Big big rec for Paws of Coal. Absolutely amazing.

Inside: Blackwell Legacy, Fayburrow, Paws of Coal, Detective Grimoire, The Last Express (kind of)

Blackwell Legacy
(Wadjet Eye Games, 2006)

Part of the reason I generally dislike the “a cthulu did it” style of paranormal mystery is that they end up being meaningless. Hauntings can work wonderfully as a metaphor for meaningful things — especially things like intergenerational trauma and cycles of abuse. But unless the writer is cognizant from the beginning of how they’re trying to metaphorize the supernatural, it more often ends up, at best, completely disconnected from any meaningful commentary, and at worst can trivialize and delegitimize real-life issues. And in this genre, you simply can’t create something that’s devoid of commentary; it’s the nature of taking crime as your subject.

Blackwell Legacy ends up in the “meaningless” category of badly constructed supernatural mystery. The very last bits of dialogue in the game are the protagonist going, “There’s a lesson in that,” and her sidekick going, “Oh…?” and she just goes, “Yup,” and it fades to black. It’s an accurate reflection of the game — an epic shrug. Sure, there should be some substance here, but there isn’t, and no one can even make a wild guess. To borrow a turn of phrase from Elmo, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if a bunch of people got possessed by an abbot from a ouija board and it made them all kill themselves???” Uh, I guess? But it’s not a plotline that has any bearing on anything that has ever happened or could happen. Why in the world should I care?

Further, this game was… so written by a white dude in 2006. The protagonist, Rosa, spends the entire game surrounded by men who browbeat and condescend to her, especially her spectral sidekick who spends, I kid you not, the entire game calling her things like “sweetie” and “honey” and “gorgeous” and it’s basically like, a street harassment simulator? Did the dude who wrote this not show it to one woman during the process? Like obviously this ghost is supposed to be an eternal 20s gangster or whatever, which is stupid on its own, but having the only way that’s demonstrated being treating women and animals like shit is such an insane choice. Also, why in the world would I want to spend the game with a guy who gets off on terrorizing dogs? Who the fuck thought that was appealing? And he just whines about his manpain constantly, while giving the protagonist shit for being stressed out, like, dude shut the fuck up.

And of course, it’s further complicated by the “at worst can trivialize and delegitimize real-life issues” part. It’s just… so obvious that the guy who made this game has never had to think at all about the actual threat of women being institutionalized as a punishment. There’s no awareness of any reason why a woman might be extra frightened to appear insane, especially early in the 20th century, or any concept that women being institutionalized might involve more than being sedated if they’re violent. It’s honestly an inexcusable level of ignorance for someone choosing this setting and premise — like two minutes of research would have brought him into contact with writing on women and constructions of sanity. It was 2006, not 1906.

Also, in real life, people don’t commit suicide because they’re being haunted by ghosts. This is the “supernatural trivializing real issues” part. There’s no exploration or even acknowledgement of mental illness as something that could possibly go beyond the fantasy of a haunting. Like, when you meet the one of three suicide attempts that’s survived, the protagonist is like, “I believe that you’re being haunted, don’t worry,” and the girl goes, “Oh good, I guess I don’t have to kill myself anymore or take any medication,” and that’s it, she’s just no longer depressed or stressed out and I guess also not traumatized by her friends dying.

It’s hard to believe this game is by the same guy who did The Shivah. Shivah was so thematically rich and meaningful and this is so empty and pointless. I didn’t mind the protagonist, Rosa, who finds out she’s a medium and is tasked with recusing trapped souls by solving their murders. But the game feels so uninterested in her. It’s constantly talking about how Johnny McManpain has it sO mUcH wOrSe, it never even tries to explain why her aunt was able to be a medium for decades just fine before suddenly going stark raving mad for the rest of her life, and it’s completely uninterested in her grandmother’s choice to try to ignore it and live her life. Also the implication that if any ghost  anywhere is suffering it’s unreasonable for Rosa or her Aunt to try to live their own lives is just… I mean, even beyond the basic “women must sacrifice” thing, the idea that you’re not allowed to rest until you’re the most miserable person in the room is some toxic-ass bootstraps shit. And Frankie O’Shithead constantly telling Rosa she has no right to any answers about what’s happening to her or happened to her family and just needs to do what he says is so annoying. (Seriously, does the writer not know any women?)

It’s a shame because the gameplay here is still good. The engine they have is really enjoyable and even with a few puzzles that were very 2006, I still enjoyed the actual experience. I’m mostly just trying to figure out what happened between Shivah and this. I’m honestly fascinated to see how the rest of this series turned out. There are somehow 5 (!!!) of these games. Are they all nightmares or was this one just the bad one? Like a moth to folly’s candle, I will find out.

Fayburrow
(The Animation Workshop VIA, 2022)

Fayburrow is an absolutely wonderful demo for a game that will never get made. That’s kind of all there is to it — if I saw it at a con I’d wishlist it in a heartbeat, but in truth it’s a student project that they’ll likely never come back to. It’s a shame, because it’s 30 minutes of something really interesting, but it literally ends at the climax, and I couldn’t believe it just… stopped.

It’s free, so if you’ve got 30 minutes and are curious to see what the top end of student projects can look like, it’s worth checking out from that perspective, but I just ended up feeling irritated that it got me hooked into the story and then didn’t finish it.

Detective Grimoire
(SFB Games, 2014)

This game is, somehow, more than the sum of its parts, in a way I can’t really justify. I have basically only complaints, but also I came away from it feeling like I enjoyed it?

Many years ago, on this very blog, I reviewed a silly and fun arcade game called Haunt the House — the review still exists on Steam. Imagine my surprise when I saw this was the next game from that developer, who I’d not followed in the interim. What this game shares with Haunt the House is its colorful, high-contrast and distinctive visual style, which is its best feature. I just really enjoyed the look of it, and can’t really underestimate how much that affected my overall impression.

Because the game was… flawed. The biggest problem was the UI, which was labyrinthine, unintuitive, and sometimes downright unintelligible. I get that you could hide the sidebars, but some of the info was useful, there was just so, so much, more than anyone could ever need. And just so much clicking through redundant menus. The worst part was that if you wanted to ask people about clues, for some reason it would exit you out of the clue menu each time, so you couldn’t just go through the clues one by one, you had to re-open the menu from the dialogue screen and find your place each and every time and it was so annoying. There were also smaller issues, like how unclear it was which direction you were facing as you moved from screen to screen. And while I liked the art, the way the characters changed pose constantly throughout the dialogue was really annoying — it meant they were constantly dancing around the screen like the evil schoolteacher from Fairly Oddparents, and it made it harder to look at the art. Stay still!

And then there’s my worst enemy, text you couldn’t adjust the speed of. The dialogue seemed to have two settings, pause and autoplay, represented by a play and fastforward icon respectively, which ???. I genuinely don’t know if you were meant to be able to manually go through dialogue, since just clicking would toggle the pause/fastforward, and enter and space didn’t seem to do anything. Let me control the speed! It was so much waiting. Made worse by the really bad voice acting.

Weirdly, the game made a big thing about how the game must be played with sound on, which I hate, but it didn’t really matter — there was one audio puzzle and it could be solved fine without sound, so I’m not sure what that was all about. They blew money on voice acting, I guess, and gosh darn people better listen to it.

Also one of the achievements spoils the ending — if you put all your suspicion on the right culprit in your notebook before finishing the game, the achievement will trigger for figuring it out even though you haven’t committed to anything and may still be trying to work it out. Weird choice.

All of the characters speak purely in Plot. There is no meaningful character or personality, just exposition, which was often bizarre (lots of conversations where two characters just spelled out the same information over and over) but it did mean that things progressed pretty briskly, which I appreciated. I do think part of the reason I feel positively toward it is because the plot is quite competent. My biggest criticism is that it does too good a job at giving multiple people a motive, to the point that there were just too many people still in the running at the end, and while I knew from context who it had to be, I wish the motive and reasoning had been stronger. Things were too evenly spread out to ever feel like I’d found The Clue I Needed to Put It All Together. But it’s also hard to have strong motive without strong character. Also, who the eff was the Little Girl? I guess she’s maybe a reference to Haunt the House based on how you can start by saying you’ve met her before, but why is she also like a cluemachine with a psychic connection to the swamp or something? It legit just never bothers to explain, it was super weird.

The puzzles also… sucked. Like, I don’t understand why they were there. It should have just stayed text-based. One is literally handing you red, blue, and yellow flowers and asking which make green. That’s not a “puzzle” it’s just an interruption that prevents me from staying in the flow of the game. And the puzzles being so weirdly simplistic made the detective look like a moron, which is always a bad thing in this type of story.

I did like the the sequences where you had to build out the deductions Grimoire was making word by word — those worked really well. And finding all the notebook entries was eminently possible in a way I liked; it had to be sussed out, but didn’t fall into that moon logic one-interactable-pixel thing point-and-clicks so often do. It felt really satisfying to get all the info. I think it the basic design of the investigation was solid.

And so, somehow… I left it feeling like I should definitely check out the sequel. If any of this is improved even a little, it will be a fun game. It was eye candy, high energy, and competently plotted. I just… liked it. Maybe I’m tired. Who knows.

Paws of Coal
(Gamechuck, 2023)

At the time of writing I’ve played more than a dozen of these, and this is far and away the best one. The writing was excellent, the hand-drawn, old-school animation gave it an incredible feel, and it required the most actual thinking and deduction of any game I’ve played so far. It’s honestly brilliant and I completely recommend it.

In Paws, you play as Charles, a porcupine botanist, who’s doing research in a coal mine when the rabbits — and only the rabbits — who work there start developing a serious illness. It slowly becomes clear that the animals in the kingdom are subject to a harsh caste system and the powers that be don’t really care about the well-being of the rabbits, who strike in response. The local doctor asks you, as a scientist, to try to figure out what’s causing the illness, hoping that because you’re something of an outsider to the entire situation you can see it with a fresh eye and get people to talk to you. Along the way you can decide which factions to support and how, and the game explores the complexities of collective action, broaching questions like internalized bigotry and personal responsibility in a collective. It’s really brilliantly written and thought-provoking.

The gameplay here was also really unique and effective. The first thing the game does that sets it apart is organizing Charles’ notebook really, really well. Being able to minimize and filter by evidence type meant none of the scrolling forever like in Case of Distrust. But the unique thing was the way you put it together — you could select evidence from the right side of your notebook, and it would allow you to make if-then statements on the left side. For a completely made-up example, say you have these pieces of evidence:

All the sick miners wore blue hats.

Jim wore a blue hat.

Jim did not get sick.

Selecting those three and putting them on the left side would then generate a conclusion, something like, “Because Jim wore a blue hat and didn’t get sick, the blue hats can’t be the cause of the illness.”

But if you didn’t take all the evidence into account, you could also generate an incorrect conclusion. If you only selected, “All the sick miners wore blue hats.“, for example, you might generate, “Because all the sick miners wore blue hats, the hats must be the cause.”

This meant that, unlike any other of these games I’ve played, solving the mystery *actually relied on my ability to make sound deductions.* I had to notice details and be able to connect them together in meaningful ways that held up to logical scrutiny. And let me tell you, the first time I noticed something that truly let me fully eliminate one of the suspected causes was so goddamn exciting. I loved it. It must have taken forever to write, but it was brilliant, easily the best and most satisfying investigative game I’ve ever played. I genuinely felt like I, personally, was solving the mystery.

This game is apparently a side story of a larger game that’s been in development for a while, to be titled Trip the Ark Fantastic. There’s a demo on their itch.io page, though it looks like they’ve been prioritizing other projects lately. Fingers crossed Trip eventually makes it to release — I so badly want more of this world, this writing, this gameplay. Wild that billionaires could do things like fund the arts and animal shelters and shit but they instead just want to murder people. Do you know how much art I would buy if I had money. All games would get full releases. Also I’d have 25 dogs.

The Last Express
(Dotemu, 1997)

This isn’t really a review, but I just wanted to note that the version of this game on Steam has been ported so poorly that it’s unplayable. A few reviews said this but I thought, eh, I play a lot of old games I’m sure it’s fine, and it was not fine. Apparently the GOG version runs okay but I’m not so interested in it that I feel like getting it a second time. (TBH it seems like more of a spy thriller than a detective game anyway.)