<aside> ✉️ [email protected]
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<aside> Developer Waibinin Genre Incremental Dinner Table RPG Simulator Release date Coming soon Platforms Windows- Mac - Linux - Web
Players Solo
Store page link https://store.steampowered.com/app/4100460/Family_Reunion/
Itch (Demo) https://waibinin.itch.io/family-reunion
Socials Bluesky | Instagram | X
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I’m Leandro Waibe making the code, art and design. Most of the sounds too. Main music by Willy Fishman.
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<aside> 📰 PRESS RELEASES
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Your typical incremental family dinner table simulator where you play as a very bored child trying to speedrun the evening.
Family Reunion is an incremental family dinner table simulator from a child's perspective. Time starts super slow and it's up to the player to imagine things, spread gossip, explore the house and think ideas to make time faster and speedrun the dinner.
Family Reunion is a dinner table simulation game in which you take on the role of a child sitting at the family dinner table, wanting to be anywhere else.
Time goes super slow, it feels like the dinner will never end. You must rely on your imagination, conversation and exploration skills to make time pass faster such as: sneaking around the house while your parents are distracted, imagining a new world around you or enthralling conversation with your family while avoiding family fights, harsh comments, crushing boredom and the long wait for the meal to arrive.
At the start of the game, you choose between three archetypes that shape your playstyle. The Introvert focuses more on inner thoughts and visual imagination, the Chatty archetype emphasizes dialogue, questions and verbal interaction and the Adventurer prioritizes exploration and looting beyond the table.
Your freedom of action is governed by the table’s general stats: Attention Level (focused on you), Alcohol Level (on the table) and the overall Ambience. Each action you do affects one of those items which you can bypass getting to know your family or special items.
Each character starts with their signature abilities, such as Imagine, Small talk and Toss, but you can unlock powerful abilities like Gossip and Work Out by exploring the house on your explorations as you can expand your repertoire by creatively engaging with the world. Choices influence both the environment and the flow of the dinner, including selecting meals at the key checkpoints (the Appetizer, the Main Dish and the Dessert) which affect your progress. Inspired by the mechanics of family gatherings, Family reunion transforms an intense social ritual into an interface driven-game that blends a cute cozy, slice-of-life experience with bullet time, incremental simulation elements part-RPG part- dungeon crawler.
Can you speedrun family dinner?
Family Reunion's idea is a continuation of my thoughts on previous projects, where I have explored themes of childhood, memory, family, and the systematization of ordinary rituals through electronic installations ,paintings, graphic novels, and video games. Through these works, I became increasingly interested in the table as a space where different voices intersect and a narrative is formed, how a child perceives time and space differently, how they construct ephemeral new worlds with their gaze of wonder and how the narrative draws from with a database of family sayings, anecdotes and recurring stories.
With Family Reunion, I mixed those ideas in a shape of a systemic video game taking the place of the child, where boredom, time, child's ideas and familiar narrative intersect. I'm also interested that around a family dinner table, tensions between family members are often invisible to a child and how those tensions arise in what may be a routine moment for adults, but a never-ending event for a child.
I wanted to reflect how a child builds an understanding of family dynamics from fragments of conversations and the boredom of the dinner table as a creative space which may shape their personality or just be a moment of play. Through this, I hope players reconnect with their own memories of family dinners and reflect on how those moments helped shape who they are today. Playing as child also helps to empathize with the character immediately.
Rock Paper Shotgun: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/family-reunion-is-a-dinnertime-simulation-game-that-captures-the-wonder-and-boredom-of-being-a-loosely-disciplined-7-year-old
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11ZeJVRFEMD1jKCSVpEWzuyqRMZN5VSmR/view?usp=drive_link
Leandro Waibe is an artist and designer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work explores the intersections of art, technology, and storytelling, often focusing on ephemeral connections, chance encounters, and fragmented narratives through drawing, videogames, electronics and printed media.