minority. But as A.Y. BING notes in their insightful essay-review, the critique seems to have flown over many readers' heads. Perhaps, that is a strong indicator of how the white fetishizing of "the orient" has become normalized.

As a result, I do not expect many people to get the approach this visual novel is going for. But I resonate deeply with this game: it gets why I feel awkward, if not unsafe, being Chinese and queer in these online communities.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

1,000,000 shrimp

Free | Incremental | 2026

You are hovering over buttons to catch a lot of shrimp.

*This game can be found on Itch.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya

Paid | Anime | 2026

This movie speaks to me as a long-time writer on internet subcultures. It is not always clear where the trajectory of subculture media will go, but the movie reminds us that the virtual infrastructure that made communities possible has democratized art and social spaces for ages. Queer people can rely on virtual spaces to express themselves. There are indeed real rags-to-riches stories thanks to the advent of Vocaloid producers, virtual reality content creators, and VTubers. And the rejection of the mainstream "adult" world is not only possible but perhaps something you actually want to be a part of.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya presents a future that isn't riddled with generative AI, corporations censoring expression, and heteronormativity. It depicts a world made by us for us, with little concern for boomer crises like the low fertility rate. The romance developed is only possible if you believe in the historical and connective powers of the internet.

As a Luddite, I find its optimism so refreshing. Even if the decay of the web is visible to everyone, there is still something worth defending and nurturing. The movie came at the right moment for me when my faith in internet subcultures was wavering. I want the fantasy of queer people like me giving back to the internet that nurtured us to be real. It is not an understatement to say that the movie has revitalized my interests in writing more about the internet.

Otherworld Doll

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

The sexual fantasy of becoming enslaved is one that eludes me, but this masochistic fetish is but one of the preoccupations of this game. Presented as a minimalist play in RPG Maker 2003, the visual novel is written mostly in the perspective of a captive from another world. The pretense of resisting her witch master is quickly dropped as the narrative fixates on more extreme fetishes including scatology.

The lack of consensual sex scenes and extreme dehumanization should not stop us from perceiving the tenderness of the game. Much like Love and Dehumanization, the game wants to affirm the value of these fetishes. The abusive relationship is sometimes difficult for me to read, but the characters do appear to care for each other in ways that are alien to me. The ending is a path I have no interest in walking, but I understand the people who do: that is where their desires reside.

I find reading these kinds of scenarios has helped me reflect on my contradictory attitudes toward sexuality. Just because I read books by sex workers does not mean I have eradicated the prudishness in me. But I won't know the extent of my faults until I discover works like Otherworld Doll and start thinking about sexuality with it. I don't know if I need to get the erotic appeal of consuming fecal matter in order to support my queer comrades, but I do think realizing that the people who enjoy this stuff are people is something I still need to work on.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

Seams and Senses (v1)

Free | Visual Novel (Demo) | 2025

I am going to reserve my thoughts on this game when the full version comes out. Suffice to say, this is a solid foundation for exploring queer furry awakenings through the internet (the protagonist saying she feels more comfortable looking at nude anime characters than real people is a mood) and the struggle to bring online relationships offline. It would be a shame to not bring more attention to this wonderful title.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

Orangepeel, Onionskin

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

As much as a few body horror scenes of this visual novel grossed me out, I was entranced by the religious? amorous? relationship between the two protagonists. Their visceral suffering together is a testament of ugliness as a source of beauty and pride. Their love emerges not from destiny but a shared understanding of the horrors inflicted on them.

As I reached the ending and realized the game was a kind of thesis on the grotesque turned beautiful, a sense of relief came over me: the developers understood that intimacy in narratives must feel like a journey with lows and highs. They were there for each other for all four nights of the rituals --. I had to believe in their passion because it felt so genuine to me.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

MURDERPLANT

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

The game exploits the voyeuristic connections between found footage movies and snuff films to great effect. Most of the game revolves around the protagonist watching a recording of her partner getting violated by an alien plant. Her erotically charged guilt takes control of the narrative, turning what should be her partner's dying moments into pornographic pleasure. But once the film ends, the actual fear strikes into her heart: she remembers her partner is gone, and all she can think of is revenge.

Unfortunately, the real villain is not the monster she wants to burn to smithereens but rather her shame. She was destined to fail because she couldn't confront the fact she enjoyed masturbating to her partner's death that she was partially responsible for. The protagonist mistakes the titular MURDERPLANT as her source of repressed pleasure, not the possibility of furrykind's downfall.

Because the narrative is tapping on that subconscious need for atonement after indulging into too much erotic pleasure, I found the idea of the game more horrific than the gore I'm seeing on the screen. The ongoing societal repression of the erotic grotesque will only lead us to death.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

Butterfly Æffect: Papillons à Quatre Mains

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

The protagonist believes he's better than his handsome, perverted roommate who treats dating women as a kind of game. He tries his best to respect women as well as he can, but he still dreams of getting into their pants.

I've met these kinds of "nice guy" incels before. They like to intrude in already established relationships between women and are frankly uninterested in their interiority anyway. It was fascinating to read in their POV for the majority of the game: he doesn't seem to understand that he is simply tolerated by the women he's trying to hit up nor do they actually care about his well-being.

But all the endings revolve around him pushing one girl to her limits: each heroine may be an archetype of a college student, but their traumatic childhood experiences come out in full force to punish his transgression. While torturing him, they explicitly call him out for being a nobody trying to be a somebody.

In one ending involving his kidnapping, another heroine thought that he had dropped out. He mattered so little to everyone that I found it oddly comforting. The visual novel is intentionally adopting the 2000s English-language visual novel aesthetics and harem romance tropes to criticize the stature of protagonists like him. Don't we find him repulsive too? Why do we have to enable his attitudes toward women when we can just avoid him? The answer, heteronormativity, won't fly with modern audiences and I think this visual novel responds quite adequately to anyone seeking to justify this gross practice.

This game can be found on Itch.

DIGITAL BOYMEAT

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

When I played the game for the first time and picked whatever intrigued me, the "consensual torture" that the protagonist's boyfriend concocted ended in the death of a willing participant. I was fascinated and repulsed by the violence inflicted on this guy, and I kept going.

There are multiple endings depending on how one balances the boyfriend's desires and the participant's health, a decision I understand as a game designer but unsure as a reader. They serve as a barometer of the stability of the relationship between the protagonist and his boyfriend.

But the most interesting part of the game is how much the protagonist was getting into this: this was something he didn't know he needed. The game teased on this element but never delivered for me -- and that's fine. It's about how attractive and problematic the boys in his life are, and that's kinda hot.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

BROKEN CORE: sister = doll

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

I once read a post by Kayin that stresses people should see "weird porn" as "people processing the horror of being horny", not just simply a way to jack off. And I find this heuristic useful for explaining certain sexual tensions that are clearly harmful but remain enticing to the author and readers.

Here, the protagonist is attracted to a doll who is an ideal version of her real life sister. Not only does she find comfort in talking to the doll but she is able to enact her sexual fantasies. This game is highly aware of incest as a taboo, especially when her real sister appears in the game. Yet, it remains unabashedly horny for the fiction of incest.

But the game takes a step further than the Kayin post: the illusion of escapism shatters and the horror of reality seeps in. The boundary between real and unreal is transgressed near the end, and dread and titillation become one and the same. What was supposed to be a fantasy of healing and safety began to turn into a nightmare.

Then, the fantasy of incest swoops in and saves the day. The visual novel surprised me with its triumphant ending: it argues for a separation of fiction and reality precisely because reality will never compare to the aspirations of fiction. "Weird porn" can only function as therapeutic if it isn't real. As long as it is just a doll you play with and fuck, it becomes more than a reprieve from reality -- you can actually recover and learn what you truly desire, and that is perhaps an underrated component of what it means to be yourself.

This game can be found on Nadia Nova's personal homepage.

Moonlight Duelists

Free | Visual Novel | 2026

Speaking of Kayin, her visual novel draws from the visual languages of Revolutionary Girl Utena and old adventure games. It played like a PC-98 adventure game, most notably the screen transitions and resolution, and this evokes the feeling that one has uncovered an erotic game hidden in the archives.

Yet, the concerns of the narrative are far more modern: the protagonist cannot untangle her feelings toward her rival from her erotic fixation of violence. Her intrusive fantasies are realized when she duels with her rival in the dream world. No matter what choices the player makes, the protagonist cannot restrain herself from ogling violence.

This unravelling of her true self is disturbing not just to her rival who once saw her as an equal but also herself. She is now haunted by her awareness that she's a social loser. Crucially, the game becomes sympathetic with her because her anguish is quite adorable. She knows that she will never be able to make amends, and that remorse brings out how pathetic she actually is.

I have always appreciated seeing characters like the protagonist treated so poorly. Perhaps, there's a sadist in me waiting to be uncovered because I thought she appeared more attractive than before. I will not say more on the matter.

*This visual novel can be found on Itch.

honeydewcomplex: SLF

Free | Visual Novel | 2026

I am a lapsed environmentalist not because I don't believe in the goals of recycling and the dangers of climate change but because there's a misanthropic bent to all of this. Humans may have caused the current climate change, but the current line of thinking in these circles treat humans as a problem that needs to be excised.

This leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of, say, invasive species. The vegan protagonist feels wrong about stomping on any invasive being since it wasn't even their fault -- it was the humans' for importing them. Yet, she knows better to endanger the environment: in order to overcome her cognitive dissonance, she transforms the bug into a woman. She starts sexually torturing the "woman" and, in the process of killing her, awakened to the possibility she might be a lesbian.

Later, her delusions intrude into reality when she tries to have sex with her roommate who discovered her new sexual inclinations. The transition from steamy sex into something nonconsensual and horrific reveals the protagonist's degree of separation from reality. The roommate was, for a moment, not human but her bug woman to torture.

As such, I see honeydewcomplex: SLF as a study on the eros of ecofascism. The environmentalist in her cannot see a way out for the troubled relationship between humans and nature, but the sadist in her gets turned on by writhing human bodies suffering from punishment. She revels in the masochism of watching the bug woman squirm in pain and pleasure.

I felt weird for being into these sex scenes after the fact. Yet, like the visual novel, I know I can't imagine a more ethical and humane eros of environmentalism: the paradoxical eroticism of ecofascism is too tantalizing. Torturing humans for their ecological sins is a bit too hot.

This game can be found on Itch.

Proverbs

Paid | Puzzle | 2025

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the Netherlandish Proverbs in 1559: he literalizes many Dutch proverbs to give us a bird's eye view on how brutish we really are.

Proverbs belongs to a series of so-called Mega Mosaics by Mark Ffrench and uses the painting as its base. The ruleset is simple: you need to color in the squares based on the number clues Minesweeper-style; the exception should also be colored white. In practice, it becomes a hybrid of Minesweeper and nonograms (or Picross if you like trademarks) and filling in different sections like a jigsaw.

While the game appears complex, it ends up boiling down to clearing small sections piecemeal. Unlike nonograms, the tiles you fill in do not match the picture; you can glance at a section and quickly exploit common patterns that emerge logically from the ruleset. No puzzle is ever difficult, so you end up getting into the zone and seeing the completion percentage go up.

Seeing your incremental contributions complete the picture and the clickety snap of placing a tile in feel rather satisfying. The achievement text also reflects the proverbs in question and what it translates to in English, a nice reward for all that effort. After clearing a few sections and zooming out to see my work-in-progress, I imagined that this mapped well with the satisfaction of getting closer to completing a massive jigsaw puzzle or finishing a large Powerwash Simulator level.

I listened to podcasts, friends, and music as I worked through the game. Breaks are necessary as it takes around 30-40 hours to complete. The small sessions it encourages fit well into my daily routines, and it has made me appreciate long games that don't ask you to marathon it to completion.

The game can be found on Steam.

Lies of P

Paid | Soulslike | 2023

I will reserve my extremely positive thoughts on the story and setting for an article/review about Overture, so I will instead focus on the gameplay side of things.

The enemy and boss designs of Lies of P encourage aggressive gameplay from the player: they have to step in, parry, and hack and slash at the bosses to get anywhere. Yet, there are moments in the game where playing passively is the better option: you can dodge the infamous combo in the second phase of King of Puppets, the Black Bunny Brotherhood rematch is all about dodging a NPC who pulls the player into a different part of the arena with other semi-aggressive NPCs, and running away from area of effect attacks in fights like the second phase of Simon Magnus seems to be the only option. It breaks the rhythm for me since I am interested in studying the complex attack patterns that I could parry and find openings.

And the level design, with the exception of the DLC, is full of long corridors that seem designed for attrition in mind. The environmental storytelling and exploration rewards feel like a blur as I can only picture enemy placements in awkward locations.

But nevertheless, I found the game highly rewarding. It was thrilling to overcome bosses like Laxasia as I felt like the developers of Lies of P acknowledged me as an equal for mastering its systems. I had to strategize: think about my resources and what I can and cannot deal with. The sense of relief I feel from finally climbing over these walls is incredible.

It has been reinvigorating to watch people play and explore the bosses of this game. I cannot wait to write about its narrative design.

The game can be found on Steam.

Well, that's all I have for now: a mix of visual novels made for jams and some well-known AAA games. I had to work on an article that asked me to read several visual novels, and I also got a new gaming laptop to replace my old one that was making some interesting fan noises.

I plan to keep this going as a publishable diary of sorts. While I'm sure my readers will enjoy my thoughts regardless, I think it's a nice way to reflect on myself and also make myself accountable: I can't just fixate on one media "category" forever because there's more than just the world of indies or the world of AAA games.

Hopefully, I get to write some book reviews. It's been too long since I completed light novels. I feel "gamed out" from completing the DLC of Lies of P, but knowing me I know how shallow my intentions can be.

Alright then, I hope this was fun to read as it was fun for me to write. Be seeing you.