Winter, 2001: Someone tell Luigi I love him
A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
Help Luigi find his brother.
WASD to move. Click to open doors.
Julie Muncy, WIRED: "Winter, 2001 captures the fondness I feel for those memories better than anything more straightforward could."
https://www.wired.com/story/winter-2001-mario-luigi-sibling-game/
PC Gamer: "In this strange, sad, and funny little game...every part of this odd tapestry feels appropriate...there's something at the heart of this lightly unsettling game."
All models from Luigi's Mansion, Super Mario Sunshine, and Mario Kart 7.
Font from Super Mario Sunshine. Music inside the house from Luigi's Mansion.
Download
Install instructions
Just download, unzip, and run the "Final build" Unity application!
Comments
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The melancholic aura that permeates in this game is fantastic. It feels like an original take on loss, but it’s hard to explain why. I can see why this is a classic.
wow i'm happy i stumbled upon this joey schutz classic! the dialogue at the start is rly beautiful and i kind of just let it wash over me on the first playthrough/couldn't follow the thread then it felt very rewarding playing again and seeing what was going on. there's a very high level of attention paid to every transition between scenes in this game that inspires me a lot. the multiple luigis gameplay makes it feel like almost like a lost early prototype of a different luigi's mansion but also in a dream and also half-remembered, which elevates this game from being one's average plundercore. makes me very curious about how much of this game appeared clearly in your head and how much emerged from just working on it. the switch from earnest chidhood memory to horror story also took me way off-guard.
ahh thanks hatim :)) this was my very first game, and i had a loose idea in my head of what i wanted to do but i didn't know nearly enough about game dev to actually execute haha so most of the development was me pivoting and letting a new shape take hold. actually the opening dialog was added last, which is sort of funny since i think it's what holds it all together -- my background was in writing, but i had read so much in game design articles / textbooks / etc about how visuals and mechanics should be driving everything and writing was bad, so i felt i shouldn't have writing in my games, or use it very sparingly (which is a bit of an overreaction probably on my part lol). anyways it wasn't working and so in dismay i finally added some writing and it really transformed the game into something i was happy with :) thanks for playing!
Banger, really made me think about my own brother and how we would play games when i was a kid, and how distant we are from each other now
hey thank you for playing <33 i find it's strange to feel those distances -- but it can be nice to revisit what something "lost" once meant to me. i hope revisiting was nice for you this time around :)
hey, thank you so much for making this. i'm an only child, but this helped me peek into the world of having a sibling in a way i've never experienced from any other piece of media. there really is something existential about working together with the person you're growing up with to co-habit a single digital body. luigi was the first video game character i ever got really attached to as a kid, so he holds a special place in my life too, if perhaps a different one. as a result, playing this was such an uncanny blend of my experiences/feelings/life and someone else's experiences/feelings/life. i'm glad i found this, it was actually by searching "luigi" on itch.io haha... i appreciate how short it was, it felt like a poem you direct with WASD. thank you for sharing this part of yourself and your life with the world.
hey thanks so much for the kind words! :)
Very neat. I'm scared easily and I was pretty afraid something would pop up by the end but thankfully the game is smarter than using cheap scares. It's eery but also capture a certain nostalgia about gaming late at night as a kid, which is not as conflicting as it sounds.
Great stuff.
Thanks for playing!
Great game, but is it supposed to just end after you find the mario portrait?
Thanks! Yeah, you made it to the end. Thanks for playing <3