Two Short Indie Games That Make You Take Notes

     I'm a big fan of taking notes when playing video games, I'm the kind of pervert The Painscreek Killings was made for. Writing stuff down on a piece of paper helps make things feel so much more real, and leaves you with a memento that probably makes sense to you and only you (also, my memory is shit. It's fucking dogshit). With that in mind, I'm going to highlight a pair of shorter indie games that lean into this: A Hand With Many Fingers and Life Eater. 

  Content Warning: Life Eater is a horror game, and as such will feature discussions of stalking and artistic depictions of gore. Reader discretion is advised.

A Hand With Many Fingers

    A Hand With Many Fingers is a game about uncovering a conspiracy and going full Pepe Silvia on it. You're an investigator in an archive looking into the Nugan-Hand scandal, a real thing which really happened, and you're left to look through the pieces. Your main source of finding new evidence is the card catalog, and in order to make a proper search you need a Name, Date, and Place (say, Frank Nugan, Australia, 1980), which you can then cross-reference to find a box in the basement with more information. Making things extra fun is that you have not one but two separate conspiracy boards, and you can link stuff together pretty much however you want. 

Via the game's Steam page, a brief look at the corkboard.

    The whole thing is pretty short (my playthrough took me less than ninety minutes), but it's great at creating those little a-ha! moments and it's really satisfying. It also caused me to reevaluate how susceptible I am to stuff? Like this might just be me drastically telling on myself, but I was surprisingly shocked when I started doing research on the actual figures involved and realized that this wasn't actually a "Solved" conspiracy like CoIntelPro, because the fake documents in the game had successfully persuaded me like "Oh this is happening." I'm still figuring out how to process all of that, but it's still fun detective work.

    It can get a bit spooky at times, and the game kinda just ends rather than having a proper denouement, but at five bucks on Steam, I can't recommend it enough. 

That's a lot of boxes. One of them has something you need.

Life Eater

    In contrast to A Hand With Many Fingers, Life Eater is a fictional story about a man stalking people and sacrificing them to the dark god Zimforth in order to forestall the end of the world. This is done via a Lucifer Within Us-esque timeline, but whereas in that game you're tasked with spotting contradictions, here you're uncovering more and more of your target's life in order to successfully abduct them. This continues through ten increasingly difficult levels, or forever if you're into the game's endless mode.

The main game interface. Static means you don't know what they're up to yet.

    

    Where things get complicated is that figuring out who Zimforth wants you to sacrifice gets more and more complicated as the game goes on, as you need to isolate details of their lives while still having enough time left over to build up enough familiarity with the target's routine to abduct and successfully sacrifice them. Over the course of the game, you begin to develop a sense for the timeline, being able to detect things like "These people have a commute" or "Everyone's asleep at this time." or discovering the sad sad life of an old man who spends all his time on the computer. It can, at times, get a little pixel-bitchy, especially near the end, but that might just be a skill issue on my part. 

    Unlike a lot of horror games, the horror in Life Eater comes from what you the player are doing. Your default "Verbs" are things like "Catfish" "Rattle their back door" and "Search through their trash" and the game has a lot of fun with this. The violation of privacy aspect also plays into it, with you becoming familiar enough with someone that you know when they take a piss in the night, or have nightmares, or go shopping with their mom, in a scenario where they ideally don't know you exist. This call culminates in the part where you need to prepare the sacrifice, and (here's where you were hopefully taking notes) how you prepare them is based on what you know about them and their routine. Around Year Six, I realized I was getting pretty comfortable remembering the location of individual ribs to break, and went "What the fuck."

The sacrifice interface. Their heart is still beating during all of this. My one complaint is the left and right lung are player-relative, not relative to the victim. That tripped me up a few times.

    There's also a fairly minimalist story, concerning our main character and a man he kidnaps for getting too close to him. It develops over the course of the game's ten years, and it worked for me and Octavia as we played. There's also a few hidden surprises within the game's interface that I won't spoil, but I'd call it all serviceable at worst, and the quality of presentation never drops below "Stellar." Life Eater is fifteen bucks, I got it half off on a sale, and at that price point I'd recommend it, especially if you think the gameplay loop sounds like your jam.