Deeply embarrassing.

Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.

Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.

This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.

The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.

The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.

Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.

Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.

What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.

If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.

It's Undertale! No, wait, it's Paper Mario! No, wait, it's a creepypasta! No wait, it's a metaphor for toxic relationships!

Impressively enough, Buddy Simulator manages to fumble all of these things individually, and rather than fumble the job of blending them together, it doesn't bother. The elements don't mesh, nor do they clash. They're just sort of there. It does one thing it's seen before, and then it does another, like a monkey imitating a man with no real understanding of why he does the things he does.

In fact the entire game can be described as a series of monkey see, monkey do moments. Undertale had irreverent NPC dialogue and creepy tonal shifts, so we can do that too. Paper Mario had quirky side kicks and action commands, so we can do that too. All of these elements are used once and then discarded because there's no overarching thought to how they contribute to the whole, either in terms of gameplay loop or thematic resonance. The narrator is clingy and annoying and that's supposed to be scary. Surprise! Your computer is haunted, and it's possessed by a discord sadboy.

Stunning to learn that Daniel Mullins didn't make this game because it really does have his stink all over it.

Imagine if some game dev stared at a piece of shit for 5 minutes and said "What if it had gameplay", he would probably make Buddy Simulator 1984.
This piece of shit is not scary, is not fun, it's a chore to get through the dialog, and it railroads you into doing stuff in the most boring way possible.
I guess people are really impressionable these days or something to get "enthralled" by the first hour, or maybe life got me too cynical? I don't really care, I lost precious hours of my life in this crap and even more writing this.

Play this game if you wish you to be annoyed.

Neat experience that's rough around the edges.

Went in completely blind so I had no idea what to expect.

I like how the game "evolves" over the course of it.

I didn't exactly get attached to the buddy though so it didn't land as well for me.

(Por favor, jogue essa obra sem ter visto nada de spoilers, vá de mente aberta.)
Buddy Simulator 1984 apesar do nome é um jogo realmente bom.
Eu o comprei com o intuito de jogá-lo para tomar uns sustinhos aqui e ali (Até porque o jogo tem um visual meio de terror), mas na verdade, o jogo não se trata (só) disso. Buddy Simulator possui por trás de sua plot uma boa filosofia, vou colocar dessa forma. O jogo trata sobre uma IA que é amigo do jogador, e por conta disso faz de tudo para animá-lo, porém, a diversão acaba rápido, e a IA se vê desesperada para arranjar alguma coisa que faça o jogador ficar mais tempo com ela, e muitas vezes toma atitudes contraditórias para mantê-lo o máximo possível por perto.
Antes de falar sobre a história maravilhosa desse jogo, quero contar um pouco sobre a experiência de ter jogado Buddy Simulator. Como posso dizer... BS1984 é um dos poucos jogos que me fizeram realmente pensar sobre o que eu estou fazendo e as consequências das minhas ações. Eu amo quando me sinto assim jogando algo, pois a gameplay não é feita de somente momentos tipo "Ok, tenho que ir até a base inimiga e matar 300 soldados, eles tem família, mas é só um 2D, não tem problema.", mas sim de situações que (No meu caso) faz você se sentir mal, principalmente como a forma que a IA/Amigo reage a essas coisas. é um pouco difícil por em palavras as emoções que esse jogo me trouxe, principalmente depois de ouvir as músicas ( que são relacionadas aos finais) as quais me trouxeram uns 3 tipos de depressões diferentes.
O ponto que me deixou emocionado com essa obra é o que ele trata, ou seja, o tema que ele está abordando, que vai muito além de uma IA e um jogador se divertindo. Buddy Simulator conta sobre perda, conta sobre amizade, muitas vezes não correspondidas, conta sobre "seres" que fazem de tudo para permanecer do lado das pessoas que gostam, e muitas vezes pioram a situação. Esse jogo mostra um relacionamento que é muito comum pelo mundo, um relacionamento "tóxico" no qual uma pessoa faz qualquer coisa pela atenção. Eu sei como é, já passei por isso, e talvez esse seja o motivo de eu gostar tanto dessa maravilha. Sei como a IA se sente, ela só quer passar mais tempo ao lado de quem ama, só que muitas vezes se vê perdida e desesperada quando perdem o interesse. É revoltante, é angustiante, e você acaba se lembrando dos bons momentos com seu/sua amado(a) e quer ter essa alegria mais uma vez, criando situações que ao invés de proporcionar felicidade, machuca ambas as partes.
Acredito que seja isso umas das coisas que Buddy Simulator 1984 queira passar para os jogadores, a ideia de que forçar as pessoas a ficar do seu lado só torna as coisas piores. Em relação aos finais, eles são realmente bons, falam sobre a aceitação, sobre bons e velhos momentos, falam sobre redenção, sobre medo e angústia, ou sobre acusação e ainda mais dor.
Buddy Simulator 1984 é uma obra prima entre diversos outros jogos genéricos, recomendo fortemente jogá-lo.

Tortura em forma de jogo. Aguentei o adventure de texto, aguentei o joguinho 2D de exploração com diálogos chatos, mas o jogo ainda consegue piorar e se tornar no RPG com o pior sistema de batalha de turnos que já vi, tudo isso somado a uma trilha intankavelmente chata, diálogos insuportáveis e uma exploração cansada. Tudo pela promessa de que algo vai acontecer e me surpreender há algum momento.

Tortura é uma palavra muito adequada, é um eterno lenga-lenga de um "terror" que ameaça a todo momento que vai te dar medo e nunca chega lá.

A ideia é legal, mas aqui não passa de uma ideia pretenciosa e mal aproveitada.

lot of cute ideas but ultimately not executed in a way that's interesting or distinct from other "heckin' wholesome games that turns out to be a SCARY game". it plays its hand way too early with no buildup and barely tries to even hide the genre mix-up midway through, leading to a woefully boring and overplayed yandere-type antagonist at the end of the road.

thank god we're out of this era of storytelling in gaming, it should've died with doki doki.

a fun experience at best but dreadfully overhyped and unoriginal at worst.

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how this game made them cry, which makes me a bit wary of being too harsh on it. It can really suck to see someone trash on something that really, genuinely touched you and made you feel seen, and far be it from me to take that away from anybody. Maybe the narrative at play here is worth the hype, but this isn’t just a narrative, it’s a video game and as a video game this one of the worst I’ve played in a while. Buddy Simulator 1984 tries its hand at several different things and fails at all of them. It’s a horror game that isn’t scary, it’s a comedy that isn’t funny, it’s an Undertale-like that doesn’t display even a quarter of the talent Toby Fox has in just his pinkies. This game doesn’t even have the decency to give you any half-decent character designs to look at. I really tried, but I can’t find any sort of saving grace or redeeming value here, it’s just a miserable experience all around.

As per usual with this type of game, you wanna go in blind but chances are you know at least a little bit about what you’re getting into. If not, just enjoy the ride, experiment, see what you can find and uncover, and what the game reveals to you. Does it all work? Not always, but at the same time.. it kinda does?? It takes playing it to understand - even if that doesn’t make much sense at all typing it out.

For others looking for a bit of context: without spoilers, it’s dashes of Inscryption, Paper Mario, Minit and also what I would
call a heavy Petscop creepypasta influence. Take that as you will.

My buddy’s name was Poopy, and he showed me a good time, warts and all

Only finished the neutral ending, Going to finish the other endings soon, already became one of my fav games of all time

People complain a lot about the middle parts, i honestly found them really charming, the only problem i had with the game was getting bored before the beggining of the end, but i think that's intentional considering the story :)

It's important to note that the game tries to be overly cheesy on purpose and ironically. I really recommend this game if you're a fan of OneShot and/or doki doki, or if you have attachment issues in general

I can't put to words how much i love everything about this game, the music, the characters, the world..