The Fridge

The game that coined the term ‘visual novel’ just got its first-ever fan translation for its 30th anniversary

On Monday, a team of fan translators celebrated the birth of the visual novel with an English patch for 1996’s Japanese PC-98 game Shizuku. In the mid-90s, recently established development studio Leaf—which at that point had only made a strip mahjong game and an adult JRPG—launched a “Visual Novel Series” of three adult games, beginning…

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Grounded 2’s first major content update delivers a new biome, bugs, a sweet new mount, and a really big snake

The first major content update for the backyard survival sim Grounded 2 went live today with a new Garden Patch biome, new creatures (friendly and otherwise), and “the mysterious Tang effect,” the result of an experiment gone wrong at Ominent Practical Technologies that’s corrupting the soil, water, and unsuspecting creatures alike. Toxic Tangle adds a…

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Baldur’s Gate 3 modder adds legally distinct Poké Balls so you can ‘capture non-player characters inside a ball and free them later (or don’t)’

In a game packed with interesting items that can be used for all kinds of productive and/or sinister purposes, one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s more flavorful bits of enchanted ephemera is the Iron Flask, an item you can find early in the game that, as its tooltip says, “can hold friends and foes.” The only…

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