Three Lesbians in a Barrow

oh my goodness... i finished playing through this entire series a week or so ago, and i honestly just had to come here and say: thank you so, so much for putting this art into the world!  if i am being completely honest with myself, i think this is the first time i have ever felt truly represented by... uhm... well, any piece of media.  period.  ever.  in my entire life.  the first time i have ever played or watched anything where i feel so wholly at home and welcome and understood by the narrative that i could actually take it for granted.  

at several points in these games, i had to stop and wonder if this is what cis people feel like, about the stories they cherish.  where they can so effortlessly relate to the main characters and find personal meaning in what they're seeing.  i think it made me really realize that for so long now, all i've experienced is either man-in-a-dress hurtful dehumanizing garbage, or fauxgressive stuff about what cis people think the trans experience is.  where cis actors play characters written by other cis people, whose stories pretty much always revovle solely around Trans Suffering™, so that the cis audience can pat themselves on the back and feel good about the fact that they feel sorry for the trans person who inevitably gets abused and deadnamed.   because of course they will be.  because we always are.  because our place within fiction may as well just be the cute dog that gets killed onscreen for cheap shock value.  i don't think i even knew really what an actual story starring a actual trans character could actually look like.  but now i do!  and it makes me so happy that i was lucky enough to come across this series :>

i can't even begin to describe how close to home trixie's outburst in bell's route hit.  down to the exact age when i started my transition!  every last line in that scene making me just stare, wide-eyed, over the fact that a piece of fiction that isn't even about Being Trans could so perfectly and naturally articulate thoughts that have run through my head over and over and over again throughout the years.  and when i found out in tliab that tabby is trans too?!?!?!  can that happen?!  is that even legal?!  to have two (2) entire trans characters in main character roles?!  in the same story?!  TALKING to each other and bonding over their shared experiences, like actual trans people might do?!  and they still get to go on cool and gay cosmic horror adventures in a really fascinating setting! holy shit.  what the fuckmst.

thank you again, for making these games.  they were an absolute treat to get to experience.  whether you keep making stories in this world, or move onto other projects, i'm sure it'll be amazing!

also, i laughed a lot whenever lovecraft got dunked on

hell yeah

Aaagh! Played all 3 of the games in this series over the past 2 days (and sped through cyber dark-cool-yas). I'm just starting to come out to people and begin my transition, and good god do I find trixie relatable... Hope there's a chance we get to see more of her and this awesome cosmic horror world you've created! (Have been a big Cthulhu Mythos fan for a while too so I love all the mythos stuff, it's like I found this series right at a point in my life where it's taylor made to hit all my irl anxieties... In a good way...?)

I absolutely loved this series! The hand animation and just charm in Parsnip is unmatched and i loved that as well as the dark undertones and branching endings.

The Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith, while losing the oustanding art, made up for it with a killer story and characters as well as really characterizing themes, parsnips being especially remarkable, with the random trumpets showing his unpredictablility and personality.  

three lesbians in a barrow, while shorter, had more character development than the previous titles, a notable instance being Nikita's ear being damaged in a fight, which i thought as a character design quirk in The Testimony, and i liked the interaction mechanics,  stop here if you don't want to read a rant about representation and natural feeling chacterization. Just know i loved this game series and i hope to be able to play more of them in the future, Love pretty much everything about it and could do a whole nother paragraph on the wordbuilding!

As a preface, i have nothing against trans people and i think that gender dysmorphia is a very real, treatable condition that effects thousands of people.      

While trixie being trans is something i liked, with it being foreshadowed throughout the first half of Testimony, through things like the ear patch and her line about "growing boobs", Tabitha being trans actually slightly soured her character for me, there was no lead up or plot impact to her being trans, with the problems Trixie shows from her transition not afflicting Tabitha and (even taking into consideration "the queerest town in the country") it felt to somewhat overrepresent the population of trans people, the chances of two people in a small town being trans, semi friends, and not knowing it ("are those oestrogen patches on your ear?") is so low that it doesn't make much narrative sense. If i missed something in my playthrough that changes this please point it out! it just seems a bit contrived to me.

shit that was long. 

Just learned about the Bluehills county series from the bundle, and goodness but I'm glad I did. While I couldn't get Parsnip to run (closes itself in about ten seconds) I absolutely loved the VNs. Queer eldritch horror is a thing I'll never get tired of.

One question though - Trixie in the first game was (maybe) ace, and here describes herself as bi. I was wondering if that was meant to be read as her having a firmer grasp of her sexuality, or whether she meant like biromantic.

Thanks again! I look forward to whatever comes next from you.

Honestly, I really love this series. Part of me just wants another game where it's like "all of the characters just have a nice gay day together and work out their issues without anything u͕̣͎̳̰͜ņn̫̦͖̪͙ͅa̲͉t̫̠̙̱̯̙̣u͕̥̜̠͖̤̖͘r̞aĺ͚ happening," but that's just me thinking queer thoughts. In any case, thank you for working on this series! It's been really fun to play through thusfar.

I just got through this and had a lot of fun with it! (No spoilers in this review, so don't hesitate to read it)

When I discovered the previous game, "The Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith", I was really surprised at just how much it hooked me. After my first playthrough I knew I wanted to go back and see the other paths the game offered, and even got to the point where I was trying things just to see the minor alterations they'd have on the game's ending, so seeing a new VN from Digital Poppy, I knew I'd be playing it immediately.

Though still being a horror-themed VN and starring two of the previous title's characters, the tone on this one felt different! The horror (mostly) played a backseat to just letting the characters interact with each other, and I found myself laughing at a lot of the game's lines. "Trixie" had its humor, but it felt like comic relief to its more pressing plot. "Barrow" seems to be much more willing to just try to be funny, and does a great job of it, even if the situation is more dire. (Even without a supernatural horror, the characters do have to deal with potentially being trapped in the barrow and not being able to get out!)

In "Barrow", you get to play as the new character, a transwoman fox named Tabby. She's a very fun character and I couldn't help but pick all the happy/positive/shippy choices whenever they were presented. She gets to play the role of mediator to Trixie and Nikita who have a very aggressive relationship with each other. The description says that you don't need to play the previous game to enjoy "Barrow", but I would highly suggest doing so myself, as it makes their dynamic a lot more understandable when you know what they went through in the previous game instead of just being told something happened last summer and to drop it. At the same time, Tabby does get to try and learn a bit about them and if you yourself are a blank slate you'll be able to pick up on some of it, if not the specifics.

Also I am extremely jealous of her dress. Though it is perhaps not the best outfit to be wearing on an outing to some weird old barrow.

"Barrow" builds on "Trixie" in terms of interactivity by turning the game into a series of limited choices. This was explored a little in a library scene in "Trixie", where reading books passed X hours and you only had so much time to get the relevant lore, but here it's the main conceit of the game. This time the lore is there but you can only read so much of it before having to work on other things. There's still plenty of old forgotten tales to be read of wars with abominations and magic spells to banish evil, but this time the player has to keep it in their own mind at the end where they need to demonstrate they've been paying attention (and hopefully got all the information needed).

At the time of writing, I've only done a single playthrough. "Trixie" was a very similar game with most of its prompts leading to the same results other than a decision of which character to spend time with, which made subsequent playthroughs a lot of mashing clicking to get to this main split. (Of course, you could just save before making any choices...) "Barrow" is structured in a way that I feel like when I get around to my next run that the differences should happen a lot faster.

As a whole, it feels more compressed than the previous game. It took me a little over 2 hours to get through, but not for lack of content. It's a quicker pace and is able to get to those decisions a lot faster given the context that the game takes place with the characters trapped together so there's no need to talk about what to snack on at a bakery or who to text about the day's events. It's just three lesbians in a barrow after all. It was a very fun two hours, and I'd definitely recommend it (and "Trixie") to anybody who wants a story focused around LGBT characters that isn't a romance.