When Bonbon first launched, our Adam found that the quiet little story of domestic horror in ’80s Britain spoke to him, in a creepy nightmares-whispered-in-your-ear kinda way. Before we put him back in The Box, he described it as “a house of horrors that hit far closer to home than most”. That alone should be enough to get your attention.
Assuming it didn’t, maybe this will: Bonbon is making an encore today with it’s Steam debut (and re-launch on itch.io), along with a slew of tweaks and polish to help you sink into an uncomfortable dream of a British childhood that looks just close enough to mine to be unsettling.
When I was a kid I once woke up so scared that I couldn’t open my eyes. My bed faced a window and I knew that if I looked, there’d be something outside the window, scratching at the glass. It felt safer to walk rather than to run, slowly sliding from beneath the blanket and treading through treacly air to the door, eyes still closed. I reached the landing, outside my room, looked around and wanted nothing more than to burst into my parents’ room where nothing bad could happen. And then I realised the monster was behind that door as well.
Bonbon [official site], a short horror game that is out today, took me back to that night and others like it.
You look tired, traveller. Come in, sit by the fire and listen to the RPS podcast with us, the Electronic Wireless Show. It’s about comfort gaming this week – the things we play when we feel down in the dumps or ill with the flu or just a little cold and tired. Here, drink it all up with your ears, like a nourishing audio broth. Delicious. Adam likes to relax in his cabin in The Long Dark, Pip finds safety in the world of Zelda, while Brendan soothes his sick self with a bit of Final Fantasy IX.
But we’re not done here. Space-walking simulator Tacoma also came out this week and both Pip and Brendan have things to say about it. But so does Karla Zimonja, one of the game’s creators at Fullbright, who takes part in a round of Quickfire Questions. On top of all that, Adam has been putting ignorant cultists in charge of school lessons in The Shrouded Isle, and we also look at what our listeners consider their own go-to comfort games. Read the rest of this entry »
Freeware Garden searches the corners of the internet to highlight one free game every day.
Bickadoodle starts off with an apparently distressed damsel waiting in her tower for a knight to come and do knightly stuff of the typical light fantasy variety. Like, for example, serenade her. Or maybe kill the threatening dragon who has irritatingly just dropped by and seems intent on destroying a perfectly adequate romantic evening and a perfectly comfortable trope.
Instead of kidnapping the good lady though, the beast slightly burns the knight and flies him to its lair, thus, refreshingly, leaving her to face insurmountable odds, save the realm and free the armored brute in the only way known to sensible people: by pointing and clicking on things.
Somewhere in the dark and nasty regions, where nobody goes, stands an ancient castle, according to an old British legend. Deep within this dank and uninviting place, lives Jonathan Burke, overworked servant of “the thing upstairs.” But that’s nothing compared to the horrors that lurk beneath the trap door, for there is always something down there, in the dark, waiting to come out.
Don’t you download that Trapdoor. You’re a fool if you dare. Stay away from that trapdoor, ’cause there’s something down there…
