Bless the furries, fuck ICE.
Good: The Flower Collectors
Mehs: The Painscreek Killings, Detective Gallo, Senna and the Forest
Bad: Return of the Phantom
The Flower Collectors
(Mi’pu’mi Games, 2020)
This is a really, really good and interesting game about fascism. I highly rec it.
The Flower Collectors is an interesting take on the Rear Window premise — you play as Jorge, an ex-cop who is confined to a wheelchair in post-Franco Spain and you witness a strange murder from your balcony. That same night, a woman named Melinda knocks on the door of your apartment and begs you to hide her, though what she’s running from isn’t immediately clear. After letting her stay the night in your apartment, she tells you she’s a journalist who was supposed to get some kind of intel from the murdered man. From your perch on your balcony, you investigate the crime, helped by Melinda, who can go speak with people and interact with things in the world below.
Them game takes place just after Franco’s death, in a period where restoring Spain to democracy is anything but certain. The extremely interesting choice it makes is to have the protagonist not be Melinda — Jorge is an ex-cop who did and believed terrible things under the autocratic regime, and the story is very much about him moving from seeing Melinda as a dangerous extremist to starting to reckon with the reality of the harm he caused. The game’s ability to be empathetic to Jorge while making it clear that what he and people like him did wasn’t okay was impressive; it managed to make Jorge feel like a person and not just like, the worst Redditor.
I think the choice to make Jorge disabled is a big part of this. For the first time in his life, he’s an outsider in his own society — he can’t leave his shitty apartment because the elevator doesn’t work right, he feels unmanned and useless, and buys his own propaganda about the worthlessness of the disabled. His character arc about realizing the Nationalists are wrong is tied tightly to realizing his disability doesn’t disqualify him from living a full life. I just… really liked the way the game portrays the impact of sudden disability. It mapped so well onto my own experiences and was clearly very carefully and meaningfully written.
I think the game asks some hard questions about what it means to deprogram a fascist, because the truth is that Jorge’s ability to reckon with himself can only happen because he’s made an outsider. If he hadn’t been injured, he would probably have been outside helping the cops beat up a homeless guy. On the other hand though, the game posits truth and community as a form of resistance — Jorge’s heart grew three sizes that day both because of his experiences, but also because of the relationships he starts to form with Melinda and people like Dona Anna, and you see him slowly but surely starting to care about the murdered man as more than just a corpse. Fascism can only be maintained by disconnection and lies. The journalist being the foil of the solider-cop is a key part of this as well.
I just found this game weirdly… cathartic? I can’t think of any other word for it, it made me feel better, made the burden of everything feel a bit lighter. It was just really good and affecting and I really loved it. I continue to not understand why furries make the best games but I’m beyond questioning it at this point. From here on out I consider furry art to be a reason to buy a game lol.
The Painscreek Killings
(EQ Studios, 2017)
This is a solid “meh.” If you really like this style of game you’ll probably enjoy it, but if you don’t you will probably find it to do only things you dislike. I found it to drag, personally, and it didn’t do anything I found interesting, but I certainly wouldn’t call it bad.
A couple years ago, while on a plane, I watched the Death on the Nile movie with Kenneth Branaugh because the idea that they were trying to do ‘Agatha Christie but gritty realism’ was fascinating to me. This decision caused a lot of problems, but the biggest one ended up being a tone issue. It’s really, really hard to make a gritty-real Golden Age mystery because the ironic tone covers for the fact that the premise of the Golden Age detective story is kind of inherently ridiculous. Why does Miss Marple keep stumbling into conspiracies? Why does Cabot Cove have the most murders per capita of any place on the planet? Even when the topics and critiques this type of story makes are serious, the story has to be aware of how absurd its premise is in order to carry it, has to nod and wink at the audience. The biggest problem Death on the Nile had was that when they wheeled the body of the third victim into the kitchen freezer I laughed out loud, because it was so ridiculous and being presented so, so seriously.
This game had this same problem. Before I played it, I saw a lot of reviews complaining about how many journals are left lying around for you to find in this town. At the time that felt not entirely fair, since the central conceit of these type of games is always that people are meticulously documenting their lives and leaving that documentation in findable places. But I actually think what those reviews were identifying is the tone problem. The sheer amount of incriminating evidence left in people’s houses after they’ve moved out is truly bonkers, but the far larger issue is that the game tries to play it straight. On top of that, the game keeps adding new murders and new culprits. There’s like 25 people who live in this town and like 7 of them are murdered, across like 5 different culprits, and apparently no one cares? Like at a certain point so few people are left alive that you’d think they could just take everyone not dead into an interrogation room and tell them no one gets to leave until this is sorted out. But instead apparently everyone just collectively shrugs and is like, c’est la vie!
The game’s insistence on trying to cultivate a horror atmosphere coupled with its extremely bland and empty visual style meant that as things progressed, the tone of the story and the tone of the setting diverged really sharply and created a huge suspension of disbelief problem, which is then compounded by trying to add in supernatural elements,* because of course it does. The plot here is ridiculous. Everything about it is absurd. And when the game pretends it’s not, suspension of disbelief just falls apart. I’ve honestly been laughing about how over-the-top it was for days now, which is definitely not the intent, but is the inevitable outcome when you try to ignore the genre you’re working in.
*(You’re apparently supposed to get jumpscared by a ghost at multiple points but I just… didn’t notice, lol? I saw screenshots and I was like, “Oh, I thought that was a tree.” I got through the entire game without getting ghosted. I’m not sure if this is my stupid self or a thing that’s happened to other people but it felt pretty silly.)
And then… I can’t justify this, but this game takes place in Small Town USA (TM) and everyone is named like John Doe but then for some reason at the end the culprit whose name is also like Jim Blandman and was apparently born and raised in this town has this really thick Eastern European accent and it just sent me? I went from being really tense and waiting for the denouement to utter confusion, it vaporized my involvement in the scene. I assume the guy was just someone on the dev’s staff but could they really not find someone who sounded like they were born and raised in rural Iowa or whatever? Like it’s literally a plot point that he grew up in the town, why does he have this thick accent no one else does?? Wild.
The gameplay is solid. The puzzles worked well for me, though they weren’t ever more complex than “figure out where to put this string of numbers”, and I liked rifling through people’s houses, although I felt letdown by just how many reused assets there were. Small things like different china patterns and tablecloths really would have made the place feel lived-in; the whole town was samey and sterile in a way that made it feel extremely artificial and it seems like an easy missed opportunity.
I think the game did a good job of leading you through it and I didn’t have any trouble finding everything. My main complaint from a UX standpoint is that I don’t understand why they archived some evidence automatically and made you manually screenshot others. It feels like it would have been pretty straightforward to just do a reference journal that updated whenever you found anything. This also would have allowed for searching, which would have been really, really nice considering the sheer amount of documents you end up with. The way this was halfway implemented makes me wonder if that was the original intent and they ran out of time. I think a game telling you upfront that its design is so bad you need to have a pen and paper handy to play the game is completely unacceptable, straight up.
The one thing I appreciated in this game that I haven’t seen very much is that I do think it managed to pull off the lategame One Clue That Puts It All Together. I had a complete !!! moment and it was very satisfying.
I haven’t really gotten into the plot because aside from the absurdity of it, it was one of those that wasn’t really about anything. It works well enough as premise for a logic puzzle, but there’s no larger point. The game seems to realize it at the end and has the narrator epilogue that, “I guess this just shows that actions have consequences!” and like, sure, if that’s what you get out of a third of the town murdering another third and then everyone left moving on like nothing happened, okay. Sure, lol.
The game is not very long — 100% in 6.8 hours — so as I said, if you love this kind of walking-sim style investigator, you’ll probably feel that time well spent. For me it was just like eating celery — it feels like food while you eat it, but somehow you’re even hungrier afterward.
Detective Gallo
(Footprints Games, 2018)
So this is part of what is apparently a subsubgenre, of continental European games done in retro-cartoon style with cheesy jokes. This, Detective Case & Clown Bot, Magret & FaceDeBouc, Mortadelo y Filemón … these are all so similar there’s clearly some seed work out there, like a 70s kids’ cartoon or something, but I don’t know enough about like, Italio-French pop culture to know what it could be. There’s something going on in the romance-language-o-sphere, that’s for sure. They certainly have a… brand of humor.
That’s actually making this sound worse than it was, though.
The one thing that’s definitely an influence here is 90s adventure games for kids like Putt-Putt and Freddie Fish — the look, tone, and gameplay are so of this era that it’s kind of hard to believe it’s a modern game. I can easily imagine myself playing and enjoying this as a 10-year-old. I think I really would have liked it.
And that’s kind of the upshot here, this really feels like a kids’ game. It’s not raunchy, thank god, and the jokes can be quite good, unlike in its cousin games, but nonetheless the overall vibe is really of something for children. Like games from that era, it’s also extremely obtuse in gameplay, and has some issues where like, items won’t combine until you hit the point in the story where you need to combine them, which could be annoying. But that stuff didn’t really matter to me playing Putt-Putt and I’m not sure it would matter a ton to a modern child, either, especially if they had an adult looking over their shoulder and guiding them. That it’s only a few hours from start to finish helps as well.
But I can’t see this having anything to offer for adults. Unless you’re European, maybe…? Idk I don’t understand any of these. I’ll definitely be actively avoiding them going forward, they just feel like they’ve been wasting my time.
This is a digression, but Mr. Act and I are huge Taskmaster fans, and were quite early adopters of it, because we both follow the British comedy scene pretty closely. We’ve also loved the Australia and New Zealand versions. We’d heard that the Norway version was also supposed to be good so we sat down to watch that and… couldn’t. Not because there was anything wrong with it, but because the cultural gap was too big. We’d be watching, and someone would say something, and the audience would hysterically laugh, and we’d be like, “What in the world was the joke?” That’s what these games remind me of, of bafflingly trying to interpret the Norwegian version of Taskmaster and just having to give up because the humor was too culturally specific.
Senna and the Forest
(Siddharth Sivaraman, 2019)
More freeware!
Senna and the Forest is a boiled-down-to-its-essence deduction game where you talk to trees. Each tree gives you a line of dialogue which potentially offers a clue about that tree’s place in a family tree, and you have to fill out the family tree based on the clues. There’s also a loose environmentalism plot. On the whole I quite liked it, although I wish some care had been put into making sure there was no guesswork necessary. In a few instances you’d have two trees left and just had to swap names until you got the confirmation.
This one made a mistake that a lot of puzzle games seem to make, which is it took a premise, made a competent game out of it, and then later on came back and like quadrupled the size of the game way, way past what the premise would support. I think the original game was great, if a bit obtuse in the third stage, and I would have totally recommended it as it was, but continuing it on for so long was really tedious and I ended up DNFing. Obviously since it’s free the risk is low, but the little QOL problems that are fine for a short freeware game really do become dealbreakers in something more longform. Probably just worth playing through the first section, ie, the original game.
…one horrifying thing I see a lot is developers getting harassed because their games aren’t live service. The social media era, gig culture, and F2P nightmares have created a situation where nothing can ever be done. Developers aren’t allowed to move on to their next project; that’s ‘abandoning’ the game. I think this is the same thing from the other end, a developer who feels the need to create CONTENT instead of looking at a project holistically and realizing that they’ve done what they set out to do. Not everything is improved by there being more of it, and many, many things, especially in this genre, are made worse.
If you really want to return to an idea, you’re better off reconceptualizing it and creating a sequel or spiritual successor instead of tampering with the original thing and mucking it up. It’s okay to move on; it’s not a failure to stop doing something. And most importantly, when you take something with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and add on a ton of stuff after the end, part of what made it work is now gone. You can’t just keep adding to something and have it be the same quality. And sometimes you just have to kill your darlings for their own good.
Return of the Phantom
(MPS Labs, 1993)
So one of my obsessions is bad musicals. I’m really fascinated by musical theater in general, as song and dance are things I am very very bad at and as such enjoy very much when people are good at it. But I also love musicals as language and the wordsmithery of a Sondheim, for example, is very appealing to me. But lowbrow musicals are also fun. I just like them!
In fact, musical theory youtube makes up the bulk of my video essay consumption, and one of my favorites is Lindsay Ellis’ video about Love Never Dies, the insane sequel to Phantom of the Opera. I have both watched Love Never Dies AND read the equally insane book The Phantom of Manhattan that Andrew Lloyd Webber commissioned, and they are some of the most entertaining pieces of bad media I’ve ever consumed; I highly recommend both.
So when I found out there was a 1993 DOS game called “Return of the Phantom” that was also a detective game I was very excited. Either it was good fanfic and thus entertaining, or bad fanfic and thus entertaining, and possibly it would be REALLY bad fanfic and it would join its brethren in the Bad Media Hall of Fame.
Unfortunately the game is the more rote kind of bad, and I’d really only rec it if you, like myself, hold a strange fascination for bad sequels to Phantom of the Opera. It’s a very for-its-time game and as such not much fun, and the story is bizarre but largely because it makes the most boring choices possible.
It does have its moments, though:
Honest this sequence with this image and the actor playing Raoul in like a vaudeville mustache made the experience completely worth it, and if the game had sustained this level of ham the entire time it would have been a masterpiece.
The game starts really well, with you playing an investigator called to find out who sabotaged the chandelier in the modern-day Paris Operahouse. It becomes apparent that someone is going around dressed as the old Phantom doing Phantomy things, and it appears he murders a young ballerina. This is good stuff!
Unfortunately it then decides to become a weird time loop story (what is it with this shitty-ass twist showing up all the time???), and you go back in time as the original Raoul and then second half of the game is just you playing out the plot of the original Phantom book/musical to a tee, except for the very end where you kill the Phantom instead of letting him go, destroying him in the future and preventing anything bad from happening again. It’s stupid, misunderstands why the original ending worked, and the most boring route they could have taken. But yeah the big problem is that it goes from being a sequel to just being a beat-for-beat recreation, which is deeply weird. I wondering if they wanted to do a straight adaptation but thought the ‘sequel’ thing was better for PR?
The other problem is there’s basically no gameplay. You walk extremely slowly across big rooms to talk to a few people, and then at the very end there are two small puzzles, but that’s it — most of the time is dead time waiting for the characters to walk. This is all extremely 1993, but nonetheless not a great gameplay experience.
Also this is a nitpick, but the rotoscoped animation was super bad looking. In Last Express it was part of a visual style that was about high contrast and constant movement, but here it’s just out of place, looking weird and uncanny on normal pixel-art backgrounds.
So sadly this isn’t as entertaining as I was hoping and has little to recommend it. Also, what is it with mediocre dudes trying to de-musical-ize their musical theater adaptations? Literally no one wants Phantom of the Opera to be gory and grimdark. It’s a gothic romance and that’s why it’s successful. Read the room!