Paradise Killer was amazing, go experience it.

Recs: Paradise Killer, Neo Cab

Meh: Star Apprentice: Magical Murder Mystery

Pans: Black Closet, Soulslayer

Paradise Killer
(Kaizen Games Works, 2020)

I loved this game so much I wasn’t even going to review it, but also I want everyone to play it. It was one of those that when I finished it I didn’t know what to do with my life.

Paradise Killer is confusing, bizarre, and amazing. Its Florida-resort-in-1970-but-also-eldritch-horror aesthetic is utterly and wonderfully unique, and the soundtrack is brilliant. I want to say it’s a game that drops you in in-media-res, but that’s not quite true — the game drops you in at the end of a story, which is as wonderfully disorienting as it sounds. And of course, for a mystery, it makes perfect sense to have to work your way back through events. It was a bold choice, one of the most challenging games I’ve ever encountered in terms of structure and messaging, and utterly satisfying. I’m glad they completely forwent guidance for the player; it was a better experience for it.

In fact, not knowing what the actual fuck is going on was such an important component I’m not going to say anything about the premise at all.

I enjoyed the investigative/exploration gameplay, but if you’re not a collectible hunter the first-person 3D platforming might be a bit of a turnoff. I can’t imagine that making the game not worth playing and I 100%ed it with little trouble, but if you’re highly adverse to that kind of thing it’s worth knowing going in. My one extremely minor complaint is that the fade-to-black effect on the lategame ‘show collectibles’ skill was awful for my eye and made me very motion sick, and there was no way to turn it off — I wish it was a toggle, or even just a button-to-refresh without the screen blinking. The game had tons of accessibility options and I wish turning that effect off had been one of them!

I just loved it to pieces and it was so well done that I would play anything this dev put out next. Go play so I can talk to someone about it.

Black Closet
(Hanako Games, 2015)

This was a good idea squandered into a mind-numbingly boring game.

The basic premise is that you’re the head of the student council as an extremely prestigious high-class private school and you’ve been tasked with keeping order. You investigate rumours and manage events and in the process protect the school’s reputation. To investigate, you send out the other members of the student council to interact with students. There are also overarching plots, such as sussing out a traitor among your own.

Unfortunately the game is just a long series of skill checks. You send someone to investigate, and they either fail and don’t find anything or pass and get you the info you need to progress. There’s no deduction gameplay at all. Further, I was really disappointed to find that the plotlines are all repeatable and RNG-based. So like, the traitor on the council is selected randomly, and while they each have reasons for being the traitor when they’re selected, this means there’s no actual story thruline or consequences since it’s all random. The cases you have to investigate are interesting until you realize they, too, repeat ad nauseum. The result is nothing matters. You either pass or fail skill checks which get you repeated information. At a certain point you can even just skip some of the skill checks since you know how the cases play out since there’s so few and they’re constantly repeating.

Part of me wants to say it plays like a board game — roll skill checks, turn over cards to see solutions if you pass — but this doesn’t really explain the lack of deduction elements; there are a litany of board game with this kind of gameplay that also require thought from the player.

The only actual gameplay involves managing the stress level of the council members, who can only be sent out so many consecutive rounds. Additionally, some of them will refuse to do certain tasks. You can raise relationship levels with them to increase their max stress level, but only for the first few weeks of the gameplay — after the first major game over check in week 5, you’re locked into a romance plotline with one of them and then all you can do is hang out with that one over and over for no extra stat boosts.

I was even more disappointed to find that training council member skills doesn’t carry over between games, which is baffling. The extra skills points you get are so thin on the ground they’re almost irrelevant in the face of the insanely high mid-to-late-game checks (in retrospect what I should have done was loaded them all on one character instead of trying to balance them), but I figured it was geared toward accumulating them over many runs, so that you could gradually see and do more and more. But… no. I don’t even know why they’re there.

I was insanely bored by this game about an hour into it, but figured I’d see it through one school-year playthrough just for completion’s sake. I got about 2/3 through semi-paying-attention before forgetting to wrap up a story mission and hitting a game over. And I really just don’t care enough to go back and replay.

Soulslayer
(开水工作室, 2017)

Unfortunately what it comes down to is that this game isn’t actually available in English.

I’ve noticed this happening quite a bit with Chinese studios, listing the game as being in English and then including an incomprehensible translation that was clearly not sufficient. I’m not sure what the indie environment is in China that so many seem to do this — perhaps a bad English reception is still better than a Chinese-only reception, or they just pay for English-language reviews (as this one did, judging by the grammar and vagueness of many of the positive reviews) to send them up the ENGL charts and this makes its worth it financially.

While I do have some sympathy for how difficult it is to be a small dev, this really sucks as a consumer. If Valve gave any fucks about community moderation I’d say it’s something they really need to crack down on. Especially considering how small their refund window has gotten and how many games I buy, I’m often months past the refund chance when I open a game only to discover it’s been falsely advertised and isn’t actually playable. It just sucks, and has the unfortunate side effect of being self-defeating, as it has started to make me gunshy about buying games from Chinese devs, which is just sad to me, as I’ve encountered a lot of really excellent ones, but I’m just not looking to set money on fire and the odds of that have gotten too high.

This game somehow had an even worse translation at release, which is astounding — I’d guess it was machine-translated into gibberish, but what’s there now, while usually parseable, unfortunately is still bad enough that I’d say this game just doesn’t count as being in English. While I could mostly follow what was happening, the ending was just incomprehensible, as on top of the bad English it seemed to be relying on the player having knowledge of like, Chinese archaeology and military history and maybe also folk heroes and/or deities (hard to tell tbh)? An actual loc team could have made this understandable to a non-Chinese audience, but someone who just took English in high school can’t (and an LLM certainly can’t, although I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, as it was too long ago for that).

It’s a shame both because there’s a lot of good stuff here — nice, unique-looking art, some interesting subversions of the ‘evil step mother’ plot, a really likeable protagonist — and because, based on bilingual reviews, the writing in Chinese is actually excellent. Based on bilingual reviews and my own experience, I think this is probably a really great game in Chinese. But I can’t possibly recommend it to an English-speaking audience, and there’s little point in discussing the minutiae of it, since I can’t know if any critiques I have are based on what’s actually there or just a terrible translation.

I will say that I liked what I saw enough that, if there was a sequel attached to a reputable, professional loc studio or an NA/EU-based publisher, I would probably check it out. But you shouldn’t.

Neo Cab
(Chance Agency, 2019)

Is this… a cyberpunk game… that’s actually a meaningful critique?!?! I thought that was i l l e ga l

Neo Cab is exactly what this genre is supposed to be — a critique of technocapitalism, a roadmap for resistance, and an examination of the way power structures are recursive, playing out in individual relationships in the same way they play out in institutions.

What it isn’t is a detective game, at least not exactly — you can pursue the disappearance of the protagonist Lina’s, friend Savy, but you’re mostly at the mercy of circumstance and the game is more about what Savy’s disappearance means for and does to Lina than about Lina than about Lina scouring the streets for her, and frankly I think this was the right decision. It kept the game focused.

And bless, this game was focused. It has a tightly constructed plot with characters who are meaningfully fit into it — none of that bullshit from Night Call where there were 100 potential passengers who were randomly assigned and from 80 different genres and none of it fit together. The passengers you encounter are worked into the main action of the plot, either thematically or literally, and all of them form meaningful relationships with Lina. I was even pleasantly surprised to see they can form relationships with each other! The two whose plotlines I followed the most deeply ended up meeting up and telling me they had met each other and it was really great! It’s a low bar but it’s so nice to see a game that knows exactly what it wants to do and turns all its resources to doing it. No gun left on the mantle here.

The weak point of the writing was definitely the dream sequences, lol, which were overly symbolic to the point of being schlocky and meaningless. People not knowing how to write dreams is so interesting to me inasmuch as we all have them. People get to caught up in them ‘meaning’ something.

The gameplay here was definitely more visual novel than anything else, but I ended up liking the way it integrated the faux-uber interface into the game; it added to the verisimilitude instead of feeling superfluous, and I really enjoyed all of Lina’s doodles.

The game’s main concern is really the question of what it means, morally and ethically, to survive under late capitalism and surveillance statism. What does it mean to be a good person when everything you do, every choice you have, is on at least some level, compromised? In a world where our lives and even feelings are being shaped for us by algorithms, how can we even know if our wants and needs are our own? Where is the line between surviving and eschewing responsibility? And in the other direction, what is activism? If anger is necessary, how do we channel is positively, without hurting each other? Without destroying everyone and everything? Without acting as poverty tourists, or losing sight of the humanity of the other?

Like many similarly themed games, community is a central part of the game’s conceptions of resistance, but this game takes it a step further and spends time on the complexity of coalition-building among people whose only real common ground is “unhappy under technocracy.” People can have the wrong ideas for the right reasons, or the right ideas for the wrong reasons, across many different questions, and figuring out how to work together through that is complex and often very frustrating. I really liked this more nuanced look at this aspect.

Also Oona was the best because “old lady who’s out of fucks to give” is the best archetype, objectively, and also who I want to be when I grow up. The worm guy was great too.

…So the elephant in the room here is Night Call, which came out a couple of months before this. It’s weird. This is the second time you have, released at about the same time, one game that’s an explicitly anticapitalist, antifascist social critique, and one that’s the exact same premise and even much of the same gameplay and UX, but with a deeply regressive and aggressively sexist messaging. It’s weird. It’s really, really weird. And to be completely honest, a in post-“Epstein is behind microtransactions” world, the idea that part of the psyop is finding antifascist games in development and counter-developing fascy analogues to undercut them just doesn’t feel like something I can rule out? I don’t even know. This is the world now.

Star Apprentice: Magical Murder Mystery
(Will-o-Works 2021)

This was a weird one. Freeware, so there’s no risk to it, but I came away unsure if it had felt like a good use of time.

First, my favorite part of this game was probably the spritework — the art was really lovely, especially for a freeware game, and especially the full-body portraits. It was detailed, high-resolution, and just really well-composed by someone who clearly knew their color and design basics. This is… not always true, lol, so I really appreciate it when I see it. It was just nice to look at.

Where things start to get odd is in the gameplay. This is a bullet hell game, where bullet-hell combat takes the place of social deduction battles. This isn’t something I totally mind, but it’s also not what I really look for in this kind of game. It made me think of Brok the Investigator and why I felt like the beat-em-up gameplay worked there while this felt more incongruous — one part was definitely that in Brok there were always multiple ways to solve problems, so you always felt like you were choosing the action gameplay, and it was also diegetic (Brok is an ex-boxer) so it felt like a natural part of the game world. But I also think it’s that even when the solution was “punch” it was still the solution to a puzzle, so you were still doing the mental work before doing the action work, whereas in this game there was only ever one kind of gameplay — big bullet boss sequences — just broken up by VN sequences of people talking, so the two halves never felt like they were really meant to be together. In the end, this wasn’t an inherently bad idea or even badly done, but it didn’t really work. It was never cohesive.

The story was boring, super predictable was in a mostly competent way, and I was glad at least it didn’t go the awful “it was all an act to test you!!!” route that apparently a lot of people think is clever. The fact that everything is magic never really matters. You could have completely taken that out and had the battles be purely metaphorical and it literally wouldn’t have changed anything, which took away one of the elements that should have made this unique.

The other issue I had was that there were some brief adventure sequences, but you couldn’t point-and-click, you had to walk up to things, and there was no indication of where hitboxes for interactable were. On more than one occasion I couldn’t figure out where to stand to talk to someone, and it was very annoying. They also made the very weird and phenomenally awful choice to have your character sprite on the boss screen not be your hitbox — your hitbox instead was a glowing point in the middle of the character, which was insanely confusing and made it impossible to tell where you were trying to avoid contact with attacks. Baffling decision.

All of that being said, though, it was well-made — the production values were quite good, and it played well. Like I said, the art was nice. I suppose in the end it was kind of less than the sum of its parts. At the same time, I find myself curious about the followup, which is still in development, and about other things the dev does, because there’s a lot of potential here.