242 | The Wishing Stone
Saturday, 7 January 2023 03:36 pmToday I beat my first game of the year: The Wishing Stone, a point-&-click adventure game with visual novel elements that I’d picked up through a charity bundle on itch.io last year. It was pretty different from what I was expecting it to be!
The premise is that the main character, Ailsa—who’s feeling pretty indifferent about life and is struggling with some memory issues—helps out a witch one day. The witch then gifts her a “wishing stone” that will grant her three wishes. The first wish has to be made before midnight; otherwise, the wishing stone would grant her something unwanted.
My impression going in it would be one of those fantasy games with a deeper undercurrent—dealing with some sort of serious theme. Based on the opening prologue, I assumed that it would be a game about grief, and specifically that Ailsa’s memory issues were going to turn out to be the result of her trying to deny what happened, and that the game itself would be about her accepting what happened and learning how to move on.
Yeah, no. What I actually got was a lot more different—and heavier—than that.
( so many spoilers beneath the cut )
The premise is that the main character, Ailsa—who’s feeling pretty indifferent about life and is struggling with some memory issues—helps out a witch one day. The witch then gifts her a “wishing stone” that will grant her three wishes. The first wish has to be made before midnight; otherwise, the wishing stone would grant her something unwanted.
My impression going in it would be one of those fantasy games with a deeper undercurrent—dealing with some sort of serious theme. Based on the opening prologue, I assumed that it would be a game about grief, and specifically that Ailsa’s memory issues were going to turn out to be the result of her trying to deny what happened, and that the game itself would be about her accepting what happened and learning how to move on.
Yeah, no. What I actually got was a lot more different—and heavier—than that.
( so many spoilers beneath the cut )