Game with a relatable story about going back to your hometown in adulthood and it REALLY sucks, not because anything's changed with the cute old map-shop couple living across the street, or the curry special at the local diner, but because you've had cinder blocks tied to your feet causing you to walk at a glacial pace, and your good old friend Fujita hasn't gotten into conspiracy theories or MLMs, but building space-time exporation devices he insists you to check 'the vibrations out'. He breaks you into a power plant, you meet aliens, and things get worse from there.

The game itself is mainly walking (slowly) around the surprisingly detailed and realistic-feeling town with your shitty car, the fastest bus system in the world, and trains. You can check e-mails to get a sense of who to meet or when, but sometimes these people want to meet you at nighttime and you can only pass time by walking around, or sitting on a couch (for one hour at a time: and up to two hours max.)

The minimal interactions and weirdly detailed spaces with their bespoke toilet rooms and random characters stick around in your mind afterwards. I think that's the game's strong suit - all you can really do is talk to or kill people, but that combined with your relative helplessness in combat make you even wary to walk around a hospital, since some characters will just assault you based on your in-game state.

Well, I didn't stick around for more than 3-4 hours to really see what could happen or pan out beyond a few in-game days, but it's a unique game. There IS technically a goal to do (pursuing the mystery of the game,) but it feels equally valid to just barely follow the plot and wander the huge city and enjoy the wonderfully-modeled spaces. It feels Crypt Underworld-like - the game doesn't really progress the story a lot of times outside of moments you really have to hunt for, so it kinda feels like walking in and out of bizarre, city-life vignettes.

Fujita, your friend you have not talked to since high school, has something important he would like to tell you! Good luck finding where he lives!

After about an hour of meandering around a very liminal town of no cars and no citizens (the ingame explanation is that there is a virus going around so people are staying indoors, but we all know the PS1 couldn’t handle having an entire town to explore and actually have life in it as well), I finally figured out how to read my map. After randomly stumbling upon a weapon shop called “Wild Arms” (???), I buy a pistol then proceed to beat the store owner unconscious with the baton I apparently already had. Poor guy.

Somehow I made my way back to the starting point at my office where I proceeded to the map store nearby. Wherein I asked for directions to my friend Fujita’s (You know, because everyone just knows where some guy named Fujita lives right). I get back into my car and make my way there, finally with purpose!

Upon arrival (bar the occasional stop-gap when my car hits a barrier and can’t move, so I have to get out and find a payphone to call my car back to me, repeat) Fujita shows me some weird machine, of which I already forget the purpose of, then he takes me to his garage... where he has some C4. Now we are going to blow up the power plant, because “things are changing” (oh god, this is starting to sound like I joined some rightwing terrorist plot). Me, being a silent protagonist with no boundaries, decide to go along with said plan without any dispute whatsoever.

We take the bus to the power plant and the guard bars the entrance. There’s some random cop there too and I kill him with my pistol, because why not. The guard doesn’t even notice the dead cop next to him. Fujita says we can enter through the back way. So we do. Once entering the back of the power plant I proceed to get reckt by a doberman guarding the place (but no humans anywhere). I eventually kill him with my pistol and read his dogtag “Ohm, loves going for walks around town.” Poor guy.

4 stars

Proto-Pathologic que nos mete en el papel de periodista, investigando el origen de una extraña epidemia que resulta en una invasión alienígena encubierta. Como escenario, toda una ciudad monocroma a explorar libremente, vista a través de las gafas de They Live, ausente de vida, como reflejo de cierta mirada cínica hacia una sociedad gris y monótona. O quizás no y es solo casualidad como tantas otras cosas del juego. Con una progresión de leer correos, investigar lugares y liarte a palos con mutantes alienígenas de apariencia humana. Con un singular sistema de muerte, orgánico dentro de su narrativa.

Sorprende su innovación como descuadran sus extrañas decisiones de diseño, difíciles de discernir si intencionadas o placeholders de algo a lo que no se le dio una segunda vuelta. La más extraña quizás la de matar gente como forma de conocer su trasfondo. Una acción violenta sin ninguna consecuencia real desde el momento en que salir y entrar de cualquier edificio resucita a todo el mundo. Cosas que llevan a pensar si realmente se daban cuenta de la implicación de ciertas acciones. Como darnos el papel de periodista para, al poco de comenzar, entregarnos una pistola y hacernos encarar un acto violento hacia trabajadores de una central eléctrica, sin motivación o justificación previa. En They Live al menos tenía un sentido de justicia liarse a tiros con los alienígenas enmascarados y la violencia no dejaba de ser el principal medio de comunicación del estadounidense honrado.

Germs comienza intrigante, el tono sobrio contrasta con la extravagancia alienígena y hasta la portada ayuda a darle ese aura de extrañeza que atrapa. Pero descarrila en cuanto toca avanzar por la siguiente mazmorra y matar al jefe de turno. Es un juego interesante, vanguardista y pionero en muchas cosas, lo que por supuesto no significa que le salga bien todo lo que se propone.

Hey I also published a version of this with some pretty pictures on medium

At first blush Germs: Nerawareta Machi is another entry in that class of oddball PSX Japan-only curios, a game good for glancing at and then digesting into a piece of trivia or a short youtube video. "Do you know about this weird game Germs?? Check out the cover art."

When you dig deeper into it though, Germs reveals itself to be a genuinely fascinating and worthwhile work of art about the terror of change, full of ideas and ambition so great the game itself can struggle to contain it all. A team of just six developers crafted a 3D open-world narrative action-adventure game set in a single explorable city, on console, in 1999. Germs's use of space anticipates the contemplative, barren landscape of Shadow of the Colossus. It had a fully 3D drivable open world two years before Grand Theft Auto did. It features survival elements that would become ubiquitous in popular games in the 2010s. It predates Deadly Premonition by over a decade. There's still nothing quite like it.

Germs sees its protagonist coming back home after many years away. They left to work as a journalist at a respected newspaper, but all these years later a series of strange occurrences in their hometown have inspired them to return and investigate the mystery while working for the local paper. Germs opens on a foreboding note, the brooding soundscape suggesting that perhaps this old city was better left alone.

But the temptation is too great, something remarkable is definitely happening in the town. Reports have come in of a shining ball of light flying over the mountains. A strange office has appeared in town that sends emails to residents about viruses, change, evolution, and ascension. Dozens of citizens are found wandering out of the abandoned coal mine in a state of fear and confusion; nobody ever goes in but people keep coming out. A tale of invading aliens using a virus to mutate humans gets underway, and it's up to the player to get to the bottom of it all.

The player is lowered into this mystery with minimal guidance. The computer terminal at their office has a few unread emails that point in the right direction, and their assistant suggests they ask around the information center nearby, and that's it. Germs offers an open-ended adventure where the player can poke around the town at their leisure, and investigate the leads in their emails in a non-linear order.

The world outside the office is rendered in stark black and white. Recalling the paranoia of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Them!, the grayscale visuals present the town as full of latent danger yet drained of energy, a place no one should inhabit. The coal mine the town was built around has long since closed down, and the rows of blocky buildings form a giant skeleton that houses only a few sources of life. The game's interior spaces are in color, as if the survivors in the town are the only remaining sparks of life hiding from the oppressive atmosphere outside. This eerie environment is one of the most striking I've ever inhabited in a videogame. It feels like a surreal nightmare bottled and preserved. The world is inert. For the protagonist, being back home is like being trapped in a faded photograph.

At the start of the game, upon receiving an email from an old friend asking the protagonist to meet them at their house, the player is faced with Germs's first and most definitive challenge: to figure out how public transportation works in the city. There are multiple bus routes, an underground metro, and a train in Germs's city, all on top of the car the player is given from the start. This series of transportation systems is realized with beautiful detail. The large scale of the city makes learning their operation essential for getting around, and their interconnections make the overall world design the greatest single aspect of Germs as a work of interactivity. This is a game that turns remembering directions for taking the subway and walking a few blocks into a thrilling experience.

Nearly as impressive is the game's approach to narrative design. Germs's narrative plays out in a modular series of events, which the player can tackle non-linearly. Each key building in the game goes through several major story states, from pre-invasion, to invasion, to liberation. Locations in Germs get recontextualized from mundane spaces to dungeons full of combat encounters, then back again, which makes the sense of invasion feel all the more real. Tied into these main beats are the stories of several characters, from some old friends of the protagonist, to a mad scientist, to a secret agent tasked with investigating the town. Their narratives progress as the player liberates buildings and visits them in optional sequences, which makes the overall narrative design lightweight and fluid, especially for a game of this era. Empowering the player to talk to people and clear out locations in the order they choose helps to ground them in the city, and allowing them to help dictate the narrative's progression makes the town feel like a real place in real danger. Finally of note is Germs's unique fail state. If the player is defeated in combat they do not get a Game Over, instead they're reborn in the coal mine as the sort of mutant they've been killing. In this state they can talk to the other mutants peacefully and carry on with their life, though they won't be able to progress further in the game until they get cured at the hospital. On top of all the other interesting things Germs was doing in 1999, it also turns a player's failure into a narratively and mechanically intriguing, thematically resonant feature, something most games two decades later are struggling to do.

Despite its achievements in narrative and world design, the game is not without its share of rough edges. The combat is clunky at best, though it doesn't commit the sin of also being challenging. Circle strafing or ducking behind corners with a decent weapon is all it takes to defeat any mutant, and frankly this is a positive. In an experience full of friction the combat itself proves mercifully straightforward.

Likewise, Germs's integration of role-playing and survival simulation mechanics is forward thinking but embryonic in execution. The player has to manage hunger that doubles for health, damage to their individual limbs, and the need for sleep. The game also features an experience point system that lets the player level up their competency with individual weapon types as they use them, increasing accuracy. The kitchen sink-ish inclusion of these elements adds to Germs's overall ambitiousness in design, but in the course of play they end up feeling a bit perfunctory. Keep your health up at restaurants, see a doctor and sleep at the end of the day, and stick to one good weapon to make it accurate, that's the extent of the decision making.

The area where Germs's various design elements do cohere into brilliance is in the interplay between the health system and the aforementioned world design. To get through a building full of mutants, the player will want as much health as possible going in, and since their health depletes slowly over time, they're incentivized to get from place to place as efficiently as possible. This means skillful play in Germs is not in the shooting, it's in the navigation. The game trains you to plan a day trip to the coal mine by learning the fastest route to a delicatessen to get food to go, then knowing which bus will get you to the closest station for the special train that heads north to the mine, and then knowing the quickest way to get back to the hotel via the subway so you can squeeze in a visit to the strange old man living near the mountains before bed.

Germs's somewhat sparse story speaks to the pain and fear that comes with change, and the fear that stasis might be even worse. Two of the major characters are old friends of the protagonist. One of them is coming back to town for a job, what else, and by the end she feels the virus welling up within her, stuck between the human she was and the deformed thing she might soon become. The other friend never left, he stayed and dried up along with his hometown, and all he has now is his endless study of the virus. Even when the invasion has been stopped and the mutants killed, he just thanks you politely before stating that he really ought to get back to his research. The alien virus engulfing the town changes the host into some other type of being, and the transformation is described by turns as either horrific or sublime, and often both. The long abandoned town is now the site of cataclysmic change, and interestingly, the protagonist has come back to their lifeless home in order to stop that change.

I come from something of a ghost town myself. It's a small place with lots of dead ends that seemed to me growing up like it was specially built to be moved away from. The idea that I could one day go back there, take up a job, and pick up my old life, gives me a sort of creeping sensation like I can feel my body decaying around me. But on the other hand as I move forward in life and set big goals that I inevitably fail to reach, I feel the fear of the unknown future, wondering if I'm up for whatever strange and difficult form it's sure to take. Germs speaks to me as an examination of that tension, staying still is unthinkable but moving forward is terrifying. The understated tragedy at the heart of Germs's slim narrative lies in how, after defeating in the final boss the part of themself that wishes to embrace the grotesque future of mutation, the protagonist dismantles the source of the change in the name of safety. The choice makes sense, it's an alien invasion after all, but what is left in the end? The game has no distinct ending, no fade to black with credits rolling. The player is just sent right back to their office at the newspaper, the only change being that the citizens are more grateful and fewer in number now. Color does not find its way back to the targeted city, it's just the same old town. No alien invasion killed this place, it was already dead. The ending of Germs: Nerawareta Machi is just that faded photograph, an endless, quiet purgatory. The future the aliens promised may have been horrific, but without it what the hell is the present? It's a brilliant, haunting non-ending that follows the player even after the game is shut off for the last time.

Germs deserves to be more than trivia. It's shockingly prescient, systems-rich, full of harmony between narrative and mechanics, and the only game from a small team of artists biting off the biggest goddamn gulp they could imagine with zero thought as to how they might chew it. I love it, it's one of the finest pieces of foreboding and alienation I've ever played.