Buy Hyacinths

A short, free, sincere game about the decline of your university (literally and figuratively) and the rippling effects on your small community. It might not be everyone's cup of tea - the thrown-together quality and humour might not always be a hit - but there's definitely something deeper to experience here.

☀️

A pleasant little contemporary adventure as serious as it is humours. Raw in their artstyle but no less charming, the visuals are bright and colourful. There is clear effort behind them with how the characters sprites and portraits change through the years for example. The music fits the setting and the sound effects are a little goofy which is equally as fitting. Most of the gameplay consists of walking around and interacting with people and the environment. Additionally there are two mini-games where you manoeuvre through a maze to get something. Each maze has slightly different obstacles though they are equal in difficulty as well as short enough to not become frustrating even if they take a few tries to complete. A great emphasis is put on exploration to find everything the game has to offer, but it’s not required to see every little piece of dialogue to get to the end. There is some replay value with the few choices you can make, but this too is not inherently necessary as the overarching story beats stay largely the same. The biggest part of the narrative is the friendship between Sheepy and the other characters, which is written quite well. Their interactions from talking about the events on campus down to some disputes feel very believable. Even though the setting is the UK, it works for multiple places really and some of the commentary is as relevant as ever currently, especially with the blond bad guy that briefly had me forget that this is set in the UK. All in all this is a fun and cute narrative game, which even manages to be a little deep at times if only with a coat of whimsy on account of most of the story taking place as a retelling of the past in a dream.