Both Miss Gosling and The Bat have you use a mattress to break a fall.
I expect this is a really common thing and in tons of other games with more than one vertical level on their map.
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Beverages are central to a lot of games.
- 198BREW is about getting coffee
- Bad Beer is about, well, bad beer
- The Bat prominently features serving drinks as the most common action in the game
- Hebe is about finding gods and giving them nectar
- Deliquescence is…well…
- Energy drinks are central to When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves
- I haven’t played it but I think First Contact might include beverages
- Several puzzles in Breakfast in the Dolomites are about getting beverages
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A very weird and specific coincidence from two games:
- 198Brew
- The Saltcast Adventure
The shared element: a single consciousness spread among the bodies of several birds.
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I’ve played every game that didn’t have warnings about strong sexual content now (some I’m still in the middle of and the rest I beta tested).
I’d say there are a lot mystery games, especially ones where you either gather clues or are an agent legally granted power to investigate (or both):
Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe
Miss Gosling’s Last Case
Winter-Over
Big Fish
The Killings in Wasacona
The Triskelion Affair (listed as a detective game in the blurb)
A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric
A Death in Hyperspace
Bureau of Strange Happenings
Bad Beer
(last year had around 7 of these, so it’s not like they’re super unusual, but I feel like there is a larger than normal cluster, especially since we have less games)
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To be fair, last year it was specifically noted how many detective games there were. So it may not be a good metric to measure this year’s by.
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By percentage maybe?
- both BOSH and The Den involve a pretty difficult to acquire screwdriver
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Something I only discovered through reading reviews: Sidekick and Miss Gosling’s Last Case are both Dialog games that use a THROW [OBJ] [DIR] verb in puzzles. This isn’t a standard feature of Dialog, it seems to be an independent invention.
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If we’re going apocryphal, a reference to the “raven/writing desk” riddle turns up in An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There.
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For a very weirdly specific connection, 198BREW and Verses both feature cannibalism that transfers memory/consciousness from the eaten to the eater.
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That’s … Very random! I’m not sure there’s another game like that…
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Yeah, I thought about saying as much in my initial comment too—definitely makes it extra surprising to get that element in two games in the same comp.
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Both The Maze Gallery and You feature animal odd couples—a possum and a racoon in MG and a crow and a goat in You.
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Two big, puzzly games with special magic glasses that make a certain thing automatic, so you want to keep them on as much as possible, until the game automatically removes them for certain puzzles: BOSH and Hildy.
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Two parser mystery games revolve around the ghost of a person who died in a tragic fall down the stairs. They now haunt the building where they died, causing random chaos in the kitchen and hoping that someone corporeal will finally get the cue to investigate their tragic death. (Miss Gosling’s Last Case and Bad Beer.)
Of course, this is such a common trope it’s not especially surprising it shows up twice.
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Wait, it’s a common trope? Admittedly, I never found the time to play Miss Gosling’s Last Case beyond the initial escape room puzzle, but I thought the premise quite novel.
Is there a relevant TVTropes page?
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Oh, there’s not (as far as I know), I was just making a joke about how oddly specific this similarity is. And 100% unintentional!
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Is there a relevant TVTropes page?
There’s always a TVTropes page. Doing an in-page search to narrow it down appropriately … apparently, Bleach and an M.R. James story each combined ghosts with death-by-stairs, though maybe without the investigation angle.
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How many instances do we need before it becomes a trope? It could happen!
Coming next year: GHOSTS-FALLING-DOWN-STAIRSCOMP
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Well, technically they weren’t ghosts until after falling down the stairs.
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