Jump the Track (2025)

I found this one on Steam's indie game event, where it mixes comic-style visual novel with Peggle gameplay where the results help unlock your path choices throughout the story. The story follows Sam, a young man in a dystopic society trying to right a fatal mistake he made to get out of trouble with his billionaire boss. He'll deal with familiar faces and peculiar strangers by coming up with different solutions that is decided by the gameplay performance. The Peggle puzzles attempt to reflect the situations around action and dialogue thinking, so there's some fair variation on the challenges here.

I don't click much with visual novels, so something had to be implemented to keep the story engaging. It's a bit hard coming back to the game when the flow leaves more to desire but at least the cast is distinguishing. Even the writing covers a few thought-provoking topics including social revolution, capitalism and solidarity.

This indie game sticks out on combining two core gameplays to engage the player, for sure! For the sake of the engaging gameplay, I hope the devs get the dynamics more polished, in case of a possible sequel.