Critters for Sale is a surreal horror game that blends a visual novel with point-and-click adventure, made by indie studio Sonoshee and released on June 3, 2021. It is built from five short stories, drawn in 1-bit pixel art, and inspired by the creepy folk tales of the Middle East and North Africa.
Five Strange Stories
The episodes are called Snake, Goat, Monkey, Dragon and Spider, and you can play them in any order. Each one takes you to its own place and time. You will find a garden in low Earth orbit, visitors from Neptune, Paranoids from neighboring timelines and the residents of the Palace of Reincarnation. The themes match the setting: time travel, black magic and immortality. You take turns playing as characters who left their mark on the hidden history of the world, while a sinister cosmic force looms over every story, eager to destroy the hero and everything around them.
Live or Die by Your Choices
Every decision affects whether a character makes it to the end of an episode. Each story has several endings, and a wrong move often means death, shown without any squeamishness: beheading, burning, strangling. The developers warn about these scenes themselves, though the monochrome pixel art softens the impact quite a bit. If your hero does survive, they can influence the larger plot, which makes the episodes worth replaying to see how else things can turn out.
Noir With a Dark Sense of Humor
For all its gloom, the writing has plenty of black humor, and the mood is closer to a psychedelic, dialogue-driven noir than to a horror game about running and chases. It is part of the Sonoshee's Folktales series. The system requirements are minimal, with just 2 GB of RAM needed, so you can download Critters for Sale for free and run it on even a very old computer.
Key Features
- Five short episodes you can play in any order.
- Time travel, black magic and immortality.
- Several endings in every story.
- 1-bit pixel art.
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