This review is for Act 1 of the game Snatcher.
Act 1 is a standout experience, receiving top marks across several aspects. The balance of puzzles is just right, offering a challenge without being overly difficult. The pacing, both in gameplay and story, is well-executed, keeping the player engaged. While the shooting controls may feel strange at first, they eventually become enjoyable.
The art in Act 1 is particularly impressive, considering the limitations of the hardware. Technologically, Snatcher pushes the limits for its type of game, showcasing innovation that sets it apart. Despite some minor tedium with backtracking, the overall experience is very enjoyable.
The music and sound design are top-notch, with clear and non-intrusive sound that complements the game well. Clarity in gameplay is mostly good, though the "look" vs. "investigate" system can be a bit confusing at times.
Act 1 of Snatcher's innovation extends beyond just gaming, making it a unique experience. While there are some repeated actions, they don't detract significantly from the overall experience. The game leaves players wanting more, with a high level of replayability.
The X-factor of Act 1 of Snatcher is evident from the start, and the game keeps players engaged throughout, making it a very satisfying experience. Fairness in gameplay is also notable, with the game feeling reasonable in its challenges. Overall, Act 1 of Snatcher stands out as exceptional.
Act 1 is a standout experience, receiving top marks across several aspects. The balance of puzzles is just right, offering a challenge without being overly difficult. The pacing, both in gameplay and story, is well-executed, keeping the player engaged. While the shooting controls may feel strange at first, they eventually become enjoyable.
The art in Act 1 is particularly impressive, considering the limitations of the hardware. Technologically, Snatcher pushes the limits for its type of game, showcasing innovation that sets it apart. Despite some minor tedium with backtracking, the overall experience is very enjoyable.
The music and sound design are top-notch, with clear and non-intrusive sound that complements the game well. Clarity in gameplay is mostly good, though the "look" vs. "investigate" system can be a bit confusing at times.
Act 1 of Snatcher's innovation extends beyond just gaming, making it a unique experience. While there are some repeated actions, they don't detract significantly from the overall experience. The game leaves players wanting more, with a high level of replayability.
The X-factor of Act 1 of Snatcher is evident from the start, and the game keeps players engaged throughout, making it a very satisfying experience. Fairness in gameplay is also notable, with the game feeling reasonable in its challenges. Overall, Act 1 of Snatcher stands out as exceptional.
Perfect vibes but the shooting sections can get in the bin. I didn’t love having to play as a literal sex pest.
Throughout history, suspicion has always bred conflict. The real conflict, though, resides in people's hearts. This conflict has just begun.
"KOJIMA IS GOD," I say as I pray on my hands and knees while The Man Who Sold The World (Midge Ure version) is played on repeat. This game is peak fiction and I mean it, like there is nothing bad about this game there was NOTHING that I loathed about Snatcher. The gameplay while barebones is still kind of engaging, the story is extremely kino, the art direction is stylish in the sense that it reminds me of 80's/90's anime movies, the music is phenomenal and and another example of how the Sega CD can produce such great sounds, the voice acting while not award-winning has charm to it which leads me to my next point, the characters all have such a pull to them that really makes me invested in the world around them and just them in general. I really wish konami or some other studio does something more with Snstcher like a sequel or remaster. So many clever things are in the game, but I hate doing long logs, so honestly, all I can say is "Play Snatcher".
"KOJIMA IS GOD," I say as I pray on my hands and knees while The Man Who Sold The World (Midge Ure version) is played on repeat. This game is peak fiction and I mean it, like there is nothing bad about this game there was NOTHING that I loathed about Snatcher. The gameplay while barebones is still kind of engaging, the story is extremely kino, the art direction is stylish in the sense that it reminds me of 80's/90's anime movies, the music is phenomenal and and another example of how the Sega CD can produce such great sounds, the voice acting while not award-winning has charm to it which leads me to my next point, the characters all have such a pull to them that really makes me invested in the world around them and just them in general. I really wish konami or some other studio does something more with Snstcher like a sequel or remaster. So many clever things are in the game, but I hate doing long logs, so honestly, all I can say is "Play Snatcher".
Kojima is the video game equivalent to those 70's/80's movie "classics" your middle aged father shows you that turn out to be the most unbearable pieces of cinema you've ever seen. Kojima's storytelling and writing consistently receiving universal acclaim is a testament to how low standards for video games are.
Literal hours are spent not developing any character. The story is barely coherent, more focused on hammering in information about the premise you've already been told about in great detail 5 times over. Connective tissue and leads between scenes are so loose the game literally stops to recap how every event in the last hour and a half is connected because they seemingly knew how weak and unmemorable each scene was. Very little actually happens for major chunks...And when things DO start picking up, they actually slow down. Instead of building emotional connections and stakes naturally throughout the course of the story -- it waits until there's time sensitive urgency to ruin with droning, unengaging, one sided info dumps telling you why you should care about what's happening.
I've always been critical of Kojima games but I went into this one thinking his style may lend itself well to a point and click adventure game, only to find even this genre's gameplay is too much for him. Tedious and repetitive, performing the same 2 actions of look and investigate ad nauseam until you get enough dry flavor text for the game to let you move on. Beyond that there's shooting mechanics that get a grand total of maybe 2 minutes playtime in the entire game. Any moment that uses said shooting has to over-telegraph the encounter, killing any tension they may have built up. Which is a shame because if this game does anything well it's having some good vibes and atmosphere in a few scenes.
Under a different director I think there's a lot of potential here for a tense point and click adventure, with an engaging mystery-focused plot. But, we're stuck with Kojima, who's idea of being cinematic is 30 minute exposition dumps combined with almost NO animation whatsoever for almost the entire game. In fact one of the only things in the entire game that's animated is a female dancer in a bikini, so that shows where the priorities lie here.
I already don't agree with Kojima's approach of ignoring the gameplay in favor of "cinematic" storytelling. I think it's a complete waste and insult of the medium to basically say for a video game to have a good movie-quality story you have to just make a movie and not a video game. BUT if the story was actually good, there'd be something to get out of it and enjoy. I'm a firm believer in judging something for what it set out to do rather than what you want it to be. So even if I
prefer a different approach, I try to meet a game halfway and keep an open mind to its direction. With that said, as a movie this game is horribly written and derivative at absolute best even for its time, and that's really all there is to say about it.
Literal hours are spent not developing any character. The story is barely coherent, more focused on hammering in information about the premise you've already been told about in great detail 5 times over. Connective tissue and leads between scenes are so loose the game literally stops to recap how every event in the last hour and a half is connected because they seemingly knew how weak and unmemorable each scene was. Very little actually happens for major chunks...And when things DO start picking up, they actually slow down. Instead of building emotional connections and stakes naturally throughout the course of the story -- it waits until there's time sensitive urgency to ruin with droning, unengaging, one sided info dumps telling you why you should care about what's happening.
I've always been critical of Kojima games but I went into this one thinking his style may lend itself well to a point and click adventure game, only to find even this genre's gameplay is too much for him. Tedious and repetitive, performing the same 2 actions of look and investigate ad nauseam until you get enough dry flavor text for the game to let you move on. Beyond that there's shooting mechanics that get a grand total of maybe 2 minutes playtime in the entire game. Any moment that uses said shooting has to over-telegraph the encounter, killing any tension they may have built up. Which is a shame because if this game does anything well it's having some good vibes and atmosphere in a few scenes.
Under a different director I think there's a lot of potential here for a tense point and click adventure, with an engaging mystery-focused plot. But, we're stuck with Kojima, who's idea of being cinematic is 30 minute exposition dumps combined with almost NO animation whatsoever for almost the entire game. In fact one of the only things in the entire game that's animated is a female dancer in a bikini, so that shows where the priorities lie here.
I already don't agree with Kojima's approach of ignoring the gameplay in favor of "cinematic" storytelling. I think it's a complete waste and insult of the medium to basically say for a video game to have a good movie-quality story you have to just make a movie and not a video game. BUT if the story was actually good, there'd be something to get out of it and enjoy. I'm a firm believer in judging something for what it set out to do rather than what you want it to be. So even if I
prefer a different approach, I try to meet a game halfway and keep an open mind to its direction. With that said, as a movie this game is horribly written and derivative at absolute best even for its time, and that's really all there is to say about it.
JUNKER forever!
This review contains spoilers
In the midst of continuing to play through the rest of the Metal Gear Solid games for the first time (it's been 3 years since I beat the MSX titles as my first true introduction to the series), I decided to go back and include some of Kojima's other works into the marathon as well.
The cyberpunk world of Snatcher is rendered beautifully on the Sega CD. Neo Kobe City has so many distinct and varied locations; whether it be the run-down abandoned slums where the Freemen gather or the black market city of Plato's Cavern (Joy Division, in the Japanese version), the sprite work is always gorgeous and colorful bringing these places to life. The character portraits are also well-animated and very nice to look at. Occasionally the game gets super dynamic with its presentation, especially where the third act primarily consists of fully voice acted cutscenes.
The game itself is really well-written, especially for one of Kojima's earliest works. The first Metal Gear was extremely light on plot, only ever going as far as to include a twist that Big Boss was the antagonist the whole time. I thought Metal Gear 2 was really where Kojima found himself in his writing ability, but this game's original MSX2 and PC88 versions predate it! Snatcher never gets too caught up in being a pastiche to American science fiction films to feel too derivative, and that works in its favor.
I had seen a review claim that despite drawing so much heavy inspiration from American sci-fi films, Kojima seemed to only have a surface-level understanding of those films' texts. It went as far as to say he missed the point of the movies by making the Snatchers generic bad guys rather than the expectation-subverting complex characters fighting to extend their expiration date that the Replicants of Blade Runner were. However, I'd argue both examine the human condition, just in very different ways. Whereas Blade Runner uses Replicants to make statements about what it means to truly be human and to live a fulfilling life, Snatcher makes pretty scathing commentary about the pervasive feeling of distrust in society towards those who are different being the cause of its ruination (which I initially took as a parallel to the American Red Scare, given the involvement of Russians in the Snatchers' creation, before the game explicitly stated it to be commentary on Japanese society). It's different from the movie it's inspired by, but that's a good thing. Even with the censored graphics of the Sega CD version intentionally obscuring the homage of the Bioroid Snatchers' design to the Terminator, I'd have found the story to be too derivative and devoid of Kojima's creativity and originality had they gone the exact same twist of Blade Runner with the Replicants being sympathetic.
The characters are wonderfully charming and all memorable. Gillian's a great character, and I cared deeply about his ability to reconnect with his wife and regain his memories. Napoleon the Chinese informant was funny, and I always rolled my eyes whenever he asked me for money in exchange for crucial information to progress the story. Randam Hajile was a badass bounty hunter, I just wish he appeared more often throughout the story. I felt awful for Harry after his close friend Jean dies in the field, and especially as the creator of my robot companion, I grew a close attachment to him. And speaking of, Metal Gear mk II was adorable and definitely the stand-out character of the whole thing for me. His relationship with Gillian progressing over the course of the story was very nice, and it makes me wish I had my own talking Metal Gear companion. He's so adorable! As someone eventually hoping to make her own video games, Kojima is my idol for a reason. He is a master at his craft.
The game also has plenty of moments of levity in the midst of an otherwise brutal and serious drama story. You can find a phone sex hotline number on some sample tissues passed out in Alton Square. You can call the number and make some really corny pickup lines and fail at "getting in the mood" enough that she'll just hang up. Calling again will make her give you her "private number", which is just a prank, out of service phone number. Calling a third time puts you through to a character that remarks that she's not actually able to do phone sex with you because it's a video game being monitored by ESRB censors, so they can't do much more than make vague suggestions towards sex with double entendres before she hangs up as well.
A great feature you can access early on is the JORDAN database. It's filled with logs about different characters and the history of Neo Kobe City. You can read up on various terminology and of the geopolitical state of the world leading up to the game's events. I spent probably an entire day of my playtime just reading all the different files in JORDAN. Things like the Freemen and SNOW-9 are all eventually explained to the player, but being able to digest the worldbuilding at my own pace rather than in a brief expository line helped immerse me in the world more. Freemen were an especially interesting concept. In a world where such an invasive and deep profiling system such as JORDAN exists, these are characters who intentionally wipe all traces of their existence off public records. They are legally considered to be dead and live low in the ghettos. Almost prophetic of how the Internet-dominated world we live in today is constantly scraping and selling our data and monitoring what we do.
Another cool feature I learned about just before I started playing is that the Sega CD version has support for the Konami Justifier light gun. Unfortunately, as I'm not playing on real hardware, I emulated the functionality through my emulator. I may have miscalibrated for most of the playthrough, but the bullets didn't always register exactly where my cursor was pointing, so I had some difficulty during the light gun segments until I decided to intentionally miscalibrate to make it line back up with my cursor. The action sequences are not at all the point of the game, though, and are quite boring to play with just a D-Pad. So for the sake of making those few moments of gameplay diversity more memorable, I think playing with a light gun improves the experience in general. 90% of the time I spent utilizing the light gun was at Junker HQ in the practice range, where Mika and Metal Gear (depending on your progression through the game) will comment on your shooting ability. After resetting the game a few times to make sure my calibration was right, Mika even claimed that she thinks I've already done this before based on my 100% hit score with no wasted shots.
My only criticisms, truly, are that the gameplay is sometimes a little confusing and unclear. There's a difference between "Look" and "Investigate", and sometimes the way to progress is not available until you've found the "right" option. So I'd spend upwards of 10 minutes just cycling through the same few text boxes only to realize the way to progress is to look at something BEFORE I interact with it, or vice versa. To enter a hospital building, you have to investigate the building and the door before you're able to enter. Sometimes, you have to select the same option multiple times in order to exhaust all possible dialogue you can get from the option before you're allowed to progress with new story events. Luckily, I was able to get through the whole game only looking at a guide once to check if I was doing the right thing (I was). It's perfectly playable blind.
And finally the voice acting of certain characters are a minor criticism I have with the game, but otherwise were actually pretty impressive for the time. Most of the voice actors are okay-ish, but Gillian Seed (the protagonist, unfortunately) has the worst voice acting of the bunch; being the main protagonist means you're also going to be hearing his voice a lot. The Japanese version makes him sound like a very cool and mysterious guy, but he sounds more like an even dopier Inspector Gadget in English. A scene in which a character dies in his arms has Gillian's VA speaking as though he's talking casually with him on the phone, so sometimes the low range of emotion negatively impacts an otherwise very emotional and well-acted scene. Jamie and Metal Gear probably both had the best quality voice acting. The Japanese voice cast is unsurprisingly better across the board, based on a YouTube playthrough I listened to after finishing the game, but most of the English voice acting is especially good for the age in which the game released.
From the way people online made it sound, I thought I was walking into a bastardized port of the game; a tragedy that this ruined copy was one of the only ways to play in English (even including fan translations, of which only a roughly and literally translated version of the MSX2 port exists). The only conversations of the game I witnessed online being about censored twitching dog guts and dead Snatcher breasts rather than the wonderful characters, excellent writing, and its abundance of memorable scenes & charming flavor text is quite honestly a disservice to this game. Would I have rathered the game be uncensored? For the most part, yes. Despite my uncomfortability towards certain aspects, it was part of Kojima's vision and should be respected. My discomfort is never a reason why something should be changed, unless the original artist wished for it to be altered themselves. But a 14 year old girl you can hit on and watch take a shower now being 18 does not mean this game has been unsalvageably tainted by localizers and shouldn't be played.
Aside from the very mixed bag of English voice acting and the mind-boggling decision to add 5 years to every in-game date for the sake of keeping things "modern" relative to the CD port's release, I really loved my time playing Snatcher. It's not only one of my favorite Kojima games I've played thus far, and not only one of my favorite visual novels ever, it's one of my favorite games of all time. It's an underrated masterpiece that I'll be annoyingly pestering all my friends to try for the next few weeks.
The cyberpunk world of Snatcher is rendered beautifully on the Sega CD. Neo Kobe City has so many distinct and varied locations; whether it be the run-down abandoned slums where the Freemen gather or the black market city of Plato's Cavern (Joy Division, in the Japanese version), the sprite work is always gorgeous and colorful bringing these places to life. The character portraits are also well-animated and very nice to look at. Occasionally the game gets super dynamic with its presentation, especially where the third act primarily consists of fully voice acted cutscenes.
The game itself is really well-written, especially for one of Kojima's earliest works. The first Metal Gear was extremely light on plot, only ever going as far as to include a twist that Big Boss was the antagonist the whole time. I thought Metal Gear 2 was really where Kojima found himself in his writing ability, but this game's original MSX2 and PC88 versions predate it! Snatcher never gets too caught up in being a pastiche to American science fiction films to feel too derivative, and that works in its favor.
I had seen a review claim that despite drawing so much heavy inspiration from American sci-fi films, Kojima seemed to only have a surface-level understanding of those films' texts. It went as far as to say he missed the point of the movies by making the Snatchers generic bad guys rather than the expectation-subverting complex characters fighting to extend their expiration date that the Replicants of Blade Runner were. However, I'd argue both examine the human condition, just in very different ways. Whereas Blade Runner uses Replicants to make statements about what it means to truly be human and to live a fulfilling life, Snatcher makes pretty scathing commentary about the pervasive feeling of distrust in society towards those who are different being the cause of its ruination (which I initially took as a parallel to the American Red Scare, given the involvement of Russians in the Snatchers' creation, before the game explicitly stated it to be commentary on Japanese society). It's different from the movie it's inspired by, but that's a good thing. Even with the censored graphics of the Sega CD version intentionally obscuring the homage of the Bioroid Snatchers' design to the Terminator, I'd have found the story to be too derivative and devoid of Kojima's creativity and originality had they gone the exact same twist of Blade Runner with the Replicants being sympathetic.
The characters are wonderfully charming and all memorable. Gillian's a great character, and I cared deeply about his ability to reconnect with his wife and regain his memories. Napoleon the Chinese informant was funny, and I always rolled my eyes whenever he asked me for money in exchange for crucial information to progress the story. Randam Hajile was a badass bounty hunter, I just wish he appeared more often throughout the story. I felt awful for Harry after his close friend Jean dies in the field, and especially as the creator of my robot companion, I grew a close attachment to him. And speaking of, Metal Gear mk II was adorable and definitely the stand-out character of the whole thing for me. His relationship with Gillian progressing over the course of the story was very nice, and it makes me wish I had my own talking Metal Gear companion. He's so adorable! As someone eventually hoping to make her own video games, Kojima is my idol for a reason. He is a master at his craft.
The game also has plenty of moments of levity in the midst of an otherwise brutal and serious drama story. You can find a phone sex hotline number on some sample tissues passed out in Alton Square. You can call the number and make some really corny pickup lines and fail at "getting in the mood" enough that she'll just hang up. Calling again will make her give you her "private number", which is just a prank, out of service phone number. Calling a third time puts you through to a character that remarks that she's not actually able to do phone sex with you because it's a video game being monitored by ESRB censors, so they can't do much more than make vague suggestions towards sex with double entendres before she hangs up as well.
A great feature you can access early on is the JORDAN database. It's filled with logs about different characters and the history of Neo Kobe City. You can read up on various terminology and of the geopolitical state of the world leading up to the game's events. I spent probably an entire day of my playtime just reading all the different files in JORDAN. Things like the Freemen and SNOW-9 are all eventually explained to the player, but being able to digest the worldbuilding at my own pace rather than in a brief expository line helped immerse me in the world more. Freemen were an especially interesting concept. In a world where such an invasive and deep profiling system such as JORDAN exists, these are characters who intentionally wipe all traces of their existence off public records. They are legally considered to be dead and live low in the ghettos. Almost prophetic of how the Internet-dominated world we live in today is constantly scraping and selling our data and monitoring what we do.
Another cool feature I learned about just before I started playing is that the Sega CD version has support for the Konami Justifier light gun. Unfortunately, as I'm not playing on real hardware, I emulated the functionality through my emulator. I may have miscalibrated for most of the playthrough, but the bullets didn't always register exactly where my cursor was pointing, so I had some difficulty during the light gun segments until I decided to intentionally miscalibrate to make it line back up with my cursor. The action sequences are not at all the point of the game, though, and are quite boring to play with just a D-Pad. So for the sake of making those few moments of gameplay diversity more memorable, I think playing with a light gun improves the experience in general. 90% of the time I spent utilizing the light gun was at Junker HQ in the practice range, where Mika and Metal Gear (depending on your progression through the game) will comment on your shooting ability. After resetting the game a few times to make sure my calibration was right, Mika even claimed that she thinks I've already done this before based on my 100% hit score with no wasted shots.
My only criticisms, truly, are that the gameplay is sometimes a little confusing and unclear. There's a difference between "Look" and "Investigate", and sometimes the way to progress is not available until you've found the "right" option. So I'd spend upwards of 10 minutes just cycling through the same few text boxes only to realize the way to progress is to look at something BEFORE I interact with it, or vice versa. To enter a hospital building, you have to investigate the building and the door before you're able to enter. Sometimes, you have to select the same option multiple times in order to exhaust all possible dialogue you can get from the option before you're allowed to progress with new story events. Luckily, I was able to get through the whole game only looking at a guide once to check if I was doing the right thing (I was). It's perfectly playable blind.
And finally the voice acting of certain characters are a minor criticism I have with the game, but otherwise were actually pretty impressive for the time. Most of the voice actors are okay-ish, but Gillian Seed (the protagonist, unfortunately) has the worst voice acting of the bunch; being the main protagonist means you're also going to be hearing his voice a lot. The Japanese version makes him sound like a very cool and mysterious guy, but he sounds more like an even dopier Inspector Gadget in English. A scene in which a character dies in his arms has Gillian's VA speaking as though he's talking casually with him on the phone, so sometimes the low range of emotion negatively impacts an otherwise very emotional and well-acted scene. Jamie and Metal Gear probably both had the best quality voice acting. The Japanese voice cast is unsurprisingly better across the board, based on a YouTube playthrough I listened to after finishing the game, but most of the English voice acting is especially good for the age in which the game released.
From the way people online made it sound, I thought I was walking into a bastardized port of the game; a tragedy that this ruined copy was one of the only ways to play in English (even including fan translations, of which only a roughly and literally translated version of the MSX2 port exists). The only conversations of the game I witnessed online being about censored twitching dog guts and dead Snatcher breasts rather than the wonderful characters, excellent writing, and its abundance of memorable scenes & charming flavor text is quite honestly a disservice to this game. Would I have rathered the game be uncensored? For the most part, yes. Despite my uncomfortability towards certain aspects, it was part of Kojima's vision and should be respected. My discomfort is never a reason why something should be changed, unless the original artist wished for it to be altered themselves. But a 14 year old girl you can hit on and watch take a shower now being 18 does not mean this game has been unsalvageably tainted by localizers and shouldn't be played.
Aside from the very mixed bag of English voice acting and the mind-boggling decision to add 5 years to every in-game date for the sake of keeping things "modern" relative to the CD port's release, I really loved my time playing Snatcher. It's not only one of my favorite Kojima games I've played thus far, and not only one of my favorite visual novels ever, it's one of my favorite games of all time. It's an underrated masterpiece that I'll be annoyingly pestering all my friends to try for the next few weeks.
Great presentation, sprite work, music, and even voice acting especially for the time period.
Unfortunately I didn't find the story all too special, progress is made to often by Looking and Investigating ( how and why are those different, by the way) every insignificant object without learning anything new, or even interesting and Gillian's sexism really got on my nerves after a while.
Unfortunately I didn't find the story all too special, progress is made to often by Looking and Investigating ( how and why are those different, by the way) every insignificant object without learning anything new, or even interesting and Gillian's sexism really got on my nerves after a while.
Apesar de limitado por conta da época, toda a parte de investigação é bem legal e divertida, infelizmente o último capítulo é todo cheio de exposição entediante e quase 0 gameplay, mas o jogo ainda é bom
I wasn’t completely surprised when jumping into one of Kojima’s earliest games and immediately recognizing how much Snatcher’s genealogy is inherited through his later body of work. His signature hallmarks are all proudly showcased here. Yeah, Kojima definitely whipped out his love for cinema with this one to gush how much he loved Blade Runner, Terminator, Akira, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That signature quirky meta humor he enjoys injecting with how everything in the game is deeply aware of the fact it’s, uh, well, a video game. Your miniature robot companion, “Metal Gear Mk. II”, is a cheeky nod to the game Kojima previously worked on before and, interestingly, even gets reintroduced down the line in MGS4 as a reverse callback. You can especially see how much of Snatcher’s story-driven adventure gameplay, interacting and talking to a colorful cast of characters, would evolve into the codec calls in Metal Gear Solid. Above all else, Snatcher helped pioneer what elevated Kojima to renowned status as a legendary game developer by tackling bold ideas through his commentary. It weaves the very on-its-sleeve science fiction inspirations to create a dystopian cyberpunk noir setting plagued by uncertainty and distrust. Technology being a mere tool for manipulation preying on humanity’s distrust for control which gave it room to exist freely in the first place. Which overlaps with one of the bigger themes explored in the Metal Gear Solid franchise with the importance of human ingenuity against technological artificiality. Something that our protagonist grapples with himself, bumbling around with a case of amnesia, too flirty with every woman he meets, trying to be on the same wavelength with his robot partner, while being wary of who’s real or fake during his investigation.
It never overstays its welcome, wrapping itself up as a tightly paced seven to eight-hour narrative experience with a moody vibesworthy soundtrack and some phenomenal pixel art to stare deeply into. While there’s a logical progression of how you’re supposed to go from one point to the next in advancing the story, aside from a few clumsy moments, it doesn’t reach the point of hitting a deadend. You might fail in some investigative detective work the game puts you up for the test, but you’re still narrowing down options for the right course of action instead of getting abruptly softlocked. I only suggest that you didn’t need to exhaust every single dialogue option or action, multiple times even, just to trigger something to get the story moving along. It’s gotten a cult following overtime, but I kinda wished this left a heavy footprint on an entire generation of aspiring game developers, y’know? There’s a lot here, creatively, that isn’t too far apart from what made Undertale so charming and influential. In a completely different alternate timeline I could even see a version of myself that has more stock in making games taking unashamed heavy cues from this tbh.
It never overstays its welcome, wrapping itself up as a tightly paced seven to eight-hour narrative experience with a moody vibesworthy soundtrack and some phenomenal pixel art to stare deeply into. While there’s a logical progression of how you’re supposed to go from one point to the next in advancing the story, aside from a few clumsy moments, it doesn’t reach the point of hitting a deadend. You might fail in some investigative detective work the game puts you up for the test, but you’re still narrowing down options for the right course of action instead of getting abruptly softlocked. I only suggest that you didn’t need to exhaust every single dialogue option or action, multiple times even, just to trigger something to get the story moving along. It’s gotten a cult following overtime, but I kinda wished this left a heavy footprint on an entire generation of aspiring game developers, y’know? There’s a lot here, creatively, that isn’t too far apart from what made Undertale so charming and influential. In a completely different alternate timeline I could even see a version of myself that has more stock in making games taking unashamed heavy cues from this tbh.
La défiance, arme d'autodestruction massive ?
This review contains spoilers
Ending was kind of weak imo; Elijah Modnar's motivation for creating the snatchers is just extremely generic evil-villain mastermind which is kind of disappointing. However, everything that happens leading up to the end is amazing.
As with every other Kojima game, it doesn't hide its inspirations.
Pretty much a Blade Runner/Terminator riff packaged as an adventure game that's surprisingly solid!
The game has great art, good music and surprisingly terrific voice acting for its time. There are some really weird puzzles, but the game doesn't usually let you get stuck on those, giving you more and more hints.
The main issue with the game is that its progression is very scripted and if you forget to do one specific thing the story will come to a full stop.
Still, it's an enjoyable sci-fi romp that I feel is better than some Metal Gear games
Pretty much a Blade Runner/Terminator riff packaged as an adventure game that's surprisingly solid!
The game has great art, good music and surprisingly terrific voice acting for its time. There are some really weird puzzles, but the game doesn't usually let you get stuck on those, giving you more and more hints.
The main issue with the game is that its progression is very scripted and if you forget to do one specific thing the story will come to a full stop.
Still, it's an enjoyable sci-fi romp that I feel is better than some Metal Gear games
An interesting game that's definitely very Kojima-y, if not particularly interesting otherwise besides that characteristic. Underneath its mishmash of Blade Runner, Terminator, Akira, and many other 80s sci-fi movies is a decent enough adventure game with great sense of mood and style (showcasing Kojima's interest in a more cinematic flair to his games), mainly let down by some weird quirks (why do I have to look/investigate things so many times before the game acknowledges the effort and moves on?) and a rough third act that only consists of the crappy shooting gameplay and a half hour long exposition dump.
The fact that this game was localized when it was is a miracle: without a consistently natural and funny script this would simply be a pretty, shallow adventure game with some ungodly difficult light-gun sections. Like Ace Attorney, it's carried by the large comic personalities of its cast familiarized through restrained repetition. There's a clever ramping-up of the game's silliness from the grittier exploitation of the opening chapter to the pure cartoon of the ending: a few nuances like Gilliam's ambiguous relationship with his wife are unfortunately flattened out by the process. In spite of this, it's a proud start to the tradition of VN-adventures being much better written than VNs.
what if blade runner was cool
It's surprising to me that this really quite excellent cyberpunk-noir title sold so poorly outside of Japan, but I think there were two factors behind this: its potent cocktail of gore, violence, and mature themes significantly reduced the demographic of gamers who would buy it, and it seemingly is one of the first (if not the first) visual novels to be released outside of Japan, into a playerbase that is more accustomed to point-and-click adventure games.
In a way, my initial experience with this game probably mirrored that of the West in general - this might be my first visual novel, and I was baffled at first by the linearity, the lack of difficulty, and the lack of... gameplay, really. But I warmed up to it quickly enough - the genre's laserlike focus on telling a story made the experience like reading a book but with extra interactivity, and the ability to take things at my own pace. Gillian Seed, who was investigating the menace of the Snatchers (humanoid robots who kill people and take their place), could either be played as a no-nonsense straight-laced agent, or a talented goof-off who flirts with anything that moves and drinks booze on the government's dime, or anything in-between. With each new area and next stage of the investigation, I could either rush through with urgency or spend time interacting with everything and soaking up the impressive tapestry of lore, and I enjoyed the freedom that this genre afforded me. And, of course, Hideo Kojima being Hideo Kojima, the game made very clever use of the medium to pull of some clever tricks that books can't; in a very early example of this, your companion hears a faint noise and rather than outright telling you what it is, prompts you to turn the volume up so you can hear it yourself.
Of course, an interactive book is only any good if the story itself is good, and Snatcher definitely delivers on that! A lot of the plot elements seem derivative, especially today, but that doesn't take away from how well-crafted the world is, how cool some of the plot twists are, and how this story about synthetic life forms replacing people contains a heart and humanity that I associate with Kojima's best works. The pacing and storytelling is generally good too, though it suffers slightly from a need to over-recap key plot points, and several jumpscares or genuinely tense moments lose some of that thrill due to being overly-telegraphed.
This is an easy recommend to anyone - a patchwork of cinematic influences and inspirations that contains the seeds of Kojima's later work, easy enough to play to completion, both streamlined and compelling enough to never wear out its welcome.
In a way, my initial experience with this game probably mirrored that of the West in general - this might be my first visual novel, and I was baffled at first by the linearity, the lack of difficulty, and the lack of... gameplay, really. But I warmed up to it quickly enough - the genre's laserlike focus on telling a story made the experience like reading a book but with extra interactivity, and the ability to take things at my own pace. Gillian Seed, who was investigating the menace of the Snatchers (humanoid robots who kill people and take their place), could either be played as a no-nonsense straight-laced agent, or a talented goof-off who flirts with anything that moves and drinks booze on the government's dime, or anything in-between. With each new area and next stage of the investigation, I could either rush through with urgency or spend time interacting with everything and soaking up the impressive tapestry of lore, and I enjoyed the freedom that this genre afforded me. And, of course, Hideo Kojima being Hideo Kojima, the game made very clever use of the medium to pull of some clever tricks that books can't; in a very early example of this, your companion hears a faint noise and rather than outright telling you what it is, prompts you to turn the volume up so you can hear it yourself.
Of course, an interactive book is only any good if the story itself is good, and Snatcher definitely delivers on that! A lot of the plot elements seem derivative, especially today, but that doesn't take away from how well-crafted the world is, how cool some of the plot twists are, and how this story about synthetic life forms replacing people contains a heart and humanity that I associate with Kojima's best works. The pacing and storytelling is generally good too, though it suffers slightly from a need to over-recap key plot points, and several jumpscares or genuinely tense moments lose some of that thrill due to being overly-telegraphed.
This is an easy recommend to anyone - a patchwork of cinematic influences and inspirations that contains the seeds of Kojima's later work, easy enough to play to completion, both streamlined and compelling enough to never wear out its welcome.
playing this via RGB on a PVM changed my life
Had to emulate this since I don't come from wealth but goddaaaamn this is a fantastic game. Gillian's a dork, though
One of the most charming games I've ever played. It's more or less a tribute (or ripoff) of several well-known entities. Most obviously Blade Runner and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Nonetheless it to me feels like it's own thing and it's very engaging throughout. It's also surprisingly violent. Basically every version that has come after this has been censored quite a bit. And I think even modern games would not go to lengths that this game loves to visit.
I'd recommend the Sega CD version. It's the first time the story is told in it's entirety, and in my opinion it's also by far the best looking version. And really, with a visual novel you really want to play the version with the best graphics if you ask me.
Even though I'm completely used to how the game works, it's undeniable the design of the menu and especially progression is not very good to put it politely. Sometimes to progress you have to interact, look or use a couple of specific things before the game allows you to continue. And if you didn't investigate one of the key parts, enjoy going back and checking everything and reading every line again until you finally see some text that hints you can progress now. Like if Gillian says 'let's go somewhere else' and you realize you can finally continue. Luckily during the most intense parts this might only happen a few times. And it's mostly during downtime that you're likely to get 'stuck'.
I'd recommend the Sega CD version. It's the first time the story is told in it's entirety, and in my opinion it's also by far the best looking version. And really, with a visual novel you really want to play the version with the best graphics if you ask me.
Even though I'm completely used to how the game works, it's undeniable the design of the menu and especially progression is not very good to put it politely. Sometimes to progress you have to interact, look or use a couple of specific things before the game allows you to continue. And if you didn't investigate one of the key parts, enjoy going back and checking everything and reading every line again until you finally see some text that hints you can progress now. Like if Gillian says 'let's go somewhere else' and you realize you can finally continue. Luckily during the most intense parts this might only happen a few times. And it's mostly during downtime that you're likely to get 'stuck'.
Amazing graphics and art style, with an engaging plot.
Good music and pretty cool voice acting, fitting of any 90's sci-fi movie.
But it feels like you are trying to find combinations of options to make the game realize you know what you need to do, instead of going directly to the solution. In some instances you feel like a detective, but a lot of times you are more like "lets see how to tell the game to advance by clicking on all the options available 'till it realizes where we need to go", which sometimes requires to press an option several times to make it work, becoming all the process even more unintuitive. Very often I had to look for a walkthrough just to realize I ignored an insignificant "LOOK" or "INVESTIGATE" at some point and thus, the game just won't let me go on.
Cool game from an artistic perspective, and also THAT opening. But gameplay can be tricky, making you doubt of what you already know.
Also Seed is a real dick. I rather be the little robot buddy than him.
Good music and pretty cool voice acting, fitting of any 90's sci-fi movie.
But it feels like you are trying to find combinations of options to make the game realize you know what you need to do, instead of going directly to the solution. In some instances you feel like a detective, but a lot of times you are more like "lets see how to tell the game to advance by clicking on all the options available 'till it realizes where we need to go", which sometimes requires to press an option several times to make it work, becoming all the process even more unintuitive. Very often I had to look for a walkthrough just to realize I ignored an insignificant "LOOK" or "INVESTIGATE" at some point and thus, the game just won't let me go on.
Cool game from an artistic perspective, and also THAT opening. But gameplay can be tricky, making you doubt of what you already know.
Also Seed is a real dick. I rather be the little robot buddy than him.
I actually really enjoyed this despite it's flaws. I loved the style, sprite work, music and voice acting (especially for the time). Yes, it's borrows very liberally from its influences. When those influences are Blade Runner, Terminator and Invasion of the Body Snatchers amongst others though, it's hard not to like it.
I enjoyed the story, although the gameplay does require you to ask about/investigate the same things repeatedly to progress and it's got a lot of that trademark, dated Kojima seediness.
I enjoyed the story, although the gameplay does require you to ask about/investigate the same things repeatedly to progress and it's got a lot of that trademark, dated Kojima seediness.
i want to strangle gillian seed
That Opening is so CASH BRO.
Like most game stories it's a derivative nerd fever dream consolidated from a selection of superior fan favourite works
This could have been a perfect game but the final act felt so rushed and anti-climactic. I hate when good games have to end like that.
A great visual novel/graphic adventure game with an engrossing atmosphere and lore, neat writing, a compelling story with a tight pace, a smooth and cool soundtrack, and a great visual style that wears its influences like a badge of honor. Great stuff I highly-recommend if you're a fan of Kojima's other works or just older Japanese games in-general.
Metal Gear Creator Kojima's Vibes are strong in this one.
When you play this game you can easily realize that this game developed when Kojima was young. Why? Because plot is nowhere near complicated and it's just a goofy simple: let's find out who is behind all of this with my trusty buddy yehaaaa! Kind of plot(until act 3 that is). But of course that doesn't make this game not valuable. I can guarantee you that if you love buddy-cop adventures you will love this one with our metal gear mk3 and Gillion go into a fun adventure together.
But of course this game is not perfect. It does have a really unintuitive progression system that feels trial and error(maybe to make the game seem longer than it is). This results with time wasting tbh with selecting the same choices over and over again just to find which one results with progression, but at least choices are limited so still you can make it without a guide most of the time at least (mostly...)
Also if we subtract the time wasting, story pacing is unbelievably fast, you go somehere, you ask questions, after that you find and kill that area's snatcher, then on to the next one! Tbh I wished a slower pace at times. Because it makes hard to care about payoffs when the build up itself is not longer than 20 minutes most of the time. So the scenes that supposed to be suprising just ends up flat for me.
Also that results with not being able to connect other characters other than Gillian and Mk3. I can't say I am fond of Gillian and his "pervert comedic" actions(tbh for this reason alone this game is the most pervert kj game, even more than mgs5) but his relationship with mk3 is really entertaning and motivates you to select every option so you can see what are they gonna argue about next. Also yeah maybe characters aren't developed enough but their goofy interactions with us still manages to make them memorable somewhat.
Everything changes when you come to act 3 tho. I know that this act added in later releases and didn't existed in the first release and it's really easy to see that. Because when you play it, suddenly plot becomes 5 times complex, 5 times cutsceney, 5 times serious no more goofiness. With how the writing suddenly revolves around real life technology's possible dangers also it's place on politics, it's really damn easy to see that this is the guy that wrote mgs2. But also the part that made me more engaged about the story, tbh I predicted half of it before the act itself started but still that doesn't change how fresh and suprising it felt to experience it.
Actually, you know what. Visuals and upbeat soundtrack combination makes it worth it alone. They together make this game one hell of a journey. Play this game. It's short(5 hours). Fast. 80's fun. Engaging Sci-fi mystery. Fun soundtrack. What more do you want?
When you play this game you can easily realize that this game developed when Kojima was young. Why? Because plot is nowhere near complicated and it's just a goofy simple: let's find out who is behind all of this with my trusty buddy yehaaaa! Kind of plot(until act 3 that is). But of course that doesn't make this game not valuable. I can guarantee you that if you love buddy-cop adventures you will love this one with our metal gear mk3 and Gillion go into a fun adventure together.
But of course this game is not perfect. It does have a really unintuitive progression system that feels trial and error(maybe to make the game seem longer than it is). This results with time wasting tbh with selecting the same choices over and over again just to find which one results with progression, but at least choices are limited so still you can make it without a guide most of the time at least (mostly...)
Also if we subtract the time wasting, story pacing is unbelievably fast, you go somehere, you ask questions, after that you find and kill that area's snatcher, then on to the next one! Tbh I wished a slower pace at times. Because it makes hard to care about payoffs when the build up itself is not longer than 20 minutes most of the time. So the scenes that supposed to be suprising just ends up flat for me.
Also that results with not being able to connect other characters other than Gillian and Mk3. I can't say I am fond of Gillian and his "pervert comedic" actions(tbh for this reason alone this game is the most pervert kj game, even more than mgs5) but his relationship with mk3 is really entertaning and motivates you to select every option so you can see what are they gonna argue about next. Also yeah maybe characters aren't developed enough but their goofy interactions with us still manages to make them memorable somewhat.
Everything changes when you come to act 3 tho. I know that this act added in later releases and didn't existed in the first release and it's really easy to see that. Because when you play it, suddenly plot becomes 5 times complex, 5 times cutsceney, 5 times serious no more goofiness. With how the writing suddenly revolves around real life technology's possible dangers also it's place on politics, it's really damn easy to see that this is the guy that wrote mgs2. But also the part that made me more engaged about the story, tbh I predicted half of it before the act itself started but still that doesn't change how fresh and suprising it felt to experience it.
Actually, you know what. Visuals and upbeat soundtrack combination makes it worth it alone. They together make this game one hell of a journey. Play this game. It's short(5 hours). Fast. 80's fun. Engaging Sci-fi mystery. Fun soundtrack. What more do you want?
As for a lot of gamers, I am a big fan of Hideo Kojima's work. Not just because I find it of high quality and a lot of fun to engage with, but because these days, he is among few AAA game directors who truly try to make unique video games. Not those "focus-grouped to death" copies of each other with a different coat of paint to appear as mainstream as possible, but once in a lifetime experiences where he doesn't care whether it is universally praised or not. See Death Stranding for example, a game literally about making deliveries from Point A to B. Go into it deeper and you will find a way more profound experience with a lot of commentary on modern society (scarily apt during the pandemic that started a year after its release as well), and personally I found the gameplay to be a lot of fun as well.
Just as Hideo Kojima's work over the past couple decades is unique to the AAA video game industry to this day, his work in 1988 with SNATCHER is unique to this day's Hideo Kojima. It's not an Action blockbuster like the Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding games, but it's rather a game in a genre of games Hideo Kojima enjoyed during his own formative years, the visual novel / crime mystery genre that was somewhat popular in Japan at the time.
Snatcher released initially on November 26, 1988 for the PC-8801 and the MSX2, two Japanese personal computers. It then released in a "remade" version on October 23, 1992 for the PC-Engine (exclusively for the Japanese version of the TurboGrafx-16) before it finally got an English release in December 15, 1994 for the Sega CD, which is the excuse I used to add it to my playlist for the challenge I am currently doing. To be honest, I have no idea how it came about to release this game in the West after not having done so in the 6 years prior, especially since the spritual successor 'Policenauts', which also released in 1994, did not get a Western release. But, thankfully, it happened, and with voice acting to boot. These games have a cult following these days and after having finished Snatcher, you can count me in among those who would be happy to see Hideo Kojima do another game of this type as some sort of side project during these modern times.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
If you decide to play Snatcher, you will probably do so to mainly experience its story. If that is not your expectation going in, I'm sure it will quickly become what will hold your attention, as the gameplay is rather typical for a visual novel. It's mainly clicking at prompts and listening to dialogue.
So with that being the case, delivering an interesting story full of interesting characters, plot twists and tense moments is quite important for this game to be worth playing. Luckily, the game delivers on all fronts thanks to its cyberpunk setting filled with a lot of well thoughtout, interesting lore, its compelling premise and its cast of characters.
50 years ago, the explosion of a biological weapon in a research facility near Moscow called "Lucifer-Alpha" killed over half of the world's population in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In the present, a new city on an artificial island in Eastern Asia was made and is called "Neo Kobe City", a melting pot of cultures due to large number of immigrants from China, the USA, Eastern and Western Europe and even more areas of the world. Mankind faces a new dilemma due to the appearance of humanoid robots that are called "Snatchers", because they 'snatch' a person (kill and dispose of them) and take up their spot. They can't be detected due to the fact that they breathe, bleed and sweat like any human and even wear artifical skin to look exactly like the person they are copying. They mainly snatch VIP types however, which presumably means that their appearance goes beyond "AI gone rogue".
You play Gillian Seed, who, along with your wife, is an amnesiac and just got assigned to the JUNKERs, a special anti-Snatcher task force (Japanese Undercover Neuro Kinetic Elimination Ranger). Your assignment is to be a runner, an in-field operative taking on the highest of risks by facing these Snatchers head on and eliminating them. To do this, you are assigned a Navigator, a robot that assists you on the field. Navigators get their personalities formed somewhat after the Junker they are assigned to, so yours. Your navigator is called "Metal Gear Mk. II", designed after the "Metal Gear menace from the 20th century", so yes, this seems to play in an alternate future of the Metal Gear universe.
This game is a visual novel, so gameplay looks like this. The first screen you see is that of the Junker HQ reception. A panel of prompts appears at the bottom half of the screen. You can "Look" at things, "Investigate" things, "Talk" and "Ask" if a person is in the room with you and also look at your "Possessions" to "look" and "investigate" them as well. Looking at things and investigating things is different in that investigating them is more analytical. You are often meant to look and investigate things multiple times, as each time reveals new information and thoughts. Some of these options are optionable if you want to get immersed more deeply with your surroundings, and some you are meant to use to trigger a moment that lets you progress, such as uncovering a new clue. As someone who likes to get immersed as much as possible, I have used every single option as many times as I could (at least I think), which not only does what I just told you, but also triggered a few "hidden" moments that I found quite entertaining. In one part of the city for example, Gillian attempts to "pick up women" and if you do so multiple times, one woman turns out to be a Snatcher, which triggers a "Game Over?" screen before it is revealed that Gillian was just daydreaming.
Gillian Seed in general is a pretty odd fellow, though he is more of a poster-boy for how Kojima seemingly wanted the game's atmosphere to be more humane to balance out the fact that Snatchers dominate everything else in this game. Gillian is an amnesiac as mentioned and has a wife called "Jamie", though they don't remember each other. He likes to use humor whenever possible to lower the tension that the entire case and his occupation represents, though balances that out with a get shit done attitude when the situation requires it. The non-serious part of his personality would have felt a bit too "in your face" however, if he wasn't assisted by Metal Gear Mk. 2, who steals the show in this game in my opinion. Both the voice acting and the personality of Metal Gear is perfection, as Metal Gear uses his analytical makeup to save Gillian's butt countless times on the field, but also roasts him every chance he gets when they get a break from the Snatcher-hunting they do. For a guy like Gillian who I can only describe as a "creep" for most parts of the game, I think it was a great idea to have him be accompanied by someone like Metal Gear who keeps him in line as much as possible. I say "creep" because there are 3 female side characters and several other female NPCs in this game, and I don't think there was a single one Gillian didn't make a pass at. For one, you can "look" at any character several times, and doing so once illicits a "she looks great" type response from Gilliant, while doing so more than once prompts the women to say that they feel uncomfortable, which doesn't stop Gillian from making way more straightforward remarks about their apperance. Now don't get me wrong, this type of behavior doesn't usually weird me out and I can see it for what it is, which is entertainment. But with Gillian, it's different. For one, he has a wife, which you can call in this game to tell her how much you want to get to know and to love her again. This creates a very weird situation where Gillian talks to Jamie on the phone, only to flirt with several women over the next hour alone. Second, one of the women includes the 18-year old daughter of a fallen co-worker, who is 14 in Japan's version of the game, so that Gillian doesn't know boundaries whatsoever is pretty off-putting. Otherwise though, his attempts at flirtation are mainly meant to be humorous, and it works since he gets shot down constantly (and gets ridiculed by Metal Gear for it), but on his own he doesn't make a great main character because his personality is mainly doing this shtick.
Apart from Metal Gear, who is the best character in the game for me, there are several individuals who have this mysterious aura around them, like there is more to them than you'd think. Harry the engineer is one of these types, but it extends to the Chief of the JUNKER operation, a bounty hunter named Random Hajile, your wife Jamie, an informer you talk to several times, and Gibson, the only other JUNKER who currently works as a runner alongside you.
With that, I want to get to the main story. I don't want to spoil anything, and in general I think the big story beats flow at a great pace and introduce a lot of twists and memorable moments. However, there is one flaw to the premise of the story that I found to be pretty odd. Actually, there were several over the first couple of hours, but it is worth noting that the plot cleared up plenty of questions I had and actually answered them in a quite satisfactory manner. This one issue that remains though is that this JUNKER operation seems pathetically tiny considering that the "Snatcher menace" presents a huge issue to all of mankind. ALL OF MANKIND. Meanwhile, here you are in the secret JUNKER operation tasked with stopping it and all you have is 5 (five) measly people working there, including just two actual runners. What? Even if Snatchers would snatch up everyday folk, this would be unrealistic, but when VIPs are exclusively involved, you'd think more monetary efforts would be made to make sure the menace was eradicated asap. The game does have an answer to this worry later on at least somewhat I suppose, but I still think that is too unrealistic to have two guys do all the work.
That said, if you enjoy a good mystery story, if you enjoy visual novels and if you like the cyberpunk aesthetic, I think you will enjoy the story that this game tells. It's well executed, I never felt like the game dragged with filler moments and the plot twists were well executed. The pre-1992 version had only 2 acts, but while this version comes with an additional third, which turns this game from one with a cliffhanger ending to one with a complete story. Knowing this, the third act did feel slightly out of place, as the majority of it involves listening to dialogue instead of much player input when it comes to investigation or the like, but the act does end things on a satisfactory note, so I'm glad it's there to give the player a full story to enjoy, though it does leave some room for a sequel.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
This is a visual novel, though not exactly like most modern ones. Instead of listening to a story and just clicking the A/X button to read the next lines, you select options to look at and investigate, so you are constantly involved with what the next set of lines of dialogue will focus on, keeping you more engaged. But of course, gameplay is a low priority in this game overall.
There is only one part about this game that has true gameplay, which is the game's light gun sections. In a 3x3 grid akin to a game of whack-a-mole, enemies appear in one of the 9 spots and you need to quickly react and aim and shoot at the part of the grid that they are on. This is a pretty small part of the game and I found it to be appear just the perfect number of times over the course of the game. I didn't fail once, but I've read that some found these parts to be kind of difficult. There is a rush of enemies in one late-game section of this, which might give you some trouble, if you are slower on the buttons, but I'm not nearly the fastest and got by with plenty of health remaining.
With visual novels, I find that the quality of the story makes the gameplay more or less tolerable, and since I found the story to be so good, I enjoyed taking my time with this one. This involved choosing every option to investigate multiple times, even to just trigger some optional dialogue from the characters.
You don't just choose options however. First, to find clues and progress, you often need to choose specific options multiple times. The order you would usually choose is to look at something and then to investigate. Sometimes though, you look, investigate and then have to look again to trigger an event, which was a weird way to do things, so be wary of this. That said, asking the player to be thorough is not a bad thing on its own, as reading through all the lines that are available adds to the overall context that the player gets.
One final part of the gameplay here are the puzzles. Often, you need to input answers, such as the password to talk to an informant, the name of a person, the really contrived "Oleen" puzzle and more. If a puzzle gives you any trouble, the game guides you to the answer pretty nicely, so don't worry about not figuring them out.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
This game has voice acting!!! An anomaly for games that I play as part of this retro challenge I'm doing. Of course, it's less unique for Sega CD titles, but still a very new thing for video games at the time. Due to this, I was expecting terrible performances, but the majority of characters are genuinely well voiced. These of course do not compare to today's quality, but for 1994, they don't take away from the experience. Some voices I thought didn't really have much emotion in them, such as the voice of Katrina, while the voice actress for Metal Gear did a fantastic job in my opinion. It's a good performance from the cast overall, with some high and low points.
The soundtrack of this game has a very unique sound to it in my opinion, and I mean that in a positive way. This is a cyberpunk / cyber noir themed game, and while I couldn't have told you what that sounded like beforehand, I think the game nails that atmosphere really well. The track that plays when shit hits the fan really gets you off your seat and ready to investigate the crap out of the place you're in, while I have no doubt that I will remember some tracks (like the Junker HQ one) years and years down the line. Liked it a lot overall.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Snatcher has a great cyberpunk aesthetic. Whether its the neon-lit Neo Kobe City, the run-down slums in the otherwise high-tech environment or the presentation of the Snatchers, it has a great visual style, timeless you could even say. The game features some pretty gory sections (decapacitated humans, dead animals), so if you don't like that sort of stuff, stay away. For me, it added a lot to the legitimacy of the Snatcher threat and was not used too much as to be tactless. The presentation of the screens in this game looks pretty good in this remade version of the game, though they are simple-looking for the most part, as the majority of screens had little to no actual movement in them but rather remained still. This didn't take away from the cinematics however, which were well done despite the visual limitations the game had to work with.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Incredibly atmospheric. Cyber noir is presenting "technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality", and that fits the game's theme perfectly. It's a story about humanity's lack of trust in one another and how it is one of our biggest flaws, and it carries that from its beginning all the way to the end. Heck, due to suffering from amnesia, Gillian is partly defined by this, though he hardly is the only one here. The game portrays this theme well several times throughout the game. The cyberpunk part of the cyber noir theme is also well represented here, with the contrast of high tech and the rich parts of Neo Kobe City being compared to the slums ridden with poverty. There are even minor things here, like a group of women taking their artificially enhanced pets to the vet, like a parrot with instant memorization, a dog that barely makes any sound and ... a pigeon? The deep lore that you can read up on on the computer at Junker HQ also is worth going through to familiarize yourself with Neo Kobe City.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game took me about 10 hours to beat, though you can easily beat it a couple hours sooner, if you skip some of the optional stuff. For example, reading through all the lore on the computer at Junker HQ took me over half an hour and is completely optional. There is a lot of good stuff here, and little feels as filler.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
This is a pretty well-paced adventure throughout, with a good mix of investigating, action, comedy and romance, though the last part never really felt right to me due to what I talked about in the Story part of this review. My only issue was that progression was somehow hidden behind a combination of Look / Investigate / Look that felt unnecessary, and some of the puzzles felt really contrived. That said, this is a pretty focused game and does its job well in terms of the design of its structure.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
This is not a new concept, as Hideo Kojima used similar Japanese crime adventures as inspiration for this game. It is unique in that I haven't played it in the 4+ years worth of games I've played as part of this challenge, it is a visual novel, which is a rare breed for its time, especially in the West and it tells a good story that aged pretty well. And I guess it's also worth pointing out that the game does enough to keep the player engaged without making this game feel like a book and without making the limited light gun sequences to feel annoying.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
This is a very linear adventure. If you are going through all options like me, which doesn't take a lot of effort, you will see everything in one go, besides some minor dialogue results at times perhaps. But other than that, one playthrough will give you pretty much everything here.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 78/100
A visual novel that is worthy of being played. If you are a fan of Kojima's work, this is a must play, if you are a fan of visual novels or adventure games, this is well worth a playthrough and if you enjoy good stories in video games, this is in the upper tiers, especially for its time.
(This is the 94th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Just as Hideo Kojima's work over the past couple decades is unique to the AAA video game industry to this day, his work in 1988 with SNATCHER is unique to this day's Hideo Kojima. It's not an Action blockbuster like the Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding games, but it's rather a game in a genre of games Hideo Kojima enjoyed during his own formative years, the visual novel / crime mystery genre that was somewhat popular in Japan at the time.
Snatcher released initially on November 26, 1988 for the PC-8801 and the MSX2, two Japanese personal computers. It then released in a "remade" version on October 23, 1992 for the PC-Engine (exclusively for the Japanese version of the TurboGrafx-16) before it finally got an English release in December 15, 1994 for the Sega CD, which is the excuse I used to add it to my playlist for the challenge I am currently doing. To be honest, I have no idea how it came about to release this game in the West after not having done so in the 6 years prior, especially since the spritual successor 'Policenauts', which also released in 1994, did not get a Western release. But, thankfully, it happened, and with voice acting to boot. These games have a cult following these days and after having finished Snatcher, you can count me in among those who would be happy to see Hideo Kojima do another game of this type as some sort of side project during these modern times.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
If you decide to play Snatcher, you will probably do so to mainly experience its story. If that is not your expectation going in, I'm sure it will quickly become what will hold your attention, as the gameplay is rather typical for a visual novel. It's mainly clicking at prompts and listening to dialogue.
So with that being the case, delivering an interesting story full of interesting characters, plot twists and tense moments is quite important for this game to be worth playing. Luckily, the game delivers on all fronts thanks to its cyberpunk setting filled with a lot of well thoughtout, interesting lore, its compelling premise and its cast of characters.
50 years ago, the explosion of a biological weapon in a research facility near Moscow called "Lucifer-Alpha" killed over half of the world's population in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In the present, a new city on an artificial island in Eastern Asia was made and is called "Neo Kobe City", a melting pot of cultures due to large number of immigrants from China, the USA, Eastern and Western Europe and even more areas of the world. Mankind faces a new dilemma due to the appearance of humanoid robots that are called "Snatchers", because they 'snatch' a person (kill and dispose of them) and take up their spot. They can't be detected due to the fact that they breathe, bleed and sweat like any human and even wear artifical skin to look exactly like the person they are copying. They mainly snatch VIP types however, which presumably means that their appearance goes beyond "AI gone rogue".
You play Gillian Seed, who, along with your wife, is an amnesiac and just got assigned to the JUNKERs, a special anti-Snatcher task force (Japanese Undercover Neuro Kinetic Elimination Ranger). Your assignment is to be a runner, an in-field operative taking on the highest of risks by facing these Snatchers head on and eliminating them. To do this, you are assigned a Navigator, a robot that assists you on the field. Navigators get their personalities formed somewhat after the Junker they are assigned to, so yours. Your navigator is called "Metal Gear Mk. II", designed after the "Metal Gear menace from the 20th century", so yes, this seems to play in an alternate future of the Metal Gear universe.
This game is a visual novel, so gameplay looks like this. The first screen you see is that of the Junker HQ reception. A panel of prompts appears at the bottom half of the screen. You can "Look" at things, "Investigate" things, "Talk" and "Ask" if a person is in the room with you and also look at your "Possessions" to "look" and "investigate" them as well. Looking at things and investigating things is different in that investigating them is more analytical. You are often meant to look and investigate things multiple times, as each time reveals new information and thoughts. Some of these options are optionable if you want to get immersed more deeply with your surroundings, and some you are meant to use to trigger a moment that lets you progress, such as uncovering a new clue. As someone who likes to get immersed as much as possible, I have used every single option as many times as I could (at least I think), which not only does what I just told you, but also triggered a few "hidden" moments that I found quite entertaining. In one part of the city for example, Gillian attempts to "pick up women" and if you do so multiple times, one woman turns out to be a Snatcher, which triggers a "Game Over?" screen before it is revealed that Gillian was just daydreaming.
Gillian Seed in general is a pretty odd fellow, though he is more of a poster-boy for how Kojima seemingly wanted the game's atmosphere to be more humane to balance out the fact that Snatchers dominate everything else in this game. Gillian is an amnesiac as mentioned and has a wife called "Jamie", though they don't remember each other. He likes to use humor whenever possible to lower the tension that the entire case and his occupation represents, though balances that out with a get shit done attitude when the situation requires it. The non-serious part of his personality would have felt a bit too "in your face" however, if he wasn't assisted by Metal Gear Mk. 2, who steals the show in this game in my opinion. Both the voice acting and the personality of Metal Gear is perfection, as Metal Gear uses his analytical makeup to save Gillian's butt countless times on the field, but also roasts him every chance he gets when they get a break from the Snatcher-hunting they do. For a guy like Gillian who I can only describe as a "creep" for most parts of the game, I think it was a great idea to have him be accompanied by someone like Metal Gear who keeps him in line as much as possible. I say "creep" because there are 3 female side characters and several other female NPCs in this game, and I don't think there was a single one Gillian didn't make a pass at. For one, you can "look" at any character several times, and doing so once illicits a "she looks great" type response from Gilliant, while doing so more than once prompts the women to say that they feel uncomfortable, which doesn't stop Gillian from making way more straightforward remarks about their apperance. Now don't get me wrong, this type of behavior doesn't usually weird me out and I can see it for what it is, which is entertainment. But with Gillian, it's different. For one, he has a wife, which you can call in this game to tell her how much you want to get to know and to love her again. This creates a very weird situation where Gillian talks to Jamie on the phone, only to flirt with several women over the next hour alone. Second, one of the women includes the 18-year old daughter of a fallen co-worker, who is 14 in Japan's version of the game, so that Gillian doesn't know boundaries whatsoever is pretty off-putting. Otherwise though, his attempts at flirtation are mainly meant to be humorous, and it works since he gets shot down constantly (and gets ridiculed by Metal Gear for it), but on his own he doesn't make a great main character because his personality is mainly doing this shtick.
Apart from Metal Gear, who is the best character in the game for me, there are several individuals who have this mysterious aura around them, like there is more to them than you'd think. Harry the engineer is one of these types, but it extends to the Chief of the JUNKER operation, a bounty hunter named Random Hajile, your wife Jamie, an informer you talk to several times, and Gibson, the only other JUNKER who currently works as a runner alongside you.
With that, I want to get to the main story. I don't want to spoil anything, and in general I think the big story beats flow at a great pace and introduce a lot of twists and memorable moments. However, there is one flaw to the premise of the story that I found to be pretty odd. Actually, there were several over the first couple of hours, but it is worth noting that the plot cleared up plenty of questions I had and actually answered them in a quite satisfactory manner. This one issue that remains though is that this JUNKER operation seems pathetically tiny considering that the "Snatcher menace" presents a huge issue to all of mankind. ALL OF MANKIND. Meanwhile, here you are in the secret JUNKER operation tasked with stopping it and all you have is 5 (five) measly people working there, including just two actual runners. What? Even if Snatchers would snatch up everyday folk, this would be unrealistic, but when VIPs are exclusively involved, you'd think more monetary efforts would be made to make sure the menace was eradicated asap. The game does have an answer to this worry later on at least somewhat I suppose, but I still think that is too unrealistic to have two guys do all the work.
That said, if you enjoy a good mystery story, if you enjoy visual novels and if you like the cyberpunk aesthetic, I think you will enjoy the story that this game tells. It's well executed, I never felt like the game dragged with filler moments and the plot twists were well executed. The pre-1992 version had only 2 acts, but while this version comes with an additional third, which turns this game from one with a cliffhanger ending to one with a complete story. Knowing this, the third act did feel slightly out of place, as the majority of it involves listening to dialogue instead of much player input when it comes to investigation or the like, but the act does end things on a satisfactory note, so I'm glad it's there to give the player a full story to enjoy, though it does leave some room for a sequel.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
This is a visual novel, though not exactly like most modern ones. Instead of listening to a story and just clicking the A/X button to read the next lines, you select options to look at and investigate, so you are constantly involved with what the next set of lines of dialogue will focus on, keeping you more engaged. But of course, gameplay is a low priority in this game overall.
There is only one part about this game that has true gameplay, which is the game's light gun sections. In a 3x3 grid akin to a game of whack-a-mole, enemies appear in one of the 9 spots and you need to quickly react and aim and shoot at the part of the grid that they are on. This is a pretty small part of the game and I found it to be appear just the perfect number of times over the course of the game. I didn't fail once, but I've read that some found these parts to be kind of difficult. There is a rush of enemies in one late-game section of this, which might give you some trouble, if you are slower on the buttons, but I'm not nearly the fastest and got by with plenty of health remaining.
With visual novels, I find that the quality of the story makes the gameplay more or less tolerable, and since I found the story to be so good, I enjoyed taking my time with this one. This involved choosing every option to investigate multiple times, even to just trigger some optional dialogue from the characters.
You don't just choose options however. First, to find clues and progress, you often need to choose specific options multiple times. The order you would usually choose is to look at something and then to investigate. Sometimes though, you look, investigate and then have to look again to trigger an event, which was a weird way to do things, so be wary of this. That said, asking the player to be thorough is not a bad thing on its own, as reading through all the lines that are available adds to the overall context that the player gets.
One final part of the gameplay here are the puzzles. Often, you need to input answers, such as the password to talk to an informant, the name of a person, the really contrived "Oleen" puzzle and more. If a puzzle gives you any trouble, the game guides you to the answer pretty nicely, so don't worry about not figuring them out.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
This game has voice acting!!! An anomaly for games that I play as part of this retro challenge I'm doing. Of course, it's less unique for Sega CD titles, but still a very new thing for video games at the time. Due to this, I was expecting terrible performances, but the majority of characters are genuinely well voiced. These of course do not compare to today's quality, but for 1994, they don't take away from the experience. Some voices I thought didn't really have much emotion in them, such as the voice of Katrina, while the voice actress for Metal Gear did a fantastic job in my opinion. It's a good performance from the cast overall, with some high and low points.
The soundtrack of this game has a very unique sound to it in my opinion, and I mean that in a positive way. This is a cyberpunk / cyber noir themed game, and while I couldn't have told you what that sounded like beforehand, I think the game nails that atmosphere really well. The track that plays when shit hits the fan really gets you off your seat and ready to investigate the crap out of the place you're in, while I have no doubt that I will remember some tracks (like the Junker HQ one) years and years down the line. Liked it a lot overall.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Snatcher has a great cyberpunk aesthetic. Whether its the neon-lit Neo Kobe City, the run-down slums in the otherwise high-tech environment or the presentation of the Snatchers, it has a great visual style, timeless you could even say. The game features some pretty gory sections (decapacitated humans, dead animals), so if you don't like that sort of stuff, stay away. For me, it added a lot to the legitimacy of the Snatcher threat and was not used too much as to be tactless. The presentation of the screens in this game looks pretty good in this remade version of the game, though they are simple-looking for the most part, as the majority of screens had little to no actual movement in them but rather remained still. This didn't take away from the cinematics however, which were well done despite the visual limitations the game had to work with.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Incredibly atmospheric. Cyber noir is presenting "technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality", and that fits the game's theme perfectly. It's a story about humanity's lack of trust in one another and how it is one of our biggest flaws, and it carries that from its beginning all the way to the end. Heck, due to suffering from amnesia, Gillian is partly defined by this, though he hardly is the only one here. The game portrays this theme well several times throughout the game. The cyberpunk part of the cyber noir theme is also well represented here, with the contrast of high tech and the rich parts of Neo Kobe City being compared to the slums ridden with poverty. There are even minor things here, like a group of women taking their artificially enhanced pets to the vet, like a parrot with instant memorization, a dog that barely makes any sound and ... a pigeon? The deep lore that you can read up on on the computer at Junker HQ also is worth going through to familiarize yourself with Neo Kobe City.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game took me about 10 hours to beat, though you can easily beat it a couple hours sooner, if you skip some of the optional stuff. For example, reading through all the lore on the computer at Junker HQ took me over half an hour and is completely optional. There is a lot of good stuff here, and little feels as filler.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
This is a pretty well-paced adventure throughout, with a good mix of investigating, action, comedy and romance, though the last part never really felt right to me due to what I talked about in the Story part of this review. My only issue was that progression was somehow hidden behind a combination of Look / Investigate / Look that felt unnecessary, and some of the puzzles felt really contrived. That said, this is a pretty focused game and does its job well in terms of the design of its structure.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
This is not a new concept, as Hideo Kojima used similar Japanese crime adventures as inspiration for this game. It is unique in that I haven't played it in the 4+ years worth of games I've played as part of this challenge, it is a visual novel, which is a rare breed for its time, especially in the West and it tells a good story that aged pretty well. And I guess it's also worth pointing out that the game does enough to keep the player engaged without making this game feel like a book and without making the limited light gun sequences to feel annoying.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
This is a very linear adventure. If you are going through all options like me, which doesn't take a lot of effort, you will see everything in one go, besides some minor dialogue results at times perhaps. But other than that, one playthrough will give you pretty much everything here.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 78/100
A visual novel that is worthy of being played. If you are a fan of Kojima's work, this is a must play, if you are a fan of visual novels or adventure games, this is well worth a playthrough and if you enjoy good stories in video games, this is in the upper tiers, especially for its time.
(This is the 94th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Masterpiece
Snatcher wears its Blade Runner influences for everybody to see. As blatant as it is though, the game does feel like it's doing its own thing. It's less "we're ripping off blade runner" and more "this is what we would do if we had the blade runner franchise." It feels more earnest in that way.
In terms of the overall storytelling quality though, I feel like Snatcher is more entertaining as a series of individual moments than it is as a cohesive overarching narrative, because I've played this game at least three times now, and I still can't remember what the story is about. I do however, remember the characters, the little robot, the actiony sequences, the setpieces... The computer device in your HQ had a whole bunch of shit that had that sort of trademark Kojima "jesus christ he put way too much thought into this" thing, and it made for some entertaining worldbuilding. All of these things pull enough weight to keep you going to see what'll happen next, so as a story, I guess I'd rate it "good enough!"
Music's pretty good too. The opening theme is a particular highlight, by far the best song in the game. The rest of the songs tend to stick to 16-bit Genesis kinda sounds, though I wish there was more of them across the game. The visuals seen across are some of the best spritework you'll find of this era. Richly detailed cities lit in the night, busy crowds during Christmas season, and decrepit abandoned relics of the past, all of which emitted some feelings of nostalgia for places I've been to, similar to these.
As a game though, it's not fun. You have your traditional adventure game interface of that time, where you can look and examine various things, but Snatcher gets really annoying about it by providing you with random arbitrary requirements regarding what counts as "progress." Get ready to examine the same objects 5 or 6 different times constantly throughout the game, until it finally decides that you were thorough enough to unlock the next area. It'll cause you to get constantly stuck, and makes for some pretty padded pacing.
Besides that, you have a couple basic gallery shooter segments for when you have to engage in combat, but they're nothing to write home about. It's just something to do, but the lack of depth makes it arguably pointless.
Going back to the story, there is one major point of criticism I have against it. Your MC, Gillian. Gillian's a detective. I really like detective characters. Cool guys that get shit done. And Gillian does do some cool shit over time. It makes me really want to like him too. If it weren't for the fact that he's a major fuckin' horndog.
This is a complicated thing to discuss, as there are right ways to write a comically horny character, and there are very wrong ways that make things actively creepier than funnier. Gillian is a creepy horny. I think that's in part because he's the only one in the game that behaves that way, so he sticks out. It doesn't matter who it is, could be the 18-year old girl grieving her father's passing, for all he cares. As long as they're even remotely feminine in appearance, Gillian starts going awooga all over'em.
The contrast becomes explicitly obvious when you compare the way the game treats male characters versus how it treats girls as things to undress with your eyes. Not to mention, how it uses the existence of a trans person all for the sake of a shitty "Oh NO, I've been flirting with a GUY?!" joke. The treatment of sexuality here is off-puttingly one-sided, entirely based around making women uncomfortable by telling them to be submissive for the guys, and it turns the otherwise cool detective character into an incredibly depressing, and rarely endearing loser.
One may argue, that these flirting options are optional, and, as a result, are a roleplaying element. Absolutely not. Gillian will do stuff like this with or without your heads-up. There's one point in the game where you're searching the streets for an informant, and Gillian just happens to stumble upon some random girl on the street and starts acting up all on his own. It's not a roleplaying element, it's just part of his personality.
Not like this is a roleplaying game anyway, you don't make choices that affect the course of the game's story, all you're in charge of is your womanizer levels. I know I've been prattling on about this for like half the review, it's just unsettling that within a game that has so many neat moments, also lies this pointless bullshit. I mean, it could've had the potential to be an ironic Johnny Bravo, but it instead wound up being that creepy drunken guy in the bar that follows you down the alleyway. And it makes the game kinda embarrassing to recommend to anyone.
And I haven't even gotten to reviewing Policenauts yet, 'cause jesus christ.
In terms of the overall storytelling quality though, I feel like Snatcher is more entertaining as a series of individual moments than it is as a cohesive overarching narrative, because I've played this game at least three times now, and I still can't remember what the story is about. I do however, remember the characters, the little robot, the actiony sequences, the setpieces... The computer device in your HQ had a whole bunch of shit that had that sort of trademark Kojima "jesus christ he put way too much thought into this" thing, and it made for some entertaining worldbuilding. All of these things pull enough weight to keep you going to see what'll happen next, so as a story, I guess I'd rate it "good enough!"
Music's pretty good too. The opening theme is a particular highlight, by far the best song in the game. The rest of the songs tend to stick to 16-bit Genesis kinda sounds, though I wish there was more of them across the game. The visuals seen across are some of the best spritework you'll find of this era. Richly detailed cities lit in the night, busy crowds during Christmas season, and decrepit abandoned relics of the past, all of which emitted some feelings of nostalgia for places I've been to, similar to these.
As a game though, it's not fun. You have your traditional adventure game interface of that time, where you can look and examine various things, but Snatcher gets really annoying about it by providing you with random arbitrary requirements regarding what counts as "progress." Get ready to examine the same objects 5 or 6 different times constantly throughout the game, until it finally decides that you were thorough enough to unlock the next area. It'll cause you to get constantly stuck, and makes for some pretty padded pacing.
Besides that, you have a couple basic gallery shooter segments for when you have to engage in combat, but they're nothing to write home about. It's just something to do, but the lack of depth makes it arguably pointless.
Going back to the story, there is one major point of criticism I have against it. Your MC, Gillian. Gillian's a detective. I really like detective characters. Cool guys that get shit done. And Gillian does do some cool shit over time. It makes me really want to like him too. If it weren't for the fact that he's a major fuckin' horndog.
This is a complicated thing to discuss, as there are right ways to write a comically horny character, and there are very wrong ways that make things actively creepier than funnier. Gillian is a creepy horny. I think that's in part because he's the only one in the game that behaves that way, so he sticks out. It doesn't matter who it is, could be the 18-year old girl grieving her father's passing, for all he cares. As long as they're even remotely feminine in appearance, Gillian starts going awooga all over'em.
The contrast becomes explicitly obvious when you compare the way the game treats male characters versus how it treats girls as things to undress with your eyes. Not to mention, how it uses the existence of a trans person all for the sake of a shitty "Oh NO, I've been flirting with a GUY?!" joke. The treatment of sexuality here is off-puttingly one-sided, entirely based around making women uncomfortable by telling them to be submissive for the guys, and it turns the otherwise cool detective character into an incredibly depressing, and rarely endearing loser.
One may argue, that these flirting options are optional, and, as a result, are a roleplaying element. Absolutely not. Gillian will do stuff like this with or without your heads-up. There's one point in the game where you're searching the streets for an informant, and Gillian just happens to stumble upon some random girl on the street and starts acting up all on his own. It's not a roleplaying element, it's just part of his personality.
Not like this is a roleplaying game anyway, you don't make choices that affect the course of the game's story, all you're in charge of is your womanizer levels. I know I've been prattling on about this for like half the review, it's just unsettling that within a game that has so many neat moments, also lies this pointless bullshit. I mean, it could've had the potential to be an ironic Johnny Bravo, but it instead wound up being that creepy drunken guy in the bar that follows you down the alleyway. And it makes the game kinda embarrassing to recommend to anyone.
And I haven't even gotten to reviewing Policenauts yet, 'cause jesus christ.