A Walk Around the Neighbourhood by Leo Weinreb
You’re trying to go for a walk rather than write a passage of your PhD thesis, and your romantic partner is physically present in the same house, but I still felt strong affinities with Violet here. You’re confined to one room. You’re trying to do what your partner wants. You’re presented with mundane problems requiring mostly mundane solutions. And the best ending sees you reconnect to your partner in a way that wasn’t quite obvious from how the original puzzles was framed. (That does happen in Violet, doesn’t it? I haven’t played it since it came out.) Also, heteronormativity seems to be off by default this time, with the characters having gender ambiguous names.
A Walk Around the Neighbourhood is good, simple fun. It’s a one room puzzler that doesn’t ask much more of you than carefully examining everything, although I did get stuck at one point. (You need to ‘look under door’, which is not an action that seemed very plausible to me. When it turned out I couldn’t open the door to check for the key, I took the door off of my mental list.) There are numerous ‘false’ endings which add to the fun. And there’s the special ending that gets you closer to your partner – though in a low key manner, with no background threat of impending separation. The game is well implemented, well written, and all in all an easy recommendation if you’re looking for some non-taxing parser fun.