Free Indie Game Roundup

 Recently I did a event on my stream that I titled "Free Indie Game Dumpster Diving" and despite the word dumpster in the title, most of the games I played during that stream were actually really good.  Here's a quite roundup of those games 

1) Gun Devil 

Gun Devil, avaliable for free on Steam, is a 2D side scrolling platformer.  It starts with a story sequence about your characters wife being kidnapped and its full of semi-edgy early Newgrounds tier writing that's a little bit cringeworthy but once the game gets going its a rather enjoyable experience.  It has tight controls, some very nice pixel art and despite being a quite a short game has some replay value after you are finished because you can get these giant coins at the end of each stage for doing it no hit and killing all the enemies.  I would have happily paid a few bucks for this one but you can play it right now, for free. 

2) The Backrooms: Lost and Found

The Backrooms are some creepy-pasta thing that I dont fully understand but there seems to be a lot of media surrounding it.  This game involves navigating through the backrooms looking for wooden giraffes while you are on the hunt for an exit.  Depending on how much you explore you can get one of SEVEN endings which I have to admit is quite a lot for a free game.  However, the game has a really stupid stamina system that makes running around sort of tedious and after the first run I can't really see myself ever going back to see what those other 6 endings were.  Not terrible by any means but you can do a lot better in terms of free indie horror

3) Freight Hopper

There was a game that came out a while ago on Steam that cost money called Clustertruck (I think) that involved free running across the tops of trucks as they sped down the stages.  It's the kind of game that's made for speedrunning with its emphasis on clearly levels quickly and movement mechanics.  Well this is just a free version of that.  Not many levels and the controls are sort of floaty and weird but once I got used to them I had a pretty good time.  If you liked Clustertruck and you need some more of it in your life, play this one I guess.

4) Workaholic

A first person shooter about shooting your co-workers in the face with finger guns.  There isn't really much more to it than that, you just blast your way through 4 stages that have sort of random layouts and then your done.  The art is cool and the gameplay is fast but its way too short and is just begging for some kind of endless mode which I don't think would have been too hard to implement given that the levels are procedurally generated anyway.  There's a fairly impressive selection of weapons for you to find which is cool but picking up a life steal, super kick or dual weild powerup puts a weird filter over the graphics that make it borderline unplayble.  Pretty good as long as you avoid those items, would play again .

5) Ghost Trap 

Very basic precision platformer that doesn't go too crazy with the difficulty.  My only real complaint is that there's a lot of waiting around for the games 2 bosses that make them quite annoying.  Comes with a cool speedrun mode which lets you play all the levels back to back without having to go through the annoying menu every time.  

6) Resonance of the Ocean 

Some kind of art game about a person on a island trying to communicate with someone by copying strange noises that come from another nearby island.  You have to go around picking up and combining items to make the right sound and then take them to a big megaphone to end the stage.  Very basic, very easy and very much has its head shoved up its own ass.  Nice art though

7) The Night that Speaks

When someone in my chat told me about this game they described it as "a game where you fight monsters by giving them the finger" which got me very excited.  Upon playing it though it's just a bland and boring horror game and giving the baddie the finger to make it go away isn't awesome like I thought it would be and it isn't even really all that funny.  Also the game was made to look like it was on Game Boy, which sounds cool but it just makes all the graphics murky and its hard to make anything out.  I got it for free and felt ripped off

8) Self

A interesting platformer where instead of jumping you sort of expand a big rubber band and use it to flick yourself around the level.  Not much more to it than that but its short, sweet and has some really good music.  Comes with some bonus challenge levels that are actually really hard and its very satisfying to clear them after some practice

10) Grippy

A Pico-8 game where you play as a piece of chewing gum that has to grab its way around a bunch of stages.  Its interesting because you play it by using the arrow keys to direct your fists and then you have to hold and release either Z or X for each hand in order to swing around.  Takes a while to get used to but really fun once you get the hang of it.  Also has multiple routes through each section with the harder ones being shorter so the more skilled player can get a faster clear time, which is a nice touch.  Will probably play again some time to get my time down.  

11) 13 Gates

A very basic first person platforming game.  You play the 13 levels, have a sort of good time and then never play it again 

12) Guardian Sphere

The game I chose for this posts header image because it was EASILY the best one I played in the entire 14 hour stream.  A top down shooter that has the cool gimmick of your life points also being your shot power AND a form of currency.  There are 5 stages and each stage has a couple of shops in them where you can spend your HP for various upgrades creating a sort of risk/reward system that can be really satisfying when you gamble all your HP for a sick upgrade and then survive long enough to collect a few more hit points again.  The game also has 8 playable characters to choose from each with there own shot type and 3 difficulty settings.  I did a 1cc run of the game on my first try on normal but that's because I'm an actual shmup God rather than the game being overly easy, I think for your average player this game may be kind tough depending on how lucky you are with the RNG shops.  You coulda put that on Steam for $10 and I woulda been happy but giving it away for free on Itch is just Godlike  

13) Plead with the Mountain God

A PS1-like platforming game which rips off the story of Shadow of the Collossus almost enitirely.  Only instead of having epic battles with giant monsters, you're very clunkily jumping up a tower.  Gameplay gets very dull very fast, has no music and at once point I glitched through the floor but not an awful experience by any stretch.  A forgettable game

14) Ashes 2063

A full, stand alone Doom conversion that I didnt finish during the marathon but happily added to my "now playing" list as it was a ton of fun.  Adds a bunch of stuff that base Doom doesn't have like towns, dialouge and shopping.  Quite challenging as well but there's a chance that I thought that because I was 12 hours deep when I started it.  Will post more about it in the future

15) Mini-Doom

A Doom fan game that I played for about 20 minutes but that seems really good.  A 2D platforming version of Doom that has a Mario 3 style world map and elements of a Metroidvania.  Didn't play enough to form a proper opinion but at a glance it seems very interesting indeed

That was all the games I played during the marathon and overall I had a damn good time.  If we get enough channel points via the stream at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis then we'll do another one!

The Last of Us Part 1 Is Pointless (and stupid)

 

Oh boy here we fucking go again. 

I remember when The Last of Us: Remastered came out on PS4 and I had all sorts of nasty things to say about that because is there anything more obviously money grubbing than "remastering" a game only a year after the release of the inital version?  Well history does like to repeat itself as yet another lazy cash grab from the hacks at Naughty Dog, who haven't done anything other than bottom of the barrel, shallow dross since the early 2000s I might add, are doing yet ANOTHER version of the first Last of Us game.

See, there is nothing inherently wrong with a remastering of a game as evidenced by the release of Resident Evil on the Gamecube. 

 When this came out it was cool to see because there was a 6 year gap between the release of the original and this one and in that time there were HUGE leaps in graphical tech and game play conventions.  We went from the game having cereal box people walking around on low poly pre-renders to models that actually looked like people walking around some really high detail environments.  On top of that the game was changed up a little with some additional mechanics, new areas and new bosses and a few other things.  When this came out it was absolutely incredible to play.

The problem with The Last of Us Part 1 is that even though there is technically a bigger year gap (9 years) the tech hasn't jumped up quite as dramatically as it had back then and game play conventions have become a homogenised mess that even the PS3 version back then was very much playing into.  If what I've read about the game is true also there is no extra content or nothing particularly special about it so it's literally a case of throwing it into an up-res machine, spitting it out and charging $70 for it.  It's disgraceful, lazy bullshit and the fact that anyone is even remotely excited for absolutely boggles my mind.  

If I'm being really honest, if a company MUST wallow in their back catalogue I'd rather they remake a game entirely rather than just remaster it and slap a new price tag on it.

For example I'm much more a fan of something like the Final Fantasy VII Remake because is's basically an entirely new game.  The good thing about a remake over a remaster is that it's not really a replacement for the original game and therefore feels like almost an entirely new experience.  If I want to go back to my 3 disc semi-turn based RPG with Duplo people on the PS1 then I can pop that game into my PS1 and enjoy that.  Then if I want to play a stealth-sequel retelling of those events with real time combat and modern graphics, I can play that and now both the old and new retain equal value. The same thing goes for the Resi 2 Remake.  If I want to enjoy some classic zombie murdering with tank controls, RE2 is right there for me to enjoy and if I want the same thing but a bit more modern then I can fire up the remake and enjoy both the game and the ugliest 3D burger ever produced by an artist ever made.

If The Last of Us Part 1 had waited, let's say, 10 more years to come out.  When the first game was nothing more than a memory in some old mans mind and then he could re-live that memory in 2032 turbo-graphic-o-vision then I wouldnt mind.  If the game had been added too, or reworked in some way akin to REMake then I also wouldnt have minded.  But as it stands The Last of Us Part 1 seems like a soulless, lazy, cash grab pile of bullshit because Naughty Dog KNOW they can milk your comfort zone to cash and they are willing to do it, as hard as possible, with absolutely no remorse

Shameful bullshit

Amnesia Rebirth: A Good Idea Left Unimplemented

 

At time of writing I have just finished Amnesia Rebirth, provided to me for free by the Epic Game Store.  I am also maybe the most frustrated I have ever been with a horror game in my life.

I'm not really here to write a review or anything but I'll quickly cover my thoughts on my playthrough.  Amnesia Rebirth is a game I was expecting very little out of based on the previous entry in the series called A Machine For Pigs.  The first game, The Dark Descent was greatly entertaining but Machine For Pigs was no more than a walking simulator spook-house made by a group of devs so devoid of talent that you could have probably made a better game by giving a new born baby a 1970s IBM and a big stick to hit it with.  Luckily Amnesia Rebirth is a bit more of an actual game and tells the story of a woman called Tasi as she gets stranded in the desert in a plane crash as she goes through caves and some alternate dimension in an attempt to escape and save not just her life, but the life of her unborn child as well.

Gameplay involves exploring areas, solving puzzles and occasionally hiding/running away from a monster.  The sanity management thing from Dark Descent is back where spending too much time in the dark or looking directly at the creature will cause you to freak out and die so managing things like your supply of matches and latern oil is something the game tries to convince you is important.  However Rebirth is also incredibly easy with pathetically easy puzzles and no punishment for failing encounters with the creatures, but I'll talk about that later.  That said though, it was just entertaining enough to keep me playing to the end without getting too angry with it so as far as "run and hide" horror games go you could in fact do a lot worse.  

So why am I so frustrated with it?  Well one of the main things in the game is the main character "controlling her fear" and "not succumbing to anger" and all that bullshit.  It's pretty clear, pretty early on unless you have some kind of brain problem that the events of the game are somehow her fault and she's actually retracing her steps finding out what happned to her and the crew of the plane that went down at the start.  As you play you encounter a monster that will, in certain areas, attempt to chase you down and get you, only if and when it does get you, you don't actually die or game over.  The game throws you a mini cutscene of the main character running through a couple of previous explored areas and then waking up either just before or sometimes just after the area you were just in.  

What I thought was going on was that every time the creature caught you, that was her "succumbing to her fear" and so each failed creature encounter would somehow affect the ending in some way.  What compounded my impression of that happening was the fact that after you are caught and get back to the monster area, the monster is gone from that zone.  Like you are now free to progress the game monster free at the cost of the ending.  Not failing any monster encounters would mean that she managed to stay mentally strong during the whole ordeal and you would get the best ending and failing all or nearly all of them would give you the worst one, maybe with some other factors thrown in as well.  

However none of this actually happened.  As soon as I hit the final cutscene and was given a "do X or Y" choice the rug was pulled from underneath me and I realized that all of that hiding and running away that I did barely mattered at all.  The only monster encounters that actually matter are the spoopy ghosts with the lanterns near the end because they dont actually despawn when you fail but, and I'd have to test thing, they lose the ability to "kill" you after the first time.  

The other reason I thought this was the case is because when you start the game you are given a choice between "normal mode" and "adventure mode".  Adventure mode basically just turns off the monsters and the sanity mechanic and lets you just explore and puzzle solve and is described by the game as "for people that don't want to deal with horror".  

There are two things wrong with this

One is that, like I said before, getting caught by the monster just deletes it from the area anyway so even if you're the worst hide and seek player of ALL TIME you still only need to suffer one minor failiure before you are allowed to progress.  Two is what the fuck do you mean by "dont want to deal with horror"?!  Why in the name of bloody fuck would you buy the THIRD GAME IN A SERIES OF HORROR GAMES if you didn't like horror?  That would be like me going to see a movie called "Love Actually 3" and then getting pissed off at the fact its a romance movie and not a supernatural thiller, what a stupid fucking mode to have in your game.

So what could have been a cool mechanic that encourages repeat playthroughs just wasn't used at all and now if I want to see the other endings all I have to do is load my save and pick the other other thing.  "Push a button on the Ending-tron 3000" is the shittiest, laziest most bullshit way a developer can implement multiple endings and anyone who's used that method deserves to have an entire day spent in wet socks, you're a disgrace.

Despite my griping though, Rebirth is still SIGNIFICANTLY better than A Machine for Pigs which granted, is not a very high bar to pass, but at least there is an attempt at an actual game here.  The most 5/10 horror game you'll ever play in your life

Fire Emblem Perma Death is Important

 

In the last week or so I've fallen down a sort of rabbit hole of Fire Emblem content on YouTube which has acted as the inpiration for this post and I want to take a moment to discuss one of the franchises sort of controversial mechanics

If you have never played a Fire Emblem game allow me to fill you in on what I'm talking about real quick.  Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs that has been running since the NES with stories focused on warring nations and their armies and such.  Unlike something like Advance Wars though each unit in a Fire Emblem game is its own character with dialogue, story beats, personalities etc. and if they fall in combat they are usually gone for good.  Some Fire Emblem games have methods of reviving dead party members in extremely limited capacity but generally speaking if someone dies in FE, they are gone for good.

What a lot of players have been doing for years and years, then, is to reset a mission as soon as a single character falls and in the case of the later games the perma death has become a toggleable feature that can be turned off entirely so a fallen unit just "retreats" from the battlefield and can be re-deployed again next chapter.  People do this generally for two reasons.  The first being that they have sort of grown attatched to the character either for mechanical or story reasons and the idea of moving on without them fills the player with such dread that they would rather hit reset and tediously do an entire mission over than carry on without them.  The other reason is fear of "softlocking" themselves by losing either a character they feel is proficient or losing too many characters in a single chapter.  They worry that by losing certain characters they will be totally unable to clear the next chapters and thus have to restart at an earlier save or, in the worst case, the entire game.

Well on both fronts this is completely stupid because these games are designed with player loss in mind.

The softlocking thing generally speaking will not happen on a normal play through of a Fire Emblem game almost no matter how many units you lose.  In each game you are given a lord character and if this guy or gal falls then you are met with a game over and are forced to restart the chapter.  If you're losing bad enough on a map to get more than 1 or 2 characters killed, chances are your lord is going right down with them so progressing past a massacre like that is probably not going to happen.  But even if it does, what Fire Emblem has been doing even since the NES is constantly giving you a stream of replacement units that you can use if the worst case scenario happens.  If you play a Fire Emblem with the perma death turned off or you reset upon a death you will generally find your roster to be filled with tons of duplicate classes.  The units you get later are probably not going to be quite as good as ones you get early that you can train for an entire games worth of maps but if you press on through every death, the chance of you making the game unbeatable are EXTREMELY low.  

Just to really hammer the point home here is a video example of how hard it is to softlock a Fire Emblem game in this manner.  The amount of effort this guy has to go through to get a handful of maps to be in an unbeatable state would never happen in normal play (also sub to this guy he's very cool)

The idea that being able to turn off perma death "for new players" in complete nonsense because Fire Emblem has ALWAYS been kind to new players.  All you're really doing is allowing for sloppy strategy in your STRATEGY. WAR. GAME.

But then there's the other more personal reason of become attatched to the cast and not wanting to continue if someone you like bites the dust.  Well I also think you're being silly by resetting or toggling to off because you are sort of undermining the entire point of these games' stories and removing any and all tension from individual story beats.  These games are about war and war is both brutal and unpredictable.  What the perma death does in a Fire Emblem game is really make you feel the weight of what these characters are going through and adds a lot of immersion to you, they player and supposedly master tacticain, as you work as hard as you possibly can to keep all these indviduals safe.

Here's an example

In Fire Emblem 3 Houses there is a mission when you're looking for a kidnapped person inside a spooky basement.  As you're going through the mission a guy on a horse weilding a schythe with a skull mask on turns up and starts threatening to push your shit through your nose if you don't get lost.  His stats are very high for that point in the game and you are supposed to be intimidated by this guy.  If you have the perma death turned off for this mission you are sucking every last part of the tension out of this scene.  If you screw up and get one of your students in range of him, he will just bonk them on the head, they will say "owie zowie see you next mission" and vanish off the map.  Only with the perma death turned on do you get the intended effect of this enemy.  With it on you'll probably want to stay well away from him to stop that scythe from dicing your cute mage waifu into little pieces or cutting your handsome lance boy right down the middle and thus you must also play smarter and be more creative with how you play.  It's the difference between having a story about war and having a story about a paintball match with swords.

I think the best sort of half way point that has been devised by the developers in the pulse system thing found in 3 Houses on the Switch.  In that game your lord character has a power to rewind time a little bit.  What this translates to for the missions is that if something goes wrong, you can pulse and reset a few turns and try to re-jig your strategy to not get someone killed or get a more favorable position.  This allows the player to still make mistakes or try risky strategy but not get punished too hard for it.  Do it too many times and your pulses run out so after that you're up shit creek so the tension is still there but you still have to play smart.  It then goes and ruins it by ALSO having the death on/off toggle but at the very least I have to give it credit for trying a solution more involved than just a lazy on/off switch.  The best thing about the pulse system is that players who were turned off by the perma death but still wanted to be a little brave and play with it turned on now have a title in the series to help them realize that it's not as punishing as they might think, and as a way of gathering new eyes for the series that's a good thing.

But whatever, if you enjoy FE as a reset-fest or you want to play with it turned off, then power to you.  These are single player games either way so just enjoy them your way.  All I'm saying is that I feel you might get a little more of these games if you played with it turned on.  Greater stakes equals to greater satisfaction when you win which equals greater amounts of fun.

Yakuza Kiwami 2

 

I just beat Yakuza Kiwami 2 on stream recently so I thought I'd share some thoughts on it.  

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a remake of Yakuza 2 on the PS2 originally released in 2006 but with beefed up graphics and extra content out the wazoo.  Being a direct follow up from Yakuza 1 it follows Kazuma Kiryu as he gets involved in an inter-family war between the Osaka and Tokyo branches of the Yakuza.  There's also a korean mafia involved and a plot involving the police and if I tried to write up a true plot summary this post would take me literally all day considering how many twists and turns it takes.  But really I'm not out to spoil anything in this post so all you really need to know is that the plot is absolutely bonkers and you MIGHT have some trouble following it completely if you have not played this first game.  There is also a remake of Yakuza 1 though (Called Yakuza Kiwami, go figure), so I might suggest giving that a go before jumping into the second one.  

This is a Yakuza game though so the plot is only about 25% of the overall experience because, as any fan of the series will tell you, these games are DENSE with additional stuff to do.  In fact, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is so dense with content that it's basically 3 games in one.

The first game is your classic Yakuza experience.  You wander around Sotenbori (based on Dontonbori in Osaka) or Kamurocho (a made up bit of Tokyo) progressing the story while you fight thugs, goons and other Yakuza clan members.  On top of that there are a ton of mini games including things like; Golf, Majong, Shogi, a karaoke rhythm game, UFO catchers and full versions of Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua On just to name a few.  They may seem like just distractions to pad out the game but not only are they fully formed games that are fun to sink a lot of time into in their own right, you get rewards such as experience and money for engaging with them so they directly help you out for the main game.  On top of that there is also an INSANE number of sub stories dotted around the two towns which also net things like rewards and extra finishing moves for combat.  Some of them are very basic and just involve beating up a couple guys and some of them are fully fleshed out, sometimes with cutscenes, mega side quests that involve going to multiple locations and really getting into the nitty gritty of the weird goings on of the two locations.  There is so much stuff to do in just the main game that you could play for multiple hours and not progress the main story a single beat but be constantly getting fun and engaging story and gameplay.  

But then on top of that you have the Cabaret Grand Prix.  The Cabaret game is unlocked pretty early on and involves Kiryu helping a down on its luck hostess club as it climbs the ranks of a sort of hostess battle tournament where the club with the most profits takes home the prize.

It's presented as a mini game but it's a full on hostess sim where you have to recruit girls, manage their mood, help them with customers during the game proper when you are making money and each segment of it has a full on plot going along with it where you get to know your staff and there's betrayal and intrigue and all sorts of shit going on.  The story and character development here is so well done that if you presented "Yakuza: Cabaret Grand Prix" as its own spin off title I would have bought it.  Also the "villains" of of the plot are cameos of various porn stars (pictured above) which is a fun little cherry on top of the cake if you're a complete degenerate like me.  

This content wasn't actually in the original release of Yakuza 2 and has been added for the Kiwami version.  I've been told it first appeared in another Yakuza game that I've not played and then was added to Kiwami.  I'm extremely looking forward to playing this one again in the other Yakuza game soon.

But even then it doesn't end

Majima Construction is another fully storied, fully fleshed out, could have sold it to me as its own game "mini game" where you have to play a sort of tower defence/real time strategy game to defend construction sites from a bunch of land sharks.  While in Cabaret GP the guest appearances where from popular porn stars, this one includes a rather large cast of professional wrestlers.  If you have ever watched the "No Laughing" series from a Japanese show called Gaki No Tsukai, Masahiro Chono who is well known for slapping a chubby Rakugo man in the face every year, is the main bad guy for most of the adventure, voiced by the man himself.  

This game gets intense too with some of the later missions being quite challenging if you aren't levelling up your team properly and sinking millions upon millions of yen into upgrades.  This is another mini game that was included in a later entry and then reincorporated for Kiwami 2 so I'm once again looking forward to doing it all again at a later date

My only real complaint about the game is that it's too easy.  I was playing on Hard mode and had no trouble beating up all the dudes throughout the story and the main game.  By the end of the game I was so skilled and powered up that I beat the final boss mostly by not moving and just pressing triangle to do a counter when he attacked me.  If you are having trouble with an enemy, the game is also far too easily cheesed but equipping a weapon, chugging an energy drink to fill your heat gauge and then spamming the unblockable heat attack with it until their health meter empties out.  

Still though, despite the lack of challenge Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a fun, hilarious, exciting and sometimes heart wrenching game that is absolutely brimming with content and will keep you going for a long LONG time.  Probably one of the best open world type games I've ever played, and you should play it too

Yurukill Pre-Purchase Impressions: Worryingly Interesting

 

Yurukill is a game that doesn't come out until July this year but after seeing the trailer it's such a weird idea that I have to say a few things about it.

Yurukill is being advertised as an "escape adventure bullet hell" game that is planned to be released for the Switch, PS4/5 and PC.  From watching the trailer it's easy to tell that this means the game is a visual novel combined with a sort of point and click adventure type thing that's ALSO combined with a....bullet hell shooter...of all things.  It's an interesting idea that will either be really good or be the gaming equivalent of chocolate mint ice cream on black pudding.  An idea that's so out there that regardless of what I hear about it from now until release, it's basically guaranteed that I'm going to buy it

Being a cross genre game doesn't inherently make it a bad idea.  Games like Persona 3 and up that combined Tokimeki Memorial style dating sims with RPGs turned out to be a fantastic idea and indie darling Undertale showed that you combine bullet hell "shooting" and RPG mechanics for something really special.  However what a game like Undertale also shows is just how hard it is to make a decent bullet hell shmup.

Let's be honest here, the combat in Undertale is kind of ass.  With the exception of maybe Sans and Genocide Route Undyne, most of the enemies have boring as shit, dull as dishwater attack patterns and the controls feel sort of "heavy" and the combat generally isn't all that great.  The writing and characters in that game is what makes it so special and the sub-standard combat can be forgiven because it's contextualised probably as part of the story.  As a "shmup" Undertale is a pile of ass but when regarded as an entire piece, it's not bad at all.  The other thing that elevates Undertale is that the set pieces in that game are incredible.  Like sure, the controls are kind of dog water and the patterns are basic and a bit dull for a shmup but the overall vibe of a fight like Metaton or the emotional weight behind the battle with Asgore means that it can get away with it.

But then there's Yurukill 

Just from this game player trailer alone you can see that Yurukill is a boring, generic looking ass shmup that looks like it was pulled from the underside of some doujin game freeware site.  Also it's hard to say for sure given what we know right now but it also looks like it doesn't benefit from having story context to help forgive boring game play.  Like there's a bunch of visual novel shit and then "oop, time for a shmup break" and the impression I get is that it's poorly thought out.  Some proper Triggerheart Excellia lookin-ass garbage.

But these are just my initial impressions from a trailer, who knows the later shmup levels might be crazy intense with fun game play and story context, don't judge a book by it's cover right?  I have another, slightly more personal reason for being wary of this game.  The first thing that this whole thing reminded me of when I first saw it wasn't Daganrompa, like it seems to in most people, but  Deadman Wonderland.  A fucking HORRENDOUS anime about a high school student being framed for a murder and having to serve a prison sentence in a theme park prison where people have to the death duels with their blood-based super powers.  It's fucking awful and I can't look at Yurukill and not get traumatic flashbacks to watching that pile of garbage.

Yurukill is an interesting combination of genres that means that even despite all the shit I just gave it in the above paragraphs I'm going to buy it and therefore I hope to whatever God may be watching down on us all that I'm wrong and the game is actually incredible.  But a dull shmup and a setting reminiscent of one of the worst pieces of fiction ever made means it has some work to do for a good write up.  

Fingers crossed though, I love it when whacky ideas work

Twilight Syndrome: Investigations

 

As a fan of the developer Grasshopper Manufacture and their lead dude Suda51, I decided to take it upon myself to go and experience a few of his older works when he used to work with another company called Human Entertainment.  Very recently I finished off Twilight Syndrome: Tansaku-Hen and so I thought I'd share some thoughts on the game.

Well I guess I should use the word "game" very lightly because there's very little in terms of game-play here.  Twilight Syndrome is a visual novel about 3 school girls who find themselves often caught up in some kind of spooky happenings.  Each chapter starts with some kind of rumor that one of them hears about and then the 3 go and investigate and a bunch of weird shit happens.  The main "gameplay" in Twilight Syndrome is the same kind of "gameplay" that you get in most games of this type, where you read the story and then every so often you are presented with A, B or C options and you pick one.  The choices that you make throughout each story change the outcome but I'll get into that a bit later.  Sometimes you are also able to control the girls around certain environments but there's not really anything to explore and they all walk so slow that I think going from one side of the school building to the other in Chapter 4, for example, caused me to age about 2 years.  Gameplay is not what we are here for.

Weirdly enough there is also an EKG at the top of the screen that at first made me think there might be things to hide from or options that would cause the girls to panic or die of fear, thus resulting in a game over but nothing ever came of it.  There's one chapter where one of the girls gets caught in a looping train station and every time you make the loop you find a public phone that's ringing.  If you choose to not answer the phone the girl runs away and loops back to it, causing the EKG at the top to pulse faster and change color from deep blue to green to red.  I wanted to test the effects of this so I kept on running away rather than taking the call and despite the bar being red and the pulse being extremely fast, nothing happened in the end.  I went the whole game and it never came into play so who fucking knows what that piece of shit bar is there for. 

I bitched about this in the last post but depening on the choices you make during each stage, you can end up getting a game over.  At the end of each chapter you are given a rating that includes 区 meaning bad luck, 中吉 meaning medium luck or 大吉 meaning big luck, based off what you get when you do those temple fortune telling thingies.  If you get 区 then the chapter is considered failed and you have to replay it.  This is annoying because the game doesn't feature a fast forward and it doesn't allow you to skip past the bits where you made correct decisions so if you fuck up you have to replay the WHOLE THING again, which is tedious as all fuck.  Usually though, these decisions are not hard to notice, where usually you'll get the worst result if you abandon an investigation early or leave a character behind.  For example there was one stage where one of the girls gets trapped in a room with a ghost and your choices shortly after are to either leave her behind and go home or go back and try to help her.  While I was streaming it I decided to leave her there to get ghost-wrecked because I didn't know about the game overs only to have a big 区 slapped on the chapter select list and told to do it again and properly this time.

But that's fine, that was me fucking around with the obviously stupid answer and finding out.  However there was one chapter where the wrong decision didn't feel so obvious and caused a game over.  It's in the aforementioned train station chapter near the end, where the girls find themselves on a ghost platform with a ghost train.  One of the girls decides it might be a good idea to ride the ghost train and you can choose between talking her out of it, or lending her about $300 for a ticket.  Now before I said that most chapters end in 区 if you abandon the investigation, correct?  Well this is the one time in the game where you HAVE to abandon the investigation or you get a failing grade.  Failing to talk her out of the train ride leads to her going missing for a week and then the police find her somewhere out of town with a hard case of amnesia.  What makes this double annoying is that this comes right at the END of the god damn chapter so if you got on that train because you've been conditioned to see your spooky shit to the end, then enjoy re-reading the whole thing, fuck face, 区 for you.

Annoying design problems aside though, the game is sort of interesting.  It sort of reminds me of something like Goosebumps are Are you Afraid of the Dark or some shit.  Not something I'll be ranting and raving about like Suda51s other works such as Killer7 but interesting for a one time play through and good enough to make me interested in it's sequel which is also called "investigations" but in Japanese it's 究明 instead of 探索.  Maybe "search" would be a better translation for this game's title but that sounds stupid as fuck to me

Anyway, if you were looking to play this for yourself you might be shit out of luck because as far as I'm aware none of of the Syndrome games have English translations.  Someone on YouTube has done a playthrough of them with English Subtitles attatched though so you could go look that up and just watch that instead.  You're essentially getting the same experience.  

For me though, this game ended on a cliffhanger so I'll probably write another post when I beat 究明