I've paged over all of the various games vgperson has translated over the years, making a mental repository of which ones had my interest and I wanted to give a try. Yet, all those times, Re:Kinder always fell squarely in the "not interested bucket" because, well, just look at any screenshot of it. Look at it! On the surface, this game is fucking grody, an amateurish mashup of default RPG maker assets that all clash against each other. Every character looks like they're missing one of their eyes when their sprite is facing to the side. Where the fuck is that Backloggd icon from? Everything at face value would suggest that this is a hastily slopped together thing in the sea of the thousands of other RPG Maker projects made over the past several decades not worth caring about.

And yet, what if I told you that underneath this presentation, somehow, some way, this was not only a good game, but one of the best experiences I've had with a RPG Maker game??? It's kinda crazy.

Re:Kinder stands out on two fronts. First, the number and novelty of gameplay situations it sets out during its short runtime is incredibly strong for the genre. The puzzles are generally well thought out and play with the standard RPG Maker elements of inventory and interactables. There is also some combat, but the leveling and inventory systems are stripped out to make each fight more of a puzzle using a limited set of tools. The apartment towards the end of the game is certainly the highlight, with a clever interaction puzzle and one of the most novel combat encounters I've seen in one of these RPG Maker games pasted back-to-back. The combat encounter has you run around a room collecting items and gaining new skills as you fend off a boss constantly trying to engage in combat with you, until you obtain the tools necessary to ignite the boss for an instant kill. It was a bit on the obtuse side (I consulted vgperson's guide for it, which even she admitted some of the elements of the fight were quite inexplicable), but that didn't take away from how novel it felt.

It's other main appeal is the writing and tone it goes for, with a poignant discussion of the impacts of mental illness. The game takes place in a world where mental illnesses are treated as quack science by society, examining how people deal with not having an outlet for or even recognition of their issues. It's a clear reflection of our own world, and it explores the concept with a pretty hefty depth, again, for its short runtime.

Yet, the main villain Yuuichi throws in a hefty mix of off the wall, often dark humor into the game, sometimes right in the middle of some serious moments. Nothing quite prepares you for the main villain coming out after just having murdered a kid to an intense track with Spanish lyrics, nor a stock photo of a dog suddenly flashing on screen (more than once!) in the middle of a conversation. There's a great sense of humor here, making me laugh at several points from the sheer absurdity of what happened. The soundtrack to the game is diverse and shocking in all its own ways, adding a lot to each scene, even if sometimes that a lot is a "wtf is happening right now". By the end of the game, even the seeming mess that is the graphics feels, somewhat, kinda, almost the intent, feeding into the chaotic vibes of the chaotic world.

The craziest part about all of this? Re:Kinder is not some avante garde title, but instead indicates its a remake of the TWO THOUSAND AND THREE game Kinder. Finding out about this after beating the game made its novelty and strong theming feel even more potent. The framework of this game is over 20 years old! It's older than Yume Nikki! From what I understand--there's no English translation of the original release--the dark comedy aspects of the game were added into the remake, where the original kept a thoroughly dark tone throughout. I believe this addition ultimately made the game more interesting. Still, the rest of the game, how it handles mental illness and even touches on some queer themes, and how it plays on the conventions of the RPG genre is radically ahead of its time. Honestly, it pulls a lot of these things off better than many other RPG Maker games I've played that released a decade+ later.

The longer I sit with this, the more profound it feels to be experiencing this creation of an individual 20 years after it was first released, almost in tandem with when I was born. One of the main reasons I play RPG Maker games is the way the pastiche reveals these experiences revolving around, in most of the cases I've seen thus far, a single person's thoughts and identity. In the best case, stepping out of my world to delve into someone else's mind for a couple hours, seeing everything they have to say. These minds enshrined in code that will be available for time in memoriam, from times I didn't get to experience the way I am able to now. And, idk, Re:Kinder is one of the best enshrinements of this.

Definitely my favorite game, it just gets everything right for me. This is the most personal and raw depiction of childhood I've seen in any media. It's also extremely funny? I wouldn't even say it balances humor and horror, it makes them intrinsic to one another in a way I've never seen done before. The way the battles are made fresh in the default turnbased rpg style is insanity to me. Also I really do have a soft spot for doujin product art, there really is something to admire like in higurashi when a creator who isn't primarily an illustrator does their own art for the sake of making a complete product.

inhabits the sense of childness better than most things; the third graders here being utterly unhinged in their expression in a way that rings far more true than either the naive or precocious archetypes that children are often chained to in fiction. in third grade these kids wrestle with mental health, death, and the eternal cudgel of generational trauma; they respond accordingly with coarse jokes and catastrophic outbursts and reflection; they seek companionship, they try to wrangle their feelings, and the outcomes are mercurial and messy and ugly and dumb and real. in third grade these kids are about what I remember of being in third grade — an impressionistic, heightened portrait, if not always a direct doppelganger

it uses its own status as remake as an opportunity to carve up the format with broad, erratic cuts. equally crushingly earnest and sneering at its own earnestness; irreverent humour picking at its own skin. embracing a need for warmth, kindness, and compassionate understanding while burning its own history with a magnifying glass for fun and interjecting frequently with self conscious fourth wall breaks and edgy non sequiturs

plumbs the depths of rpg maker design to pull elaborate gotchas; a puckish sprit overtaking the game's more perplexing asks; saving a life only by being impossibly hypervigilant to the point of psychic phenomena or counter clockwise time travel. scenarios get increasingly unmanageable and more brazen in their expectations, forcing failure and having you reckon with an endless parade of "what if"s while simultaneously showing an undeniable cleverness for these kinds of punji stick designs

the queasy true ending is the elaborate last showcase of the game's dueling philosophies. telling us what we already know, it sets the table up for unconditional love and understanding before the dealer flips their cards to reveal some things are immutable; the participants bowing out with a hideous BANG, canned laughter, and the wistful murmur of those who want to be better — to themselves, and to those around them

rest in peace parun

when i'm an adult i hope to be a kinder one.

sobre trauma geracional e a dificuldade não só/necessariamente de se conectar, mas de procurar empatia, procurar quem entenda e quem ajude. talvez a única maneira de romper com o rito seja dar um fim completo ao último na linhagem da maldição, mas a bondade prevalece sob a angústia e praticá-la, mesmo ao ver o pior reflexo de nós mesmos em outrem, é a chave para tornarmos pessoas melhores.

outro banger do parun. rip.

recently me and my boyfriend have been rewatching Hulu’s normal people which isn’t great but I think the source material and those characters are some of my absolute favorites. it’s a story that’s underneath everything else about the failings of previous generations on younger ppl. ie connell and marianne aren’t bad ppl at all but have the capacity and the learned knowledge to be bad and awful towards their friends, each other and to themselves. the family life of marianne compliments things for her and connell’s financial situation (already being poor and coming of age in the recession) makes things harder for him. the past failings of past generations screwed things up for the next. and bc of the open-ended-ness of both the book and the series the implication if viewing the characters wholly pessimistically is that they too will mess things up for whoever comes next and each other bc they weren’t taught any better.

Rekinder more than any other piece of media I’ve consumed is about future generations reckoning and reaction w their parents generation.

there’s that rlly cringey and also very famous segment in the fight club movie where brad pitt, standing in presumably for all of gen x, says that they’re a generation of men raised by women and that is more or less why they are failed men for lack of a better term. it’s a good theory and a good scene in practice, blaming the past without doing any introspection is a good bit and would actually work if not so deadly serious and even worse sexist and espousing borderline MRA talking points. rekinder is about rightfully aiming blame at others while also holding urself accountable for ur own actions and shortcomings regardless of how u ended up that way.

it’s also a game very of its time and of its place, very edgy and scenemo. the jokes and the references sure but most importantly the visuals. it reminds me a lot of weirdo indie horror animation I would watch in my teens, a lot of it rlly well produced but also not rlly saying anything. rekinder says sm in such little time, it’s also def about how kids and teens as time progresses they become more and more desensitized to their own environments. I was a preteen when the Boston bombing happened and I remember day of making tasteless weird jokes to my friends and asking my family who even cared and why was I supposed to care. it was supposed to be shocking and upsetting definitely but I felt nothing when it happened and when national tragedies happen now I try to have empathy and sympathy but I can’t say I’m any closer to “getting” it. just that I’m more mature and less edgy w how far removed I feel from stuff like that. this past week YouTube randomly recommended me a real liveleak video. there is rlly no reason why the algorithm suggested this to me, I just happened to stumble upon it while searching smth completely unrelated up. I didn’t watch it obv but the thumbnail to the v short vid made it very clear what was about to happen. it was gross and weird to even see the image but it was also hard to realize that that’s a real human life, it feels distant and fake and the memory of it more or less completely left my mind and with time will totally leave my mind. and I had a similar experience w a drawn piece of cartoon gore present in the very end of the game, it felt sudden and it was gross looking but it felt just as distant and fake as that thumbnail. the children in rekinder are so completely desensitized to their real world that their demeanors and attitudes aren’t rlly different once the tone of the game shifts about ten minutes in. and it’s because of their fathers and mothers and those parents fathers and mothers that they’ve ended up in a world where nothing is shocking and nothing is scarier than the world in which they’ve already spent their whole lives growing up in.

cute game and a very hopeful one at that, idk maybe generation alpha will buck certain cycles that every preceding generation hasn’t been able to^_^
traumacore but with hope and love in every moment
I love the deviant art tier drawn portraits of the main characters and how the backgrounds are still present in their little character models and not like edited out.

This is a bit of a mixed bag for me but if I'm really honest here the thing that impacted me the most was Parun (the developer) and their personal story. Since it hasn't really been said here I'm not necessarily comfortable discussing it in a review but feel free to look it up if you are curious.

The foundation is great. It's the Corpse Party/Misao vibes with a story focused on mental health and tackles the effects of domestic abuse, adultery and the main theme of loneliness. These are all concepts that have the potential to be executed well even in an RPG Maker format.

The dialogue was where things got a bit strange for me. There's moments where a lot of out of place humor or plot points break any genuine feelings I had towards Yuuichi and Shunsuke. Yes, it's a tragedy. I've seen quite a lot of tragedies in these games but this one was just not one of the better executed ones. Details like the father's roleplay fetish and the interjections of the dog, while fairly amusing, ended up rubbing me the wrong way in a game with such a serious message.

The other problem is that the gameplay here is extremely annoying to deal with. It is a combination of the trial and error puzzles AND the turn-based combat. The puzzles aren't bad, until they are. There are points where the solutions are so specific that you wouldn't know without a guide.

The example that is still sticking with me a dark hallway where you lose your friend Ryou. You can obtain a flashlight beforehand, but you cannot activate it, implying you need to use it later. In actuality, you're supposed to wait till you hear a sound while moving through the darkness, check your menu until Ryou's icon disappears, turn around and keep walking back until you encounter Ryou, then access a cutscene in which Shunsuke will turn the flashlight on. Stuff like this exists in other RPG Maker horror games, yes, but this one felt like it had significantly more moments like that.

Turn-based combat is also basically just a puzzle. This makes it also another very specific trial-and-error type situation, in which most turns require to do extremely specific moves or patterns, else you will die. I did not find this to be very fun.

If I disregard the strange dialogue and the slightly shallow way the story portrays itself, there were certainly things to love. The mental health focus is still something I must respect and will cherish the impact it made on this genre. Parun spoke out about something that absolutely deserved to be talked about and he did it in a very unique way. I thank him for this and he will be missed.

The ending is certainly memorable and I can't help but feel that there is a very real connection between the true end and the fog surrounding mental health in our world. Some will ignore it, others will never even know it is there. That is definitely true horror.

I think I also realized I need to start looking for some really happy games to play in the meantime because goddamn have I been on a major depressing game spree.

played oct 2nd (finished oct 15th) for rpgmaker october

after playing this myself w a friend in tow id say heisei pistol show is the better game--this being a remake of a 2003 game forces it to somewhat rein in the more wild tendencies hps lets loose, and it being more subdued is not always a bad thing but it can make it feel too beholden to the blunter theming and rpgm horror conventions of the original that im not as big on. this being said, its one of the most fascinating cases of a remake out there, and even reined-in late oeuvre parun is at a greater power level than almost anyone else working with the engine. coming back to kinder to take the piss out of its own corpse party riffing and its overly sentimental moments with tone smashing cutaway gags and black humor is so much fun, and ironically makes its concerns more believable, more infused w a keen sense of self-deprecation that wont let itself wallow in misery. the motifs you can spot from hps that were added to the remake too (the princess/prince tale, art serving as parallax backgrounds) go to show there was a sincere drive to revisit the project and not just mock it emptily. yuiichi being campier in this version (as far as i can tell) makes him even better as the host of this show. the ending where everyone dies is everything i love abt parun distilled too, literally one of the best bad ends ever.

reaching the credits is too sad knowing this is the last song this author sang to us. a disappearing act at the end of a grand finale is too much to bear when they arent around to hear the applause they deserve.

This game starts really hard, having kids as main characters makes the things even better, we do not get EXP, there are no permadeaths but they can die under certain events in the story.

Music is good but not perfect, could be better, art is very nice for the time.

Sadly, this game suffers of the same issue as the other RPG Horror games, depression and all that shit, this one kinda takes it pretty well compared to other works but, maybe it was me but the message of depression of this main antagonist wasn't so powerful compared to the Aya kid.

Getting the TRUE END on this game is not a chore but it's trial and error and since you can save wherever you want you can just repeat if a child dies because of your mistakes.

Overall a pretty good game despite it's very few flaws but still a nice distraction if you want to sit 3 hours on a game at most.