Recommended by ludzu as part of this list.
The funniest thing about Palette to me is that is shows that even as far back as the year 2000 (22 years ago, oh how time flies!), the biggest successes made in RPG Maker have basically never been RPGs. Not only did Palette sweep the awards at the Fourth ASCII Entertainment Software Contest, it managed to get a publishing deal and a full-blown remake for the Playstation, which means its rousing success despite a lack of any traditional gameplay probably set the Arthouse RPG Maker scene in stone for the rest of time. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. What is Palette, first and foremost?
Palette is, put simply, a game about memories. A psychiatrist being held at gunpoint has to walk a girl known as B.D. through her mind palace in order to help her piece together her fragmented psyche and unravel the mystery of her tragic past. This is not just simple set-dressing mind you, it's part and parcel of the whole experience: the visual and mechanical fundamentals of Palette are built directly on top of this foundation.
Visually, the rooms are framed as vignettes, snapshots of locations and events that you only see the relevant part of, people rendered as loose outlines only marked by their most prominent details, loosely connected by thin threads of logic and feeling, just like trying to recall a childhood memory. True to its name, the color palette is the star of the show here. The psychiatrist's office (the real world) is rendered in color, but the mindscape you explore is a stark black-and-white, with the important objects you need to interact with always rendered as a bright, contrasting red. As you step into memories, it seeps into either a warm sepia or a cool monochromatic blue to represent the tone of the memory and the events wherein. It's constantly shifting to set the mood with little effort for maximum results, pushing the engine to its limits as the game struggles to handle its artistic vision.
Mechanically, the gameplay centers around a Gauge on the right side of the screen. It's split into chunks, and moving to another room or clearing obstacles in your path consumes a chunk of the Gauge. You hit 0, and you're booted back to the psychiatrist's office to try again. You must find mementos scattered around your mind palace in order to increase the amount of Gauge you have to work with, as well as unveil more and more information about B.D. and her situation. In a great bit of story and gameplay integration, you start off very weak-willed, and it takes a while just to remember basic information, but as you gain more mementos, you're able to access more traumatic memories and power through the mental roadblocks preventing you from uncovering the truth of the situation. It's remarkably subtle storytelling that helps the mystery naturally build up towards its climax.
Speaking of, the mystery at the core of Palette is an intriguing one, constantly presenting questions and drip-feeding you information at the perfect rate, motivating you to continue playing and powering through admittedly tedious backtracking and pixel-hunt puzzles just to see how these pieces connect and intersect, but it kind of crashes into a cacophony of nonsense near the climax as twist upon twist is cascaded on top of each other like a 7-lane pileup, but that's not a negative, and I walked away both shocked and thoroughly satisfied with my time. If you don't mind jumping through a few technical hoops to get this game running, it's a landmark piece of RPG Maker history and a mystery story that's worth checking out.
The funniest thing about Palette to me is that is shows that even as far back as the year 2000 (22 years ago, oh how time flies!), the biggest successes made in RPG Maker have basically never been RPGs. Not only did Palette sweep the awards at the Fourth ASCII Entertainment Software Contest, it managed to get a publishing deal and a full-blown remake for the Playstation, which means its rousing success despite a lack of any traditional gameplay probably set the Arthouse RPG Maker scene in stone for the rest of time. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. What is Palette, first and foremost?
Palette is, put simply, a game about memories. A psychiatrist being held at gunpoint has to walk a girl known as B.D. through her mind palace in order to help her piece together her fragmented psyche and unravel the mystery of her tragic past. This is not just simple set-dressing mind you, it's part and parcel of the whole experience: the visual and mechanical fundamentals of Palette are built directly on top of this foundation.
Visually, the rooms are framed as vignettes, snapshots of locations and events that you only see the relevant part of, people rendered as loose outlines only marked by their most prominent details, loosely connected by thin threads of logic and feeling, just like trying to recall a childhood memory. True to its name, the color palette is the star of the show here. The psychiatrist's office (the real world) is rendered in color, but the mindscape you explore is a stark black-and-white, with the important objects you need to interact with always rendered as a bright, contrasting red. As you step into memories, it seeps into either a warm sepia or a cool monochromatic blue to represent the tone of the memory and the events wherein. It's constantly shifting to set the mood with little effort for maximum results, pushing the engine to its limits as the game struggles to handle its artistic vision.
Mechanically, the gameplay centers around a Gauge on the right side of the screen. It's split into chunks, and moving to another room or clearing obstacles in your path consumes a chunk of the Gauge. You hit 0, and you're booted back to the psychiatrist's office to try again. You must find mementos scattered around your mind palace in order to increase the amount of Gauge you have to work with, as well as unveil more and more information about B.D. and her situation. In a great bit of story and gameplay integration, you start off very weak-willed, and it takes a while just to remember basic information, but as you gain more mementos, you're able to access more traumatic memories and power through the mental roadblocks preventing you from uncovering the truth of the situation. It's remarkably subtle storytelling that helps the mystery naturally build up towards its climax.
Speaking of, the mystery at the core of Palette is an intriguing one, constantly presenting questions and drip-feeding you information at the perfect rate, motivating you to continue playing and powering through admittedly tedious backtracking and pixel-hunt puzzles just to see how these pieces connect and intersect, but it kind of crashes into a cacophony of nonsense near the climax as twist upon twist is cascaded on top of each other like a 7-lane pileup, but that's not a negative, and I walked away both shocked and thoroughly satisfied with my time. If you don't mind jumping through a few technical hoops to get this game running, it's a landmark piece of RPG Maker history and a mystery story that's worth checking out.
2 Comments
@ludzu No problem, thank you for suggesting it! It's not too hard to set up honestly. If you have a machine running Windows, simply setting the Compatibility Mode to Windows 95 is enough to make it playable (minor graphical bug with textboxes and occasional audio hiccup but otherwise p. accurate).
ludzu
2 years ago