I don’t know if I’m qualified to do too much here, but we have this topic every year. So I’d start.
So far there look to be 3 games with hints from people you live with.
The Last Christmas Present
The Only Possible Prom Dress
A Walk Around the Neighborhood
What’s everyone else seen?
At least two games with trashed bride gowns :
Two games where you’re an inhuman creature in a forest:
Into the Forest with the Beast
Under the Bridge
Two games with Cain and Abel references in the title:
According to Cain
and
Am I My Brother’s Keeper?
Two of the first games I played, Inside and Witchfinder, involved witches making potions. I see there’s an Alchemist game in there too.
(To be fair, I’m new to this, and it may just be that making potions is a common IF trope. I can imagine it’s good for puzzles.)
Potion-making also features in Lazy Wizard’s Guide.
Star Tripper and The Thick Table Tavern both have the player work for tips, although it’s just a side activity in Star Tripper rather than the central mechanic.
No One Else is Doing This and Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s both end with a performance assessment by a supervisor.
Ha! So someone else was doing that after all!
Crash and Into the Sun both take place in a spaceship that’s suffered some kind of disaster and use nautical directions to navigate.
No references in its title, but Lucid has two salamander brothers. When one of them disappears, the other one answers the protagonist’s question with
“He went out.”
Went out where?
“I don’t know, I’m not his keeper.”
while blood “mashes between his teeth”.
A Matter of Heist Urgency and Who Shot Gum E Bear both have pieces of gummy candy at the scene of the crime.
This is the best connection. I love it. Let’s hope it’s a new trend in interactive fiction.
Lots of entries have had smoking, but I don’t remember two with smoking indoors (e.g. beyond “this is a smoky tavern,”) at least not for a good long while. not just cigarettes, either, heavier tobacco.
The Only Possible Prom Dress and One Way Ticket both feature this.
I must also bemoan, given an entry in Texture called Ink, the lack of a game in Ink called Texture. Now that would’ve been a hard-to-top coincidence!
Games about pandemic-related despair and poverty and general social malaise in the UK:
The Absense of Miriam Lane also has this, kind of? But you don’t really live with Anthony.
A Long Way to the Nearest Star also takes place in a spaceship that has siffered a disaster, but doesn’t have nautical directions.
I think I remember another game with that sort of theme. Something about archivists, maybe? There was a revolution in there?
Including these two, there are 4 games about women leaving their fiances or having an affair on their husbands (the other two are Admiration Point and (mild spoilers) The Chinese Room). Only one game, The Grown-Up Detective Agency, is about a man abandoning his fiancee.
Approaching Horde! has the male protagonist attack his zombie wife, does that count?
Well, one of the goals is to build an escape tunnel afterwards, so there’s that whole “fleeing someone you don’t love/who doesn’t love you any more” theme.
Oh, and in the semi-joke-opposite department, To Persist and The Last Christmas Present both end with a phone call with no meaningful conversation.
To be fair, Archivist and Revolution doesn’t take place in the UK 