Lovely Lady RPG is an extraordinarily beautiful yet chaotic slice of the average transfem’s life told through the lens of “an older time” exemplifying the joys and struggles of being a stupid furry woman who wanders the woods and make women smile.
You play as a character who got hit by a space orb and subsequently has amnesia—but you could argue that you’re just playing the “normal her” as-is. You play as someone whose choices both matter a lot to the people who perceive it but also not at all in the grand scheme of things. You’re the average struggling peasant, who happens to take estrogen and like women. You play as someone who doesn’t really know who she is and what she believes in as she treads into her 30s and onward while being lost in what others think of her and what she thinks of others. You play as Ghost.
Narrative wise, I really like the decision to use this rather archetypal “The {noun}” means of referring to characters—I can only assume that they do have names, but you just never ever learn about them. And why should you? You play as Ghost—she lost her memories, but did she really know any of these people in the first place? Of all the people she meets, she could’ve only possibly have known The Pulp Writer—and their dialogues suggest that, no, they didn’t really know each other.
Subsequently, you, the player, also do not get to know their names.
There are numerous fabulously illustrated (with words!) scenes, from the opening of the game to the comet scene with Orb to Rat ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ God Herself to taking walks in the forest to the most stupidly commercialised pride ever (typical). The power of words to pull one in and imagine you a world is a great weapon to wield—I played this game a lot when I was mentally slightly stuck on some things. I played it in recommendation of a friend’s because there’s rodents in here and I love rodents. I got all of the achievements and read almost every single line (except for the car smashing one. that one sucks I just read the source code about it but it’s a funny bit so whatever) and I was left with a deep imprint of all the words and characters and hopes and dreams and ordinary mundane British life.
Some disjointed bits I really liked (spoilers below!):
- Orb. Orb is an interesting character, and equally both Lovely Lady and Nasty Girl too. They’re all elaborately deep characters (despite their incredibly unassuming entry (well, Orb smashed into Ghost and would’ve straight up killed her, but that’s besides the point, it’s still rather unassuming. “who would’ve thought an Orb from Space would have a plotline???”)) and throughout the story they’re built up with lil pieces of dialogues (and monologues) that paint a much more nuanced picture, even with the small canvases they’re given.
- Dawnsight. I didn’t know what I would think about with regards to the whole “Probably a Christianity Allegory” thing, but I went for the Dawnsight ending and…well, it has sure stuck with me and made me reference her in my own writing. It’s a quaint lil plot. I don’t have the words to really talk about it, I can only say that it aligns well with my overarching thoughts on religions and beliefs throughout my life and no words can really do that kind of thing justice.
- The Pulp Writer is a lot of things. I can only say that she’s just like my headmate and we hold her dear to our heart, and that she’s ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cute with Ghost.
- The Nightmare. Welcome home internalised transphobia & immense self-hate & dysmorphia & dysphoria & yeah alright Ghost’s a babytrans.
- The Gender NKVD. Uh. I don’t know. Let’s just say I had to look into the source code to figure out how to even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ get HRT officially in this game. Let’s just say that’s just like real life.
- The Weapon is… I may not relate but I know many who would and do and he’s… well, he’s a weapon. He’s stingy and paranoid and traumatised and would rather his life stayed the same for 50 years than for anything to ever change again. He prepares for war for the ease of mind despite failing spectacularly at the basics. He gets scammed and only has himself to blame. He has few to no possessions at all and yet he feels the need to put up a facade of having a life and a past to speak of. He gets stuck on things just to try and abstract and distance himself from it. He rants at any chance he can but acts dismissive of his own words—
- The Raven is almost just the other side of the same coin, with her is stuck in the past in another way. A memory she’s afraid of letting go of because she’s scared that if she forgets about it then she would commit the greatest sin of “assuming forgiveness”—and she doesn’t forgive herself, and she thinks about how it was her fault, and she copes about it and yet say the wrong word and she snaps. The Weapon justified the hatred and stagnation with “it’s what the world is and how the world works”, whereas The Raven justified it with “it was all my fault”. They’re children of war, but you don’t have to be to understand these feelings.
- The Sinner is hot xd.
Ghost can talk each of them out of it, but healing takes much longer than that, she just forced them to take the first step.
There’s a lot more I can say positively of this game, but if I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter. I do have some criticisms, however—
- I’m slightly disappointed that Orb doesn’t get to have much more serious emotional dialogues after the comet scene. He’s an interesting character nonetheless, but…I wished for more to have been done.
- (This is ***probably*** mostly due to the engine and not the game) The game is functional on Linux, but uh… not very good. There’s also just a lot of issues I’ve had with it:
- There’s a bug where if you quit out to the main menu during a scene transition, the game would be stuck and you would be unable to interact with any menu items and would have to quit the game from the taskbar.
- Fonts don’t ♥♥♥♥♥♥ work for some reason and the **magenta** and (what I assume to be) zalgo text renders as tofus/squares because fonts don’t ♥♥♥♥♥♥ work for some reason.
- I can only select between the game’s default font and OpenDyslexic, and as a dyslexic person, uh, OpenDyslexic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks. OpenDyslexic doesn’t actually work, multiple studies have debunked it and it was created by techies who don’t know how dyslexia works and have never done studies with dyslexic people with the font and they were just operating on the same wrong assumptions other “for dyslexia” fonts held (because for a very long time and today still, people think of dyslexia as something it is profoundly not, mostly due to how movies portray dyslexia). I don’t know why the game can’t just let me use my preferred fonts, it’s a browser game that runs in a packaged Chromium binary.
- Also I can literally not read any of the texts with the unifrakturcook font. I had to ask people to transcribe it for me. It is entirely just illegible for me. I will stay mad about this because it feels like a slap in the face in addition to the above, sorry.
- The font size slider is ass please do not change font size while actively selecting a font size. Please also have it as a numerical input as well. I know text is hard and user input is hard (because I work on those stuffs myself) but this is running in a packaged Chromium binary.
- The volume sliders just suck and don’t really let you know what it actually translates to because there’s no demo of the audio really. Also sometimes the individual audios are just not normalised to the same loudness so some stuff are significantly louder/quieter than others.
- WHY THE HELL ARE SETTINGS SAVED WITH INDIVIDUAL SAVES OF THE GAME. WHY AREN’T THE SETTINGS GLOBAL. WHY ARE THEY A PART OF THE NORMAL GAME SAVE. WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY.
