Recent reviews by Natural Puppy

I wish more games were this game

I feel I am uniquely qualified to say Dreaming Sarah is a lot more playable than most Yume Nikki-inspired games, which offer the same style of content only more obtusely. However, for all the lip service this game pays to the progenitor of the genre, it resembles Knytt Stories more than anything else, and has more of a Yume 2kki flavor in its use of locations, characters, and music.

"Inspired by the horror game" would suggest Dreaming Sarah takes cues from Yume Nikki's hostile, surrealist design, but it really doesn't, which is either a pro or a con depending on the kind of game you're looking for. The NPCs have fairly humorous dialogue, the environment is a hazard rather than enemy AIs (and taking "damage" is much more forgiving), and everything there is to see in the dream world can be summed up in under two hours.

You might like Dreaming Sarah if you're looking for a diet exploration platformer that's short and mostly linear, or are looking for a fresh take on the "dream diary" genre. Dreaming Sarah combines Nifflas platforming mechanics with Yume Nikki conventions to unique effect, and you can also turn into a fish. This is a huge plus over Yume Nikki, where players famously could not turn into a fish.

However, those looking for something weird and thought-provoking should probably pass on this one. There's not much in this game that's unexpectedly interesting, and if you end up missing a cue on the guided tour that is Dreaming Sarah's gameplay, there will be a fair bit of backtracking until you find your way again, so you'll probably get bored easily. For example, I went out of my way on a five minute detour past the same trap hallway twice to see if there were any secrets and all I got was a rock pun for it.

Perhaps too concerned with meeting the expectations of the series' enthusiastic, niche fanbase, Zero Time Dilemma made a lot of bold, bad decisions, not only diverging from the time-tested qualities of its predecessors, but also running them over with a lawn-mower.

Most of the plot can be described as "fumbling in media res." Rather than a navigating a branching yet still chronological storyline, the player jumps between discrete, out-of-context scenes and puzzle rooms called Fragments. The characters wear bracelets which knock them out and erase their memory at 90-minute intervals, so every scene starts with them waking up in a new place with knowledge of the game in general, but no memory of the previous scenes.

The Fragment system is definitely the game's Achilles' heel. While it may seem at first like a highly personalized way of delivering a story — every player will experience it in a different order! — the developers probably realized that, in a game that relies so much on plot twists for emotional impact, it'd probably be a bad idea to let some players accidentally bump into a plot-crucial revelation, without any context, right at the beginning. (They did not follow this realization to its logical conclusion, that the entire Fragment system is lousy, but I digress.)

Their solution was to arbitrarily limit the scenes you can access by delivering them in sets. You have to explore every option in a single set (including every gameover) before unlocking the next one. The result is, ironically, a system that seems even less personal than simple chronological decision-making, and more like crossing items off a shopping list. It doesn't matter which Fragments you pick when; you do all of them because you have to. And if that's the case, what is even the point?

The Fragment system ultimately ends up undoing a lot of the series' characteristic strengths which Zero Time Dilemma might otherwise have been able to rely on. For one thing, cutting the puzzles off from the rest of the story really emphasizes the disconnect between gruesome horror and off-beat humor (usually reserved for puzzle flavor text), making the latter seem out of place.

There's no longer a single point-of-view character. Furthermore, the character teams for puzzle rooms are also always the same, meaning that not only are you likely to be stuck with someone you dislike in every puzzle, but the group dynamics are almost identical, which becomes increasingly obvious whenever you're forced to repeat the same Fragment with all three teams. Each has a leader, a chaotic neutral guy, and a girl who will have an extensive reaction to any moral choice you make. In the case of Akane and Phi, this is to explain that you're a horrible person every time you press the kill-your-friends button, which is not great when you're required to press the kill-your-friends button to get the next set of Fragments.

Rather than starting with a puzzle, the opening is about 20 minutes of repetitive Fragment cutscenes. None of the branch endings are very climactic, since you're stuck ping-ponging through out-of-context scenes in order to reach them.

And of course, a lack of context between scenes makes bad, over-the-top twists even harder to swallow.

Virtue's Last Reward introduced a lot of revelations that greatly exceeded in magnitude those of the first game. Zero Time Dilemma, attempting the same on an exponential scale, was left to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel for interesting plot twists. As a result, Zero Time Dilemma a lot like Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy, in that it's not only bad, it's so series-crunchingly bad that it also actively sabotages your love of the games that were actually good.

There are many ways ZTD does this, including such bleach-your-brain twists as Phi being Sigma's daughter, the entirety of of VLR being a bad end of one ZTD timeline, and a bad memory-wipe retcon for Tenmyouji's character arc, but the biggest offender is its handling of Akane and Junpei, who, now sporting purple hairdos, only vaguely resemble their former selves.

Apparently, during the time Junpei spent with Seven searching for Akane in the criminal underground(???), he witnessed such Traumatic Events™ that he claims to have lost faith in humanity and is now an alcoholic. He's "done playing the action hero." Needless to say, this image of him as Junpei the Epser[i.kym-cdn.com] is no exaggeration.

Meanwhile, Akane has been vacuum-pressed into a generic anime heroine who is at times grossly cutesy, overly maudlin, self-righteous, and yes, even yandere.

Glancing at the early concept art and profiles included in the DLC artbook, I can kind of see what they were going for (I might have called Junpei's original outfit "lovably dumb"; the developers opted for "childish"), but the result is two mass-marketed, unlikable iterations of erstwhile charming and morally complex characters. They are so unrecognizable that the opening cutscene spends an awkward beat just revealing their identities.

I can imagine this game might be enjoyable if it wasn't also a disappointment. The promotional art and the music is good. It might be a worthwhile purchase for people who have never played Zero Escape and have really low expectations.

For series veterans, don't bother for any reason. Any questions you have regarding Kyle, Dio, Snake, or Santa will not get answered. In fact, your time is probably better spent looking at this picture of a hamburger[www.shutterstock.com]. Enjoy!

With a visual style combining children’s books, traditional paintings, and 1940’s art deco, Fran Bow tells the story of an adolescent girl caught between her parent’s deaths in the real world and several vivid, alternate realities only visible to a select magical few.

Fran had an ordinary life until the night her parents were mysteriously murdered and she ended up in the Oswald Asylum. Fran doesn’t think she’s crazy, but the doctors won’t let her leave, and the medicine they give her makes everything worse. As the game begins, a vision convinces her to escape the asylum and find her cat using a bottle of red pills which allow her to see beyond her own reality.

Navigating two simultaneous spaces, one manifest and ordinary, the other latent and morbid, is a really cool premise for a horror game. Just by using an item in your pocket, a regular old waiting room can be willfully transformed into any variety of horrific meat locker! The Fran Bow demo shows off this device well, though it's worth noting that the "horror in a 40s children's asylum" vibe isn't exactly the whole picture. The full game is five chapters, and while the first two are horror as the demo describes, the final three diverge into hypnagogic high fantasy. Considered as a whole, Fran Bow is not so much a horror game as it is a warm surrealist hug.

While some might feel the midway shift in tone to be something of a bait and switch, I'd say it's more like a friendly Trojan horse, using the veneer of spookiness to sell you on a brand of fantasy that does not work well on paper. Pinecone tribes, dancing wizards, and friendly airships are the order of the day, and never has a horror game so well invoked Alice in Wonderland not for its card-suit imagery but for its absurdism. The world of Fran Bow is a magical Wonderland where every object has a name and a face.

Meeting its companionable inhabitants, too, is like a night-time romp with your stuffed animals. If there is any genuine horror to be found in Fran Bow, it is a horror that is faced while holding hands with your closest friends. There is a skeleton man in a top hat who throws you a birthday party and he is the best.

I absolutely invite you to check out the dev vlogs if you haven't. At Killmonday Games, it’s ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hour every hour. Their work space might best be described as a Swedish-Chilean Pee-wee’s playhouse. Isak, seemingly camera-shy, wears a pig’s mask and makes dial-up modem sounds at the viewers while Natalia alternates between describing development progress and an ongoing sideplot about a hand puppet named Mr. Red and his girlfriend-except-they-broke-up, Princess. One of the Indiegogo perks was supposedly a Fran Bow making-of documentary which would presumably comprise these vlog entries and other misadventures. I can only imagine what unholy special features might be on there.

tl;dr, you really don't want to miss out on a game where a little girl goes around saying thing like:

• “Oh, sharpy, shiny knife! It can be good to have you.”
  
• “Somebody was playing a dirty game around this clock.”
  
• “Ouch! It has thorns… Well, that’s brave!”
  
• “The red flower! It’s like warm love!”
  
• “The placenta is like a jetpack of blood and nutrients!”

This is kind of a half-thumbs-up, because you won't like it if you hate this genre. Picture Yume Nikki, only 3D, with six Madotsukis, a randomly generated forest, 144 optional collectibles (initially the game was to be called “144”), and an even more confusing bundle of metaphors.

In The Path, six city girls are sent one by one to their grandmother's house, where they will probably die alone in the woods. Before their abstract and surrealist demise, however, they must journey through those woods, which are littered with mysterious relics of their past and symbols which represent all their fears and vices.

Honestly, though, what's not to like? Just look at all these features:

• Make bad choices!
  
• Discover a boot!
  
• Knock a shopping cart over!
  
• Put the shopping cart right-side up!
  
• Collect shiny objects!
  
• Give up!
  
• Inspect a telephone pole!
  
• ????
  
• Steam cards!
  
• Good soundtrack!

This game is labeled as horror, but whether or not you'll find the experience scary is mostly subjective. For example, I was terrified of the Girl in White because I met her in a graveyard, she has an expressionless, corpse-like face which would appear in a large overlay upon interaction, and then she started following me. After playing the game, however, I read other reviews and found out she's actually just there to help you when you get lost in the woods.

When you send a little girl into the forest to confront her fears with zero instructions, there is a general unease in the atmosphere as though something terrible is about to happen. Nothing ever does, though, and ultimately The Path is about ethereal sightseeing.

Disenfranchised after his work in the Bible (you may have heard of it), the one and only Satan has become a bad indie game developer. He's currently working on the twenty-somethingth iteration of his magnum opus, the titular "Pony Island." Now in order to save the souls of the damned, you'll have to beta-test his hellish, horse-themed endless runner as Satan walks you through every version of its development history, including the adventure game version, the text-adventure version (yikes), the 3D version (double yikes), and the version with a mascot (4-Michelin-star YIKES).

Pony Island has three basic modes. The first mode is testing the actual gameplay of "Pony Island," which is usually some variation of running across a field and destroying critters. Mullins manages to make "Pony Island" seem terrible while actually being enjoyable to play, probably because being a horse that can fly over pits and fire lasers at its enemies is an inherently enjoyable activity. Whenever you run up against actually bad game design, you can "hack" your way around it by solving a hacking puzzle.

In hacking puzzles, you guide an arrow through various “programming” commands by replacing certain blocks in the sequence. What I love about these puzzles is that they are situated on a nearly perfect learning curve; the instructions are intuitive and new rules are implemented gently so as to make things neither too easy nor too difficult.

When you accidentally hack the game too much and Satan gets angry, you'll be able to mess the arcade machine's operating system. Here you communicate through a chat interface with the "Hopeless Soul," who urges you to destroy the game's three core files (which serve as bosses) in order to liberate the thousands of spirits trapped in the game. You can absolutely spam him with all sorts of messages the AI is not built to understand, as well as rifle through the files on Satin’s desktop, such as the incredibly juicy “triangle.png.”

Though it takes cues from haunted video game pastas, Pony Island is actually just a comedy based on the concept, and has no pretensions of hiding the sinister origins behind its cutesy surface-level game. There are no spooky sounds, jump scares, or leftover processes that cause Zalgo Pinkie Pie to appear on your desktop. Pony Island is a tongue-in-cheek museum tour of Satan's attempts at making a video game.

Hidden collectibles, Steam achievements, and surprising number of secrets reward repeat playthroughs. Pony Island is one of my faves and absolutely worth a $5 buy (though you can usually find it in bundles too).

Welcome to the Game is fun, but it's a reskinned FNAF, not an investigation game. Take that into consideration when buying.

This is because apparently even so much as glancing at the Deep Web turns your home into a helicopter landing pad for hackers and terrorists. The horror in this game comes not from the websites you find, or even the fact our protagonist is suspiciously cool with the existence of livestream torture rooms, but from the surprise Russian kidnapper who can appear in and around your house at any time.

As a result, you have to parse web pages as fast as you can for the eight hidden codes that lead to the Red Room, while keeping an eye on any potential danger outside the computer screen, which means turning off all the lights and shivering in the dark like a panicked kitten every time somebody coughs or there's a noise outside. By the time you're making progress, your computer will get hacked at 1-minute intervals and Boris will come for a visit at 45-second intervals. If you're lucky, you'll get both at once! And don't worry, there's a sweet jump scare slamming noise every time you die.

Much like you will soon be, the protagonist has likely been trapped in this life-death cycle for years. By the time you pick up the game, he's already beaten into submission, which would explain why he refuses to call the authorities, move away from his desk, or close his window. Honestly he's one step away from setting a batch of cookies on the windowsill with a sign reading “Welcome Russian exchange students! :)” And why shouldn't he be, when his kidnapper can basically teleport?

Welcome to the Game is designed for replay- and stream-ability. It's a good time once you get the hang of it, but gameplay is just a race against the clock with some occasional Easter Eggs, not an exploration of culture surrounding the mysterious Dark Web.

To Hato Moa’s credit, while the original Flash game started as an April Fool’s joke, the concept of an all-avian dating sim is not just a gimmick for press attention, although it has functioned as one. Hatoful is a genuine, fully fledged, visual novel love letter to birds, from someone who really likes birds. It's just not very interesting to read.

Otome games like this, which follow tropes and archetypes to the letter, operate on an implicit exchange: in exchange for the prospect of a fictional romance, readers will overlook the genre's typically weak translations, characters, and storytelling. But Hatoful Boyfriend is a friendship sim. It's not subversive, and without any element of romance, it's just a collection of hackneyed genre cliches coupled with bird photographs.

The kind of humor you’d expect from a game about a human dating birds appears in short, mild bursts. The birds themselves aren’t actually the joke, and the universe operates as though they're just humans being viewed through a birdoscope. They ride human scooters, read human books, and shoot human guns with neither opposable thumbs nor any sense of irony. Instead, the comedy is centered on your schoolmates’ wacky shenanigans, like track star Okosan and his obsession with pudding, which is the kind of zero-decibel non-humor you might expect from Lucky Star.

Hatoful Boyfriend is fairly bare-bones for a $10 game. Thanks to overlap between story paths and a nigh-unusable skip function, the game's 3 or so hours of content are stretched to a watery 10-hour playtime. There are 15 endings in all plus an epilogue. Seeing them all requires viewing the a lot of the same material over and over again.

Assets-wise, each of the birds has one (1) expressionless sprite, a sometimes lo-res photo of their species with a choppy black outline. That's fine for a free title. It's less fine for a game that costs $10. It is downright mysterious when the main developer is a freelance mangaka who has drawn comics of these characters. In fact, the only illustrated elements are the backgrounds, the items, and the suitors’ imagined human forms, which appear briefly at their introduction and mostly serve to raise the question of why this isn't just a human dating game. The SFX and soundtrack appear to be mostly royalty-free assets and there are no CGs.

The GUI is also a quiet tragedy. Mediatonic did the Steam remake in Unity. Pigeon-God only knows why when there are dozens of Ren’Py games in this market. The result is a clunky interface with no rollback function and a skip button that only works intermittently, sometimes breaks your game, skips all dialogue whether you have read it or not, and needs to be pressed after every choice menu and scene change.

The common recrimination when people leave bad reviews for this game is that they did only one playthrough and gave up without experiencing the true story. Little did they know that in addition to being a generic otome story with birds instead of people, Hatoful Boyfriend is also a generic horror story with birds instead of people! The “real story” of St. PigeoNation’s is the hidden Bad Boys Love route, which appears after you have completed at least one ending for each of the important birds.

This time, the heroine is killed early on, and her best friend Ryouta teams with class aristocrat Sakuya to investigate her murder as it relates to the secret, sinister, and shockingly political history of the academy. In part, this serves to answer the integral questions of the Hatoful universe, questions the reader mostly stopped asking after they were made to suspend their disbelief for the first 8 hours of the game. Why was only one human admitted to the school? How did birds begin to develop as an intelligent species? (Questions as of yet unanswered by the Bad Boys Love storyline include: Why does the human live in a cave off of red meat and noodles while Sakuya owns a mansion? Why don't they live in bird houses? Shouldn’t eating poultry be illegal? How does a bird play the piano? Why are there only like ten people at this really prestigious school? What the hell is a Java Blessing? And other, less important issues.)

In reality, BBL functions best as an AU; it doesn't have much emotional impact as a suspense story due to the lack of CGs and flat, non-descriptive narration. It raises more issues than it solves, and the solutions supplied the murder mystery ordeal are either insultingly obvious (yes, the evil doctor is still, in fact, evil) or out of left field, because the protagonists can only acquire so much useless information before the more knowledgeable birds get bored and just explain everything to them. While we do get a few new interesting backstories, these come at the price of a nauseating number of flashbacks, secret brothers, and childhood promises.

Hatoful Boyfriend aspires to be an otome game and a thriller sci-fi but succeeds at neither. This is not a party game to play with friends for a night of uproarious laughter. If you are not surprised and delighted by the idea of a bloodless dating game with bird photos where the people are supposed to be, then there’s not much this visual novel has to offer you.

I do enjoy the comics though.

Come for the murder mystery, stay for the elaborate New England-esque family drama.

In The Painscreek Killings, you play as a reporter named Janet, sent by the Sun City Tribune to uncover what happened in the once lively village of Painscreek, Newland (a very real state in the US of A), now a ghost town following a series of untimely deaths. What begins as a simple cold case investigation reveals into a dramatic series of events involving in the deaths of famous philanthropist Vivian Roberts as well as six other people, including the last private investigator involved in the scandal.

Painscreek is supposed to offer a relatively realistic take on crime investigation. There's no HUD minimap, no hint system, no fast travel or hand-to-hand combat, and our protagonist lacks the supernatural acumen or Bat-Tech of many of her detective contemporaries.

For a game that tries to be realistic, though, the number of secret rooms, hidden compartments, and convenient diaries is almost comical. There is not one journal entry that is not somehow pertinent to your investigation. Have you ever owned a diary? I sure have, and if some murderer was on the loose and everyone in my town disappeared tomorrow, the unfortunate ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ suckered into investigating it would die reading lists of things I like and the imagined internal monologues of my pet fish.

Indeed this is not a glamorous crime-solving adventure where you get to point out the disguised killer to a room of startled party guests. There are no other characters on screen, which means you can only make headway by doing lots and lots of paperwork. Open drawers! Spin Bibles around! Stare out the window, dreaming of the day you too will get to apprehend criminals on the field or grill suspects over their lack of an alibi, and then go back to cross-referencing hospital sign-in sheets! In essence, Painscreek plays like collecting the pages of a novel in a tiny, empty village.

But the novel at its center is good. I started The Painscreek Killings before a family vacation and found myself shoving other activities aside just to get back to it. The population of Painscreek proper can't be more than a hundred, meaning the characters you investigate are closely involved with one another. As you dig deeper into the mystery of who killed Vivian Roberts, many other fascinating plot threads emerge, and a helpful inventory system allows you to easily refer to the relevant documents for each actor in this tiny soap opera. According to Steam I've only spent 4 hours on this game, which either means Steam is a liar or I played it while traveling at the speed of light.

There's also a fun little twist at the end for fans of horror. A surprise homicidal AI is the perfect way to spice up an afternoon of looking at documents and unlocking doors. I'm not even being sarcastic. I got murdered with an axe.

Best Parts:

• Noping the ♥♥♥♥ out of the hospital when the lights went out
  
• Looking for leads in the hunting grounds only to discover this is an unfinished part of the map

If you're into RPG Maker art games and thrillers, stop reading now and buy this.

The rest of you are probably expecting a lengthy description, and here it is: Little Red Lie is a sprite-art, story-rich indie game exploring the ways one's financial circumstances (controllable and otherwise) affect their ability to interact with the economy, using deception as a central story theme.

The way it's presented here, as a game where deception features as the main mechanic, is somewhat misleading. Little Red Lie is unquestionably a kinetic novel. The ability to lie about any object or to any person is just a repackaged examine button which is used to prompt narration from the player character or otherwise continue the scene.

Even without traditional gameplay, however, the story is still well worth reading, full of uniquely tense and heartwarming scenarios and unusual characters. Little Red Lie follows a recently unemployed thirty-something-year-old named Sarah and a pompous financial self-help guru named Arthur. Sarah's chapters focus on the challenges she faces as she moves back in with her parents. The chapters in between follow Arthur as he indulges his bottomless hedonism and bolsters his career. The marketing copy deliberately obscures one additional element of the story (which I won't spoil here!) that elevates the game from interesting weekend endeavor to outright discussion piece (with most of the questions beginning something like, "wtf just happened???"). It's a really nice surprise out of left field from a game that mostly dwells in the land of bleak realism.

Little Red Lie's characters act mostly in the service of advancing its views on the unpredictability — and unfairness — of modern capitalism. For eat-the-rich Millennials convinced the world's economy has failed them by design, the game will prove an immensely gratifying experience. However, advocates of "individual responsibility" and other such mantras will probably find its perspective much too reductionist... Nor will it be fun for centrists looking for both ends of the spectrum to get a fair shake, as Little Red Lie begins its tale fully convinced of its own philosophy.

One last word of caution for the optimists: this game plays on certain expectations of how an underdog story is supposed to resolve — don't be fooled. The moral arc of this story bends ever downwards. Its villains leap gracefully through flaming hoops of karma while its heroes catch fire attempting the same. Getting through this game unscathed will require you to laugh in the face of life's most painful ironies.

In the end, whether you'll enjoy Little Red Lie comes down to your expectations of how or to what extent a game should respond to and reflect the idiosyncrasies of the player. This one doesn't, but it does very much excel at what it actually attempts.