Respecting the fact that indie gaming represents a wide variety of flavors, budgets, and talent levels across the entire scene, you’ll often see impressive titles made by large teams of people sitting right next to much more humble offerings from very small ones that simply must make use of the tools available to them, trying to make the most of what they can. Not surprisingly, once you remove impressive graphics, sound, and quick action from the potential gameplay mix, what you’re left with is the story, so to be successful you need to make the most of what you’ve got.

In many ways Next of Kin: Fidelity reminds me of its predecessor, given that both serve as somewhat simple top-down adventures, using periodic simple sequences where you’ll need to perform some sort of action or solve some puzzles, and contrasting that with emotionally-powerful storytelling. In the case of the original Next of Kin, this centered around the loss of the main character’s wife and how he was struggling with the trauma related to that. In this case it’s instead a key childhood trauma that is continuing to haunt your character, and you’re trying to help him continue to move forward with his life despite that pain.

It isn’t hard to see at a glance that everything here is very simple, both in terms of its visuals and its overall gameplay, so the experience lives and dies based on what you put into its story and what choices you make. Thankfully, there is an element of player agency where some of your decisions will impact the outcome of this relatively short experience, so depending on how you feel about it all you will at least have some potential reason to return to it more than once. Just bear in mind that given its humble setup there needs to be a realistic limit on your expectations.