It’s the fourth yearly outing for the story-driven festival
LudoNarraCon returns from today until Monday for its fourth year of showcasing games that focus on story, story, story. The whole thing is being hosted digitally on Steam, and features 12 live panels, along with ‘fireside chats’ with some of the devs behind the festival’s line-up. Some of those are games you might be familiar with, like Inkle’sOverboard, Anomaly Games’The Fermi Paradoxand Silverstring Media’sGlitchhikers: The Spaces Between. Panelists and fireside chatters include Sam Barlow ofTelling Liesrenown,80 Days’ writer Meghna Jayanth, and Lucas “Return Of The Obra Dinn” Pope.
More than 40 games are exhibiting at this year’s LudoNarraCon with 33 sporting free demos. There’s a broad range of stories, from learning old school telecommunications tech in ALJO Games’Morse, cheating people in Nerial’s tricksy 18th-century scumbag simulatorCard Shark, to Fuzzy Ghost’s magnificent soundingQueer Man Peering Into A Rock Pool.jpg. Probably the standout here for me though is Northway Games’I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, which is apparently a story-led life simulator set on an alien planet with card battles and plenty of teen angst. Sounds much like my own adolescence.
LudoNarraCon is organised by publisher Fellow Traveller, who just released the tabletop-esqueCitizen Sleepertoday too. In hisCitizen Sleeper review, Brendy said: “Throwing off the shackles of a faceless process governing your life is a recurring theme in this blend of sci-fi RPG and interactive fiction, and it makes for a strong rags-to-ramen story of one robot on the run. Even when the game’s own systems of dice and clocks clash with its stories of human interest, it is the people who come out on top.”
LudoNarraCon runs from today until May 9th onSteam. The full schedule of panels isover hereon LudoNarraCon’s site.
Disclosure: Xalavier Nelson Jr. is appearing in panels at this year’s LudoNarraCon and writes for RPS from time to time.
