Butterfly Soup 2
2017’s visual novel Butterfly Soup made waves with its heartwarming and deeply human story of queer Asian high-school girls playing baseball and falling in love. In 2022, artist and writer Brianna Lei finally released a sequel, once again demonstrating her knack for giving us characters who are more emotionally and psychologically complex and real, more funny one moment and heartbreaking the next, than just about any you’ll encounter elsewhere in games. The new game didn’t get quite as much attention as its predecessor, though, perhaps because Lei is only continuing to prove what we already know: that she’s in a league of her own. But her work is no less vital now than it was in 2017. Games this alive and human are still all too rare, and Butterfly Soup 2 deserves to be recognized as one of the year’s great game achievements. — Carolyn Petit
