LogFAQs > #940107645

Oh hey, this started.

3. Eight games received a single +10 vote and nothing else. They may not be the most popular kid in class, but theyre already found someone who loves them. They were:

Bastion
Bomberman 64: The Second Attack!
Lenna's Inception
Night in the Woods
Phantasy Star 2
Terranigma
The Beginner's Guide
The Longest Journey

Surprised to see a couple of these on the one-and-done list, and Phantasy Star 2 is a really interesting inclusion. (I assume that was mostly for the veer at the end, because that was an interesting twist back in '91 or whatever year that was.)

However, I'm calling attention to this short list because I was the one who put Lenna's Inception on there.

Lenna's is an indie game that came out earlier this year, and I hadn't even heard of until two weeks ago. Judging from how many reviews it has on Steam, not too many other people have, either, so I'm gonna give it a little love here for a second.

Lenna's is a retro-style procedurally-generated blatant Zelda clone. That's it's gimmick. You're playing a game that thinks it's somewhere between Zelda 1 and Link's Awakening, except the whole world is random. The dungeon order, the key items, the overworld, some of the puzzles and NPC interactions...shuffled and dealt out like a Diablo game. That's what you have to look forward to in the gameplay. But we're here to talk about the story, and for such a short (and randomized!) game, Lenna's has a surprisingly well-composed story.

Lenna is a schoolteacher in the Kingdom of [GLITCHED], watching her pupils until she decides to step out for a moment. Once outside, she briefly blacks out, and when she looks back, the data where her schoolhouse is stored has become corrupted. Desperate to save her students, she hurries to the Village Elder for guidance, only to find him brutally slaughtered, leaving behind only a package for the hero, Lance.

The joke at this point is that Lance is clearly Link, and everyone in the game world knows they're in a game world and have a specific role to play. Except, with the elder dead, nobody is left to give Lance the tutorial. Being a schoolteacher, Lenna picks up the slack, and promises she'll show Lance how to swing his sword if he'll complete a quest to rescue her students. But then a monster murders him horribly. Lenna defeats it and loots the game's version of the Triforce of Courage. Now it's up to Lenna to clear the eight dungeons Lance was supposed to finish, as the world becomes increasingly corrupted, and try to save everyone before the game's data becomes completely ruined. And that's just for the bad ending.

I hope you'll consider giving it a shot. It's ten bucks on Steam.

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