Desert Angels

A wistful, melancholy tone pervades Desert Angels in its setting, its soft piano soundtrack, and the way that its story is more or less told starting from the epilogue. Players take the role of Gerel, a young person who knows her way around a desert junkyard. She's from a village nearby, a community made up of people who fled a more technologically-advanced civilization across what is, at this point, imagined as an impassible desert. As Gerel conducts one last search around the junkyard in the wake of a moment of conflict, she reminisces about two friends who joined her in her fascination with the place. Navigating the junkyard often involves blowing up piles of junk with assorted weaponry found lying around, which provides a little more of an openness to the scenario beyond moving from point-to-point and memory-to-memory. I think the game is a overly reliant on those memories as scripted cutscenes -- it would have been interesting to explore within them in a more interactive way -- but overall, these are characters and a place worth visiting.

This quiet, warm and contemplative story-driven game is both relaxing and deeply engaging. Desert Angels is essentially a walking-sim in which guns are used to help clear a path through a huge scrapyard in the middle of a desert - this is fun, by the way - instead of for killing people (a nice change). This is a beautiful-looking game: the heaps of discarded technology look rather beautiful, and the character portraits are gorgeous. It also has a vivid sense of place. Although you never leave the scrapyard, the huge piles of detritus - along with the lovely dialogue - brilliantly evoke the outside world, both of the village of the protagonist and the world beyond. The game’s carefully bounded setting is one of the game’s most impressive artistic features, leaving enticing space for your imagination to work in. The scrapyard itself is a joy to explore. You play as Gerel, whose story you unravel as you traverse the scrapyard triggering memories of her relationship with the only other two characters in the game. As with the artistic limitations imposed by the setting, the non-linear storytelling benefits from its small cast of characters: you really get to know them and their relatio…

A slow, meditative journey through a scrapyard full of discarded machinery and poignant memories. You will repurpose old weaponry for traversal (not violence), as you blast your way through the heaps of junk, looking for a particular device that could save your village. Here, you will recall conversations between a trio of friends about their hopes for a future that has lost its luster in the eyes of their community. Would you loosen your grip on that dream to stay grounded with your people, or hold on and let it carry you far away from the life you know?

Desert Angels is a relaxing game with a sweet but melancholic atmosphere. It tells a story about friendship, finding your place in the world, the old vs the new ways of surviving, and the tension between those who want to avoid conflict no matter the cost and those who want to stay and fight. It's a good game to absorb slowly, taking in a small storylet at a time, with some decluttering in between. The gameplay strikes a nice balance between letting you clear all the debris if you want, but having mild narrative nods to reasons you might not want to, leaving up to players to do as much or as little as they want.

A walking simulator that gains some depth with VN-style interaction memories and traversal of a destructible environment. Still a bit slow-paced for me, but I'll come back to it when I crave the "walking the desert" aesthetic.

A sentimental world to get lost in for a few hours