It's Hug Time! Dropsy Released
Open-world adventure game
Dropsy may look like a clown from your childhood nightmares, but he only wants to make people happy. From humble beginnings in a choose your own adventure comic run through the Something Awful forums, the fire-starting funster now has a game of his very own. Dropsy [official site] has the tagline "a point and click hugventure" because he'll be giving out a lot of those as he roams an open world trying to redeem himself after accidentally burning down his circus. Oh it's a bit dark all right, but also sweet and funny and yeah okay a bit nightmarish and surreal at times too, as its sing-a-long launch trailer shows:
There goes Dropsy, out to uncover mysteries and solve puzzles. It's non-linear, interestingly, giving a fair bit of freedom in where you go and which strands you tackle first. He'll need to sleep too, which sends him into a surreal dream world where pieces of thoughts and memories are pieced together to give hints of what has happened. I say dream world, I probably mean nightmare world. I do like the emphasis its art and animations place on seeing rather than reading, and even conversations are through little pictures rather than words. The fluidity of images lends itself well to strange and slightly nightmarish things, where words would pin ideas like dead butterflies.
Dropsy is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux from Steam, GOG, and Itch for £6-ish.