Parents' Guide to Dropsy

This is a very weird game that's simultaneously patience-trying and yet also entirely transfixing. As mentioned earlier, your character appears to be illiterate, and it's a great handicap to understanding the people and world around you: You'll see squiggles and shapes where words actually are, and people only talk to you in pictographs. The main thing you can glean from your surroundings and neighbors is that nobody seems to like you much, perhaps due to a fear or distrust of clowns -- which could allow players to read this game as a look at prejudices and stereotyping. However, that likely doesn't work either because it falls upon Dropsy to change people's minds about him, when all he did was walk around and say hello in the first place. That's part of what makes this game so very challenging and confusing, because pretty much nobody will talk to you, but there's a huge, huge world to explore and try to make sense of.

On top of that, there's also a day/night cycle, and you can take naps at places where your companion dog -- who can access areas you can't -- can dig holes to sleep in. The purpose of this is not only to help Dropsy feel rested but also because people in the town go to different places at different times of day, so you can study their patterns and get a sense of what's missing from their lives to help them out. With a huge map and an inability to communicate with people, obviously, it just makes it hard to get your bearings. But Dropsy is also charming in a quirky way, so though it's certainly worth a try, you should be aware of its less penetrable aspects before jumping in blindly.