Dragon Quill

Good: Karaski: What Goes Up, NUTS

Bad: Dahlia View, Lucifer Within Us

I was really irritated when I wrote the Dahlia View piece. Not wrong, but angry, lol.

Dahlia View
(White Paper Games, 2021)

This game dares to ask the question: What if The Flower Collectors was just terrible?

God I don’t know where to start. This is another Rear Window game, but this time, there’s basically no player input, just awful, clunky navigation from one cutscene to another in a 3D environment with a fixed camera angle that make it impossible to see anything or navigate. The fakeout dialogue options that result in the protagonist saying things that clearly are the same no matter what you choose. Then there’s awful protagonist’s awful narration, where he painstakingly describes everything happening and every emotional state because I guess the writers think we’re complete morons. It was one of the most inane, infuriating things I’ve ever encountered. “Oh they’re fighting. She looks mad. Now she’s confused. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s deciding between A and B. He’s made his choice.” LET ME SEE IT MYSELF. LET ME HAVE THE EXPERIENCE. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

There is also no deduction in this game; it is an extremely linear story, which has the perhaps-intentional effect of adding to the narrative’s cynical sense of inevitability. It is most similar in gameplay to Blacksad, a game with barely any gameplay that was, at best, extremely clunky; Blacksad at least had some interesting character writing to make up for it. The biggest difference here is that where Blacksad undermines the language of games with the language of comics, Dahlia View does that same undermining with the language of film. Honestly I don’t know why studios like this don’t just make animated movies; the sheer amount of cutscenes here are basically 75% of a film already. If the medium is the message, the message here is “I care little for the particulars of this medium.”

And god the protagonist is an aggressively terrible person.

Really, it’s so interesting to me that when the cops are bad they’re women. This game makes the truly baffling choice to have the incompetent lady cop be the protag’s daughter, and she spends the whole time begging him to not interfere in her career. He nonetheless undermines her, deceives her, and hides evidence from her at every turn, all while acting like he couldn’t help it. I think this is the first of these types of  games that posits the feminization of the police as the fundamental issue — the problem with the cops, unlike in Flower Collectors, isn’t the inherent problems of an authoritarian Institution. It’s that gritty old men are being pushed out in favor of weak women who can’t do what needs to be done and have such misguided beliefs as “we should follow the law.” The police force would be able to do its job properly if only we gave the reigns back to white men with impunity. Don’t they know the law should only be for certain people?

This kind of worldview permeates the game. I mentioned in the Flower Collectors review that the game was about community and getting to know the people around you; Dahlia View, on the other hand, is about how your neighbors are fundamentally unknowable and other. And unlike in the country-house mystery, the secrets in the house don’t represent institutional failures or socio-cultural conflicts — instead, they are utterly individual. There is no point is establishing relationships with others, because underneath will only ever be hatred, jealousy, and violence. Like the serial killer stories, this conflict is person vs nature, where the culprit’s action defy reason or logic and fundamentally can only be contested by reciprocal authoritarianism. All someone can do in response is cultivate a hyperindividualism where one protects them and theirs at all costs. Hatred and violence are inherent; community is impossible.

The protagonist is a laughably evil person, spying on his neighbors with impunity, photographing their private moments, all while creepily narrating the worst possible interpretations of their actions and interactions. He then uses these interpretations to justify violating their homes, privacy, and safety, breaking into apartments, rifling through underwear drawers (yes, literally), even casually accusing them of murder, all because he (and, it seems, the narrative) fundamentally believes that his own selfish amorality is something everyone shares. You get the sense he has thought about kidnapping and murder himself, he so sees it everywhere. And yet, the narrative never judges him, nor does he ever have to learn or grow. In fact, the game originally had his name in the title, implying at one point they were thinking of making this a series. I cannot imagine a series with this man. It is baffling they thought anyone would want that.

This game came out a year after The Flower Collectors. Intellectually, I know they must have been in development at least a little concurrently, but it does feel a bit sinister to have this explicitly antifascist take on Rear Window come out, and then a year later an extremely regressive game with almost identical premise and gameplay shows up. It’s weird. “The nosy old lady is a friend,” says Flower Collectors; “The nosy old lady is a criminal,” says Dahlia View in response.

Karaski: What Goes Up
(Unbound Creations, 2016)

I was totally engrossed by this game. It’s one of those that really gets at what I like about indies.

As I was poking around about it, I saw that the dev considered it a commercial failure, which is really such a shame. Happily they’ve continued to release games in the years since, but this deserved a much better reception than it seems to have gotten. It was unique, ambitious, and well-written; it was impressively complete for such an ambitious indie game, IMO.

Karaski is set in a kind of fictionalized USSR on the verge of balkanization. You and a smattering of other people are on the maiden voyage of an airship whose creation is hugely politicized. When it becomes clear the dirigible has been sabotaged, you have to try to suss out which of the many different political factions is responsible, and who onboard is trying to get everyone killed.

The game starts with you, Player Character, waking up in a closet on the middeck of the ship; you walk down the hallway to find that some kind of explosion has happened in one of the control rooms, killing an employee. In a panic, you try to escape, and as you do end up talking over a radio to someone who seems to think you’re an ‘agent’ there to investigate the sabotage and stop a tragedy from unfolding.

The sheer amount of ways you could go about the investigation was really impressive. Every dialogue choice affects a constellation of relationships, as does your performance in the stealth areas of the ship (there’s also robust accessibility options for those who dislike stealth gameplay). There are multiple ways to approach everything and completing a plotline doesn’t necessarily mean choosing the schmooziest options. The game also keeps very meticulous track of who you’ve talked to and where you are on each of the main characters’ plots, as well as the important items and documents you’ve found, which I appreciated a lot.

It was just really well-written and well-put-together, definitely heads above a lot of the other more uptaken games in the genre, which kind of sucks.

There were a few things I didn’t like — the  weird metafiction (that seems to also be a Pathologic reference?) was superfluous and went less than nowhere; IMO it actively detracted from the experience of making choices and deductions. I almost wonder if the dev was having issues with people ‘getting it’ and felt like he had to add this in, because it doesn’t fit in with anything else about the game and was a really big distraction from the more meaty things it was trying to say.

Two, I really wish the badge got you free reign in the lower levels. You get it so lategame that it feels like it should be a way for you to clean up little bits and go in every nook and cranny, but it basically doesn’t do anything helpful — at the stage where I got it, the rep hits didn’t matter, I just needed to be able to find some hidden stuff. It’s weird, it’s this item that’s framed as super strong but ends up being a letdown.

I want to muse about the end a little:

NUTS
(Joon, Pol, Muutsch, Char & Torfi, 2021)

This was a great little game. When I first saw the premise of stalking squirrels in a park with thriller and deduction elements I so very much wanted to enjoy it, lol. It was just such a great unique premise. When I booted it up for the first time I said to Mr Act “I’m going to be so disappointed if this is bad.” But it was good! Yaaaaay.

Gameplay wise, NUTS is probably closest to a walking sim. The gameplay consists of setting up camera in a forest — Melmoth Forest, an A+ reference — to take pictures of squirrels, and move the cameras each day to try to track the squirrels. It’s a kind of insane premise for a game, but it works so well, lol. I can’t really explain why — it just works. It varies the way the gameplay unfolds over the 5 or 6 levels enough that it felt like a fresh challenge each time, and the sinister atmosphere had me constantly feeling like I was going to catch a ghost or a murderer or something on camera. Its simplicity — in aesthetic, in gameplay, in story — is somehow what makes it compelling. No small part of that, I’m sure, is that it’s just wildly original as a premise.

I wouldn’t really call this a detective game, exactly, but I can’t deny that following the squirrels around is deduction gameplay, and that I always felt pretty smug when I caught the little buggers on camera.

This is one where I enjoyed the experience so much I’m out of things to say about it! If a weird, minimalistic deduction game where you roleplay as a field biologist appeals to you check it out. Sadly it seems to be the only thing these devs ever did.

Though I do have to say that as much as I liked it, $25 is not a fair asking price. I was able to 100% it in 3 hours, for reference. It sucks, but I would say anything below $10 would feel pretty fair to me. According to ITAD it discounts down to $2 pretty regularly and for that it’s an absolute steal, idk what they’re trying to do with the list price.

Lucifer Within Us
(Kitfox Games, 2020)

Many years ago I reviewed a game called Moon Hunters, saying that the issue with it was that it was fundamentally a very interesting and playable proof-of-concept lacking any of the meat that a real game needs. I concluded that review as follows:

“It feels like this game was rushed out, and while I can understand both the resource crunch and the desire not to work on one project forever as a small dev, there’s a point at which you have be honest with what you’re capable of before you start setting expectations, internal and external.”

This is the same dev, and they have not learned this lesson in the ensuing years. This game, again, feels like a polished playtest for an interesting deduction system with a game hastily assembled around it. As I felt with Moon Hunters, the system they invented was interesting and unique, but everything else felt so rushed and incomplete that it’s not worth encountering just for what is basically a proposal for a cool gameplay idea.

Because yeah, the system here is interesting, and one of the more unique I’ve seen. It involves comparing testimonies via a simultaneous timeline where you can line up stories and see where they contradict each other and the environment, and then press the suspects when you find those contradictions. I quite liked how it played, but there were three small ‘cases’ following 2 or 3 suspects, which was just too small for them to feel engaging. I would much rather have seen one cohesive story using this system to comb through 5 or 6 suspects. Comparing two people just feels like a tech demo. And each case was very obvious as a result.

Plotwise… I have little patience for Christian apologia, something that might have colored my experience of this game. But  the story here was such a mess that I’m not sure it matters. Yeah, the Christian-coded Inquisition are heroes, but heroes of a piece so thematically chaotic that it’s hard to derive anything meaningful from it.

This was, interestingly, also a problem with Moon Hunters, which was about a weird, nonsensical religious conflict. This seems to be a bit of a pet thing with the dev, but what’s weird about it is in neither case do the games actually say anything about religion or religious conflict. They just… exist around them.

The plot in this game was honestly just flabbergasting. “Wouldn’t it be crazy if God was actually Satan??? but also Satan was actually an AI??? and now everyone who uses a phone is POSSESSED????” Lol, what the fuck are you on about. Trying to couple this kind of ‘im 12 and this is deep’ stuff with this insane choice to have one of the characters just be Alan Rickman as Snape just so we know who the mastermind is immediately is so weird, in a ‘how stupid do you think your audience is’ kind of way. Also the whole ‘people only do bad things because Satan makes them’ is as vapid and irritating a story beat as it always is, I wish someone would deconstruct that nonsense.

It’s kind of weird to see a developer not mature at all over 5 years. From an experiential perspective, this is just Moon Hunters 2: Electric Boogaloo. I’ll conclude with another bit from my Moon Hunters review:

“It’s a shame so many of the bigger elements are a mess, because the core mechanic is very well done and a lot of the ideas here are so good. I would have rather they just went for broke on the experimental nature of it and positioned it as a proof-of-concept than hastily filled in the adventure-game elements in a way that promised so, so much more than they delivered. “