A puzzle game with a simple premise: examine a setup of blocks (or "bars") and remove a preset amount to ensure they'll stand still afterwards.
It's as minimalistic as it gets: the levels randomly cycle through a few muted, pastel palettes, the background is empty, evoking the feel of playing in a void and the BGM, though limited, further enhances the dreamlike quality. However, were it a dream, it wouldn't be a particularly good one.
Some levels stumped me, but that's probably because I don't know my physics. (Though because full guides are available, I never truly got stuck on a level.) In stark contrast to the BGM, the level fail sound is jarring. When launching the game, the first thing that pops up is a command panel window… and then it stays open for as long as the game is. Now that's puzzling.
When a game is as sluggish as this one from the moment it opens up, my first instinct is to lower the graphical settings; lo and behold, the options menu here is extremely limited. The only thing I could actually do was going from fullscreen to windowed mode… and then, the resolution it launched in had black bars at the side of the screen. Reading the (negative) reviews, apparently it was on me to fix that one by simply resizing the window. Most modern games just don't have this problem, so that's not on my mental troubleshooting list, I suppose. Heck, this game won't even tell you what resolution it changed to. (unless that showed up on the control panel, I didn't think to check)
All in all, it… well, it's certainly a game. If you have any experience with Blender, though, it seems you could run simulations like these for yourself without paying for it. I randomly decided to redeem this key from an old bundle that was rotting somewhere deep on a list and I'm sure I would not have stumbled upon it otherwise.

This one is huge, though for good reason. These cats really are hidden in a genuine painting from the Song Dynasty. That's not just some random concept to justify pushing out a dozen of these games at once.
And when I say the cats are hidden, they really are hidden. Some of them straight up blend in with the background. …YMMV on that one, I suppose. I do, also, enjoy the variety of cat sounds in use here.
I've previously played Plants Huddled Together from the same dev and I like knowing that they still put out F2P games from time to time. Will keep on keeping an eye on their stuff.

Four years later, nothing has changed.

Bought Humble's Sekai Project 2026 bundle, so I'm back at it again.
This one is a prequel to the prequel to the original game and, much like vol. 0, a collection of vignettes of the Minazuki family spending their time together. Although there's no romance or sex happening here, watching Shigure talk about "catpanions" to Chocola and Vanilla feels like being privy to the start of a grooming process (and not the animal kind). I know this game is 8 years old by now, but really, is there still nobody on the dev team who can tell how bad this really looks? At least I got to enjoy Azuki being her regular self.

Night Book follows Loralyn, an English <-> French interpreter working the night shift remotely while pregnant and caring for her mentally ill father. It would've been a shift like any other, if not for the titular book being in her clients' possesion. Besides English and French, Loralyn also knows the fictional language of Kannar, which, by her own admission, makes her very employable. She's persuaded to read a part of the book and ends up summoning a demonic entity. Depending on your choices, she can convince her clients to help her seal the curse or fail, letting herself and/or others become possessed.
This was created in lockdown and boy, does that come through. Much like Five Dates and Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?, Night Book is a series of video calls, so that no two characters are ever physically in the same room. Smart as this may seem, I think it hurt the story in the long run. I understand now why the playthrough I've seen a few years back never had a completionist-type follow-up. It's just all so… nothing.
It's really short, the choices don't give you much variety and nothing feels like it's happening as a direct result of whatever you chose, all the way down to the end. Whichever ending you get first, treat it as the right one and get out while you can. Julie Dray was great as Loralyn and this may well have been the first second game I ever played with a pregnant protagonist, but even if that's your sole criteria, there's still better games to choose from.

I barely watch modern TV - not to mention retro - so I didn't stand a chance against these questions. I "earned" -$29.500 in the 21 question game (might have gone better if I had picked one of the other Jack Attack clues) and -$7.500 in the 7 question game. Only a couple of these left to go now.