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In Tavern Talk, the drinks you mix affect an adventurer as they ready themselves for a quest, almost choosing what they do for them.

You have a lot of power as a bartender, as the drinks you mix change the strength, stealth, logic, and other stats that each adventurer has. These drinks change how they take on quests or go about the rest of your day, so there is a lot of power in them. Often, when a customer comes in, they have a specific stat they are aiming for, along with a number of liquids that stat needs. The rest is up to you. You can pick drinks from a recipe book and then start tinkering around with liquids to match the recipe. Once the drink is done, it’s served. If you make a mistake, you do get to feed the potion to a weird frog guy.

Tavern Talk has a fun cast of characters who all feel unique and interesting, making you want to invest in their adventures and help them out in the only way that you can. While your drinks have an important effect on the adventurers, you can ..

Sally sees players soaring across a peaceful world in a flying boat, sharing tasks among a community of characters.

Slice of life style adventure games are always my jam! I like the idea of relaxing, building out my own little world and seeing where adventure takes me. When I saw Sally at Gamescom, I was pretty excited to hear about what this cozy adventure game would become.

This game sees you playing a young child of the same name. She is an orphan living on a flying boat with two adults and a bunch of other children. The boat itself is massive, flying through the sky and bringing you to new locations. You and the rest of the children on the boat are often working together to achieve goals.

You can actually pick what part of a task you are interested in doing and the rest of the children divide up the other tasks, so there is a feeling of community since you don’t need to take on tasks you don’t want. I ended up making some food by following a recipe and gathering ingredients whil..

In Projected Dreams, you find yourself in a beautiful room full of toys, all ready for you to use to create shadows to solve little puzzles.

Creating shadows on your walls feels like a timeless thing that all children do at one point or another. Projected Dreams captures that childhood activity with a cozy puzzle game where you have a goal shadow that you need to create. The room itself is always packed with items, with drawers to open and stuff to move to find even more to play around with. These different items can be placed on tables to then create the desired shadow shape.

At first these are fairy easy, requiring you to just stack a few objects, but as you get further into the game there’s a perspective shift and you will find yourself needing to make sure you’re placing the right items on the right tables. There is also a star rating system to show how exact you are to your goal, providing a good guide as to what you need to work on. You can rotate items, but there is a real ph..

Out and About sees you visiting your grandmother and learning about the real world plants that surround a mountainside town.

A natural disaster strikes while you’re visiting your grandmother. In the aftermath, you’ll find a lot of fallen trees and hard-to-follow paths, but this encourages you to explore and talk to the other people in town. As you wander, you can take pictures of plants and use those pictures to identify them. These plants are based on real plants, with the idea being that you can casually learn about the natural flora in your own travels.

Once you have taken a picture of a plant, you then get a bunch of information on what to look for to identify it. Often that’s petal shape, leaf shape, and stem shape. You can then tick these off to decide which plant is which. You’ll then get a little information on if it’s safe to eat or use in some way (or if it’s poison). There are also sorting tables in Out and About that give you a plant part (leaves, for example, or petals) ..

Nif Nif takes inspiration from Slay The Spire, but creates a more child friendly, bright, wholesome deck-building game about cleaning up filthy animals.

There are a few playable animals to pick from, but Nif Nif‘s art centers around a cute little pig. Each of the different animals have their own decks, cards that can be unlocked, and ways of play depending on your preference.

The game itself is quite simple at a glance. There is a map showing you some areas you can choose to go next. At most of these levels, an animal will appear who’s covered in nasty ooze. This goop has made them hostile, lashing out at you even though you are trying to help. You’ll need to use your cards to clean off these animals while keeping yourself pristine despite all of the mess flying around from attacks.

Playing cards often costs energy (although there are a handful that don’t) with each card having its own ability. Some have you cleaning the other animal, others have you increasing your shield by clean..