The Sequel I Couldn’t Have Predicted: Demoing ‘Kind Words 2’ at PAX East
This March, I was fortunate enough to once again attend PAX East in Boston, the biggest games industry event on the east coast. It was a preposterously packed weekend between meeting up with friends, demoing unreleased games, and attending thought-provoking panels. While the show floor felt visibly emptier than last year, no doubt in part due to the waves of mass waves of layoffs in the games industry, I still couldn’t manage to play everything I saw. From the few dozen titles that made a lasting impression on my curiosity, one game on the show floor stood out above all others. It’s the sequel that I couldn’t have possibly predicted: Kind Words 2.
Readers of Epilogue may remember that I reviewed Kind Words in 2019. Though the rubric for our website’s reviews scores this game as a three out of five, Kind Words made a lastingly positive impression on me in the five years since publication. I remember writing how Kind Words was a “successful experiment,” that provided a “beautiful escape” from the stresses of modern life. One lingering concern in my review, that it isn’t truly a “game,” no longer persists with Kind Words 2 – and that’s one of the greatest successes I can imagine for a humble indie title like Kind Words.
The foundation of Kind Words involves writing anonymous letters between players of the game. A character called the delivery deer shepherds these letters back and forth, offering you insight into the lives of complete strangers. It’s a game that embraces humanity in all its rawness and vulnerability. In my review, I mentioned the double-edged sword that Kind Words’ premise promises: in encouraging people to open up, we hope to feel understood and less alone; at the same time, we may become unduly burdened by the suffering of others that we alone cannot fix.
While the setting of Kind Words was localized to a single room within the bedroom of the game’s protagonist, who we can for all intents and purpose call Lo-Fi Girl, Kind Words 2 radically expands this one room into an entire village – a mini-city, to borrow from the sequel’s subtitle, “lofi city pop.” The resulting game feels a lot more comprehensive, a lot more lived in. Though I have never played Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I can’t shake the comparison in my head between the two games. The expanded Kind Words 2 feels like a small but real place where you are both a part of a local community free from the unceasingly inhuman demands of this capitalist hellscape and also integrated with the broader community consisting of its player base spread around the world.
Kind Words 2 works as a sequel for several reasons. Chiefest among them is the way that the developer, Popcannibal, expands the original game’s gimmick: writing letters. In addition to the writing you can enact from the confines of Lo-Fi Girl’s bedroom, the game now features places for alternative, more task-specific writing prompts like the cafe and the hilltop. Perhaps you choose to visit the coffee shop; there, you’ll be greeted with spoken word poetry. You can choose to peruse the poems of others or write poems of your own. In my time with the demo, I read a truly bizarre limerick about blueberries. In response, I plagiarized the great American poet, William Carlos Williams, with his now-memetic poem about the plums in the icebox, hopefully leaving a future player equally perplexed.
The venn diagram of the type of person who would love the original Kind Words and people who might enjoy spoken word poetry has to be a complete circle, so this pairing makes immediate sense. It is incredibly intuitive to take a passively multiplayer game like Kind Words and sharpen the writing focus via individual venues like the coffee shop. I felt a similar success story with the hilltop where you can make a wish on the constellations in the sky. (I burst out laughing when Lo-Fi Girl, going through other people’s wishes, said “A Billionaire Tax” atop the hill. I had to rewrite it for the next player to encounter.) Kind Words 2 wants to hone its prompts such that you can tailor what kind of experience you want to have from the game. This design decision effectively accounts for the worries about emotional bandwidth that I alluded to in my original review of Kind Words.
Last year, my game of the show for PAX East was Wildmender, another indie title that has since reached early access. I think Kind Words 2 became my 2024 game of the show for similar reasons that I stated in my discussion of Wildmender. While PAX is a horribly inefficient context with which to demo and become immersed in new games, strictly speaking as a player, the high volume of players on the show floor highlights the potential of passively multiplayer games in a way that Steam Next Fest never truly does. When I walked up to Wildmender, I encountered a garden that had been tended to by hundreds of players over the course of the event. It was a one-off server for PAX, and I knew that every single tree, every single seed, was planted by a real person, promising the potential of the full game.
When I walked up to Kind Words 2’s table at the PAX Rising section of the show floor this year, I encountered a similar feeling: this demo fit the structure – inefficient or otherwise – of the PAX experience. The communal nature of such a game works incredibly well in the densely packed and yet anonymous environments that the show floor provides. At PAX, a truly representative slice of players engage with the game, players that might otherwise scroll past Kind Words 2 in the Steam store. Writing in public also encourages players to, well, be nice – something that gamers are not notorious for being.
When I entered the coffee shop in the PAX demo of Kind Words 2, I was the only player who read the blueberry poem, and so in a very real sense, the thing that game developers always hollowly promise – that you can experience your own unique story – was true here. I thought it was charming to read about blueberries, even if I didn’t have a terribly literary interpretation to offer in response. Somehow, blueberries translated to the first poem I could remember about fruit, “This is just to say,” and I hope whomever read my William Carlos William rendition was equally mystified. But unless this article sparks a trend, I wouldn’t expect to read about plums when you try out Kind Words 2 for yourself.
Another resounding strength of Kind Words 2 is the developer’s decision to not divide the playerbase. I thought it was curious that Kind Words 2 existed at all when the original was so incredibly successful at the scope it set out to achieve. But a sequel makes sense when you see the ways in which the expanded world, as well as writing opportunities within it, coalesces. In an unrelentingly commercial industry where cash grabs are all too common, nothing about Kind Words 2 feels like it leaves its dedicated players behind. Rather, this sequel feels like an organic idea birthed of passion and love as opposed to a cynical attempt at capitalizing on the original game’s success. Whether I want to continue playing the original to my heart’s content, or I want to engage in the New Horizons-eque village meanderings of the sequel, no one gets forgotten as the game moves on.
In theory, experiences like PAX East provide the influx of player messages that a game like Kind Words needs to remain “relevant” in the industry. It’s a game that doesn’t demand a lot of play time to be understood. With more to do, it’s also a game that has a high likelihood of standing the test of time given the larger volume of activities in the sequel. If Kind Words never made it onto your radar, then make sure you wishlist Kind Words 2, which looks for all intents and purposes to be a definitive version of the original BAFTA-winning game.
Other PAX East 2024 Highlights
There were other highlights from my 2024 PAX East that I will be day-oneing when they eventually release. Fretless – The Wrath of Riffson, for example, is a musical take on what feels like Chrono Trigger, and the effectively paced demo had me drooling for more content in whatever becomes the final version of the game. What stood out to me about this demo was the fresh presentation of combat, smartly borrowing terms like “gain” and “echo” from music and pairing them with a deck-building system for musical attacks. In Fretless, you can tune up your bass and guitar at various workstations, and add effects like capos and new strings to improve their abilities.
Another contender for my game of the show, Athenian Rhapsody, had some hilarious gimmicks within the demo and the actual show booth itself. Feeling very much like Undertale, the demo pokes fun at games industry events (“Yes, as you can see… My convention is called ‘T3.’ It is quite the spectacle, yes?” and “Boy oh boy, we’re gonna have such a great time here at T3 which is much cooler than PAX East! Forget I said that!” stand out as my favorite lines). I want this article to primarily focus on Kind Words 2, but I have to mention the cowboy hat that I wore while playing Athenian Rhapsody. It was truly one of the weirdest and most memorable booth experiences from my 2024 PAX East. My thanks to Epilogue writer Barry Irick for capturing this magnificent moment:
Kind Words 2 was the game that delighted me most on the PAX East show floor this year. I’ve made no secrets about my feelings regarding sequels, wondering loudly why games like The Last of Us: Part II even exist in the first place. After my surprise faded, the elation at Kind Words 2 remained. While there is no projected release window for Kind Words 2, I will be eagerly anticipating its release whenever it’s ready.
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