Update Eighty-One: 18 November 2017

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Wow, what a lovely little game.

Milkmaid of the Milky Way is a point and click adventure game made by one person that is a gem. You play Ruth, the aforementioned milkmaid, in 1929. She lives alone with her cows that she loves, and is wrapped up in an adventure that’s…. please forgive me… out of this world.

This entire game is delightful. The art is on the lowfi side of pixel art (lower resolution than a Wadjet Eye game, for example) but it is still absolutely gorgeous. The color palettes of the different scenes and settings are so strong, and the character animation in this game is incredibly provocative. I was shocked at how well the characters’ reactions read with so few pixels. There’s this one animation in particular of Ruth in high wind - her hair and her clothes flap about in a way that looks so good and so right that I can almost feel the wind, too. There’s a lot of work and artistry in this that makes this game look so special.

The soundtrack helps, too. There’s a few soft piano pieces that, paired with the idyllic setting of the fjord, made it feel like I’m walking around a Studio Ghibli movie. The only thing I would have liked was a liiiiittle bit more detail in the background - it’s very colorblocky and bare. More grass blowing, more flowers bobbing, etc.

It also plays like a charm - Ruth is pretty fast so it’s never annoying to have her trek back and forth across several wide map scenes (although having to walk back and forth so much in the second half’s world pushed it a bit). The story goes places I wouldn’t expect, got me to be emotional in ways I didn’t expect, and included something I didn’t expect but wished more adventure games did: you eventually have to save the day by fixing something that is the result of you solving a puzzle from the first half of the game. I thought that was great! That puzzle wasn’t even a big deal at the time - it was a great touch that made the world feel real and grounded.

I’d rate this game higher and put it on my close-to-my-heart list but for one thing:

The whole couplet-rhyme-thing doesn’t work.

The actual textual writing is by far the weakest of the game. The dev constraining himself to writing in rhyming couplets shackled him in a way he couldn’t overcome - it was clunky, awkward, and in a lot of places just poorly done. One line stuck out to me - ‘I should hope I do not give you displease / but I have to go make my milk and cheese.’ I - what? Bad. There are another half-dozen stinkers like that one, and the vast majority were varying degrees of ‘meh’. This game was already special enough without having to add this gimmick.

Next up: I’m picking this time!

See you soon!