The Aggie Awards – The Best Adventure Games of 2021 page 7
Best Concept: Overboard!
How many games let you play the baddie? That’s why Overboard!'s brilliant twist on the whodunit – you're the murderer trying to cover up your crimes rather than the detective trying to solve them – makes for a delightfully chaotic and hilarious new game by inkle. Playing out like an interactive graphic novel, the huge number of options at your disposal as Veronica Villensey, the fabulously cold British starlet who's just pushed her husband over the rails of an ocean liner, means the story can spill out into any number of unexpected and often very funny directions. You’ll need to play it a least a few times, but no one playthrough is very long so you’ll surely want to go back for many more, all of them yielding wonderful new surprises. As suspicions about your whereabouts the night before arise, will you flirt with the boat's captain to get him on your side? Or perhaps simply go on a wild killing spree, disposing of everyone who suspects you? Getting away with murder has never been more entertaining, and for that Overboard! wins our award for Best (and surely the most nefarious) Concept in 2021.
Runners-Up:
Moncage
A Juggler’s Tale
Genesis Noir
The Forgotten City
Twelve Minutes
Readers’ Choice: Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Either we’re all a bunch of wannabe graffiti artists, or there’s something intrinsically liberating about painting the world. Greg Lobanov clearly understands this, as Chicory: A Colorful Tale lets players take a magical paintbrush to virtually anything and everything. No skill required; just swipe or dab and suddenly a black-and-white world is filled with vibrant hues. They may not match, may not make logical sense, but the choice of palette is entirely yours! Yellow skies, brown water (eww), purple trees – in the town of Picnic, anything goes. All this painting isn’t just art for art’s sake, either, as you affect what you touch. Toadstools become bouncy, geysers will burst, clouds turn solid enough to jump on, and plants can fling you to otherwise inaccessible places, among other unique results, adding a welcome layer of puzzle-solving to your environmental transformations. This is no children’s game, with a surprisingly deep and poignant story at its heart, but it’s continually a delight, and for making all of us feel like Leonardo da Vinci (or maybe Picasso), Chicory takes the reader award for Best Concept.
Runners-Up:
Overboard!
The Forgotten City
Twelve Minutes
Strangeland
Next up: Best Setting... the envelope, please!
