radradradish
1995
Clock Tower is a game I really want to like more than I do. You play as an orphan named Jennifer Simpson (named after the lead protagonist of the Dario Argento film Phenomena) who has just recently been adopted by a wealthy recluse named Simon Barrows. However, when the orphanage matron disappears upon attempting to summon Mr. Barrows, Jennifer’s attempts at finding her instead calls on the Scissorman, who is hell bent on hunting down and killing Jennifer and all her orphan friends. Now Jennifer must navigate the mansion, collect items, solve puzzles in order to find her friends, figure out the mystery behind the mansion, and avoid the Scissorman along the way.
When I think of this game — having actually beaten it several months before writing up this review — mostly… I feel sad, because this game was the originator for a lot of mechanics and concepts that became commonplace in horror… in addition to having just a lot of stuff that’s my jam. Things like the giallo influence, the way the narrative diverges based on what the player does, graded endings based off of what mysteries the player solves (and when they choose to end the game), confrontations where you need to hide from the monster (but don’t hide when they’re in the room with you, or else its instant death)... these are all things that’ve been copied and iterated upon by other games later down the line, but it’s neat to see all these things together, and it’s fascinating to see how these things are represented in the game that helped popularize these concepts in the first place. Combine that with a cool artstyle that manages to blend pixel art and photorealism, and a story that… really works to make use of its diverging narrative, you get a game that in some respects is just as effective and fascinating today as it was when it came out.
I just wish it was actually fun to play.
Here’s how it went down: I boot up the game, enjoy the opening cutscene, get a bit confused on what I’m supposed to do during the opening segments but mostly shrug it off as me needing to get used to the game, start heading to different parts of the house… then get informed that running is a limited resource and that I need to save it for when I start getting chased. I start walking around the house instead and… holy shit Jennifer is so slow. Like, seriously. This girl plods around the house as if her life isn’t in danger. It genuinely feels like it takes upwards of thirty seconds to walk from one end of a hallway to another, and given that this house is built out of a lot of interconnected hallways, getting from one end to another genuinely feels like it takes minutes. And given that the way puzzles are structured often places items at the opposite end of the mansion from where you use them, which creates a gameplay loop of walking very slowly to one end of the house, getting what you need there, walking very slowly to the other end of the house, using said item, checking where you need to go next, realizing the next thing you need to do was on the side of the mansion where you’d just been, sighing, then beginning the cycle all over again.
Scissorman encounters, sadly, are far too infrequent to break up this monotony — aside from the first one I got precisely two the whole game — and… maybe if I knew more hiding places it would’ve been different, but what would happen was that I’d be close to where I needed to be, he’d interrupt me, I’d run back to where the hiding place I knew was… but then that hiding place was on the other end of the mansion so when he was gone I’d have to walk very slowly back to where I was originally intending to go and holy shit actually playing this game is so miserable. It’s slow and dry and more than anything I felt bored going through the mansion. Barely anything happens and the guy meant to hunt you down never actually fucking appears and the entire experience is watching Jennifer plod along through this mansion over and over again with nothing to break it up. Maybe back when it was first released the slowness contributed to the atmosphere, but having played games from nowadays that manage to achieve that sense of looming dread, it’s clear that Clock Tower wasn’t really to veer the needle towards that balance, coming off as just... genuinely really annoying to play.
Which is a shame, because I do legitimately love what it’s going for in a lot of aspects. In terms of narrative — how what rooms you enter and what things you see diverge it, how you can effectively choose to end the story at any time and getting better results for how long you choose to stay/what specifically you unearth — it’s still absolutely fascinating and effective today and it’s really worth experiencing the game to see how it does these things… just so long as you watch somebody else do it, because actually going through it? Honestly kind of a pain! 5/10.
When I think of this game — having actually beaten it several months before writing up this review — mostly… I feel sad, because this game was the originator for a lot of mechanics and concepts that became commonplace in horror… in addition to having just a lot of stuff that’s my jam. Things like the giallo influence, the way the narrative diverges based on what the player does, graded endings based off of what mysteries the player solves (and when they choose to end the game), confrontations where you need to hide from the monster (but don’t hide when they’re in the room with you, or else its instant death)... these are all things that’ve been copied and iterated upon by other games later down the line, but it’s neat to see all these things together, and it’s fascinating to see how these things are represented in the game that helped popularize these concepts in the first place. Combine that with a cool artstyle that manages to blend pixel art and photorealism, and a story that… really works to make use of its diverging narrative, you get a game that in some respects is just as effective and fascinating today as it was when it came out.
I just wish it was actually fun to play.
Here’s how it went down: I boot up the game, enjoy the opening cutscene, get a bit confused on what I’m supposed to do during the opening segments but mostly shrug it off as me needing to get used to the game, start heading to different parts of the house… then get informed that running is a limited resource and that I need to save it for when I start getting chased. I start walking around the house instead and… holy shit Jennifer is so slow. Like, seriously. This girl plods around the house as if her life isn’t in danger. It genuinely feels like it takes upwards of thirty seconds to walk from one end of a hallway to another, and given that this house is built out of a lot of interconnected hallways, getting from one end to another genuinely feels like it takes minutes. And given that the way puzzles are structured often places items at the opposite end of the mansion from where you use them, which creates a gameplay loop of walking very slowly to one end of the house, getting what you need there, walking very slowly to the other end of the house, using said item, checking where you need to go next, realizing the next thing you need to do was on the side of the mansion where you’d just been, sighing, then beginning the cycle all over again.
Scissorman encounters, sadly, are far too infrequent to break up this monotony — aside from the first one I got precisely two the whole game — and… maybe if I knew more hiding places it would’ve been different, but what would happen was that I’d be close to where I needed to be, he’d interrupt me, I’d run back to where the hiding place I knew was… but then that hiding place was on the other end of the mansion so when he was gone I’d have to walk very slowly back to where I was originally intending to go and holy shit actually playing this game is so miserable. It’s slow and dry and more than anything I felt bored going through the mansion. Barely anything happens and the guy meant to hunt you down never actually fucking appears and the entire experience is watching Jennifer plod along through this mansion over and over again with nothing to break it up. Maybe back when it was first released the slowness contributed to the atmosphere, but having played games from nowadays that manage to achieve that sense of looming dread, it’s clear that Clock Tower wasn’t really to veer the needle towards that balance, coming off as just... genuinely really annoying to play.
Which is a shame, because I do legitimately love what it’s going for in a lot of aspects. In terms of narrative — how what rooms you enter and what things you see diverge it, how you can effectively choose to end the story at any time and getting better results for how long you choose to stay/what specifically you unearth — it’s still absolutely fascinating and effective today and it’s really worth experiencing the game to see how it does these things… just so long as you watch somebody else do it, because actually going through it? Honestly kind of a pain! 5/10.
2018
I played Paratopic roughly, like, 4-5 years before this, and the impression I had then was that there were interesting ideas hamstrung by just how… confusing and padded it was for what was only a forty-minute game. Now, replaying it 4-5 years later… my opinion hasn’t changed much. I credit it for its general artstyle and sound design (I love how grimy everything is), but… yeah I wasn’t really into much else. The conceit of the revolving protagonists is interesting, but for some reason the game actively tries to mislead you into thinking that it's just the one, and it's difficult to really tell that that's what the game's going for until near the end. Meanwhile… I can’t emphasize how padded this feels for what’s already not a long game. There are no less than three sections where you drive down an empty highway for five minutes, and when it's not doing that it's either making you walk slowly through a forest, wait for the world's slowest elevator to come down, or something else that doesn't really do much more than drag the game's runtime out. Nothing of substance really happens, and it feels like in the middle of giving the game its atmosphere the idea of attaching something more to it became second or third or fifth priority. And, admittedly, it’s a neat atmosphere… but ultimately, without much of a coherent narrative or defining idea for said atmosphere to support, this game feels… kind of vapid, more than anything. 3/10.
This… took quite a bit of time to complete, on my end. I started roughly mid-September, played it for an hour before feeling low-energy and stopping, then not proceeding to play it until early October, then playing it until the first story split, then dropping it until November wherein I just kind of blitzed through nearly the entire left side of the flow chart, dropped it and didn’t pick it up until early in the new year, wherein I went through the rest of the game in the space of a couple of days. It was… a lot more sporadic of a process than usual for going through a VN (mostly due to busyness, nothing to do with the game itself) and I think that ended up hurting the game a little bit. For a mystery that focuses quite a lot on foreshadowing and micro-details, losing your memory of a lot of what happens right at the beginning does make parsing future information/figuring out the mystery harder than it’d otherwise be.
But regardless, I finished it, eventually, and… I think this is my favourite Uchikoshi game?
Well, maybe. It’s between this and Virtue’s Last Reward, and although I do love both games in semi-equal measure, I thiiiink this game gets the edge mostly because of its status as a standalone, not needing to stand within the context of a series in order to reach its full potential. You play as Special Agent Kaname Date, a detective investigating the death of his old friend Shoko Nadami. To do this, he and his police department, ABIS, utilize a top-secret interrogation technique called ‘Psyncing,’ which lets him delve into the Freud/Jungian unconscious of a character to find out what secrets lie within. In gameplay, these Psyncing segments are represented by ‘Somniums’ — adventure-game-ish segments where you look around a room, interact with objects, and break your subject’s mental locks in order to come closer to the truth of the case. Somniums often possess multiple solutions — which each reveal separate things — and through uncovering these different ways of solving the puzzle the story can split off in several ways, each branch (similar to other Uchikoshi games, like Virtue’s Last Reward) revealing different aspects of the investigation and, once you’ve turned every stone, coalescing together in the end to give you the full picture.
And I think the way you slowly work your way through the mystery is one of the game’s strongest aspects. While there’s one issue I have — a major component to the mystery that isn’t really teased or foreshadowed at all until it comes up near the end — I think Uchikoshi’s multiple-route-based, plot-heavy, solve-the-overarching-mystery style of VN really works well translated to a whodunnit like this game. The way you get answers and more questions with every little bit of story progression, the way that the plot can twist and turn and veer off onto tangents and yet still make sense with context, the way the story pretty perfectly resolves everything when even details of the mystery itself can change depending on your branch… it’s great stuff. I marathoned basically the entire final act of the game in the space of one night because I knew I had to see how everything got resolved and ultimately, in hindsight, I really don’t regret that decision. I’m pretty happy with how it all went.
And while the mystery on its own is a strong positive towards this game, I think what really made me love this game’s story was the focus on its characters. There’s a large cast of, like, 30 people in total, and while some of those characters are obviously more important than others there isn’t particularly a weak link within the main cast, which is pretty incredible on a cast that runs the spectrum on things like age, personality, sexuality, and how much the game takes them seriously. I appreciate the game’s handling of anime tropes — your main character being majorly horny is a lot better when it’s a. completely optional whether you be that or not and b. actually justified within the context of the story, and I’ve found that tsunderes are a lot more likable when they’re both your daughter and also twelve years old — but most of all I really love the way characters are defined through their relationship to Date, and by extension, you: the player. Date’s core character traits — being aloof and distant to people and unfamiliar with a lot of details regarding the world and the situation at hand yet still having a sense of humour about the world around him — are traits that are very easy for the player to insert themselves onto, and the way you can choose how Date reacts to specific things, what offhanded statements he makes, or where to go first during an investigation really hits that line between Date being his own distinct character while still having the player kinda feel the same way he does about certain things. You too can feel the same sort of frustration when you rock up to haughty, obviously corrupt-and-evil congressman So Sejima’s place for information and end up with nothing because he knows how to “you don’t have a warrant” his way out of any confrontation you want to have with him. You can go off-topic to leer at or flirt with the receptionist and you feel the eyes of everybody else in the room judge you just like Date does. It's a quiet, subtle way of making the main character an insert of the player, and I think it works really well.
And again, I love how a lot of these characters are characterized by Date’s relationship with them, and how certain facets of them are revealed just as Date begins to know them on more than a surface level. I’ve mentioned Sejima above — how Date’s inability to achieve anything every time he walks onto the Sejima estate really does a great job at selling how untouchable the guy is — but I’d really like to shout out Iris and Aiba for really showing just how well the game does with its characters. Iris — the deuteragonist for the right side of the flowchart — is on the surface an energetic and cheerful idol, but from her very first appearance she uses that exact initial appearance to pressure Date into doing exactly what she wants, which immediately works to signify that she’s a lot more relevant to the mystery than she initially seems. Aiba — an advanced AI that functions as Date’s left eye for the majority of the game — mostly functions as exposition and the main source of comic relief, but there are moments where the two of you are alone and Aiba functions as your conscience, helping Date calm down through what’s on his mind and showing that, despite being an AI, she feels things exactly the same way Date does. It’s great stuff, and just an example of how well the game writes its characters. I’m really happy that there are points when even in the middle of the investigation that the characters can just sit down and have some downtime. It really suits this game’s biggest strength.
(and also Mizuki is adorable and easily the shining star of the cast and I’m SO HAPPY that she’s the protagonist for the sequel but also I couldn’t figure out a good place to put this so)
Honestly, the game’s really easily strong enough to be considered excellent, and I’d otherwise consider it as such… but there’s one really major aspect of the game that drags it down: Somniums. The short of how Somniums work is that you’re placed in an area and you’re expected to play around with the items within it until you stumble onto the thing that works and progress. A lot of the game’s irrelevant sense of humour is on full display during these puzzle segments, and most of the alternate options, while not what let you progress, are still worth doing because they’re fun and show a bit more of Date and Aiba’s relationship. Initially, it was fun, and kind of interesting to see all the dream logic stuff, and I was down to see exactly how this core concept iterated as it went on.
How it iterated was by adding a time limit. A really restrictive time limit. One that kind of singlehandedly goes against the best aspects of the Somniums and made me dread whenever they came up.
The way it works is that every action taken inside a Somnium detracts usually at least ten seconds (though these can detract up to 30 seconds or a full minute) from a hard six-minute time limit. Certain actions award you TIMIEs, which you can use to divide/subtract how much time an action takes, but certain actions can award you negative TIMIEs, which then multiplies how much time an action takes. Somniums almost immediately become an exercise in finding the quickest route through, and when the puzzles run on dream logic and brute-forcing through options until you find the right one, this… comes at odds with itself fairly quickly. Later Somniums basically become an exercise of knowing the correct path from the start because if you happened to mess up (or, y’know, do other things so you can get an achievement/read the funny dialogue) too much there’s a point where the puzzle becomes unwinnable and you have to go back to the beginning. This means skipping through (what can be) a lot of dialogue all over again, which… even with the shorter Somniums ends up becoming super frustrating. It gets even worse when some of the later Somniums have major plot beats within. Oh, hey, you want to experience the emotional climax of one of the story arcs which heavily explores the history of these two characters and represents major character development for one of them? Do you want to go through a haunting depiction of a cognitive disorder that paints the medium and heavily recontextualizes everything you’ve thought about one of the weirder characters so far? Get ready to force yourself through the same dialogue over and over again as you realize you have to go back to the very start in order to have enough time to get through. Get ready for what was once emotionally resonant to become a complete chore. Again, maybe if the time limit wasn’t there these would’ve been a lot more fun, but by the time I was ready to push towards the end I just opened up walkthroughs for Somniums and skipped all the potential fun dialogue they could’ve had. Sucked, but it was better than having to deal with repeating stuff over and over again.
More minor, and potentially spoilery, but one thing that did disappoint me about the resolution of the mystery is that… unlike the 999 trilogy, there wasn’t any IC explanation as to why locks existed and why you needed information in order to break those locks? There’s the beginning of an explanation... but then it kinda just goes “no that’s stupid it’s obviously parallel universes” when the topic of alternate timelines was barely even brought up in the game before or afterwards. It’s mostly obvious that it’s just an OOC “you can’t go here yet,” and that it’s kinda needed so that the player doesn’t stumble into endgame revelations/the true ending immediately, but when I ran into a lock the very first route I got onto, and when one of the actual endings just very suddenly cuts off, I kind of spent the whole game wondering why exactly things were working out like that only to… not really get what I was kind of hoping for, that things just cut off because the story requires that the story cuts off at that exact moment. I think the flow chart works really well, I think it’s integral to the game’s structure and story, but when the 999 trilogy always made sure the flow chart had an IC reason for existing… it’s hard not to strike a negative comparison here.
But ultimately, I thought AI was great! The way its puzzles are executed and some quibbles with the flow chart kind of stop it from being excellent, but if you’re into Uchikoshi’s tried-and-true story structure, or if you’re looking for a crazy mystery with great, low-key character writing and an amazingly irrelevant sense of humour, then I’d say this game’s a pretty strong 8/10.
But regardless, I finished it, eventually, and… I think this is my favourite Uchikoshi game?
Well, maybe. It’s between this and Virtue’s Last Reward, and although I do love both games in semi-equal measure, I thiiiink this game gets the edge mostly because of its status as a standalone, not needing to stand within the context of a series in order to reach its full potential. You play as Special Agent Kaname Date, a detective investigating the death of his old friend Shoko Nadami. To do this, he and his police department, ABIS, utilize a top-secret interrogation technique called ‘Psyncing,’ which lets him delve into the Freud/Jungian unconscious of a character to find out what secrets lie within. In gameplay, these Psyncing segments are represented by ‘Somniums’ — adventure-game-ish segments where you look around a room, interact with objects, and break your subject’s mental locks in order to come closer to the truth of the case. Somniums often possess multiple solutions — which each reveal separate things — and through uncovering these different ways of solving the puzzle the story can split off in several ways, each branch (similar to other Uchikoshi games, like Virtue’s Last Reward) revealing different aspects of the investigation and, once you’ve turned every stone, coalescing together in the end to give you the full picture.
And I think the way you slowly work your way through the mystery is one of the game’s strongest aspects. While there’s one issue I have — a major component to the mystery that isn’t really teased or foreshadowed at all until it comes up near the end — I think Uchikoshi’s multiple-route-based, plot-heavy, solve-the-overarching-mystery style of VN really works well translated to a whodunnit like this game. The way you get answers and more questions with every little bit of story progression, the way that the plot can twist and turn and veer off onto tangents and yet still make sense with context, the way the story pretty perfectly resolves everything when even details of the mystery itself can change depending on your branch… it’s great stuff. I marathoned basically the entire final act of the game in the space of one night because I knew I had to see how everything got resolved and ultimately, in hindsight, I really don’t regret that decision. I’m pretty happy with how it all went.
And while the mystery on its own is a strong positive towards this game, I think what really made me love this game’s story was the focus on its characters. There’s a large cast of, like, 30 people in total, and while some of those characters are obviously more important than others there isn’t particularly a weak link within the main cast, which is pretty incredible on a cast that runs the spectrum on things like age, personality, sexuality, and how much the game takes them seriously. I appreciate the game’s handling of anime tropes — your main character being majorly horny is a lot better when it’s a. completely optional whether you be that or not and b. actually justified within the context of the story, and I’ve found that tsunderes are a lot more likable when they’re both your daughter and also twelve years old — but most of all I really love the way characters are defined through their relationship to Date, and by extension, you: the player. Date’s core character traits — being aloof and distant to people and unfamiliar with a lot of details regarding the world and the situation at hand yet still having a sense of humour about the world around him — are traits that are very easy for the player to insert themselves onto, and the way you can choose how Date reacts to specific things, what offhanded statements he makes, or where to go first during an investigation really hits that line between Date being his own distinct character while still having the player kinda feel the same way he does about certain things. You too can feel the same sort of frustration when you rock up to haughty, obviously corrupt-and-evil congressman So Sejima’s place for information and end up with nothing because he knows how to “you don’t have a warrant” his way out of any confrontation you want to have with him. You can go off-topic to leer at or flirt with the receptionist and you feel the eyes of everybody else in the room judge you just like Date does. It's a quiet, subtle way of making the main character an insert of the player, and I think it works really well.
And again, I love how a lot of these characters are characterized by Date’s relationship with them, and how certain facets of them are revealed just as Date begins to know them on more than a surface level. I’ve mentioned Sejima above — how Date’s inability to achieve anything every time he walks onto the Sejima estate really does a great job at selling how untouchable the guy is — but I’d really like to shout out Iris and Aiba for really showing just how well the game does with its characters. Iris — the deuteragonist for the right side of the flowchart — is on the surface an energetic and cheerful idol, but from her very first appearance she uses that exact initial appearance to pressure Date into doing exactly what she wants, which immediately works to signify that she’s a lot more relevant to the mystery than she initially seems. Aiba — an advanced AI that functions as Date’s left eye for the majority of the game — mostly functions as exposition and the main source of comic relief, but there are moments where the two of you are alone and Aiba functions as your conscience, helping Date calm down through what’s on his mind and showing that, despite being an AI, she feels things exactly the same way Date does. It’s great stuff, and just an example of how well the game writes its characters. I’m really happy that there are points when even in the middle of the investigation that the characters can just sit down and have some downtime. It really suits this game’s biggest strength.
(and also Mizuki is adorable and easily the shining star of the cast and I’m SO HAPPY that she’s the protagonist for the sequel but also I couldn’t figure out a good place to put this so)
Honestly, the game’s really easily strong enough to be considered excellent, and I’d otherwise consider it as such… but there’s one really major aspect of the game that drags it down: Somniums. The short of how Somniums work is that you’re placed in an area and you’re expected to play around with the items within it until you stumble onto the thing that works and progress. A lot of the game’s irrelevant sense of humour is on full display during these puzzle segments, and most of the alternate options, while not what let you progress, are still worth doing because they’re fun and show a bit more of Date and Aiba’s relationship. Initially, it was fun, and kind of interesting to see all the dream logic stuff, and I was down to see exactly how this core concept iterated as it went on.
How it iterated was by adding a time limit. A really restrictive time limit. One that kind of singlehandedly goes against the best aspects of the Somniums and made me dread whenever they came up.
The way it works is that every action taken inside a Somnium detracts usually at least ten seconds (though these can detract up to 30 seconds or a full minute) from a hard six-minute time limit. Certain actions award you TIMIEs, which you can use to divide/subtract how much time an action takes, but certain actions can award you negative TIMIEs, which then multiplies how much time an action takes. Somniums almost immediately become an exercise in finding the quickest route through, and when the puzzles run on dream logic and brute-forcing through options until you find the right one, this… comes at odds with itself fairly quickly. Later Somniums basically become an exercise of knowing the correct path from the start because if you happened to mess up (or, y’know, do other things so you can get an achievement/read the funny dialogue) too much there’s a point where the puzzle becomes unwinnable and you have to go back to the beginning. This means skipping through (what can be) a lot of dialogue all over again, which… even with the shorter Somniums ends up becoming super frustrating. It gets even worse when some of the later Somniums have major plot beats within. Oh, hey, you want to experience the emotional climax of one of the story arcs which heavily explores the history of these two characters and represents major character development for one of them? Do you want to go through a haunting depiction of a cognitive disorder that paints the medium and heavily recontextualizes everything you’ve thought about one of the weirder characters so far? Get ready to force yourself through the same dialogue over and over again as you realize you have to go back to the very start in order to have enough time to get through. Get ready for what was once emotionally resonant to become a complete chore. Again, maybe if the time limit wasn’t there these would’ve been a lot more fun, but by the time I was ready to push towards the end I just opened up walkthroughs for Somniums and skipped all the potential fun dialogue they could’ve had. Sucked, but it was better than having to deal with repeating stuff over and over again.
More minor, and potentially spoilery, but one thing that did disappoint me about the resolution of the mystery is that… unlike the 999 trilogy, there wasn’t any IC explanation as to why locks existed and why you needed information in order to break those locks? There’s the beginning of an explanation... but then it kinda just goes “no that’s stupid it’s obviously parallel universes” when the topic of alternate timelines was barely even brought up in the game before or afterwards. It’s mostly obvious that it’s just an OOC “you can’t go here yet,” and that it’s kinda needed so that the player doesn’t stumble into endgame revelations/the true ending immediately, but when I ran into a lock the very first route I got onto, and when one of the actual endings just very suddenly cuts off, I kind of spent the whole game wondering why exactly things were working out like that only to… not really get what I was kind of hoping for, that things just cut off because the story requires that the story cuts off at that exact moment. I think the flow chart works really well, I think it’s integral to the game’s structure and story, but when the 999 trilogy always made sure the flow chart had an IC reason for existing… it’s hard not to strike a negative comparison here.
But ultimately, I thought AI was great! The way its puzzles are executed and some quibbles with the flow chart kind of stop it from being excellent, but if you’re into Uchikoshi’s tried-and-true story structure, or if you’re looking for a crazy mystery with great, low-key character writing and an amazingly irrelevant sense of humour, then I’d say this game’s a pretty strong 8/10.
This… felt fairly run-of-the-mill. It’s one of those ‘job simulator’ sort of games, where the horror comes as something slowly creeping into your status quo, and it… sure does hit the exact same beats I’ve seen in games like these before. It’s hard to really remember much about it, in all honesty: it does all the things you’d expect a game like this to do but it doesn’t particularly have the creativity or style to make those things seem fun or unique or interesting. Most of what comes to mind were the gameplay frustrations — the trek to the titular convenience store every night where nothing ever happens, the puzzles/gameplay sections which just felt kinda finicky and annoying, how a lot of the game is just waiting for the next thing to happen so you can wait for the next thing to happen. Perhaps if it was shorter, and maybe got to the point a little quicker, I’d be more willing to vibe with it, but as is… there are other games out there that do everything this game is going for but better. 5/10.
2018
And from the best game of my Halloween marathon to… what was easily the worst. Jack is Missing is a first-person story game which is just so fucking broken. Like, there’s lag on everything you do. There’s no button prompts for anything so you kind of have to guess what you’re meant to do when you pick up an item and want to put it down. Objectives and instructions aren’t generally clear so sometimes you’re left trying to figure out what to do. Cutscenes lock your character in place so whoops, if your head was inclined down when the big jumpscare was supposed to happen then too bad, you don’t actually get to see any of it. Like, I can say that the game wasn’t really a major glitchfest… but when my assumption while playing it is that it is, and when I restart it three times because I think some non-existent signposting is actually the game glitching out and preventing me from progressing, that’s… at least a little bit of an indictment. Combine all that with a… badly written story that literally ends, like, a third of the way through and some really incomprehensible voice acting, and… man, I’m loosely generous and tend to give things the benefit of the doubt, and I wouldn’t call this as bad as other things I’ve given this score, but… I honestly cannot think of anything this game in particular does well, and when the core of this broken mess is something that… wouldn’t have been very good to begin with, I don’t think I’d be lying if I said this was one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Light 1/10.
2018
I can’t quite tell whether this game was in on its own joke or not. There are parts that indicate that it is poking fun at itself, though even then I’m… not really sure that really compensates for how buggy and broken it feels to interact with anything in this game. Beyond that, too, it’s not particularly fun: it’s a walking simulator where it’s constantly really unclear where you’re supposed to go or how you’re supposed to solve the… puzzles? the game throws at you. That said, though, it’s comedy gold. From the voice acting which is just an absolute delight (real “12 year old wants to be a serious voice actor but also doesn’t want to wake up his mom” vibes) to how the idea of endless torment seems to be… being teleported to different, identical apartment buildings and forced to climb up stairs endlessly, and when they’re not directly making the game worse to play shoddy animation and graphical glitches are a sight to behold. It’s kind of the perfect game to riff on and show to other people, even if… actually playing it is a bit more painful of an experience. 2/10.
2016
I think when Retsupurae covered this the guy playing the game for them put it best when he said “AKA: Super Creep Boy.”
Because maaaaaaaan this game isn’t good. It’s legitimately wholesale a ripoff of this flash game called The Company of Myself down to plot structure, narrative framing, and even the main core mechanic but while Company of Myself is a really clever little thing that has enough to be able to give you a little bit of impact, Broken Dreams is… not that. The sprite art is ugly and clashes both with the probably-free-on-backgroundpngs.com backgrounds and the platform environments — you can loosely tell they had to quickly change the sprites for the steam release since previously they were just stolen Maplestory sprites. The gameplay takes the base idea of controlling your former selves from Company of Myself and reduces it to “go to space and deploy shadow person. reset and wait for shadow person to move to space. go to next space and deploy shadow person.” in such an unimaginative way that going through the puzzles is just simultaneously braindead and absolutely tedious. The story… thinks “boy meets girl. boy loses girl. boy tries to get the girl back” is a lot more grandiose than it is, and between the goofy way it has to intermingle explaining gameplay mechanics with telling the story and how absolutely creepy the boy comes off (“I used WASD to control her and she did everything I liked. It was so unreal.”) the plot gets twisted into, like, the story of this incel who inexplicably has shadow clones trying to get back the girl he abandoned and who we’re supposed to root for and, like, man, nothing in this game works. It gets a bonus point for being mercifully short and the way it ends being absolutely perfect (if very likely unintentionally so — it’s probably meant to break the player's heart or something but lmao, no, this guy deserves it) but otherwise… yeah. Just watch the Retsupurae video instead. 2/10.
Because maaaaaaaan this game isn’t good. It’s legitimately wholesale a ripoff of this flash game called The Company of Myself down to plot structure, narrative framing, and even the main core mechanic but while Company of Myself is a really clever little thing that has enough to be able to give you a little bit of impact, Broken Dreams is… not that. The sprite art is ugly and clashes both with the probably-free-on-backgroundpngs.com backgrounds and the platform environments — you can loosely tell they had to quickly change the sprites for the steam release since previously they were just stolen Maplestory sprites. The gameplay takes the base idea of controlling your former selves from Company of Myself and reduces it to “go to space and deploy shadow person. reset and wait for shadow person to move to space. go to next space and deploy shadow person.” in such an unimaginative way that going through the puzzles is just simultaneously braindead and absolutely tedious. The story… thinks “boy meets girl. boy loses girl. boy tries to get the girl back” is a lot more grandiose than it is, and between the goofy way it has to intermingle explaining gameplay mechanics with telling the story and how absolutely creepy the boy comes off (“I used WASD to control her and she did everything I liked. It was so unreal.”) the plot gets twisted into, like, the story of this incel who inexplicably has shadow clones trying to get back the girl he abandoned and who we’re supposed to root for and, like, man, nothing in this game works. It gets a bonus point for being mercifully short and the way it ends being absolutely perfect (if very likely unintentionally so — it’s probably meant to break the player's heart or something but lmao, no, this guy deserves it) but otherwise… yeah. Just watch the Retsupurae video instead. 2/10.