Backwater Eulogy

What a beautiful game.

"It is a very strange feeling, to grieve for someone twice."

This is a very short kinetic novel (a form of visual novel that does not have branching) about the death of a family member, and his life in the rural US Midwest. I bought it because I want to see more games set in the rural Midwest :) and because I saw the developer post some screenshots of the art on Bluesky and I liked those a lot. I thought that it would be heavy on the art and there would be only a bit of text, but it is actually poignantly written and I think a very fitting eulogy. It's not one-sided at all, the text and the art form a whole. I am a fast reader and finished in 6 minutes, but I went back to look at the beginning again, and also to look a bit more at the art - there are also animations, which I did not expect. I would definitely recommend it if you want to read a beautiful short piece. As a Midwesterner, I also felt the prairie was very lovingly rendered, I really got what I was looking for, and more. I played on the Deck docked to my TV. Sometimes RenPy games do not do so well with this setup (I'm not sure why, a weird scaling or fullscreening issue?), but here I had no problems. If you want to read more short stories with beautiful visuals on here, I also recommend Banyu Lintar Angin as an interesting parallel, about family, but more upbeat - but with likewise warmly portrayed landscapes of a very different (or maybe not so different) region, rural Indonesia. ___ Source of the game: Bought with my own money (at a 50% off sale if memory serves right)