There I was, October 18th, idly scrolling through Steam for, as one does. Usually there’s nothing all too interesting in my bored searches, especially with a Steam recommendation algorithm that thinks I would be even the slightest fraction of a bit interested in Mortal Kombat 1. But that time around, there was a game presented under “Because You Liked Tales of the Black Forest” (tangent: I never got around to writing a review for Black Forest, but it was a pretty solid RPG Maker horror game that felt like an interesting window into the Japanese Lost Decade, despite being made by Chinese devs). Another RPG Maker horror game, with a good art style and a hell of a tag line—and a hell of a lineup of art in the game’s news feed! It seemed like a curious thing, but still I made a small note of it in my mind and moved on.
Then, the next day, I saw a huge post about it on Twitter—several in fact! It had appeared to me that I had discovered this game a day before most everyone else had. What a weird feeling it is to be ahead of the curve like that. Seeing it thrown into the discourse piqued my interest and I just had to know what was actually up with this game beyond what everyone can see on its Steam page. And y’know what? It’s pretty damn good!
Now of course, it goes without saying this game is not for everyone; not for most people even. It pretty heavily features cannibalism and incest and other topics of the sort, and it’d be disingenuous to claim it’s not at least somewhat fetishistic about some of that stuff. Even as someone who is personally not bothered with most stuff, a few specific, visceral parts to when you’re butchering a human body made me squirm. It’s not a bad thing of course, horror games are made to bring us into uncomfortable territories.
Despite me calling it a horror game, largely because it follows the structure of a typical RPG Maker horror game, its not a scary game at all. It’s a black comedy, and damn, it’s funny as hell. The writing captures a very specific snarky, almost irony-poisoned vibe to it that really landed with me, way more than I anticipated. It hashes well with the absolutely FUCKED world it takes place in.
Even more fucked is the relationship between the sibling protagonists, Andrew and Ashley Graves. Truly they need to be taken apart from each other, but seeing their constant struggle with their deeply engrained codependency issues is really compelling. The constant highs and lows of seeing Andrew maybe come close to making the sheer toxicity of their relationship not wear him away, before collapsing back into the norm. Seeing them stumble down the path of engaging in cannibalism out of pure survival to doing it more out of spite. In a lot of ways, its a similar experience to what I loved seeing in Scott Pilgrim’s journey. Though, while Scott trends more or less positively, while the Graves… not so much!
The story is all complemented with a surprising amount of really good looking art, for what I believe is a solo dev project. Practically every scene has half a dozen illustrations expressing it. The world itself sells its dourness well, and I particularly love the overworld sprites. Look at these little depressed scrimbly creature things.
The gameplay exists. You walk around to do simple tasks, a couple rudimentary puzzles, exactly what you’d expect for this sort of game. It was pretty funny reading a dev thing about how they got help implementing the puzzles and, not to be judgmental to a solo indie dev but, wondering what exactly the help was needed for. It works!
Really, I’m left just wishing I waited to play the game until after it was finished. The last chapter, which seems to be very (completely?) different depending on the ending gotten in Chapter 2, is coming sometime next year. Now that I’m legitimately invested in where the fucked up twins end up, it sucks to wait! But hey, that’s a significantly better outcome than I could’ve expected first finding that Steam page.
Then, the next day, I saw a huge post about it on Twitter—several in fact! It had appeared to me that I had discovered this game a day before most everyone else had. What a weird feeling it is to be ahead of the curve like that. Seeing it thrown into the discourse piqued my interest and I just had to know what was actually up with this game beyond what everyone can see on its Steam page. And y’know what? It’s pretty damn good!
Now of course, it goes without saying this game is not for everyone; not for most people even. It pretty heavily features cannibalism and incest and other topics of the sort, and it’d be disingenuous to claim it’s not at least somewhat fetishistic about some of that stuff. Even as someone who is personally not bothered with most stuff, a few specific, visceral parts to when you’re butchering a human body made me squirm. It’s not a bad thing of course, horror games are made to bring us into uncomfortable territories.
Despite me calling it a horror game, largely because it follows the structure of a typical RPG Maker horror game, its not a scary game at all. It’s a black comedy, and damn, it’s funny as hell. The writing captures a very specific snarky, almost irony-poisoned vibe to it that really landed with me, way more than I anticipated. It hashes well with the absolutely FUCKED world it takes place in.
Even more fucked is the relationship between the sibling protagonists, Andrew and Ashley Graves. Truly they need to be taken apart from each other, but seeing their constant struggle with their deeply engrained codependency issues is really compelling. The constant highs and lows of seeing Andrew maybe come close to making the sheer toxicity of their relationship not wear him away, before collapsing back into the norm. Seeing them stumble down the path of engaging in cannibalism out of pure survival to doing it more out of spite. In a lot of ways, its a similar experience to what I loved seeing in Scott Pilgrim’s journey. Though, while Scott trends more or less positively, while the Graves… not so much!
The story is all complemented with a surprising amount of really good looking art, for what I believe is a solo dev project. Practically every scene has half a dozen illustrations expressing it. The world itself sells its dourness well, and I particularly love the overworld sprites. Look at these little depressed scrimbly creature things.
The gameplay exists. You walk around to do simple tasks, a couple rudimentary puzzles, exactly what you’d expect for this sort of game. It was pretty funny reading a dev thing about how they got help implementing the puzzles and, not to be judgmental to a solo indie dev but, wondering what exactly the help was needed for. It works!
Really, I’m left just wishing I waited to play the game until after it was finished. The last chapter, which seems to be very (completely?) different depending on the ending gotten in Chapter 2, is coming sometime next year. Now that I’m legitimately invested in where the fucked up twins end up, it sucks to wait! But hey, that’s a significantly better outcome than I could’ve expected first finding that Steam page.
ddario
7 months ago