This review contains spoilers
Eh.
Very impressive work technically and visually and auditorily (they have got to tell me who did the ambient songs for this i need to listen to their work because the stuff here is incredible) but it falls to the same exact issues Yume Nikki does. The atmosphere is impressive until you get stuck somewhere for 10 minutes and have to pull up a wiki page (that spoils everything if you move your eyes in the wrong direction) to figure out what obscure thing you have to do to trip the flag that lets you progress to the next part. (Also not huge on the "liminal space" aesthetic that's rampant here, I think it's executed about as well as it can be, but like, empty airports and such are still kind of played out i feel.)
Judging by how much people love Yume Nikki, I'm clearly in the minority opinion as far as my repulsion towards oblique progression goes (honestly, i can barely even get through an old point-and-click adventure game, i'm definitely the weird one), so I'm just gonna chock this one whiffing on me up to personal taste
Aside: while the game itself i can easily see someone appreciating a ton, the metatextual ARG/Creepypasta shit really sucks lol, imagine turning a seemingly earnest depiction of grief into some lame "the computer is haunted and its killing me what da hell" shit
Very impressive work technically and visually and auditorily (they have got to tell me who did the ambient songs for this i need to listen to their work because the stuff here is incredible) but it falls to the same exact issues Yume Nikki does. The atmosphere is impressive until you get stuck somewhere for 10 minutes and have to pull up a wiki page (that spoils everything if you move your eyes in the wrong direction) to figure out what obscure thing you have to do to trip the flag that lets you progress to the next part. (Also not huge on the "liminal space" aesthetic that's rampant here, I think it's executed about as well as it can be, but like, empty airports and such are still kind of played out i feel.)
Judging by how much people love Yume Nikki, I'm clearly in the minority opinion as far as my repulsion towards oblique progression goes (honestly, i can barely even get through an old point-and-click adventure game, i'm definitely the weird one), so I'm just gonna chock this one whiffing on me up to personal taste
Aside: while the game itself i can easily see someone appreciating a ton, the metatextual ARG/Creepypasta shit really sucks lol, imagine turning a seemingly earnest depiction of grief into some lame "the computer is haunted and its killing me what da hell" shit
Reviewed on Apr 23, 2023
4 Comments
Why does the "ARG/Creepypasta" sucks i think it is pretty cool
I feel like it really tarnishes what I felt was the main draw, that being the game's relationship to the concept of grief. I guess it still operates within that somewhat under the creepypasta framing, but it feels much less earnest... Playing the game without context is much better than reading the Journal and learning much of anything about this world, and I regret looking at them afterwards.
I played it before reading the journal and I interpreted the shifting of things within the house to be metaphorically substitutive for the way the brain abstracts/recontextualizes mundane objects/settings in the wake of a lost loved one, which is so so much more interesting than the explicit intended framing of the map being a result of "an evil computer program that is making me add a bunch of things to this doom map and also giving me scary dreams!!"
I played it before reading the journal and I interpreted the shifting of things within the house to be metaphorically substitutive for the way the brain abstracts/recontextualizes mundane objects/settings in the wake of a lost loved one, which is so so much more interesting than the explicit intended framing of the map being a result of "an evil computer program that is making me add a bunch of things to this doom map and also giving me scary dreams!!"
wait this is supposed to have lore? wtf that's so lame I just thought it was someone doing cool shit with the Doom engine
straylight
11 months ago