Vidar

I've played through Vidar twice now, and both times I walked away feeling something close to genuine loss, which is a strange thing to admit about a pixel-art puzzle game built in RPG Maker. That reaction is exactly what solo developer Dean Razavi was chasing. He quit a litigation career to make this, and you can feel the intentionality in every system. This is not a game that stumbled into being interesting; it was architected to hurt you in a specific, considered way. The setup is austere: you are the Stranger, stranded in a snowbound village with 24 remaining inhabitants and 24 days before everyone is dead. A Beast lives beneath the town in a labyrinthine cave, and it takes one villager each night at random. The genius, and the cruelty, is in how tightly the townsfolk are woven together. The blacksmith, the alchemist, the priest, the innkeeper: every one of them has relationships, dependencies, and cascading reactions to every other death. Lose the blacksmith's apprentice early and she pivots to different quests; lose the blacksmith herself and those two surviving NPCs react to fill the void in their own way. Quests lock off. Item chains break. The village you explore on run two is not the village you explored on run one, even if you try to make identical choices, because the randomised death order rewrites the social fabric every time. Gameplay alternates between free time in town, where you talk to survivors and absorb quest hooks, and timed runs into the cave dungeon, where you have roughly ten minutes to push as deep as you can before night falls and the Beast claims its next victim. The cave itself splits into four distinct biome zones, each with its own puzzle logic: ice floors that send you sliding, switch-and-lever sequences, light pillar mechanics in the dark cave section. None of these are combat; there is no leveling, no random encounters, no stat grinding. The puzzles draw from a randomised bank of hundreds of hand-designed rooms, so even the dungeon layout reshuffles between playthroughs. Think Zelda's environmental logic filtered through the bleakest possible context. The visual cues borrow from Squaresoft-era SNES aesthetics, all expressive pixel sprites bundled against the cold, snow drifts accumulating on stoops, footprints fading in real time. The soundtrack carries that same haunting restraint: spare, wintry, the kind of score that makes silence feel intentional. The honest criticisms are real ones. The map shows NPC locations but does not mark your own position, which makes early navigation genuinely cumbersome. There is no quest log, so keeping track of who asked you for what requires actual memory or note-taking. A mandatory introductory sequence repeats on every new run and cannot be skipped, which gets wearing fast. And a small but vocal subset of players found some puzzle solutions opaque enough to stall progress entirely. For a game designed around replay, that tutorial friction is a noticeable cost. Bug reports from the early-access window were addressed quickly by Razavi, and the full 1.0 release cleaned up the worst offenders, but the community remains small enough that detailed walkthroughs are thin. Who is this for. Players who want to feel the weight of an NPC death. Players who love the Majora's Mask-style urgency loop without combat. Anyone who has thought about what grief actually does to a community rather than just a protagonist. A single run takes three to four hours; the randomised systems give it genuine legs across multiple playthroughs. If you need a quest journal, a skip button, and clear map markers, those absences will sand against you throughout. But if you are willing to work with the grain of a small, handcrafted thing that knows exactly what it wants to say, Vidar will stick with you longer than games ten times its size.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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