Scents & Semiosis is a fully-Vorpled I7 piece about perfume, memory and personal symbols. It makes heavy use of procedural generation; is a reflective, puzzleless game with a focus on theme and implied narrative; and it’s mostly light-toned - maybe a little bittersweet or melancholy in there, but mostly Nice Things. (I blogged at length about it here.)
Yoon Ha Lee, Cat Manning and Caleb Wilson contributed content; and Cat, in her role as producer, is the reason that it actually get finished. They are all good and generous people and I am super-grateful for them.
Play-time is about ten minutes, but it’s procgen; you’ll probably want to go round a few times.
The Nebulas are voted by the members of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) (and other countries actually). The awards have recently been extended to include a Best Game Writing category, which is where this fits in. The other game-writing nominees are Kentucky Route Zero, Hades, Blaseball, Spiritfarer, and The Luminous Underground (a Choice of Games title).
The winner will be announced at the Nebula virtual conference on June 5th.