Episode 180 - Your Murderous Urges - Loretta

I won’t reach the truth with podcasts. They can’t give it shape. Welcome back to the podcast, and as we finally finish the theme (and catch up on episodes in general after a hectic October) of Games Titled After Women’s Names That Begin With “L.” Loretta is an adventure game in the technical sense; it leans heavily on narrative and player choice, with your actions dictating the events of your playthrough. Most of these choices revolve around how many people you do or do not murder. The story revolves around Loretta, the player character, having killed her husband and the fallout of that action. Whether that is justified or even a positive action is determined by your choices going forward, and Loretta has a personality that stays pretty consistent throughout. The game does feature a few gameplay elements outside of this, but they are honestly barely worth mentioning in a format like this. You’re playing this game for its narrative and everything else is just around for the sake of variety. We’re going to be talking about the fact the game needs to put you effectively in the shoes of a killer before being able to explore its narrative branches, the unusualness of the setting adding to the uncanny atmosphere and being a point of interest in and of itself, and murder. We say “murder” more on this episode than we ever have and probably ever will. Thank you for joining us! Loretta falls pretty comfortably in the realm of those games we specifically like, so we were fortunate it fell into this narrow theme and one that we’re glad we could end it on. Was this game on your radar or was this the first time you’re hearing about it? Did you choose to murder every person you saw in the game? Let us know in the comments or in our Discord server! We’ve pretty much caught up with our outstanding episodes at this point and will be hopefully bringing in some more variety in the upcoming months (though Fanbruary is on you guys). Next time, we’re going to be talking about Star Wars Episode I: Racer, following the vague tradition we have of playing more nostalgic games around the holidays, so we hope you’ll join us then, which you probably will if we’ve narrowcasted enough to pretty much only appeal to people our own age.