A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Infocom.

It's an old text adventure from the 80's with a particularly cool and oddly relevant concept: You take the role of an AI that's been meticulously raised in a simulation to truly become a general intelligence. The reason this project was undertaken was to eventually send you, the AI, into other simulations based in the near future to test the outcomes of various political policies of the new republican government, record your interactions, and report back to the engineers who created you.

The game's designer said that he created the game in response to the despair he felt from Ronald Regean being elected.

I haven't gotten super far in it, but it has an incredibly well written short story in the manual that details all the events leading up to the start of the game, and so far the game itself is unlike anything else I've ever played.

Blue Prince is monopolising a majority of my mental bandwidth currently as I'm growing increasingly obsessed with it. I've spent about 11 hours on it so far and have taken probably a dozen pages of notes in my little notebook next the to the PC.

I think this game could go down as a modern classic, and if it sticks the landing it will likely be my GOTY. It's cheap too, and even 10% off right now as a release week sale.

I can't really say anything more because, much like Outer Wilds, the less you know about it going in the better. If you even remotely enjoy mysteries and puzzles do yourself a favour and go play it like... right now.

For the Frog, the Bell Tolls

An adventure puzzle/platformer for the Game Boy. The mechanics are fun, and has you transforming between a human, frog, and snake to get through various areas. I'm about an hour in and the puzzles are fairly simple, but the charming writing and lovely art design carry the game for me. I'd recommend it if you're looking for something somewhat casual. I have laughed out loud a few times while playing it.

If you want to check it out, you'll need to run it on an emulator.
- The game is a Japan-only release, but there's an English fan patch you can find on here
- You'll need the base ROM for the game, which you can find here
- Once you download both of those, use this to mash them together and you're good to go.

Rom Patcher JS

An online web-based ROM patcher. Supported formats: IPS, BPS, UPS, APS, RUP, PPF and xdelta.

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