The team behind the Tiny Game Chronicles podcast takes a look at a game they covered in a previous month’s episode. For July, Michael delves into 1997 Reloaded by following their usual podcast format. Subscribe to The Tiny Game Chronicles podcast for their fortnightly episodes on short-form video games, and please make sure to check out the accompanying episode to this article on 1997 Reloaded.
1997 Reloaded is not a game you play. It is a story you sit in. A five-hour kinetic visual novel that asks you to stop choosing, stop optimising, and simply let three teenagers drag you through a reimagined 1990s where alternative rock never gets swallowed whole by the mainstream. You click to move, you read, you listen. That is it. For what this game is trying to do, that restraint feels exactly right. They are betting everything on the writing, the art, and the music with no safety net.
What makes that bet remarkable is who made it. 1997 Reloaded comes from Martha and Olivia Agostini, two Italian sisters working out of Genoa who decided that a video game was the right vessel for a universe that they have been building together for many years. The music and the story architecture of the game belong to both of them; they talk about themselves almost like twins, interchangeable, their work so tightly interwoven that it is hard to say where Martha’s line ends and Olivia’s begins.
Both are responsible for Roxy Doom, the alternative rock queen at the centre of their fictional 90s universe, though she only plays a minor role in this particular story. If there is a tilt, it is in how they divide their obsessions: Martha tending to the sound, Olivia spending long nights on the scaffolding of the world, fixing discographies and labels and dates so that every character they created together has a precise place in time. Before 1997 Reloaded, they ran Casscomics, a self-published imprint that already blended stories and music in graphic novel form. They are not traditional game developers. They are artists who, after more than a decade of work, realised that this murder mystery needed to be playable.
Top-line Thoughts
From the first flea market answering machine onwards, 1997 Reloaded makes one thing clear: you are a passenger. There are no dialogue choices, no branching paths to optimise. The teenagers at the centre of the story move from coastal Europe to the nights of New York and Los Angeles. Your role is to watch, to listen, and to sit with what the game is trying to say about music, justice, and the way whole worlds can vanish when the wrong people fall in love with profit. That lack of interactivity will be a deal-breaker for some, and the middle chapters ask for patience, but the ambition is real and the vision is coherent. When a kinetic novel knows exactly what it wants to be, the absence of choices becomes a kind of statement: this story is not a menu.
What quietly impressed me is how often the game rewards the kind of attention our current media diet tries to kill. Songs ask you to stay instead of skipping. Panels ask you to look at what sits in the background instead of just the speech bubble in the foreground. By the time you reach the end, it feels less like you played a visual novel and more like you attended a small, fiercely curated festival: three teenagers on stage, a dead musician whose story is being retold, and a pair of creators who refuse to treat any of it as disposable.
1997 Reloaded Standouts
The first standout is the art. At a glance, the game looks like drawn characters standing in front of blurred photos, which are real streets and subway seats and diner counters caught on film. The truth is more deliberate than that. Olivia told me that the soft, hazy backgrounds are almost all hand-drawn, built with specific digital brushes to create that blurred contrast against the sharper figures. Pictures were used as a reference, then recreated. Only a handful of photos, drawn from their own catalogue, remain as actual photographic elements, and even those are folded in as mixed media rather than shortcuts.
Some of the most important spaces – the loft, the big club, the small venue, and Phil’s apartment – were first built by Olivia in 3D, then photographed, then hand-inked. The artists you see talking on the couch or at the bar are literally standing inside sets the sisters constructed and then redrew. Every background is evidence of a process: model, image, line. Over those grounded impressions of space sit characters drawn in bold, loose strokes, somewhere between graphic novel and fashion illustration. This is not just a style choice; it is a conversation with history. Since the Dadaists in the 1920s, artists have known that placing a drawn figure over a grounded image creates a gap. The space behind is the world as it was; the figure in front is memory, interpretation, and reconstruction. That gap carries meaning. It says, ‘This happened, and this is how we remember it.’ 1997 Reloaded lives in that gap, panel after panel, refusing to let you forget that you are looking at a world where reality and myth are always rubbing against each other.
What makes this even more striking is scale and ethics. There are more than two thousand illustrations in this game, all handmade. No AI. In 2026, that is not just a craft decision; it is a refusal. A choice to do the hard, slow work themselves rather than outsource it to a machine trained on other people’s labour. You can feel that in the way the linework sits over the background, borrowing from the same tradition you see in Banksy’s figures on real walls or the cover art of post-punk and New Wave records from the late seventies and early eighties. The game knows exactly which visual lineage it belongs to, and it honours it by doing the work.
The second standout is the music. The entire soundtrack belongs to fictional artists from inside the game’s world. These are not licensed tracks from real bands. They are songs written as if these artists existed, released albums, and played small clubs up and down the West Coast. Then, crucially, they are performed by real professional vocalists. Jessie Wagner, who has shared stages with Lenny Kravitz and Duran Duran, voices one of the central artists. The compositions, mixing, and production are all handled in house by Martha and Olivia at their studio in Genoa. Every note in this world comes from the same two people who wrote, drew, and built it.
There is one mechanic around the music that still lingers in my mind. When a song starts, you can move on. Or you can stay. If you stay, the track opens up: arrangements deepen, new layers slide in, and details that were always there become audible. If you’ve played A Musical Story, you will be familiar with this pattern. The game is replicating what serious listening actually feels like. First play, you catch the surface. Third or fourth, you hear the countermelodies, the space between the notes where jazz musicians will tell you where the real music lives. Building a fictional catalogue that behaves this way is no small feat. Each track has to carry a character’s personality, suggest records you have never heard, and feel like it was recorded in a specific decade with a specific studio sound. 1997 Reloaded does all that in its own quiet way, suggesting that listening is a gift offered to you and not one you should ignore.
The third standout is the Roxyverse itself and the shadow history it is arguing for. Early on, Roxy Doom feels like a name attached to a mythic figure at the edge of the story, one of those legendary musicians whose influence is everywhere and nowhere at once. The deeper you go, the clearer it becomes that this universe exists because the developers refused to let a certain kind of music history be erased.
Olivia’s definition is simple: “The Roxyverse is the universe of Roxy Doom. She is the epicentre.”
Their first graphic novel was dedicated to her story. She returns in Andy Quinn’s story as well. There is even a site where Olivia has built a complete fictional discography of the decade. This world is much larger than one game. Go hunt that Easter egg if you feel so inclined.
I was a young adult when Nirvana’s Nevermind hit, and I remember what it felt like to watch underground music suddenly become the centre of the world. The record is a landmark. That is not in question. But when it sold tens of millions of copies, the major labels did not fall in love with the way those chords made people feel. They fell in love with the numbers. The industry absorbed the music, extracted the profit, and moved on.
But something quieter slipped away in the process. What we lost was not just bands. We lost much of the infrastructure underneath them: the independent labels, the record stores where someone might hand you a strange cover of a record that quietly changes your life, the small clubs that existed first and foremost for the sound and the vibe. Within a few years, a handful of corporations shaped most of the radio with near-identical playlists. Artists who did not fit were not wiped out exactly, but they gradually fell into silence.
1997 Reloaded imagines a world where that rupture never happened. Where alternative rock kept following its own curiosity, crossing into jazz, soul, rhythm and blues without a marketing department deciding which lane each artist had to stay in. Crucially, this imagined world is not idyllic. Power still has a way of reaching people who will not fall in line. The industry does not need complete control. It only needs enough silence around the people who are inconvenient. There is a moment in the game when one of the teenagers realises that nobody has ever sat with all the pieces of Andy Quinn’s life and death in the same room at once. The fragments were always there, scattered across tapes, articles, and memories, but they were never quite troublesome enough for anyone to lay them out and see what they were quietly saying.
That line between truth and silence is where 1997 Reloaded lives. Andy Quinn finding a true counterpart in this world is not just a love story; it is a musical argument about what becomes possible when artists are allowed to breathe the same air. Martha and Olivia, Italian sisters working with dialogue in Italian, no translation, built entirely by hand, no AI, are making something on their own terms and trusting that the right people will find it. That is the whole argument.
Who Do I Recommend This To?
I recommend 1997 Reloaded with honesty rather than blanket enthusiasm. This is not for everyone, and it knows that. There are no choices, no traditional gameplay loops, just four to six hours of reading panels and listening to songs. The middle can drag if you are not in the mood to sit with teenagers being teenagers. Grammar slips through now and then. To meet it halfway, you have to be the kind of person who stands in front of a painting long enough to notice what the painter buried in the background, who puts a record on and listens past the first layer because you suspect there is more underneath.
If that is you, this game was made exactly for that kind of attention. Late in the game, Roxy Doom tells you: “Truth is what you want to believe to be true.” By the end, you know exactly what she meant, and that line has earned its place. 1997 Reloaded is made entirely on the sisters’ own terms, and you feel every bit of that, both in the places where the work sings and in the little rough patches where you can see the edges of budget or energy. For me, that honesty is part of the appeal. If you have ever cared about what the nineties alternative scene represented, not just the sound but the idea of it, you will find something here that matters.
1997 Reloaded is out now and can be purchased on Steam
