Played Arctic Eggs
I am late to the party on this, but Arctic Eggs is extremely good. It is a perfect example of people making a game only out of things they are extremely good at. I adore the way they've hung the entire game on a single physics minigame, and I'm so impressed at the ways they stretch that minigame in weirder and weirder directions. This game takes something that seems very simple and finds about exactly 3 hours' worth of depth in it. Delightful.
I completed it and really enjoyed myself.
I found that if I'm ever having trouble with an egg-frying challenge, I should just pay more attention to the sensitivity settings on the scroll wheel. It's pretty cool how a lot of the challenges look completely impossible, but end up being really simple and satisfying to solve once you develop a strategy or an approach towards the shit in the pan. It's really impressive that the minigame is so deep, I'm thinking about "pan layout strategy" or whatever. Great stuff.
I am always on the hunt for games which handle narrative dialogue presentation in cool-yet-cheap ways. Arctic Eggs has some pretty stand-out weird dialogue, but I was particularly impressed by the flexibility and clarity of the dialogue cutscenes. The text is a 2D font with a shader on it, displayed on a plane situated in the environment around the speaking character. The player character never speaks, but the player advances the text.
Each click either loads up the next sentence of text onto the panel, or moves the camera and reveals a new text panel. Sometimes the camera and the text move away from the speaker and into the environment, to frame the things they're talking about, or even just to add a different tone or mood to the line. The shots are all really well-composed, and the text plays an important role in that composition, a lot of the time.
There are a couple text treatments that break your expectations in a pretty light, creative way. In the third "level" I played, I started to see the devs sticking the text display panels to the heads of characters who were dancing very chaotically, so that their limbs would periodically obscure the text panel or clip through it. It's a really small but good thematic twist to text display, great for communicating the vibe of that area (a dance club).
Later, in a jail, I encountered text occluded by the bars of a cell.
The game seems to have required a lot of hand-placed text panels and hand-chosen camera angles, which is always a more expensive way to deliver text than just whacking a text box UI over the screen. But it can be a lot cheaper to implement this kind of highly-textured narrative stuff if you spend time on good tooling, or tooling that allows the writer to participate in implementation.
Some of my friends and I previously worked on an (unreleased) games project which focused on displaying dialogue physically in a 3D environment, in the style of this game jam game we made together. At the time we were taking inspiration from Cosmo D's work, in particular The Norwood Suite, which uses "panels" of auto-advancing text placed in the environment near characters. We were lucky to have some really good tooling from Brody Brooks that made it easier for us to apply text to panels, flow it between panels, animate the panels moving through space, etc.
Arctic Eggs' text panels are a lot more restrained, but the work to hand-craft their presence in the cutscenes pays off well. NPCs who offer gameplay challenges don't look any different from NPCs who just give you dialogue... you need to complete most of the challenges in each zone, so you have to talk to pretty much everyone in the entire game. Doing these fun, light-impact text formatting tricks is a great way to make the experience of clicking on literally everyone in a scene even more textured and interesting than it would be just with weird dialogue.
I am a huge fan of every game which chooses to spend the time and energy on text-in-scene in 3D videogames. It's a great way to make game text more dynamic and interesting. The reason it isn't done more often may be that it is combines some of the stresses, risks, and drawbacks of cutscene dev (notoriously, one of the most difficult processes in any game project, due to all the disciplines and dependencies involved) with the possibility that minor text rewrites could require reflowing dialogue between panels and re-editing dialogue to sit in the 3D scene's composition in the desired way. This is much more work than simply placing a UI text box over the 3D cutscene, and requires a certain commitment to the bit to avoid feeling like a wasted effort.
The upside, however, is that if you're an indie doing something like this, you're probably NOT doing VO--which can be expensive. And if you're doing something like this, you're making text more interesting and complex in a way that I personally feel is analogous to (though less broadly appealing than) the use of VO. Anything that makes text more textured is great.
I could say more about the game's dialogue and setting, but it's all stuff that you should just discover on your own in a playthrough. There are some fun themes that thread their way through the setting and the dialogue, and I've been impressed by how well they land, given the light touch pretty much everything in this game was applied with. There are a couple fun twists in the final 5 minutes that feel like they hit exactly the Thematic Riff Quotient I was expecting.
One final screenshot for the road - yes, you are expected to fry roaches:
