Good Bones Reviews

"Good Bones" is a captivating point-and-click mystery game that masterfully pays homage to Latino heritage while tackling significant themes such as domestic violence and grief. I'm currently on my second playthrough, and while it may not be flawless, the developers have struck a fine balance in making complex subjects accessible to players as young as tweens. This game provides more than just an immersive gaming experience; it also conveys a profound message. Hats off to the developers for their commitment to raising social awareness and promoting cultural diversity.

Good Bones is the first game released by Indie Game Dev RETCON Games. An original story driven point-and-click mystery set in a spooky house in a small town. The game features an inclusive narrative with intention to give a voice to the gamers that are often overlooked by mainstream gaming. The story is tight without a lot of fluff and bloat. It gets you where you need to be without unneeded detours. There are choices to be made and, judging by the tag "Choices Matter" and the fact that I am missing a few achievements, there is opportunity to replay and experience a different outcome. From a technical perspective the game is as one would expect from this genre of game. Almost everything is clickable to get some flavor and most things can be interacted with multiple times at various stages of the game for more flavor as the plot unravels. A few technical upgrades I would like to see from future games would be to have some animation to the world. Things like trees rustling in the wind, clouds floating by, and interactable objects animate when interacting. I think it would help make the game feel more alive. I would also like to see (or hear) material based sound effects applied to the environment. That is, when you click on paper you hear paper, when you click water you hear splashes, soft stuff sounds soft, and hard stuff sounds hard. I think that would help immerse the senses. If you are a fan of the genre, want a tightly packaged story without endless drivel, and are a supporter of Indie Devs and of the underrepresented gamer groups, pick up Good Bones.

Great story and had tons of fun clicking on every single thing to see what would happen next. I'm bad a puzzles, but these were easy enough that even I could do it.

just like the name indicates, good bones has some good bones under the 'first game jank' is presents sometimes. the story is solid, heartwarming when it has to be, but i felt a bit disappointed about being so horribly punished for allowing the protagonist to say the wrong every now and then because that happens, we say the wrong things sometimes. the ideal dialogue options were a bit too good every now and then and felt not as appropriate in the moment. and some assets seem underused (we could have spent more time in the library, per example). some of the backgrounds were a bit pixelated/not detailed enough, which is a problem in a game that DOES involve pixel hunting for items. with all of that said, most of the dialogue does indeed feel natural, the lofi ambiance is on point, the physicality if some puzzles and the discussions that good bones inspires about grief, letting go and the very concept of what if are so worth it. conceptually, good bones showcases that retcon games has the necessary tools to make good games and that we should keep an eye on them.

best game to play while nursing a mug of coffee over the course of a few hours on a rainy Sunday morning ☕︎

If you're looking for a cozy, horror-lite VN that makes you feel something and you can complete in an evening, definitely pick up Good Bones! The writing is great and I was surprised by how much it impacted me. I knew going into it it was a story about grief, but I didn't expect to get chills at times and feel so much about these characters I meet so briefly. The music is also a highlight -- it's filled with a variety lofi beats that perfectly capture the feeling of melancholy and chill. I'll be thinking about this game a lot!

I could hardly play this game. You click around at every random thing and the game offers no direction. The writing is very cheesy and the amount of dialogue is too much. The hints don't make any sense. I'm not really sure what they were going for here. The style and the story don't seem to fit together. Also, when I clicked the options on the main menu there is no way to back out. Seems poorly made.

It's hard to say nice things about this game. Well, the art style is cute and music is nice and chill. Puzzles were easy enough and I liked how fast could go through all dialogue, when tried to play second time and have different ending (that I didint). Story was so.. meh. And I've not hated a character long time as much as the daughter. Actually, all characters were shallow and I still dont understand what I should've said to make daughter less unbearable. I expected to meet more characters and start a new life in this small town.

Two years in development. Multiple delays that weren’t communicated until the release date had passed. Fawning news coverage, interviews, and a local televised interview with a news reporter. It’s hard to see how Good Bones came out so poorly, but even more baffling that the creator thought this was worth $15. It should be a free mobile game and a reminder that when handling sensitive topics like domestic abuse and motherhood? Its maybe best to let more capable writers tell the story. The writing is atrocious. The writer hasn’t spent any time with actual children: every melodramatic scene between mother and daughter plays out like a 1990’s Lifetime movie. For example, the mother tells her “We needed a fresh start,” as her daughter is complaining about the move. “No, YOU needed a fresh start!” is something no child would say…ever. Later, the daughter is discussing her own deceased mother. “You stopped talking about her. Your own wife, and it’s like she got erased overnight.” It doesn’t make ANY sense tone wise, and definitely adds to the “this entire game needed another set of eyes” behind it. Which the developer did and bragged about on Twitter, so they probably just gave her a thumbs up without reading through it. The game completely fumbles the gravity and message about domestic violence. That is a shame: it could have served as a realistic example for young girls everywhere. Instead, players are given the same melodramatic lines you’ve heard in a movie before. The sexy ghost tells you that she “doesn’t remember…maybe I was living with what I wished he was rather than WHO he was.” The delivery and message is ham fisted: there is zero nuance or realism, just a ghost forgetting her husband murdered her. Whoopsie? The gameplay should be studied as a method of torture. Your time will be wasted over, and over, and over, and over again. Clicking an object…almost any object, results in the same 4-12 lines of dialogue. Every time. No new observations or information…just the same forced exchange of base observations between the two. Did you click on the same object by accident? You get the same dialogue and observations. Did you click on the old newspaper, ready to read it? Nope: the game just tells you “it’s an old newspaper.” Clicked on the nightstand? “It’s the nightstand.” Thank God nobody ever put keys or clues in one of those things! The game does offer a hint system, but it’s vague and will lead you to clicking everything out of frustration. Players have noted that certain event triggers simply do not work…and the developer hasn’t addressed any of these bugs. Sprites and noises do not match…almost ever. The little girl is SCREAMING at her mom as the sprite but you get an “AWWWW” sound effect? Get ready to hear the same four sound effects per character, used in the absolute most incorrect times. Dialogue also starts and stops mid sentence. A realtor is talking to you and says “Sorry about showing up at this hour,” you click, she changes sprites and the rest of the dialogue appears. Either the developer didn’t know how to make this work, or she thought it’d be clever. It isn’t, it’s jarring and annoying. But hey, the realtor was also an attractive lesbian to romance. Just like the ghost! The main character, Avi, seems to have dementia. She…can’t remember that the car keys are in her bra? A few minutes after they parked the car? At one point she’s worried about her cellphone running out of batteries. The game literally tells you “I accidentally packed the charger so…consider us off the grid right now.” The charger was packed: time to use it and stop confusing your daughter! The game is tagged as “choices matter” but not a single choice matters. Seriously: don’t even bother reading the choices, they do the same thing every single time. For example, the doorbell rings. Will you answer it? You will with both choices! A ghost asks you to help her solve the mystery and you can say yes or no. Even if you pick no, by God you’re helping her solve that mystery! The achievements…the author was really trying for that Reddit-style of humor and fell flat on their face. After speaking with the realtor, the mother is relived she wasn’t murdered. Achievement unlocked: Avoided Murder. “You didn’t get murdered. Good job!”. Did you get that the joke is that the mother didn’t get murdered by the kind librarian? L O L! The game also has severe accessibility issues. The game starts with a content warning and asks if you’re OK with that. If you aren’t? The game closes. No alternative way to play or changes to the game writing: that’d be too much work, so you’re either seeing domestic violence mentioned or not playing the game. The game also is terrible at autosaving, which led to an hour of progress completely wiped. I needed to take a break (there is no “quit game” on any of the menus, you need to go to the title screen), so I begrudgingly went to the title screen. Whoops! An hour wiped out and no way to recover the save file. That will be $15.00 please! The developer, Jes Negrón, has a fascinating story behind the development of the game. Awarded over a million in payments from the Riot lawsuit, she created Good Bones to prove that her voice was needed in the games industry. It is difficult to see why she was so confident: the game experienced delay after delay, with her banners (that had the release dates!) being left up for MONTHS without letting anyone know. Guessing she was trying to figure out how to scam health insurance companies to enroll her polycule through her husbands insurance (this was mentioned on Twitter and is illegal). The work ethic just wasn’t there for her debut title, and seeing how little it was play tested should give any player pause before purchasing it. What was she doing for two years while unemployed, creating this? Why did she not have an editor correct so many glaring mistakes? We’ll never know: Jes is now working on another title with other industry dropouts, so this is probably the last title you’ll see from Retcon Games. Good Bones is a complete disaster and a complete waste of your money. Melodramatic, annoying, and outside the realm of reality. The writing quality will haunt you like a ghost, forever, because you won’t forget how many times your eyes rolled playing it. Don’t wait for it to go on sale and don’t check it out for the awful commentary on domestic violence. Other games have handled such sensitive content better and those are absolutely worth your time and money. Just bury this title in the backyard: these bones simply aren’t worth digging up.

I keep flip-flopping on whether to check off the 'yes' or 'no' for whether I recommend this game. i wish there was an "Eh?" middle option. This game is very short, with very little going on. Almost everything is clickable, and will give you some kind of dialogue, mostly to tell you that there's nothing useful about the thing you clicked on. Except...maybe later there will be but there's nothing to indicate this. Every time I clicked on the fridge we talked about how we had no intention of ever looking in the fridge. Be really unfortunate if something later on would require you to look in the fridge...oh wait. It's less of a hidden object game and more of a 'Any time you need to find something new, you have to click on every object until you find the right one, which was very likely -not- indicated by the previous times you clicked on it' game. Also lots of weird flag-setting issues, where, long after you know lots about the people who lived in the house, you're still getting the dialogue you got at the very start when everything was a mystery. That said, what story is there is an interesting story. It has worthwhile things to say, and says them well. The relationship between Avi and Bianca was well done, but the whiplash nature of the flag setting problems made it hard to feel it. A major emotional moment would happen between them as a story beat, and then you'd click on an object that prompted goofy joke dialogue. I know it's a limit of the format, but when the whole game is only 2 hours long, every time this happened, there wasn't enough meat to make up for it before you clicked on 50 things for the 50th time and got all the jokes. The nature of the story gets incredibly serious incredibly fast, and then takes a pretty dark turn, but you've still got the chill lo-fi music playing even in the middle of a horrifying crisis. Two or three more tracks in the soundtrack so you could actually communicate the tone that goes along with "You're investigating a mysterious death" would have added a lot to the game. I never re-play narrative games to "see all the outcomes". I prefer there to be one canonical playthrough that is 'the way this happened' so there was no chance I was going to run through this again to 100% it, but given that, as part of getting every achievement you have to [spoiler]literally fail to talk your 10 year old child down from killing herself[/spoiler] I am -very- not ever playing through it again. I can't even imagine how the game could have even a dissatisfying end after that happens, given that the 'good ending' ends like....30 seconds after that same point, but boy do I not want to try and find out. Ironically, there -are- good bones to this game, just...it's not enough. Buy it on a 50%+ sale, or if you're just desperate for any narrative game with even a nod towards any kind of diversity, but otherwise I think you're in for disappointment.