I was ready for this to be the story of how our attractive main character goes on the search for an even more attractive Dracula, falls under his spell and either becomes one of his wives or escapes just before getting bitten. Alas, no such luck.
Dracula's Legacy barely treats you to a story, and what is there is a downer. The main character has amnesia and seemingly no living relatives; she doesn't even remember her own name. The only thing she does know is that she's being plagued by nightmares. After years of having them, she and her boyfriend, Mark, finally find the place she's always seen in her dreams… and get chased by a monster, which leads to them separating. This means that despite the game being called Dracula's Legacy, your main objective is to find the MC's boyfriend.
You don't really learn anything about Dracula along the way, either. By the time you come across him at the end of the game, there's not even a bit of pause for surprise; just "he's sleeping, so do X and Y to kill him lol". Also, given the state of the boyfriend at the end of the game, I think the ending should have been different. There is a sequel hook in the final cutscene; thank god that never materialized.
The UI is maybe the most minimalistic I've seen in a HOG yet; personally I would have liked to see an option to lock the inventory on screen, as seen in basically any other HOG. There's also no map available, though that's remedied by the game being split in a few bunches of locations, making it impossible to accidentally backtrack all the way to the beginning.
For a HOG, it feels like there are too few HOG scenes here. That and all of them are essentially collections of huge items, so it also feels like there's never really that much stuff to find.
The minigames are good, but incredibly tedious. Instead of giving you the satisfaction of having figured it out by yourself, most of them take so long to complete, they'll have you sighing as you click around.
The game is chock-full of grammatical errors, suggesting the devs are not native English speakers.
Can't deduce anything else, though, because it doesn't have any credits! Yeah, as if the piddly fart's worth of a story wasn't enough, this game somehow doesn't even have a credit roll. This means I have no idea who voiced any of the characters, which is a damn shame. At least they went all out on the sound design. It feels like there's an SFX for everything - nearly all of them already familiar from years of playing games and engaging with other media - which is fun, but… "fun" clashes with what the mood of the story is supposed to be.
Also, I get that HOG logic is not to be applied to real life, but I'm still bothered by the fact that MC starts a fire in the forest and then just… leaves it there.
TL;DR: If you own this one, feel free to drop it down on your priority list.

A sexy VN with a simple premise: Erin takes a shower to get ready for a party, and when she gets out to put her clothes back on, they're no longer there. So her quest to find them begins.
Every decision Erin makes has you choose from exactly three options, which is… interesting. Despite using the default font, the Ren'Py UI is definitely improved upon here, laggy though the choice screens can be.
Considering this is being marketed as a game "where all activities are consensual and there is no serious violence" and Erin herself is a bubbly and innocent character, I'm disappointed this doesn't even get anywhere significant. The slapstick humor here could have been a nice change of pace from all the rough, sloppy, messy stuff that's all over the adult section of Steam.
So what happened? According to VNDB, the dev has been busy at work making a Patreon-funded game (because of course they are). And Erin? She was left to fade away in obscurity, I suppose. C'est la vie… or something. It's a damn shame.

Devs will pay the flat fee required to get their game on Steam, then not spend a cent on making said game good. I know this is "The Writer's Not-At-All Disguised Fetish", but when you're making a game like this, you have to ask yourself: "How is this better than just watching porn?"

Slopalicious. A memory game about a guy who falls for a girl named Sunny at the office… and then, the office lovers theme gets thrown out less than half of the way through as they get down to fuckin'. In the last two levels, he leaves Sunny for another girl named Pinky, the focus of the previous (and the first) game in this series. LOL.
It's a memory game with only three types of items to match, so despite the tile amount scaling up, the difficulty remains the same. The BGM is cutesy and inoffensive. Y'all know I only played this 'cause it was free and had achievements.

Some of these were faceless blobs and/or hidden right at the edge of the screen. Truly diabolical. I did like the negative space cat, though.

This half-an-hour glimpse into what communist Poland looked like ended up not giving me anything more than what I already know. It feels like this could have taken place anywhere else and I'd feel the exact same way about it. The characters don't even seem to talk like they're from the 80s, it's a mix of unnaturally polite language and modern casual speech. Oh well, at least it was free.

Boy, I did not miss that background music. Once again, type in some naughty words, the letters C, V, B and N or press the arrows in the correct order to unlock some AI slop. Thank god it's free.

Boring and utterly incomprehensible. I like my games with more text than subtext.

At a school referred to as "the Miniature Garden" for its small size and inconspicious location, our main character, Yasunari, his childhood friend, Ayana and the token male friend, Itsuki, are ready for the upcoming Miniature Festival. Despite what the name suggests, no miniatures will be on display; it's just a regular school festival named after the school. Yasunari couldn't have predicted what would happen during the festival… and just how the appearance of a mysterious, white-haired girl he's never seen before would play into it.
Without spoiling anything major, Miniature Garden's mystery starts off a bit like Corpse Party: a few high-school students suddenly find themselves transported to an alternate, deserted version of their school, where no windows or exits will open, seemingly painted onto the walls. Miniature Garden, however, is much more simple, so all our characters find each other rather quickly and set out to investigate right away.
I read a review saying their investigation consists of walking around until a plot twist suddenly shows up, and… yeah, that's pretty much it. There's potential in a setting like this and it feels like it's been squandered for… no apparent reason at all, I guess? I might have had more to say about the plot, but this is the one write-up I didn't get done on time, so I've forgotten everything by now.
It's just a shame this is as bland as it is, considering it was made under an imprint of a studio that's been around for over 20 years at this point, complete with art from an artist who's worked on some of their other games and a voice cast made up entirely of industry veterans.
I like taking the opportunity to pick out a game like this, that seemingly nobody's talking about… but they usually turn out to be bad and this wasn't much different.

Unforgivingly hard minigames destroy all of the atmosphere of this intriguing story about a game developer who mysteriously quit working on an expansive VR project. At least, for once, the minigames pertain to the content of the main game.

Scratch Man is a bite-sized comedy game about… a superhero? A detective? Or just the main character? …by the name of Scratch Man. He's on a train home when suddenly, his old enemy, the Evil Squirrel, bursts inside. He threatens to blow up the train, then takes Scratch Man to the roof and pushes him off of it. You have to help him fly back to the safety of the train without getting hit by random objects flying right at you.
The amateurish voice acting and random comedy give it a sense of charm, but there's too little here to get anything out of it. The dev is making another game, though, so I'll be on the lookout for that.

You're Isabella Song, a hacker P.I. who's currently under house arrest. Too bad for the law, home is where you work from.
Prologue lets you play through the entire first case, in which you're tasked with finding a robot dog prototype that suddenly went missing. The game is mostly comprised of three aspects: you can hack into locations of interest to uncover intel or key items, call up people related to the case (and confront them, if they're not cooperative) and investigate the leads on your evidence board as it fills up.
Pulling data about persons of interest from the web is exactly like the Orwell games while addressing their statements could perhaps be compared to Ace Attorney or Danganronpa, in a minor way (there's no time limit or punishment for getting your assertion wrong in Song of Farca). It was decently enjoyable, with a good hook - the house arrest thing - so I'd be interested in checking out more. If I had to complain about something, it's maybe that the text is a wee bit slow, which can't be changed in this version; the option tied to that is (in?)conveniently grayed out.

I'm genuinely surprised even the description of something this simple could be this misleading. I thought the phrase "find your favorite picture" meant there'd be some logic and/or creativity to it… but no, the goal here is to just explore the exhibition by going left or right until the last painting on either side locks you into its respective ending. Given what they depict, I guess you could say the meaning is self-explanatory? On the other hand, if they're not to be taken literally, I don't know what it is the dev wanted to convey here. Disappointing.

This is the story of a girl who cried a river and drowned the whole world isn't even a streamer, actually. She's a voluptuous yet shy college student who gets convinced by her ugly bastard-adjacent friend to start posting nudes online. When the local clique of bullies finds out about it, they rape her, which leads her to realize that being promiscuous is what truly lets her free her mind. From then on, she stops attending class to focus on sex work full time, coming up with ideas for themed photoshoots and meeting up with fans to fuck them and quench her need for sex. Meanwhile, her friend grows obsessed with her and tries to assault her a couple times. Thankfully, she manages to get away both times. She gets invited by the main bully to a fancy party which turns out to be a cover-up for an orgy, which she obviously enjoys. The story ends with her being a magazine cover-level celebrity who now lives in a huge mansion and fully embodies the goddess within her (as per the saying that every woman has one).
Slop sloppity slop. The art and background moans are AI-generated, and the whole thing is devoid of basic functionality found in most other VNs, like a backlog or a gallery. If you want to use the mouse, you can't even advance the text unless you click within the textbox. And it launches in Russian by default. And don't even get me started on how vile the story is.
Not only does she turn from shy and self-conscious to eager and promiscuous in a matter of days, the idea of her becoming a seemingly A-list celebrity purely off of sex work is a gross misunderstanding.
Just because it's porn doesn't mean it can't examine why what's happening is the way it is and Streamer's Journey had at least two opportunities to do that: the MC's transformation being set off by sexual assault and her friend's drastic mood shift spiralling into obsession with her. Unsurprisingly, no examination takes place.
Despite it being "just porn", there's also something insidious about this outlook on a woman starting (and getting stupid rich off of) sex work. I don't know how to put it other than that I'd prefer it not to permeate the players' outlook on real life and real sex workers.

When my mom learned about the movie adaptation that came out earlier this year, I suggested we play it together… and she agreed! Truly a momentous occasion, getting to play a game with her again.
After we completed it, I turned to her and asked what she thinks the movie might look like. Her answer? "Definitely more creepy."
Indeed, The Exit 8 requires you to actively interact with the anomalies if you want to be truly spooked. And since your goal is to not come in contact with them, this is counterintuitive.
Still, it's a game worthy of its accolades and a particularly notable title in the "anomaly horror" subgenre that emerged in the past few years.

"Mom, can we get STRAY?"
"We have STRAY at home."
STRAY at home:

Yeah, so… this was apparently inspired by that and Journey (which I've still not completed, because the concept fundamentally pisses me off)… bad start. It's made to work on high-end PCs, so I had to lower all the graphical options, which was made all the worse by the annoying sounds attached to every part of the settings menu and the fact that the UI does not scale properly when you change the resolution to 800x600. It's also prone to crashing, and when it does, you have to change most of the settings again when re-launching the game. Basically, the jank took all the attention I was willing to give to the story.
Speaking of which, you control a stray cat that somehow finds its way to multiple human spirits and helps them pass on to the afterlife. To do this, you need to complete a minor task for them, the most entertaining of which was definitely playing Go Fish at a casino. I had to install this on my Deck when I realized it wasn't gonna work on my laptop, and even Decky got a workout running it. At least it ran with no issues there. The game is incredibly short (there's even an achievement for completing it in 15 minutes or less), but it took me an hour and a half to get all achievements because of all this mess. It's kind of embarrassing that so many people worked on a game that looks this ugly and runs this poorly.

A simple game jam puzzler inspired by The Trolley Problem, in which your goal is to prevent the trolley (or multiple trolleys) from running anyone over or derailing. The solution is always to put the trolley(s) into a loop, which makes most of this game easy (there's one level where the timing for changing the tracks for each trolley is really tight, which makes it annoying and the most interesting level in the whole game).
However, I don't love how easy it is to derail a trolley by accidentally making it go towards a railroad switch from the wrong side or even just making it go off-screen. Trains don't crash just because you stop perceiving them, that's not how life works.
That being said, it was an entertaining way to spend half an hour.

Finished the 21 question game with -$2.500 and the 7 question game with $20.500. A minor mistake in the answer for the Impossible Question really messed me up. Oh well, at least I finally got to the first game hosted by Cookie Masterson.