Sometimes there are games that stick with me even if I wouldn't list them among my favorites, some experience that isn't necessarily standout but which I always think of fondly. One of those games for me was 2016's Burly Men At Sea by studio Brain&Brain, a small narrative game with a distinctive, minimalist art style. Last week the studio released a demo for its upcoming game The Marvelous Raincaster of Yell Holler, and while it's bigger, and trickier, than Burly Men, it has a lot of the touches that made that game so charming.
The Marvelous Raincaster of Yell Holler puts you in charge of shaping a folktale. It's ostensibly the verses to a song, though there's no spoken dialogue in the demo. In the demo, you have to create a song that ends with a specific animal character (all the characters are animals) performing at an evening gathering, which you do by moving the narrator's interactions around until events happen in an order that convinces the character to attend. You can fast-forward and rewind through the verses and rearrange them in a menu, locking in ones you're sure are right.
Since this puzzle makes up the entirety of the demo I won't spoil it for you. But I found it ferociously tricky– while a key clue was thankfully obvious that it needed to come first to make the rest of the events possible, others felt obtuse. I quickly figured out the basic order of events--this particular thing had to happen so that the character in question had something to sing about--it was tough to figure out where the rest of the events needed to fall and, on occasion, why. Some events will change substantially depending on where you place them in the timeline, which meant it took me a lot of shuffling things around before I stumbled upon a key event. I'd stare at the verses before me, pondering each word, and while it could be easy to tell that a certain phrase might be a clue, it wasn't always easy to figure out what it was pointing me toward. Some events will give you additional clues that exist outside the verses, which get saved in your in-game notebook, but even these could be a bit vague. It might be telling that the game's Steam page currently has only one discussion thread, which provides the answer.
As far as a demo goes, it might be a tough first impression, and I feel like the puzzle could do with a bit of tweaking to make it more solvable. But the frustration I felt was offset by the game's simple but thoughtful art style, and by the jaunty banjo music that accompanied it, which I am a sucker for. The whole thing felt so charming that I really want to see more of it, even if I felt silly bashing my head against a brainteaser that looked like a children's book.
Unlike the more serious puzzle tone of a "what happened when" game like The Incident At Galley House (which I need to make so much more progress in), Raincaster has the same playful respect for storytelling that I loved about Burly Men. Both feel like games that want to toy with what it means to spin a tale, seeing the truth as a mutable thing that can be less important than giving the listener a good time.
There's no release date yet.
