If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers (2021)

A beautifully crafted two-hour point-and-click adventure with an isometric perspective—unusual for the genre. Structurally, it echoes I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, unfolding through three distinct, self-contained narratives.

The first story is relatively straightforward: a closeted gay man meets his married lover in Rome. It subtly messes with you by replacing some pictures and eerie musical cues reminiscent of The Last Door, though nothing groundbreaking.

The second chapter is where the game truly shines. It follows a grieving woman descending into laudanum-induced madness. At first, the drug transforms her bleak surroundings into vibrant, cheerful illusions—a striking visual contrast similar to We Happy Few.

As her sanity deteriorates, rooms become split between joy and despair, with color bleeding into grey in real-time as she moves—an impressive feat in pixel art. The game also alters her sprite and animation over time, with her posture collapsing into a shamble that mirrors her unraveling mind.

The third story centers on a Black doctor in Chicago, haunted by World War I and accused of stealing morphine—something he did, but only to ease the suffering of a neighbor dying from tuberculosis. It’s a somber, introspective chapter dealing with guilt, trauma, and racial injustice.

Altogether, the stories are grim and melancholic, but the final epilogue lightens the emotional weight. Stylistically, it channels Grim Fandango—a surreal afterlife journey that reframes the preceding tragedies with a touch of poetic irony.

This point and click game has a few relatively easy puzzles (I needed a push in three places) and is mostly about telling three tragic stories of betrayal, loss, and vengeance. They begin with a mundane betrayal, one that is believable and probably happened many times in the premodern age. Each story gets more supernatural until the final tale is a fantastic tale of interplanar travel and demons.

The stories were decent enough but the game is so short you barely feel like you got a story. But it’s free on Steam and it’s certainly worth what I paid for it.