This is a transcript excerpt covering the score awarded to Discounty on the So Videogames Podcast, episode 453. For further coverage, please see episodes 452 and 451.

Brad: Okay, just wanted to, finally, for the final. Final time, circle back on Discounty. We’ve been talking about it off and on for at least a month or so. finally rolled credits last night, and I will say, I was kind of surprised that I rolled credits. this is the case where I really like the game left me wanting more. I would have gladly played another ten, 20 hours of this game, and I kind of wished that there was so a little bit of like, it sounds bad to say that I was disappointed it was over, but I was kind of disappointed it was over for those who might have missed it

Discounty is a game.. a 2D indie? kind of a top down. Well, I don’t know, 2D, just whatever. How do you call it? I always struggle, I’ve been in the video game arena for like 40 fucking years. What do you call a game that is 2Dut you’re not looking straight down. But the characters are like side view, but like also the map is 2D. What the fuck do you call that besides 2D? I don’t even know.

Carlos: We’ve said three quarters view.

B: But it’s not three quarters view, though. It isn’t isometric. It’s not… whatever. Fuck it. Whatever. It’s the same thing as Stardew Valley, you know?

C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B: Okay, I need, like, a really definitive… I can’t just say 2D because that’s too broad. But it’s not top down either, because you’re not looking at characters heads. What the fuck? 40 years and I still can’t describe it. Anybody listening? Help me out. What the fuck is a good title? Okay, it doesn’t matter anyway. Moving on…

So you move to town, you start a grocery store, and you stock the shelves and you rearrange the store, and you run the store every day, which is really well done. It’s very streamlined and fast and fun. But then you’re also dealing with side quests in the town where it seems like something spooky is going on or something weird is going on. And so you’ve got like these side quests which are not super long and involved, like they’re very light, they feel very appropriate for the game. So you’ve got like your side content, which keeps you busy during night time. You’ve got your store content which keeps you busy during the day. It’s just really, really well done. It’s really measured and polished and balanced. Graphics are great. I think the controls are nice.

I think the UI is great. Everything about it is really well considered. I think the scope is right on. I’ve had just like a blast playing it. It just feels like a very, very well put together game from somebody who really thought carefully about what they were doing and really made sure all the pieces fit together. It was great. I had a blast the entire time from start to finish. The only thing I think that I had an issue with, and this is kind of what I just mentioned a second ago, was like, it feels like it stops a little abruptly. I’m not going to spoil anything. I absolutely think it’s worth playing. I loved it, had a great time. Would recommend it. No problem. , it just feels like when you get to the next big thing, it kind of is like, and there’s the end and I’m like, oh it ended a little bit too abruptly for me. But again, I guess it’s better to leave me wanting more rather than going on for 20 hours too long. Yeah. Like, you know, oh, I’m so sick of this.

C: Which we’ve had.

B: We’ve definitely have had. That’s the norm. Honestly.

C: Two follow up questions. First, how long have you played… how long, how many hours then?

B: I mean, it’s hard to say because I was playing a little bit every night before bed. I want to say it’s like not longer than 20 hours. It might even be shorter than that.

C: Well, that’s not bad.

B: No, no, it’s very reasonable. It’s probably in fact, it’s probably shorter than that. It just seems longer because I was playing it in such small doses.

C: Second question, can you keep playing after credits or is it not that kind of game?

B: You can like you can keep playing if you want to just if you just really like super enjoy running the store, you can keep doing that infinitely. But there are no more like side quests. There’s nothing else really to like to do other than to run the store, which is fine.

C: Ok well all right, well, I still I’m still interested and I still might pick it up because.

B: It’s a good time. It’s a good time. I don’t want to end on a downer because I had a blast with Discounty and I would love DLC or a Discounty 2. I want the developers to expand what they built on. I think the mechanics are smart, the size is smart, the pace is smart — it’s it’s just really, really well done.

C: A good problem to have.

B: It’s like the best possible complaint.

C: Yes. I was just talking to my buddy Damien last night about short games. And again it came back with Silksong and he just played a couple and I feel bad. I can’t remember the names of them. I’ll I’ll find it. And you can put in the show notes. But he just played two and he beat both of them and I’m like, you know. Or he beat one and he’s about to beat the other. And I’m like, oh my goodness, that’s what I want right now in my life. Yeah, I want to beat these short experiences. And we go in cycles, you know, like sometimes I want Assassin’s Creed and just like to live in those worlds forever. Yeah. But just recently, like, Diablo is different because I can put that up and pick it up and put it down. You know.

B: It’s more of a lifestyle.

C: Yeah, yeah. But other games like hell, which we’ll talk about in the show, you know, they’re if they’re pretty huge in scope, I’m like, oh, I don’t know. You know, I just want to like beat something. So yeah.

B: Well, before we get off of this Discounty, I do want to give it an official score, since I talked about it so many times, and I’ve gone through the whole journey with the people here listening.

So I feel like it’s a great game. Like I said, at the end of the day, my only complaint about Discounty is that I wanted more of it, and that’s probably the best problem you could possibly have. It was great from start to finish and I wanted more, but it does what it does well — it gets in, it gets out, and it’s a great example of of how to deliver a measured experience. And I feel like a solid eight is a good place for that to live.

C: I totally I totally predicted that score from you.

B: Did you? Okay.

C: In my head I said it’s he’s gonna say eight.

B: There you go. Eight out of ten.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Crinkle Cut Games and published by PQube. It is currently available on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Switch. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E and contains Alcohol Reference. The official description reads: Discounty is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB with Alcohol Reference. This is a role-playing/simulation game in which players help a character salvage a grocery store in an old harbor town. Players organize and restock shelves, assist customers, and befriend local characters. A bar location is named the Drunken Tern, with billboards depicting a bird with bubbles over its head.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue comes in the form of text which cannot be resized or altered. There are no audio cues needed for play. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. There is no control diagram. The left stick moves the character, the face buttons handle interact/confirm/cancel. The plus button brings up a menu. The entire control scheme is fairly straightforward.

The post SVG REVIEW: Discounty appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Daniel Weissenberger sits down to chat with John and Rob Doncan — the two-man group behind development studio Bad Viking. They released Strange Horticulture in 2022 to rave reviews, and now they’re on the verge of releasing their new title, Strange Antiquities. We chat about design, how puzzles fit into a world with items, and which cat is best. Be sure to keep an eye out for Strange Antiquities which releases September 17th for Steam and Switch!

TRANSCRIPT:

GameCritics.com: Today on GameCritics, we’re talking to Bad Vikings John and Rob Doncan. The developers responsible for the instant classic puzzle game Strange Horticulture. Their new game, Strange Antiquities, is a sequel of sorts set in the same world, but moving the action to a shop for rare and mysterious artifacts. All right, we’re joined today by John and Rob, the two man developer team responsible for the Strange franchise. Is that what you guys refer to it as?

Rob: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s what we’d call it. Yeah. 

GC: In 2022, they gave us Strange Horticulture, a game about sorting and finding rare and mysterious plants. And now upcoming is the sequel, Strange Antiquities. So, can I start right at the beginning? What were your big influences in kicking off the Strange franchise? Like I can go to your website and look at your library and there’s a lot of action games in there and if I looked at the end of the four games you made beforehand. Strange Horticulture is quite a departure. 

Rob: Yeah, it it is. But there’s like… there is history there as well. Like you know kind of point and click games we played growing up and we made a couple of those as well. So kind of puzzly stuff was always in our blood, I think. You know, we… we grew up with games like Mist and Riven and, in particular the Discworld series as well. We loved those games, which obviously kind of more humor, than we necessarily have ended up doing here. But yeah, so I think there is, you know, there’s some history there. And then another thing that we were really inspired by was board games. So I mean you might be able to see behind me.

GC: Katan and Gloomhaven. 

Rob: Yeah, got a little board game collection going on here. So I think specifically stuff like Eldritch Horror and there’s a game called Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective which you have, if you haven’t played, there’s a similar sort of map mechanic in it where you go around London solving crimes. And so we kind of borrowed that slightly for Strange Horticulture. Obviously, there’s a map in it and you can… you solve puzzles to find your way around to find plants and and uncover the story, that sort of stuff. So yeah, board games, old adventure games and point and click games and puzzle games kind of always been there for us. 

GC: Okay. 

John: Yeah. I think I think… I think with… basically when we came to making Strange Horticulture, we were sort of… we’ve been toying around with loads of ideas for like a year. We kind of had a bit of a failure when we tried to make a sort of artillery game for Steam that didn’t do so well. And we were… we were toying with a board game idea. We were toying with a point and click adventure game set in a town called Undermere. And then it was Rob who came he he went out one day on a dog walk and came back saying I’ve seen an advert for some gardening company or I don’t know what it was exactly but he he he I think it had the word “horticulture” in it and he came back and he pitched he said I’ve had an idea called Strange Horticulture and it’s like about running an occult plant shop and what do you think and I I just said you know what that sounds really cool can we let’s make that game ’cause you know we we we hadn’t latched on to anything in a kind any kind of strong way. We… and we were desperate for a kind of… like… you know something some kind of source of inspiration and that just seemed really cool like I I could instantly kind of see something in that. So we dropped everything else and then it’s funny how like you start borrowing things. If you take the setting from the point and click game that we were sort of half working on, the map from Rob says Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, but we’d actually put that into our own little board game thing. And we took… we took that from there and and suddenly we built up this kind of world and obviously we’re just a two man team so we’re like let’s try and keep you know play to our strengths. We really liked the concept of the what they’ done with… what Lucas Pope had done with Papers, Please and having it all on one screen and kind of the tactile feel of the you know stamping documents and opening books and things like that. And we were like that could work really nicely here and having it in a single sort of screen layout. So let’s borrow that kind of game design. But like you’re… you’re studying books and studying law and and trying to find out about plants and yeah, it’s amazing how these kinds of things (work) together. But yeah, if you look at our sort of game history, it’s not the most obvious like of moves, but sometimes you got to move in tangents in this industry and hey, look, now we’re making strange games and having fun with it. 

GC: Oh man. Okay. Now here’s just a game… just a question about playing the game. Am I not playing it right if the minute I started I turned on auto-label? 

Rob: No, I mean look, that’s obviously we kind of know that there’s a subset of people that are going to love labeling their plants and it’s really interesting. We’ve watched a lot of playthroughs, particularly of people playing the demo of Strange Antiquities. Um, and there’s a lot of people who see the popup saying, you can turn on autolabeling if if labeling items isn’t your thing. And a lot of people who say, “No, it really is my thing. I don’t want to turn on autolabeling.” And then equally, there’s a lot of people who say, “Yeah, it’s not my thing. It’s not for me.” And they turn it on. So, yeah, I don’t know what the split is necessarily. Like it kind… I think this kind of game does appeal to people who like sort of organizing stuff, but it’s not that’s not what it’s about. That’s kind of a a side quest if you like, but yeah, you’re not cheating if you turn on auto labeling. That’s why we put it there. 

John: Yeah. But it was always our intention to offer that side of it. It’s like, you know, for people that want to arrange their shelves how they want to arrange them and they want to give each… each plant or each item its own label, you know, there’s something kind of quite fun about that in a weird kind of… like organizational way. Like I think some people get a lot out of that. So, it’s definitely Yeah, it’s just two types of player and some people want to turn them auto labeling on and others would rather label their own plants. And which… either camp you’re in, we just offer different… that play style to both. And it’s up to you. And that’s the great thing about being able to choose.

Rob: The… I will say that the steam thread of how to arrange your plants on Strange Horticulture is the longest thread in the whole back end… in the whole discussion section. So yeah, people get quite into it. The favorite… my favorite one that someone posted was that they arranged them by smell so the nice… the nice smelling ones are near the customers as they come in. 

GC: That’s fantastic. Sorry, that’s very good. It did not occur to me with No, I… I will say that I would have had a much easier time in the endgame if I had sorted them all by what kind of thematic resonance they gave off early in the game. 

Rob: Right. Yeah. 

GC: Like if there’s one tip to make the game a lot easier, it’s the minute you get that lens, put on the labels what kind of… what kind of resonance they have ’cause that is going to save you a ton of time. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. yeah. I think again some people are kind of naturally more organizational and they’ll just do that instinctively. Again, you see it watching people just playing the demo that, you know, different labeling systems. Some people are really organized and other people are just chaotic. I think John and I, well certainly me, I would be in the more chaotic camp. 

John: Yeah. I mean I was I… I think… I don’t think I’ve ever even put on auto labels or done any labeling, but that’s because I know I know the item sort of off by heart. So I just like where’s my thingy? Yeah, I’ll go find that. So yeah, like I think if I was playing it myself from scratch, I’d be an auto labeler to be honest. 

GC: Okay, good. I’m not alone. Is that a real cat’s purr on the soundtrack? 

Rob: I assume so. It’s a licensed sound effect. So…

JOhn: It certainly will be a real cat’s pur.

Rob: I’d be surprised if it’s not… not my, not our cats, though. 

GC: (I’m) really wondering if you recorded it live. 

Rob: That would have been cool. Yeah. 

GC: Is it the same purr in both games? 

Rob: No. A new purr for a new cat. 

GC: Okay. Alright. It sounded different to me. I just had no idea if that was just my ears playing tricks. Alright, at what point did you start coming up with the idea of doing Strange Antiquities? Were you… Did it happen during the development of Strange Horticulture or after it was finished? 

John: Oh, after like we… Strange Horticulture was like… We were so focused on Strange Horticulture all the way through like we didn’t even think about what to do after ’cause we had no idea like how it was going to be received or anything like that. So the focus was entirely let’s get make for us it was about making the best game that we could with our resources. I mean one of the kind of ideas we had during development was let’s make try and make somebody’s favorite game. That was like a concept we were… we were working with rather than trying to make something that’s like going to make loads of money or is going to be critically acclaimed or let’s make one person’s favorite game and see where it goes. So we… we tried that. We made the best game we possibly could and then we released it and gosh the reception was so much bigger than anything we could have imagined like in terms of the feedback, the reviews the audience were they just seem to really enjoy it. And so after that we were like well makes sort of sense to do another strange game I think. Um, and we still felt we had more stories to tell in Undermere. 

Rob: …but we kind of felt like we… we’d maybe exhausted like, not exhausted, but we put all our best plant ideas into Strange Horticulture and we wanted to try something a bit different. So, I don’t think we thought too much. Correct me if I’m wrong, John, but I don’t think we took too long to decide it was going to be Antiquities. I think that strange like occult artifacts kind of made sense to us pretty quickly.

John: Yeah, we were brainstorming ideas for a follow-up. And honestly, it was quite a short list. I think it was like sort of occult items, cryptic creatures, there might have been something else, but basically the natural progression for us felt like yeah, antiquities. Yeah, you know, you go into museums and there’s cursed items and items about witchcraft and all sorts of that. So, it… it works in the world really well. 

GC: Okay. Next question. Now, you’ve already mentioned and gave a wonderful shout out to Papers, Please, Lucas Pope’s just amazing simulator. Were there any other games that really you felt influenced you in designing this one? 

Rob: I mean that Papers Please was definitely the biggest one I think. I mean although it’s interesting we probably get compared more to Lucas Pope’s other big game, the Return to Obra Dinn. 

GC: Return. Yeah. 

Rob: Because the gameplay is perhaps more similar to that… that sort of deductive reasoning.

GC: …looking at all of the oblique clues to put together the answer. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. but that wasn’t really intentional. we kind of yeah that just sort of happened. but yeah I I can’t think of any other specific games that we were in by..

John: I think thematically we you know we had come across things like Cultist Simulator and Fallen London games and things like that and we sort of we we didn’t… Rob’s played Cultist Simulator, I haven’t played these games, but it… it was kind of like looking into those kind of like cultish occult things, we just felt like there was something cool there. And when we started and that was like always the idea, right? It was going to be occult plants. And then we started researching it and kind of looking into it more and you kind of come across things like well in the 15th century that there was a famous botanist in the in in Britain called Nicholas Culpepper and he wrote something called complete herbal which was like a guide to like pharmaceutical plant use and and other uses you know mystical uses more spiritual uses I guess and you sort of get we got a copy of it and you kind of go oh it’s got the plant. The sketch of the plant and like a description of the plant and then what does it do? And you know it can be how from like settling stomach to warding off spirits. And we were like that’s… that’s really cool. Like why don’t we just take that kind of concept and just you know go our go even more sort of supernaturally occulty like fun with it. and that’s kind of what we did. So yeah, those are the kinds of things we were inspired by. less probably like specific games just…

Rob: There was also well as I mentioned earlier the board games but there was also a game called Coffee Talk which itself was kind of inspired by Papers, Please and a game called Va-11 Hall-A, I assume as well which… Coffee Talk is about you know being a barista in a kind of fantasy setting not sure what you’d call it exactly but that that kind of taught us that you can have this kind of slower paced game play. and like it can be kind of chilled and you know it doesn’t… doesn’t need to be fast-paced or frantic or anything like that. You can do quite a lot with a little. 

GC: Okay. Yeah. All right. On the website for the game, Rob is listed as coding and designing. John is doing the art and designing. Who is writing the character dialogue and book entries because there’s so many of them in the game. 

Rob: Yeah, true. Well, that’s Yeah, that’s pretty much all me. Oviously with some help from John as well. And actually John’s wife wrote some of the like flavor text for some of the locations that you can visit in the first game, I believe. 

John: I think… Well, yeah, we sat down together, Steph and I, and just like just took locations and just started writing descriptions and stuff. So, yeah, I think most when I say game design is, you know, it’s a collaborative process and that includes things like the story, we we we come up with some ideas, we we talk about it like and then but most of the writing is definitely Rob’s side of it, but that doesn’t mean to say I don’t get involved. I’ve… I’ve done a few little bits in the game like I think most of the epilogue entries I think are more me in… in the game. So it is a collaborative process. it’s just our main roles are art and code and then we also have loads of other hats that we put on, you know, like sound design, animator, narrative designer, marketing, social media, community stuff. We do… we do so much just as just the two of us. 

GC: Okay. All right. So specifically about the text, what challenges did you face in coming up with the kind of word puzzles that are in the entries? I have to imagine it’s kind of difficult writing these entries that tow the line between legitimately sounding like a description of the item and the history of the item without just giving away what it is… 

Rob: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Very challenging. And much more challenging designing those puzzles on strange antiquities than it was on Strange Horticulture. Partly because obviously plants all share similar properties, right? So you can describe a plant’s leaves as being heart-shaped or whatever and that could apply to any plant and you have to go and check all of your plants on your shelf and see if they have heart-shaped leaves. Whereas you can’t really do that with items. Like if you say it has a handle or whatever then okay yeah that could apply to a couple of items but not many. If you say well yeah so it’s about like trying to use those broader terms. So trying to… trying to find those broader descriptive terms. So like using the material maybe or you know we might say it’s a pendant or it’s a totem or something. You’ve got lots of those on your shelves. So that’s kind of what we try and do is… is give a broader descriptive clue or maybe try and use a sketch or something like that that could apply to more than one item. And then we’ll try and have other clues peppered in there that will help you narrow it down. where you might have to use some other tools to help you do that. So, you might have to inspect the item in some way, see if it makes a sound or has a threatening aura or something like that. Or you might have to weigh it or use some other items in your shop to kind of help you get there. But yeah, that was… that was certainly a challenge this time round. But I think by working through that challenge, we perhaps came up with some more interesting ideas this time around, and hopefully some more interesting puzzles came out of that process.

John: Yeah, I mean it took longer like… the process way longer than in Strange Horticulture to come up with one all these items visually like plants because they’re similar. You… I just started drawing plants and then you just draw the next one and you kind of find some way of comparing them and making (them) interesting. It’s almost like we designed the puzzles first and then designed the items and then… then you also have to come back and try and throw in little bits of red herrings for other puzzles. And like it’s, you know, it’s about creating a putting in a few clues into the description like as Rob said, one that’s a broader sort of clue, one that’s more of a like narrow it down and a clincher. And but also making it sort of vague enough and interesting enough and appealing enough law-wise that it sort of like it has this richness to it in the game as well. So it’s… it’s an incredibly difficult process. I think it… it’s when we come up with a way that’s to do a puzzle that is unique and completely different to how you’re used to kind of using your book looking for and those are the ones which are, I think, land the best on the player as well. So the more of those we can put in the better really. 

Rob: And some of my favorite ones are the ones where it’s like one small sentence. So you… you know you get ones that are like have three or four quite maybe disguised clues but like…

GC: The insanity card where it’s just like I don’t know what the entry is something (like) “This is as mysterious as insanity in the mind itself.” Thanks. Hugely helpful. 

Rob: Doesn’t give you much to go on, but then you know once you crack it, I think…

GC: Very satisfying. Exactly. 

Rob: Right. Yeah. Great. 

GC: How much and well when you’re writing tests… texts this complex to work as puzzles, how much testing of that do you have to do, right? Do you have people you’d normally test this stuff on? 

Rob: Yeah, I mean obviously as as much as possible is the answer, but that is hard because well one of the biggest problems that we face with a game like this is that it doesn’t really fall into place until quite close to the end of the game like end of development in the sense that as John says you know in designing the items one item on its own is not a puzzle. You need 10 items on your shelf that you haven’t identified yet so that there can be ones to compare it against. So until you’ve kind of designed those other items that might be red herrings, you know, you can’t and… you’ve designed the… the tools to identify these items, you can’t show it to someone and say, “Is this working or isn’t it?” So yeah, that obviously came quite late in development. 

GC: You have to make the game before you know if it’s any good. 

John: Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah, it’s not a game that we could like… Even with Strange Horticulture, it’s not a game that we were able to prototype and sort of and test out on people and say, “Does this work?” We… we just had to go with sort of like a gut instinct and and as you say, just basically make the game and then try it out on people and hope that it works…

Rob: But obviously once then once you do try it out on people, you find out, okay, this one is too hard, this one’s too easy or whatever. And then you can kind of go back in and tweak them all and add in more red herrings where required or clarify certain bits here and there. So we’ve done a lot of that obviously and that’s where yeah play testers come into it. 

John: Yeah, especially like you know we… when we launched the demo one of the things obviously it’s only the first two days but all those are the… the easier side of the puzzle. So it’s, you know, we can see how people are interacting with it, where the points of friction are, try and smooth it through, and then you kind of go, okay, that’s how they’re playing. Is there anything else we need to do further up in the game? Like that will just ease people’s frictions. And we’re never going to get it perfect. Like we… we try our hardest to balance the game as as well as we can. Like not too easy, not too hard. You know, I always sort of try and lean towards making it hard and then we realize we’ve we it’s too hard. We got to go… have to go back the other way. But then we were… we were discussing some feedback and a puzzle yesterday and Rob found a quote by Ron Gilbert who did um… 

GC: Monkey Island.

John: Yeah. And he was like, you know, stick stick to hard basically. I can’t remember exactly what it was. 

Rob: He said yeah he is on the side of making it too hard. What he doesn’t want to do is like, you know, if… if you’ve given the players the tools to work something out and there’s a wrench on the table was his specific quote. Don’t be tempted to make the wrench bounce up and down and flash in their face ‘cause part of the fun of these kind of games is figuring that stuff out for yourself. And you know not… you don’t have to make every puzzle easier. It’s just the ones where you know if… if every single play tester trips up on it, that’s obviously you know that’s a flag. But you know some… some things some people are going to find a bit harder and some people will breeze through it and that’s okay. 

John: But it’s about creating those aha moments where you know where you… you know if it’s too easy you don’t get that reward. If it and it’s if it’s too hard, you also and it doesn’t really make sense, you don’t get that reward. But if it’s hard enough that you can work it out and then you do work it out, the sense of satisfaction you get from that is much greater. 

GC: Oh, I agree completely. There’s a lot of really satisfying moments in the game. There’s some… there’s some tough ones, but when you figure it out, it just feels fantastic. 

Rob: Awesome. 

GC: I was thinking about one particularly difficult one, but I’m not going to spoil it here. I tell you later. All right. Do you guys each have a favorite character in the game? 

Rob: For me, I think it’s got to be Verona Green. Partly because she is a returning character from Strange Horticulture. So, if you played that game, you might recognize her. And I mean, she’s kind of… she’s pretty central in both games. She’s… she’s kind of half based on a kind of Granny Weatherwax sort of character from Discworld, if you’re familiar with her. She’s just… Yeah, she’s kind of the… the beating heart of Undermere. I think she kind of keeps everything ticking over. 

John: I mean, like, it would be remiss if I said my favorite character wasn’t the cat because my favorite character is the cat, you know? He’s the central kind of character throughout the game. Well, both games, obviously. It’s a different cat now. But he’s the constant throughout like, he’s always there. He’s minding his own business. You know, he runs the place basically. You, you’re just like… so yeah definitely I would say the cat Jupiter.

GC: Okay. Yeah, one thing I did love about Jupiter is when he’s napping if you hit the… if you hit the bell, of course he’s alarmed that you woke him up but if you pet him first he’ll be awake and he won’t mind the bell.

John: Yeah that’s like something from Strange Horticulture which was a happy accident just how it was set up like and then people loved it or found it, found out about it and loved it so much and then when we released the demo it didn’t have that and people were like excuse me can you fix that please!

Rob: We added that back in. 

GC: Fantastic! Do you have a favorite one of the items in the game?

Rob: I think I’m going to go with an item called the Bloodbeck which I have to be careful here to not give away any sort of puzzle. But it is this kind of mysterious item that has whispered voices and you don’t know if they’re the voices of the dead or the voices of the mysterious nameless gods.

John: I mean honestly, I don’t know the items like inherently by name or by what they do but I do like as the artist is… is for me it’s how they resonate visually. So, I can say like my favorites there are like there’s a wooden doll item with some markings on his head, which I’ve… I don’t know why. I’ve just always liked it. Like I think it’s cool. It could… I can see it in a museum or something. And there’s also one which has… is it’s like a… a sort of doll, a wooden doll with earrings and a big…

GC:  …Disc headdress on top. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. I just… I just like it those… those ones visually like I don’t know. Like and so when… when I did some stickers for Strange Horticulture for Gamescom recently those… those are ones that got printed up. So yeah like um…

GC: Okay. Yeah, there they are. And of course the skull and the flower that use… 

John: Well, that’s kind of in the game’s loading screen. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s quite an iconic one. 

John: Yeah, it became like early on it it was one of the sort of earlier designs and it became like kind of the the insignia for the game like the emblem and…and so it’s… it’s kind of on the the Steam small banner and we kind we kind of use it as our kind of icon I guess. 

GC: Yeah. No, it… it’s quite an image because it ties things of course back to Strange Horticulture. You got the plant right there. 

John: That’s it. There’s a little bit of that and I think like the kind of skull and like the way it is it kind of feels occult and so which it’s a cool… it’s just a cool design. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. 

GC: All right. Now, here’s a question. How did you decide on the yacht dice minigame as a way of punishing players for just random clicking? 

Rob: That was… I’m not sure exactly where that idea came from. Well, so we had something similar in Strange Horticulture where yeah, if you fill up your rising dread meter, we call it and you get a game over. You have a little puzzle to solve to get back in. And we got some really good feedback on that. Some players really loved it. And then I think the players that hit it quite a lot found it quite frustrating that they were just doing the same puzzle over and over again, which yeah, fair enough. We… we take that on board. So we wanted to do something that could be more replayable. Which is a real challenge when you want it to be something quite simple like not take too long and get you back into the game you know within a minute or two, max 5 minutes, something like that. So yeah it went through quite a few iterations but I think we went with a dice game partly because again inspired by board games and those kind of mechanics. Partly because I think visually it’s… it looks cool having, you know, the 3D dice in there, I think it works really well. And partly because it introduces a luck factor. So, there’s that kind of randomizing element. But then balancing that and making sure because the first iteration we did of it, we, you know, we sent it off to our publishers and like, oh, what do you think of this? And they absolutely hated it because it was just way too hard. And they were just getting so frustrated that they couldn’t just get back into the game. So, we tweaked it quite a lot and made it easier. And we also added in a fun little feature where… so if you roll X’s, that’s kind of like a bad thing. You don’t want to roll those. But if you roll two or more of them, Jupiter can swipe his paw across and reroll them for you, which is, kind of nice. 

GC: It’s a delightful surprise. Is the first time it happened. Yeah. Just reached in to help me out. 

Rob: Yeah. 

John: It’s for us like that… the mini game like the game, we call it the game over minigame internally. And it’s basically… it’s needed in the game to stop people just trying every item on the shelf systematically and brute forcing every puzzle. We want people to actually try and work out the right item. So, we have to have something that takes people out so there’s an incentive to try and get the right item first time round. And obviously, if you’re playing the game correctly, you should never see the game over mini game. You should be able to go through the whole game without seeing it. But it’s there like as… and it’s got to fit sort of thematically like does it does it work like does it work within this world? It’s got to be kind of simple to play. And then we also wanted to try and make it so that if you are coming back to it regularly like you can kind of learn how to play it and then we try and increase the difficulty a little bit as you go along. So it becomes almost like a game in itself which you can kind of have… have and there is some sort of strategy to it. So yeah, I think whether people like it or not, we… we don’t, it’s going to be hard to judge until it comes out, but it’s… it’s the best we were able to come up with for that yeah, that section of the game. 

GC: Yeah. As you say, to keep people from just brute forcing every puzzle because it takes you out of the experience if you’re just click click click. Okay, well that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. Okay. No, it… it absolutely had a great effect there as does the hint system. Did you discuss whether you wanted to have a hint system in the game or was that always the plan? 

John: The… the hint system is there again for, like, people who get to a point where they’re really stuck and they’re going to quit the game and never come back to it. And it’s like, you know, why are we trying to punish people if they’re having a hard time? like let’s give them clues and rather than just telling them the answer, let’s try and like give a, you know, a simple clue and then if they’re still struggling another clue and then if they’re still struggling it maybe a final clue that really hints at it. But like it’s about providing as seamless an experience for everyone. And so having the hints, is something we always plan to do in Strange Horticulture and then for this absolutely we would… we definitely added it. And we’ve done another thing this time round which we didn’t do previously which is we kind of we talked a lot about it and then we’ve just decided to do it anyway is when you solve a puzzle and you identify an item in the in the screen that comes up there’s a popup and we we list the reason…

GC: What the clues were. 

John: What the clues were. The idea being that if someone wasn’t entirely sure why that was the right answer, we’ve given them the clues so that they can go, “Ah, okay, that makes sense.” And also maybe get into the way we think and how we’re setting puzzles, 

GC: Teaching them what to look for in future puzzles. 

Rob: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that was the thinking behind it. Sure. 

GC: Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, and that’s what it… that’s the effect it had on me. So, I confirm that works. You say the game is largely not humorous, and I think that’s true, but there are a lot of moments of levity in there, like at the time I clicked, you know, to feel what the texture of a bottle’s label was, and the answer was papery. 

Rob: Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure. 

GC: Is there stuff that from there that, like, really makes you guys laugh? 

Rob: Yeah. So when I said (it) is less humorous, I guess I was meaning in contrast to something like Discworld, which is very silly like super British sarcastic kind of humor. We do… we do have some of that kind of dry humor in there as well. You can probably tell from our accents that we’re British and… and that’s yeah, that’s kind of in our DNA there. So yeah, we did put a few things in. I’m struggling to think of any good examples off the top of my head, but yeah, I think certainly Verona adds that partly that’s why I like Verona Green because she adds a bit of that sort of wit to her um… 

GC: ..in her interactions. 

John: Yeah. when we… when we can be witty, we we’ll try and add some wit in just ‘cause it… it works well with the kind of it’s… it’s about a counterpoint to the dark kind of more sinister stuff going on when you can provide moments of levity and I think they’re important. So…

GC: Okay. All right. Now, you’re you’ve already told me that when you’re designing the quests, ‘cause it’s funny, I wrote out my question and it’s like, what comes first? The character who has a problem solved or the item you want to use, but it seems to me the real organ order you’re doing this is you come up with a puzzle you want to do first and then the other two fold into that. That a fair way of describing it? 

Rob: Yes, pretty much, I’d say. Yeah, I think that’s kind of how we approached it was design as many or… or come up with as many puzzles as we could. Like, yeah, I’ve got kind of pages of notebooks filled of just different ideas for item puzzles and… and then you kind of design an item around that. And then because you can you can kind of like not always, but you can kind of tweak the use case of an item to fit where you need it. But yeah, I mean, honestly, this was a real headache for us because yeah, we… we’ve got a narrative going on there as well. So, anyone who comes into your shop, ‘cause it’s not a narrative where you’re kind of necessarily driving it yourself by going out into the world and speaking to different characters, that sort of stuff. It’s more that you… you’re kind of yeah, you’re in your shop and characters come to you and they might propel the narrative forward with a little snippet of dialogue here and there. But then those characters that come in, they… they have to come in for a reason generally. You know, sometimes the character will come in, you know, where we just could not think of an item that this person would need at that point and they just go away and there was no real purpose to their visit other than they wanted to come in and talk to you. But that’s… there’s not too many of those. So yeah, trying to come up with a reason for every single visit and fitting in those use cases for each item. Yeah, real real headache for us and took us quite a long time to kind of unravel that.

GC: Now, for… from a replayability standpoint, at the end of the game, I won’t spoil what happens, but you let us know what happened to all of the characters. How many different character end states did you end up putting in the game? 

Rob: That’s a good question. I… I don’t actually know off the top of my head. Yeah. So, there are… I was going to say there are 10 character characters who kind of have a more central role in the story and that you… give you have bios of them. I think it’s 10. And then there are a couple more who don’t have bios, but they do show up in that endgame summary because they, you know, got intertwined in the story somehow and… and you might want to find out how they turned out. So yeah each of those has you know at least two or three different end states but some of them have quite a few. 

John: Yeah, obviously like you know feeding into that the game has branching points where you have to make choices. And like a character will come in and there’ll be… it’ll be a choice of two items that you can give her and obviously then the narrative branches and we sort of go in different directions and I think we’ve got eight possibly eight eight endings maybe nine endings in the game. And you know, each one has different end states for each of the characters, but it’s based off the end. I think there can only ever be nine separate endings like each one with that kind of summary sheet. 

GC: Okay.

John:  Where some people might…

Rob: No, the summary sheet will be different. 

John: Oh, really? 

Rob: (For like ) the same ending. Yeah. Because there are, you know, there are some characters that…  minor characters that you might have made a different choice with. 

GC: So that doesn’t meaningfully affect the main ending. 

Rob: Right, yeah. 

GC: Okay. Wow. So there’s the nine big endings and then that can have an assortment of character outcomes within the big ending. 

Rob: Right, exactly. 

GC: That is a huge amount of branching. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not… it’s slightly less complicated than it sounds perhaps in terms of the branching. It’s you know there yeah there are certain decision points during the game as John says and again like you know that branch branching it is really really difficult again because you don’t want to run into a scenario where you know you you might need an item on one branch and you whatever like it it yeah it’s complicated fitting it into this sort of framework but we obviously We we kind of learned how to do that from Strange Horticulture to a degree and kind of..

John: Yeah. But you make it sound like that we learned and it made it easier but it’s a tool like I think arguably it was harder this time round. Again I… I don’t know why but it was.

GC: All right. Now this is just a detail that I absolutely loved and I got to know how it ended up in the game. If I look left and right in the shop, it’s not like I’m turning my eyes. It’s like I’m picking up the whole shop and moving it because all of the hanging items swing back and forth. Why is that in the game? 

Rob: I kind of… I almost don’t want to admit this because well, no, obviously I will, but it was… it was basically an accident. I didn’t intend for it to be like that. I put the code for pendulums swinging into the game and I noticed that it was doing this and it was only afterwards and and but I, you know, I saw it and I was like, well, it shouldn’t technically be doing that, but it does look kind of cool, so I think I’m just going to leave it in. And yeah, the reason is that instead of ‘cause… so I can either move the camera right in the back end, I can move the camera around the shot or I can move the shelves. But because when you go down to the desk, that’s… that moves the camera down. But then moving the shelves is like a separate thing. I don’t want to move the camera across when I’m on the desk view. So, the easy solution there is to simply move the shelves, which means that by a happy accident, I’m moving the whole world, which means that the pendulums start swaying just because they… their position moves in the world. 

John: But it creates this kind of like extra tactile quality to everything, you know, like just having things like moving and stuff and like there’s something about Strange Horticulture. We had the plants were all swaying and stuff, but these are static items. It’s like how can we create life? And one of the… the things I think that does that is just having the… the talisman, the pendants kind of just sway when you pick them up and put them down and when you move the shop around. And I just yeah, it feels… I don’t know. It feels more enjoyable as a player when you’re kind of navigating it around. Even though maybe it doesn’t entirely make sense. Though that said, we’ve always maintained like the shop itself is an… is a thing is almost like an entity. I mean, there are some puzzles which require I mean, it’s not a spoiler to say there are some plinths in the counter and that one of the puzzles involves putting items on plinths and then you can go to other locations in your shop and the way we do that is we slam the shelves together and you mysteriously get to a different bit. I mean, so it’s… there is a kind of like, I don’t know, magical quality to the way the shop sort of moves around. 

GC: Well, according to the lore, the town was built around the shop, so that’s not a huge surprise. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. And nobody really knows who built it or how old it is. 

GC:There you go. Actually, when you’re talking about moving up and down to your… the desk you look down at, I did notice that the controls are much more, kind of, intuitive and user friendly than they were in Strange Horticulture. Like the way you… you put the… the magnifying glass on the mouse wheel this time. So, it’s very easy to just zip into that. The ambidextrous controls in the keyboard. Was that based on feedback from people who played Strange Horticulture? 

Rob: I mean partly that just came out of extending the layout. ‘Cause obviously Strange Horticulture is just that single screen. But this time we wanted to put the characters front and center and have the dialogue text a little bit bigger so it’s, you know, not quite as hard to read on smaller devices. so then you know as an extension of that then the desk goes below the main shop window so now you have to move it around. But then yeah so it kind of came out of that, and yeah obviously there… there was some feedback on Strange Horticulture that we had tried to address as well. And some feedback from people playing the demo of Strange Antiquities that we’ve already been able to address. You know stuff like people struggled with exiting various menus. They wanted to press escape, which I always thought that the default for escape would be to bring up the you know the system menu. But we’ve made it so that that will also exit menus and then it will only bring up the system menu if you’re kind of if you’re not in one of those…

GC: And you’re… you’re in the neutral screen. Okay. 

Rob: Yeah, yeah. 

GC: Yeah. I did hit escape a lot. You’re right. Yeah. 

Rob: Yeah. Well, yeah. Players… players wanted it. So, yeah. So obviously having as much play testing as possible allows, you know, enables us to find those kind of points of friction and… and allows us to smooth them out as much as we can. You know, we’re not going to be able to get everything, but we do the best we can. 

GC: Okay. What kind of work went into designing the game’s maps? Like you talked about some of the inspirations with Consulting Detective, but what I was intrigued by was that all three of the maps you’ve chosen to do in completely different art styles. 

John: Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, it’s funny you say that. I never intended them to be different art styles, but I suppose, like, they’re designed by different map designers. What we… the key thing was we wanted each map to feel different to the last one, right? And… and that extends back to Strange Horticulture as well. We… When we designed that map, you know, when you’re going out looking for flowers, it always felt like it needed to be a wide area. And we set our game in the Lake District in the UK and you go up The Fells and you find rare plants and you bring them back to your shop. And it was all done on a grid- based layout and the puzzles were all all around this kind of grid system. We kind of were like, well, we’ve done that grid layout. We did as many grid kind of based puzzles as we could think of in that game. And we were like, we don’t want to do that again. So what can we do differently? And I mean early on we were like well we’ll just set this in Undermere itself like focus it makes more sense. And (I) really like the idea of doing a street layout map for that. And then we kind of like people loved exploring the maps. Let’s add more. What else can we do? And it was just about trying to find other ideas which would offer us the ability to do different kinds of puzzles. So yeah, again like we don’t want to entirely spoil it for people because I think part of what’s fun playing the game is coming across the different maps as you go through the game and like oh what’s this one got in it and it’s like cool. 

GC: Well, there is definitely a… a spoilery question I would like to ask you about the… the underground map, but I’m definitely not going to do it here. 

Rob: Okay. Sure. 

GC: It was a… it was such a delight to come on that third map and just doing everyone has its own completely different kind of puzzle because for the… the town map it kind of makes sense. You’re asking people who lives across from where? What are the streets named, right? What is north, south, east, and west of place? But then the… for the mansion, right, you’re suddenly asking yourself, okay, now I’m imagining myself walking through this space. Whereas when you get into the underground, it’s all about lore and history. And it’s because it’s interesting because it’s not just three different locations, it’s three different kinds of puzzles. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of it, there’s another puzzle, which is when you get a clue card, we don’t tell you which map it is, so you have to kind of analyze it and work out which one we’re talking about. 

GC: Yeah, that was a lot of fun, not going to lie, getting through all the clue cards. Well, the embarrassing part is, you know, you get the first clue card before you know, you get it right away and you’re like, what the… what does this mean? Is this a story thing? What is going on? 

Rob: Yeah. 

GC: It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out it was a map reference. 

Rob: That’s that’s interesting. Yeah. 

GC:Yeah. 

Rob: Obviously, yeah. Well, that’s again that’s part of the game and that’s part of, you know, it’s that coming back to that Ron Gilbert quote of we don’t want to tell people that, we… we don’t want to signpost it. We want players to have those ah kind of moments and and work it out for themselves. 

GC: Oh, and all right, here’s… here’s a kind of related question just for the player experience. Have you considered adding in a new game plus mode where after they’ve gotten the trophy for unlocking every single item when they restart the game, they can just have everything pre-labeled so they can speedrun getting the different endings they want? 

Rob: So yes, we have considered it. I mean, if it’s just a case of pre-labeled, uh, that’s certainly a lot easier. The part of the reason that we haven’t done that yet, as in, so that feature doesn’t exist yet, is because there’s just two of us and making a game and finishing a game is a lot of work. And that is obviously like there’s… for the big fan for the you know our core fans of the game. We want to be able to give them those sorts of features but it’s not necessarily a core feature for the game. So they’re kind of like really nice to haves but yeah we’re not going to prioritize it until we’ve kind of done everything else basically. So yes, we… we would like to add those sorts of features but they’re not there yet. 

John: There… I would also like (to) point out for anyone playing that is interested in trying to find the different endings, it doesn’t require you to always restart the game from the beginning. We… in the save system, we do have save points at every day. So you can kind of go back in to a maybe where if you make a note of where a branch was or like certainly at the end like when you get to the end of the game there’s kind of a choice to make on where you go to kind of do your ending. Like there’s like different places where ending points can happen. So you can kind of try out the… those different branches by just going back a day and trying them different. You don’t have to play the whole game through again. It’s just like some of the more… 

Rob: If you have… if you have, you know, set up the choices to be able to unlock that ending at all, but yes.

John: That’s true. Yeah, I forget that… there are other bits further back like that can have an impact on where you can go at the end. And…

GC: I definitely did not have a choice of where to go at the end. So, obviously, I screwed something up. Okay. Do you guys have a third installment in the series in mind? Can fans expect to be like running a strange pet shop or a strange bakery in 2028? 

Rob: We, I mean, we… Yeah, we’re not committing to anything at this point, but I don’t want to think that we’re done with Strange or we’re done with Undermere in particular. So, yeah, we… we hope to come back to it, but we’re yeah, we’re… we’re you know, we’re we’re toying with ideas behind the scenes definitely. 

John: At the same time, we’ve been working in… on the strange universe now for five years and part of us is kind of like exhausted with it and needs to kind of maybe park it for a bit. So whether we go straight into, like, thinking about that or whether we sort of pivot for a bit, I don’t know. It’s like this is, you know, we’ve been so focused on finishing Strange Antiquities, getting it out, making the best game we could make. That kind of those conversations about what we do for a third game like we have like had them like little ones from time to time but nothing like properly serious like we are definitely going to do that next you know so it’s like we we we do obviously really hope and especially like well it depends kind of like how people see perceive Strange Antiquities when it comes out if people are loving it and want more and there’s a real appetite for it. It kind of makes us feel like…like well we… we ought to, you know, but if it’s really disappointing, well, may… maybe we’ve had enough. 

GC: Well, you’ve been living in this world for 5 years, So like, roughly how much work have you done on the lore and backstory of this world? Like how much do you know about this world that has never been revealed in the games? 

Rob: To be honest, I think most of that does go into the game in some way. The… Yeah, we… Yeah, I think I think it goes into the game. Like there’s… there’s some lore and stuff that we’ve written that doesn’t obviously, but…

John: But those are more like story ideas that we had like that have been dropped. We’re not like the kind of I guess like TV show designers that have planned out series 1 to 5 and they know where it’s going. We… we’ve made series 1, we’ve made series 2, and now the network says, you need to do three more series. Oh, right. Like, yeah, maybe we need to think about it some more. 

GC: You’re building the railroad as you’re going down it. 

John: Yeah, I think I think that’s definitely more of the approach. We, you know, like, I love the idea of sort of Undermere adjacent stories and, like, and things like that… that you know, writing some stories about the world like that kind of go into the history a bit more and stuff like that. That’ll be really cool to do. 

Rob: One certainly one thing that we have really enjoyed this time round is because it’s a sequel, we can kind of reference back to Strange Horticulture. So there’s quite a few little references dotted back to that game in this one. so you know for fans of the first game, I think you’ll spot a few of those things. Um…

GC: it was nice to be able to go to Strange Horticulture in the (game) 

Rob: Yes. Well, exactly. So that’s… that’s one of one of the little Easter eggs. You can actually visit the shop in this one. And there’s yeah, there’s quite a few little things like that and some like… Yeah, I really enjoyed putting those extra lore elements in there that tie back into the first game and kind of some of them might answer some questions. Like I think one of my favorite ones, I guess I don’t want to spoil it too much, but it’s not a big spoiler. There is the great oak in Strange Horticulture, which is never really explained. It’s just something that’s marked on your map. It’s this huge oak tree. And if you are paying attention in this game, you know, there are some small clues about where that came from. Which, you know, it’s… it’s a minor detail, but we really enjoyed peppering those sorts of things in. 

GC: Yeah, lots of mysterious items with oak handles in the game. 

Rob: Right? 

GC: Definitely tying in if you were go through the book carefully. All right, Sophie’s choice time. You have to pick one cat. Hellebore or Jupiter. 

Rob: Oh gosh, what are you doing to us? It’s… I think it’s Jupiter for me. I think…

John: Oh, you see, I would…

Rob: I’m sorry. (I’m sorry Hellebore)

John: I mean, Jupiter now, like it’s hard to I do love Jupiter with his heterachromia and, obviously my he looks quite… a substantially better visually. My art stuff has improved and things, but I do still really have a soft spot for Hellebore. Especially ‘cause he was such, like, a last minute addition to Strange Horticulture. He’s he was not, you know, there from the start. It was like when we were we basically had the game mostly there like in terms of you know…

GC:  All the mechanics, all the content? 

JOhn: All the mechanics and all the not all the content but like certainly all the mechanics and then we were like something’s missing like what is it? And it’s like, yeah, a cat obviously like that. It’s got to have a cat. Like… And then we like, well, can it just be a cat that just didn’t… it doesn’t really have anything to do with the game, but it’s just there. Yeah, why not? Like, just throw it in. And like, it just… it was such a… a winning addition. I  genuinely believe that Strange Horticulture would not have seen the success it has if Hellebore had not been a part of it. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s… it’s kind of shocking how long it took us to realize that this game needed a cat.

GC: Well, I’m glad you did because that purr and that petting is… is always a pleasure to do. 

Rob: Yeah. 

John: Yeah. 

GC: And of course, Jupiter has a bigger role, which I won’t spoil in this game, than Hellebore had in that one. Big question though, the game is coming out. What is the most important thing that you want people to know about the game? Like what is the thing like this is what makes this special to us and this is why we are desperate to share it with you. What are you most excited for people to see?

Rob: That is… that is an incredibly difficult question to answer. I think just the love that we have poured into this over, you know, three years of hard work. And yeah, I think, you know, I just I hope it comes through in all the little details that we’ve put into the game. 

John: Yeah. I mean, we’re just incredibly excited to share it now with people. It gets to a point where you start like you… you’re really proud of your work and then the more you work on it, it starts to, like, go the other way and you kind of want to kick it into the sun at times. And now I I’m just I really wanted to get it to people to show like one the progression like that we’ve made ‘cause I think whilst you know I look back at Strange Horticulture I think we made a pretty good game and obviously you know from people’s perception of it like it clearly resonated with a lot of people but I think we have just taken that and you really improved it on almost in every aspect. Well, at least from my point of view. Like visually, it’s a step up. Like in terms of like the puzzles and the way those (are) done, it’s a step up. Like I just so I just hope people see that as well and enjoy and enjoy it as much as Strange Horticulture and hopefully more. 

GC: Okay. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I’ve learned a lot about the game and as someone who just finished it, I can confirm that it is very much just… Everything you loved about Strange Horticulture has just been moved a leap forward in design this time around. Everything…

Rob: (That’s) very very kind of you to say so. Thank you so much.

GC: Of course!

John: Yeah, that obviously that is what we were hoping for but it’s… it’s lovely to hear honestly. 

GC: No, but I mean the design it’s… it’s so much more playable and so much more in-depth without losing any of the charm. That’s the thing. It really feels like an extension of the world. Yeah. While all of the gameplay mechanics have just taken an amazing leap forward. So, congratulations on how it turned out. 

Rob: Thank you so much. 

GC: Okay. and of course, when is the game releasing and what can people play it on? 

Rob: It’s out on September 17th. And it’s coming to Steam and Switch first, and hopefully other platforms later. 

GC: Okay. Thank you so much for your time and I encourage everybody if they haven’t yet, check out the demo immediately. You don’t have the exploration gameplay, but you do have everything, all the other main parts of the game. 

Rob: Uh, yeah. Well, the exploration is there as well. You just, you know, you have to find that map first, but it’s there. 

GC: Oh, it is. Oh my god. You’re kidding me. 

Rob: No, it’s there. 

GC: I thought it wasn’t there. Oh my god. 

Rob: That but that’s again. Yeah, some people don’t find it. Some people do. 

GC: Apparently, I’m also bad at the demo. Oh, thanks so much. Thanks for watching. Be sure to check out the links for more accessible reviews, interviews, and features at Gamecritics. Also, like the video and subscribe so you get notified whenever new content drops. We’ll see you back here for more. But until then, au revoir!

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HIGH A striking pixel art style.

LOW The gameplay feels patronizing.

WTF The ending.

Hi everyone. Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com.

Urban myths are stories and folklore about unusual or scary events that people may believe are true, but are most often not. Azami Fukurai feels like she’s been around spooky events and urban myths her entire life, and wants to know more about them. She decides to visit the Urban Myth Dissolution Center to get some answers and perhaps help for some strange visions she’s been having, and ends up being instrumental to a change that will affect the world.

Urban Myth Dissolution Center is a 2D pixel art visual novel with point and click elements.

After getting to the center and talking to its director, Azami accidently breaks a priceless artifact. She can’t afford to pay for what she did, so the director makes her work to pay off the debt instead. Why? Because Azami is clairvoyant and postcognitive, which means she has the ability to see visions of people and items in the past, and with these powers she’ll be instrumental in solving the center’s cases.

Each of the six cases in Urban Myth begins with social media research. Azami will look for information about the client and the rumors in question by scanning online posts and comments to see what people are saying about a given incident. Some keywords will stand out, indicating a new search word that can be used to gather more information.

After gathering preliminary data, players will then investigate sites where any strange occurrences took place. Similar to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games, players will move between areas to examine items, interview those involved, and use Clairvoyance to find clues.

After gathering clues at a scene, players fill in a hypothesis statement using a short selection of pre-chosen words, Mad Libs-style, to complete a sentence that will explain what’s going on and to identify the urban myth in question. Then after more research and more sleuthing, Azami and the director will discuss the case and present any findings to those involved.

What first drew me to Urban Myth Dissolution Center was the artwork. The developers and artists expertly use a limited palette of blue to create a striking effect. Every character is expressive and feels alive in a way I wasn’t expecting for pixel art. In the cutscenes specifically, there are some breathtaking moments, and some that gave me chills. Getting this close to the supernatural can be a scary experience, whether they’re myths or not!

With that said, even amazing art can’t completely carry a game, and the mechanics slow Urban Myth down for me.

The social media research felt like padding to extend playtime, as one out of every ten posts may have something interesting to say about the case or the world at large. However, there were too many times when I found myself just clicking on comments in a ‘brute force’ method to speed up the process.

The investigations also started to grate on me due to too many things repeating multiple times. There were too many instances of seeing something to investigate and then being asked to “Observe” it, only to have it followed with “Look Closer” and then “Look Even Closer” to finally get the clue I needed.

It also felt sometimes like the info gathering process overall fell somewhere between an episode of Dora the Explorer and talking to a condescending parent. For example, one case has players investigating a cursed box. Multiple people clearly remark that it’s a cursed box. When getting to the identification of the urban myth, the first question asked is “How would you describe the artifact?” after being handed the correct answer multiple times. I don’t mind a bit of hand holding, but some of these sequences make it seem like they think players aren’t capable of even the most basic logic.

Now, about the story itself. Urban Myth Dissolution Center is a detective narrative at its heart, as players solve mysteries about urban myths and the eventual climax of the narrative at large. The script also has things to say about society, like mob mentality and how people behave behind an anonymous avatar online, and those subjects are just the tip of the iceberg. The tale is a bit slow to start and the mechanics don’t help, but the ending builds to what is probably the best plot twist I’ve seen in long while, and not just in games, but in any type of media including movies and TV.

Ultimately, I’m torn on how I feel about Urban Myth Disolution Center.

The story is phenomenal and the artwork is stylishly exquisite, but the mechanics and the hand holding make the experience drag on longer than it needs to. Perhaps that is partly the point, though — scrolling through nasty comments online is a certain kind of negative energy that the developers clearly want to make a statement about. Regardless of those downsides, Urban Myth Dissolution Center still gets my recommendation, especially for those looking for a spooky story or for players who love solving mysteries

For me, Urban Myth Dissolution Center gets 7.5 artistic parlor scenes out of 10.

Buy Urban Myth Dissolution Center – PC – Switch – PlayStation

Disclosures: This game is developed by Hakababunko and published by SHUEISHA GAMES. It is currently available on PC, PS5 and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 12.5 hours of play were spent playing the game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood and Violence. There are some shots where characters will be bleeding, and there are significant instances of violence shown on screen — a spirit vision of someone getting stabbed (no blood), threats with knives/blades multiple times, getting kicked/punched and blood coming out of someone’s mouth. It’s not excessive, but it’s not a game for younger audiences.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind Modes are not present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles, but subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. there are no audio cues needed for play. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable controls: Controls are not remappable, and there is no control diagram. Players use their mouse to select items, move between different spots, and to advance dialogue.

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HIGH The critique of AI domination in society.

LOW The actual use of gen AI.

WTF The auctioning of bodies.

The games industry is in a crisis caused by generative AI, and its hype. The emergence of this tech seems to attract corporate greed, which in turn leads to the loss of jobs and creative work. Perhaps worse, the advent of games that are written, designed, and manifested mostly by AI is a daunting prospect.

Uncover the Smoking Gun piqued my interest with its premise – it uses actual generative AI as a conversational and investigational dynamic.

Speaking of myself personally, I might be gen AI’s harshest critic, but its implementation in game design deserves an honest evaluation. I was also intrigued by the prospect of examining the devs’ stance on gen AI’s and its use, as revealed via their sci-fi world. In both cases, Smoking Gun offers an excess of material for reflection.

In Smoking Gun, we play as a yet-to-be-known male protagonist, living in a classically-styled detective’s office. The area also functions as a hub world to the campaign’s five cases and a tutorial that allows us to uncover clues about the protagonist himself — such as a note from his wife reminding him not to forget his medicine, and a nearby award for excellence in solving criminal matters.

The setting of Gun reveals itself naturally by means of investigation. We live in 2030, and apparently it’s already game-over for most of humanity as robots have taken their place in most everyday jobs, including accounting, cleaning, curating, directing, and thinking. Humanity evolves alongside them, and scientists are working on optimizing the human condition in the context of a strong artificial intelligence presence. On cue, robots now show signs of resistance and evil intent — such as murdering their human ‘owners’ — which then stages the cases to be solved by the mysterious player-character.

In these cases, the player can explore freely, interact with objects point-and-click-style, and examine all sensory data as evidence, and the menu helpfully (or perhaps spoilery?) shows how many clues are left to be obtained. The detective dynamics are basic, but work well. Mainly, the player can interact with objects containing an interface to collect a hint. These hints can be linked manually, and the sense of player freedom in exploration and clue interpretation made most discoveries feel unscripted and hard-earned, which is satisfying in any detective experience.

Most of the encountered suspects are robots, and they can be interacted with and freely questioned using gen AI. Once the player feels as though they know enough, they can ‘solve’ the case, which then triggers a newspaper report that essentially highlights the facts uncovered (and missed) by the player.

The over-arching story is written by human developers (assumedly not AI) and the five main cases have the necessary overlap which ultimately leads to a general conclusion. While none of the writing is particularly brilliant in prose or world-building, the sense of mystery and impending discovery is built effectively, and I was not able to put the game down before finishing whatever case I was working on. (Each typically requires more than an hour to complete.) For example, one case involved a research lab with an assassinated professor, another the death of an artist in his own gallery. Both appeared to be murdered by robots.

The only significant shortcoming in Gun is — predictably — the generative AI.

While the chatbot function worked solidly for trivial matters (I could ask a bot what they thought of a book we had both read or the detective games they liked best) the interrogations went less smoothly. Bots would not interpret my questions correctly, even if specifically framed, and would give me answers which were explicitly underscored for signification at other times. This led me to avoid interrogation entirely for most of each investigation.

The newspaper articles at the end of each case appeared to be AI generated, offering awkwardly-phrased conclusions to my efforts, even when I got all the case’s answers right and there was only one way to interpret what happened. I’d much rather see a handcrafted final message, if only to stress the vital work of human journalists in capturing societal crises.

This leads me to a final reflection on the developer’s stance regarding AI. Going where many sci-fi tales have gone before, human/AI coexistence appears bound for catastrophe, yet, it requires human cooperation to get to this stage. The power vested in the player, and their opposition to the story’s human antagonists, tells us that the threat is looming, but far from out of our control. We have the ability to refrain from surrender to AI if we can resist its temptations of promised ease and luxury, while stressing the value of actual human work.

Thus, as a game, Uncover the Smoking Gun pits the player as a free-roaming individual against those harnessing the power of AI for a distorted idea of humanity’s future. In our role as the detective, we are reminded of the necessarily human skills of connecting dots and interpreting our world, and of protecting what is sacred to humankind. The same should go for the games industry, which demands courage to refrain from the temptations of AI and should double down on the more appreciable fruits of actual human creative labor.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Disclosures: The game is developed and published by ReLU Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 7 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: Uncover the Smoking Gun has no ESRB rating, but its PEGI rating on the Steam Store states 12+. I would agree, as the game does not feature explicit gore, but implies some mature truths that can be interpreted as disgusting. Implications of violence, murder, and severe maltreatment are present. The audiovisual style is also catered to more mature players.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. Audio clues are insignificant to the game’s progression.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Uncover The Smoking Gun Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Prosecutor’s Gambit had some great twists and turns…

LOW …but the first entry definitely didn’t have as many.

WTF Wow! The second title’s initial case sure feels timely!

Fans of the Ace Attorney series have been asking for ports of the back catalog, and Capcom has been listening. This time, the Investigations subseries is being given its time in the sun.

While the Ace Attorney titles typically focus on defense attorneys in courtroom-focused legal battles, the Investigations Collection puts players in the shoes — and the cravat — of Miles Edgeworth, one of series protagonist Phoenix Wright’s main prosecutorial rivals. Instead of going in front of a court of law, this 2D adventure title had me investigating crime scenes myself, gathering evidence, cross-examining witnesses, and figuring out how disparate pieces of complex puzzles fit together.

What’s great about this collection is that it has both games in the Investigations subseries — Miles Edgeworth and Prosecutor’s Gambit, the latter of which was never released outside of Japan. This makes this collection a must-have for fans of the Ace Attorney series. It also provides a unique perspective not often seen in the series, that of a prosecutor and a crime scene investigator.

This new formula makes for an interesting break from the rest of the series, which most often focuses on the courtroom. This time around, it was refreshing to be the one bringing a case to the court, rather than simply working with defendants. Each scenario also features new types of areas to explore outside the usual courtrooms, such as the inside of an airplane or even Miles’ office, which was very appreciated.

Each of the two titles in this collection has five scenarios, each consisting of (typically) three acts and an overarching plot that ties each investigation together. What’s nice about this collection is the ability to select not just which episode to start with, but also which chapter. This gives players the ability to jump in during a favorite scene without having to play the entire game or episode. There’s also a generous checkpoint system that allows one to reload without losing too much progress — great if someone bungles a clue or botches an examination.

As the entry that US players haven’t seen before, the second half of the collection expands the narrative of the first by providing additional background to Miles’s motives as a prosecutor, which make him more relatable. Also, since it’s set only a couple of weeks after the first title, it builds to create a bigger story for the attorney.

The gameplay is wonderful, as it allowed me to get into the head of a crime scene investigator. There were lots of things to look at in each area, such as items found in safes, objects hidden under chairs, and the like. Some clues, however, may not be relevant or — worse — red herrings to throw one off. Ace Attorney as a whole is a logic game of putting together individual pieces of a puzzle in order to bring the right people to justice.

For those looking for a more relaxed experience, a “story mode” is available and will automatically progress through each chapter, including answering questions and presenting the evidence for players. This comes with the trade-off that specific achievements are disabled. For newer players, this may be the preferred way to play, as cases can get fairly complex — even the first episodes of each title had some head scratchers.

Longtime fans will notice that the new hand-drawn art looks fantastic. Each character is rendered with an exceptional amount of care, often highly detailed. (There’s also an option for an old-school pixelated look, for anyone nostalgic for the Nintendo DS, where the series debuted.) Thanks to this high-quality work, these versions do look and feel like definitive versions.

I’d be remiss not to provide some objections to this collection, however. I found that Prosecutor’s Gambit was the stronger of the two in this collection because the pace of delivering information to players was much slower — an important aspect that the first didn’t nail. For example, the first case in Miles Edgeworth reveals who the murderer is during the first scene of the first case. It felt like I was reading a book’s last chapter, then going back to read the rest, and it’s not my preferred way to engage with crime content. Other cases which made me work to find out the truth were more enjoyable due to the thrill of the chase, false leads and finally nabbing the culprit. It’s the more exhilarating approach, if you ask me.

Another issue is that there are some confusing leaps in logic at times. During testimony phases, there were often obvious openings to make an accusation or to present a piece of evidence, but the game wanted something else to be said or done first. In one example, I was able to match a specific piece of evidence to an accused person, but the game wanted me to go through a different prescribed step first before it would allow me to move on, even though my hunch was correct.

Despite some small issues, the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection will be a wonderful experience for any Ace Attorney fan. It shines a much-needed light on the prosecutorial side of the courtroom, and leads players through the questions that have to be answered before a case can be brought to trial. Miles Edgeworth is also strong, holding his own as both a protagonist and Phoenix Wright’s rival, and I’d love to see him get a starring role more often!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Capcom Co., Ltd. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, XBO/S/X, and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher, and reviewed on PS5. Approximately 7 hours was devoted to the game, and it was not completed. There is no multiplayer mode.

Parents: This game has an ESRB rating of T rating for Blood, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes, and Mild Violence. The official rating states: “This is a collection of two mystery-text adventure games in which players help a prosecutor solve a series of murders. As players investigate crime scenes in detail, cutscenes briefly depict characters shot (off-camera) or held at gunpoint. Murder victims are depicted with bloodstained clothing and gunshot/knife wounds; some corpses are sometimes shown lying in pools of blood. One female character is depicted wearing a low-cut top that reveals deep cleavage. The word ‘bastard’ appears in the game.”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game offers subtitles. (See examples above.) Subtitles cannot be resized. Since the text cannot be resized, and this title relies so heavily on reading, this may hinder a player who needs bigger text.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. There is no controller diagram. The game uses simplie one-button controls, as most of the experience revolves around dialogue. X is used to progress dialogue, L1 is used in specific sections to access clues and some profiles about the case, R1 is used to access information about evidence and actors in the case, Square is used to review the dialogue history, Triangle is used in some cases to deduce what clues meant, or to pin an accusation on a suspect.

The post Ace Attorney Investigations Collection Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The cute, rotatable isometric perspective.

LOW A huge number of technical shortcomings.

WTF The occasional extremely sudden switches in location and perspective.

I’m not usually the type of person who complains about technical issues in videogames, but this principle of tolerance has a limit. 

In the case of Hercule Poirot: The London Case, for instance, the technical and logistical problems are so persistent and so acute that one can’t help but feel the presence of the developer in every scene, at every moment, scrambling to create a coherent experience. I applaud their efforts, in a certain sense. They’re clearly passionate about the source material, giving The London Case the feel of a charming puppet show put on by some well-meaning children. But, charm can only carry one so far when the mystery itself, the foundation of the whole edifice, is so consistently obscured by so many shortcomings. 

Let’s start this off with a compliment though. I like that the developers opted to create their own original mystery, rather than adapt a story from the Poirot books. Instead of starring old man Poirot, The London Case casts the detective as a fairly young person in charge of escorting a precious painting from Belgium to a London art gallery for display.

Naturally things go awry, leading to a winding, twisty series of mysteries within a larger mystery, but before all that, the player is placed in a tutorial level on a boat headed for London, allowing them to become acquainted with The London Case’s style and the rhythm of its gameplay.

Immediately, I was struck by the awkwardness of the presentation — the low detail of the environments, the stiltedness of the character animations, and whiplash transitions between scenes and camera angles during cutscenes and dialogue sections. That said, I did enjoy the way the player can rotate the scene at will like a little diorama, picking out clues through a shift in perspective. For some arbitrary reason the camera can’t be rotated when walking, which is frustrating given how slow the walk speed is, but… oh well. 

The intro section also introduces other main gameplay elements that will persist throughout the experience, a mixed bag that began to truly sour for me as the hours wore on.

Broadly, the player is asked to inspect the environment and talk to suspects for clues (occasionally interacting with 3D objects to pick out specific details), then connect these clues and other info in a series of deduction ‘webs,’ solve point-and-click-style inventory puzzles, and present the correct evidence during deduction sections. Some of the 3D objects are quite lovingly rendered (such as the knife that the player examines during the first chapter) but The London Case seems to arbitrarily assign both the important points of the object that need examining, as well as the placement of these important points. 

For example, an early chapter has the player examining a painting central to the mystery — arbitrarily, Poirot chooses to focus on the halo above the figures’ heads as a point of interest the player needs to select in order to advance. There’s no particular reason why Poirot would focus on this particular selection of the painting above any other, and moreover, there’s no reason why the player has to click on a specific section of the halo in order for the click to register. There’s a vague indicator when mousing over an area that contains an inspect-able point, but in my opinion it’s not enough to compensate for a minigame that often feels like padding, and an exercise in trial and error. 

Speaking of trial and error, all of the deduction sections (both the webs and the presentations that the player makes to other characters) can be failed an infinite amount of times, with zero penalty. Also, it’s not possible to go through with accusing the wrong person, or otherwise come to incorrect conclusions.

I realize that the developers are drawing on a larger point-and-click style when it comes to this lack of fail states, but it’s a little dissatisfying to play as a detective when there’s zero opportunities for failure. In contrast, a title like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments allows the player to come to completely erroneous conclusions, while letting them check their answer if they’re curious. There’s something very flashy and satisfying about coming up with the perfect conclusions when the possibility of failure exists, which is something that rarely happens in The London Case given how generous the safety net is. 

Instead, The London Case tries to offer a different avenue for player expression via the slightly nonlinear case progression, but more often than not I found myself wishing for a more streamlined — and coherent — experience.

At one point, Poirot recognized blue paint on an article of clothing, even though I hadn’t yet brought him to the room where the blue paint originated from! Other similar moments (such as a puzzle where the player is attempting to lure a cat out of a hole in a confession booth, which needs to be completed before Poirot is able to even able to talk to the cat’s owner about its whereabouts) suggest a story that has failed to take into account the true freedom required for such non-linearity. 

The London Case occupies a strange sort of middle ground — it wants to facilitate player freedom, while at the same time telling a focused point-and-click story with little room for deviation. Perhaps it would have functioned better as a more pure narrative experience — a visual novel, for instance. It certainly would have been easier to avoid the technical hiccups in that case! 

Rating: 3.5 out of 10 

Disclosures: This game is developed by Blazing Griffin and published by Microids. It is currently available on PS5, PS4, Switch, XBO, PC, XBX/S. This copy of the game was via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 8 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes. 

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Drug References, Mild Violence. The official description reads: This is a puzzle/investigation game in which players follow Hercule Poirot through a mystery involving a stolen painting. During the course of the investigation, players can examine corpses and hear dialogue about murder. One sequence depicts a character being shot (off screen); another man is knocked unconscious off-camera. One clue/item in the game is cocaine residue; text and dialogue discuss the negative effects of the drug.

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available. 

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. Every puzzle and story beat has a readable visual cue as accompaniment, meaning that the entire game can easily be played without sound. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Certain functions are remappable. When controlling the game using a keyboard and mouse, the player is able to choose between two different key layouts. With a controller, the controls are not remappable: the left stick is used to walk around, the right stick is used to rotate the camera, X is used to interact with objects, Square pulls up the Objective screen, and Triangle pulls up the inventory screen.

The post Hercule Poirot: The London Case Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Captivating performances.

LOW Long, loooong cutscenes.

WTF My save corrupted — on the last level.

The Centennial Case is a murder mystery full-motion video (FMV) game that consists of pre-recorded video sequences to deliver story and gameplay. The atmosphere is thick with intrigue as we try to uncover the mystery behind a century-old murder and how it connects to one family over the succeeding decades – and I loved it.

The Centennial Case’s presentation was something special despite looking like a small-budget TV drama. The sets felt like a character unto themselves by providing us a half-surreal world where the story could have taken place – from the Taisho era of Japan to the stiff noir air of a Showa-era nightclub, to the present with its more muted color palette. The costume designs for each era were also a notable highlight.

We play as Haruka Kagami, a plucky mystery author who’s tasked with investigating the existence of a “Fruit of Youth” at the behest of her friend Eiji Shijima. This investigation leads her into the titular case which consists of a series of murders that are connected to the Shijima clan and the secrets they’ve buried over the years.

The Centennial Case has three phases to the gameplay loop – first is the Incident phase, where the murder occurs and clues are revealed when watching the video cutscenes. Then the Reasoning phase consists of the player assembling a hypothesis through clues gathered while watching extended cutscenes. When enough hypotheses are assembled, the player will use their deductive skills to uncover the true culprit, which then leads into the last phase. The Solution phase acts as a sort of “final confrontation” where your selected hypotheses will be tested against the suspects.

 All of this flows together logically, but the Incident phase lacks depth since clues accumulate automatically while viewing cutscenes. It tried my patience, since there isn’t a timeline on the video and some of these cutscenes can run for half an hour — it turns the entire process into an exercise in patience, especially in the later cases when the system had lost its novelty.

The Reasoning phase has more depth since it rewards logical deductions and attentiveness in the previous phase. It also offers the option to reveal a particular mystery’s clues if players are stuck – it’s handy without being too easy because a minimum threshold of hypotheses must be cleared before it’s available.

The Solution phase is the most thrilling, since confrontations here let the dramatic tension erupt. Motivations are revealed, secrets are exposed, and the performances are at their best.

On that note, the narrative is a bit haphazard. The leading duo of Haruka and Eiji are given a lot of attention since they’re solving the mystery while bouncing off each other and the rest of the cast – and their journey is a surprising one – but everyone around them is an archetype, like Kazunaga Shijima (unlikable older brother) or Eiji’s father Ryoei, the needlessly cruel patriarchal figure. Worse, the plot never gets fully resolved — even at the end! — which is a shame because when the final domino falls, nothing really clicks into place, and that robs the conclusion of much-needed grandeur and closure. 

In a technical sense, The Centennial Case is problematic on mobile. For the most part it runs smoothly during cutscenes, but there are times when it froze during the Reasoning phase (especially in the last two chapters) and my save file got corrupted and rendered my game unable to be finished, so buyer beware.

The Centennial Case is an engaging FMV murder mystery with a unique vibe, thrilling confrontations, and a main protagonist who I’ll treasure because of her sincerity and undying determination to find the truth. I also felt much for Eiji, whose reserved (yet goofy) presence got me to care about his aspirations. Unfortunately, the lackluster characterizations of side characters and a corrupted save file due to the game’s instability on mobile mean that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it.

Rating: 6 out of 10

— Fumo Chabalala

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by by Square-Enix. It is currently available on Mobile and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Android Nokia 5.4 Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was not completed (due to a corrupted save.) There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Mild Language, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence

Colourblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. (See examples above.)

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. As it is on mobile platforms, players can expect to use their finger to manipulate controls on their hone or tablet’s screen.

The post The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Three of the wildest visual novel games around in a single bundle…

LOW …but it’s still not complete!

WTF Some of these jokes didn’t age too well.

The most important thing Nintendo Switch owners need to know about Danganronpa Decadence is that they can’t actually buy a game called “Danganronpa Decadence” on the eShop. That title is a physical-exclusive bundle release that unites four Danganronpa games on a single cartridge. Those games are 2010’s Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, 2014’s Dangaronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, 2017’s Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, and a new title: 2021’s Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp. On the Nintendo eShop, these games are all sold separately.

With the exception of Danganronpa S (a new title) all the games in the collection are essentially identical to their previous incarnations, content-wise. They’re marked as “Anniversary Editions” because they come with a new “gallery” feature that allows players to unlock and view story scenes on demand, but that’s about it.

In light of the omnibus nature of Danganronpa Decadence, this review will offer a different format. Rather than go into detail with each individual title, I’ll focus on spoiler-free, capsule write-ups for each of the games in the series. Readers looking for more in-depth reviews can find them right here on GameCritics. Seek out Andrew’s review of the Danganronpa 1.2 Reload two-pack, Brad’s review of Danganronpa 2, and Michael’s review of Danganronpa V3.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Things start simply enough. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc introduces players to the concept of Hope’s Peak Academy, a school for the most gifted and talented youngsters around. These “Ultimates” are gathered at the school to make the most of their prodigious talents, but protagonist Makoto Naegi is the lone “normie” of the bunch — he’s an “Ultimate Lucky Student” admitted as the winner of a lottery draw. Before long the school is locked down, with the students trapped inside and forced to play a “Killing Game” by the villainous two-tone bear Monokuma. Monokuma’s ultimatum? To go free, get away with murder. Students need to kill a classmate, then avoid being found out at the subsequent “Class Trial” to escape the school. Those found guilty are executed in gruesome and physically impossible ways. Deadly hijinks ensue.

Trigger Happy Havoc establishes the structure and pattern that the rest of the entries follow — begin a chapter, follow the narrative, interact with the characters, and continue until someone dies. Once that happens, look for clues, talk some more, and put it all together at the Class Trial, where various minigames and logic puzzles challenge players to solve the mystery. Then (if one’s logic is sound) the killer is executed and the story continues. Each case is held up by a wealth of twists and turns, as well as the outsize personalities of the characters. Some truly wild developments late in the script help cement the narrative here as a step above and beyond the typical, more grounded whodunit.

Be warned, though — some of the content is graphic, and the game contains characterizations and plot developments that were iffy even back then. I think some of this would be absolutely unacceptable today. It’s a black mark on an otherwise stellar narrative.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

When I first played Goodbye Despair, I was openly skeptical of its necessity. I felt, at the time, that Trigger Happy Havoc‘s ending was just about perfect in its ambiguity. Seeing a sequel to that story that (apparently) recreates the same premise and structure of the original with a new cast felt like a sour attempt to “franchise” a great one-and-done title.

I’m glad to say that I was wrong on all counts. Goodbye Despair meaningfully expands on the formula established in Trigger Happy Havoc, while still delivering similar big surprises that build off its revelations. It even provides the same, satisfying “it could be done forever right here, and I’d be fine with that” feeling by the time it closes out.

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony

The presence of Danganronpa V3 in this package brings me to the second most important thing new Switch players need to know about Danganronpa Decadence. V3 isn’t the third Danganronpa game. In fact, it’s not even a sequel to Danganronpa 2. The actual continuation — and conclusion — of the saga of Hope’s Peak Academy was contained not in a game, but in an anime series titled Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High. That isn’t included in Decadence, and while I am of the opinion that the two games stand well enough on their own that they can be experienced as-is without feeling incomplete, players that go into V3 expecting it to build off of Goodbye Despair are in for a rude awakening.

I emphasize “rude” because while V3 isn’t the sequel to Goodbye Despair, it is very much a ‘main game’ in the franchise. In a way, it’s a coda of sorts for Danganronpa as a whole with a metafictional prickliness worthy of The End of Evangelion. It’s a divisive entry for good reason, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Vacation

If Danganronpa V3 relied on players having some knowledge of the previous games to make the most impact, Danganronpa S has no impact at all if one hasn’t already been turned into a Danganronpa fan. It’s essentially a fusion of the two extra game modes from V3, fleshed out with content and references to the rest of the series (including characters and games that aren’t included in the Decadence package) and made to stand alone. However, the fact that one can launch and purchase it separately from the other titles doesn’t mean that it should stand alone.

The game modes it grew out of were largely ways to explore interactions with the Danganronpa cast after their relevance to the core narrative had passed. Now, Danganronpa S posits a whole other scenario — Pretty much anyone that’s ever been in a Danganronpa title has been somehow gathered into a virtual simulation of Goodbye Despair‘s Jabberwock island. There, under the care of V3‘s Monokuma Kids, the characters must participate in a “training camp” for their Ultimate Talents.

The twist? No killing!

Danganronpa S is a death-free safe space, concocted expressly for players still enamored of the wacky and memorable characters and seeking a way to get more. To that end, Spike Chunsoft has created loads of new content and event scenes featuring characters interacting with each other across time, space, canonicity, and even common sense. Without spoiling too much, one might even see multiple versions of the same character conversing like they were different people, instead of the same person at different stages of their life.

This is all well and good, but one issue is that S prominently features characters that do not appear in the Decadence bundle. In particular, Komaru, the protagonist of the shooter-style spinoff Ultra Despair Girls (which forms a narrative bridge between Goodbye Despair and the Danganronpa 3 anime) gets prominent billing, but a Switch-only player might not even know who she is.

Danganronpa S plays out like a hybrid of a party-style board game and parody JRPG. Players will take a character across the spaces while playing minigames, reading event scenes, and battling the minions of Monokuma in turn-based combat. Players can acquire new characters (there are dozens, if not hundreds) by feeding in-game currency to the in-game gacha machines. This is where things get unpleasant, as Danganronpa S is supported by microtransactions — players can pay a bit of real-world money to directly unlock characters. The actual costs aren’t high, especially in comparison with the predatory rates of more dedicated gacha games, but it’s a clear attempt to cash in on the affection people have for Danganronpa‘s cast, and this taints the experience.

Even players that can make peace with this monetization will have some caveats to consider when buying the games of Danganronpa Decadence, though.

Performance on the pre-release builds I received was rough. Noticeable frame-rate loss occurred during class trial segments across all three of the older titles, and strange errors in text rendering caused punctuation (or even individual words) to appear as invisible. None of these issues made the games unplayable, but they were concerning in light of the fact that they all work just fine on PC, PS4, and even their native, less powerful PS Vita.

With the exception of the thoroughly unnecessary Danganronpa S, the games of the Danganronpa Decadence package are still a great and unforgettable experience. Though they run better on other platforms, they’re just fine on the Switch, and players who can’t or won’t try them elsewhere won’t feel like they’re getting a worse deal. A more concerning wrinkle is that players who want as complete a Danganronpa experience as possible are better served on those other platforms, thanks to the absence of Ultra Despair Girls. As such, using the word “decadence” in the collective title comes across as a bit presumptuous on Spike Chunsoft’s part — a more accurate title might be “Danganronpa Sufficience“.

Disclosures: This game collection is developed and published by Spike Chunsoft. It is currently available for Nintendo Switch (Alternative editions of the component games are available on PC, PS4, PS Vita, iOS, and Android). This copy of the game is based on a retail build provided by the publisher and reviewed on Nintendo Switch. Approximately 83 hours were devoted to the single-player modes across four titles. There are no multiplayer modes. The games were completed.

Parents: All four games in the compilation are rated M by the ESRB, for Blood, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Simulated Gambling. The official ESRB description for Danganronpa 1 and 2 reads as follows, and this can be generally assumed for the rest: This is a compilation of puzzle-adventure games in which players follow high-school students attempting to escape from a murderous robot bear. As players navigate their environments, they sometimes come across corpses of murdered classmates. Players investigate the various crime scenes, looking for clues and interviewing rival classmates. Finding the killer can trigger “punishment” cutscenes, in which acts of violence are depicted: students killed by a pitching machine, run over by a truck, crushed to death. There are also depictions of characters getting impaled by spikes and knives. Blood is frequently depicted on and around dead bodies. Cutscenes also depict female characters dressed in low-cut outfits and bikinis that expose large amounts of cleavage; these still images occasionally depict characters in provocative poses, with the camera focusing on pelvic areas. Some scenes contain sexual/suggestive dialogue (e.g., “That creep rubbed his ham-hands all over me and called it a body check! More like sexual harassment!” “My loins are still full of poison, and I’d appreciate it if you could suck it out…” and “some even tried to have children with Junko’s dead body”). The words “f**k,” “sh*t,” and “a*shole” appear in the dialogue.

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles. There are no text size or presentation options. (See examples above.) Some audio “barks” used by characters in place of voice acting are not subtitled, but these are not essential for gameplay. This title is partially accessible.

Remappable Controls: No games in this collection offer remappable buttons. There is no control diagram. The controls are straightforward with the left stick selecting objects and the face buttons selecting/canceling.

The post Danganronpa Decadence Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Finding the government’s private Stonehenge.

LOW The ending leaves players with more questions than answers.

WTF I thought magic talking swords would be nicer than this.

Something odd is afoot in the town of Rainy Woods. Strange lights in the sky, mysterious glowing footprints, and a sword which may or may not be Excalibur turning up lodged in someone’s chest — it’s a bizarre place to visit, even before the townspeople start turning into cats and dogs! From Deadly Premonition‘s director, SWERY, comes a pastoral mystery adventure which makes less sense the more the player learns about it.

Set in a rural English hamlet, The Good Life follows Naomi, a New York photojournalist who’s dispatched to uncover the town’s secrets for her employer, the Morning Bell News. Being a big city woman at heart, there’s nothing that interests Naomi less than spending a few months in some hillbilly backwater. However, her lifestyle has placed her under a crushing burden of debt, so she’s not in a position to refuse the gig. What follows is a third-person adventure full of drinking contests, sheep races, gardening, and more photography than anything except perhaps Pokemon Snap.

As a mystery, The Good Life is oddly formless and laid-back. After a brutal murder kicks off the plot, the player is presented with the three key plot points and told to investigate them in any order they choose, at whatever pace they like. There’s no urgency in the narrative, no threat looming over every moment, and no worry that the killer might strike again — this vicious crime is treated with the seriousness of lost keys. Naturally, there’s a reason for this odd tone and pacing, but it doesn’t become clear until the very end of the game, which means players will spend the majority of their time feeling baffled and adrift. While this is almost certainly what the developers had in mind, enjoying it is an acquired taste.

Photography is at the core of The Good Life’s gameplay. Not only can the player earn money by snapping photos around town and posting them to Flamingo (the in-game faux Instagram) but most quests revolve around it as mysteries are generally solved by following a sequence of objectives and puzzles until the player finds the right target to snap a picture of. To its credit, these objectives are never particularly confusing or difficult to accomplish, although every now and then a particular item needed to complete a quest will be found at the end of a related sidequest — getting a telephoto lens or lessons on how to care for sheep, for example.

Speaking of sidequests, I found them considerably more compelling than the main narrative. The town is packed with interesting characters, from the creepy twins who hire Naomi to abuse animals, to the perpetually tipsy Pastor who challenges her to a series of drinking contests while fretting over his marriage. There are family squabbles to calm, old crimes to crack, and musical codes to solve. While a few were simple fetch quests, the vast majority of the peripheral missions gave me a chance to spend time with a genuinely fascinating cast of characters, and The Good Life is at its best when focusing on them.

In contrast, it’s disappointing that the main character winds up being the least interesting part of the story. While I don’t expect every one of SWERY’s leads to be as good as York Morgan from Deadly Premonition, he’s had a fantastic track record up until now. JJ and David (the stars of his last two titles) were each fascinating in their own right. Naomi, on the other hand, has two basic characteristics — she hates small town life, and she likes to drink. These beats get hammered over and over again without delving deeper into her character. There’s a certain amount of comedy to be gleaned from this and she does grow as a person as the narrative comes to a close, but spending so much time with someone who is essentially a cipher became more frustrating as the game wore on, especially since SWERY has done such strong protagonist work in the past.

As an open-world adventure, The Good Life is absolutely packed with minigames. There’s a huge amount of sheep-related content, dozens of plants to farm, over a hundred recipes to learn how to cook, and a huge wardrobe to craft. Players have to watch out for Naomi’s hunger, sleep, and stress levels, and finding a balance between eating things that will keep her healthy while also snacking on the food items which will give her perks is important.

There is also combat in The Good Life, but it’s a paltry amount — there’s only one mandatory fight in the entire campaign, and the rest are optional based on how interested the player is in completing side stories and crafting items. Interestingly, all of the combat happens after Naomi gains the ability to transform into a dog or cat. Naomi can transform whenever she likes, and each form has its own perks. Cat Naomi can climb sheer surfaces and hunt small animals, while dog Naomi can dig up treasure and battle large animals. In an interesting complication, there are dog and cat rivalries in the town, so certain content is locked away until players pick a side in the pet preference conflict.

Playing The Good Life can be a baffling experience. There’s a parade of weird characters, a constant stream of odd happenings, and a complete refusal on the game’s part to ever explain the whys of its biggest mysteries. I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed that things never came to a satisfying conclusion, and its eleventh-hour attempts to suddenly announce what it’s all about seem a little desperate. Even though it doesn’t stick the landing, The Good Life offers players a chance to visit a charming town full of interesting people and take part in one of the chillest, most relaxing open world adventure games ever. It’s not a masterpiece but it’s certainly worth the trip, even for those not obsessed with SWERY’s work.

Disclosures: This game is developed by White Owls and published by PLAYISM. It is currently available on PS4/5, XBX/S/O, PC and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 30 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This was rated T by the ESRB, and it contains Blood, Crude Humor, Mild Language, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence. I’m a little amazed this thing got a T — there’s surprisingly little realistic violence considering the subject matter, but wow, is there so much drinking. And urinating on things as a dog. And hunting squirrels as a cat. There’s nothing particularly sexual or salacious, though. Also, the ESRB missed some pretty implicit drug use.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All dialogue is subtitled, and subtitles cannot be resized. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The post The Good Life Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Some excellent writing and presentation.

LOW Weird tonal shifts. 

WTF Who would have guessed a murder mystery would make me want to visit Japan?

Movies are my true love. While I spend most of my time playing and writing about videogames, cinema has always been my passion. Interestingly, many games try to be like movies but are rarely about them. As for me, as a film nut I’ve always wanted an interactive experience that details the ins-and-outs of the film industry — basically a Barton Fink, Sunset Blvd. or The Player in videogame form. 

Root Film, the latest in the Kadokawa Mystery Games series, is a visual novel about an aspiring director named Rintaro Yagumo. After slumming it out directing cheesy, amateurish horror films, he finally gets his big break working on a Japanese murder-mystery series. Unfortunately, things aren’t what they seem as Yagumo finds himself in the middle of a larger mystery surrounding a real-life murder on set. 

Being a visual novel, most of the gameplay in Root Film revolves around players clicking through text and following the story. Yagumo will interact with other characters like his young editor, crew members and even random people around the Shimane Prefecture in Japan. Occasionally, there will be items to interact with in the world. Of course, plenty of murder clues will present themselves for players to examine. 

For example, early in the game players witness what appears to be a ghost walking on water in a short video. Yagumo heads over to the lake and takes note of things like the buildings in the area and where the cast and crew could have been standing. It doesn’t take a lot of detective work to click through these things in the environment, but trying to solve the mystery is engrossing enough. Once Yagumo has enough evidence, he can accuse someone of a crime. 

Here, gameplay changes up to be more like… a fighting game. Players have options of dialogue choices that refute the accused’s defensive statements. If a player chooses the correct dialogue, they inch the person closer to giving a confession. It’s an interesting shakeup to the typical Visual Novel formula, and making correct selections tests how much attention readers have paid up to that point.

While those accusatory sequences are great, the real stars of Root Film are the writing and characters that echo movies like Brian De Palma’s Blow-Out and seemingly reference events like the “cursed” set of The Exorcist. While the tone can occasionally shift from a purely horrifying experience to an odd (but endearing) slice-of-life anime, I was still engrossed. Even the voice acting was great. Performed in Japanese, the actors successfully convey the appropriate reactions, which went a long way towards supporting the narrative. 

Overall, Root Film is an engaging visual novel, but as a film buff, it was doubly great experience. For anyone that falls into the Venn diagram between these two types of media, this comes recommended!  

Disclosures: This game is published and developed  by Kadokawa Games. It is currently available on Switch and PS4. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. 

Parents: According to the ESRB this game is rated M for Blood, Language and Violence. The official description reads as follows: This is an adventure game in which players follow the story of a movie director investigating a mysterious project connected to a series of murders. The story is largely conveyed through visual-novel style panels and text, with players surveying crime scenes and questioning suspects. Some cutscenes depict still images of murder victims in various forms of injury/death: a man shot in the torso by a sniper; a man choking and spewing blood; a corpse lying in a pool of blood. Several scenes depict blood stains on walls or victims’ clothes; one protracted sequence depicts several desiccated and bloody corpses hanging on walls. The words “sh*t” and “a*shole” appear in the dialogue.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available. 

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are visual cues for audio sounds and the game offers subtitles. (See examples above) The size or presentation of the subs cannot be adjusted, but the game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the controls are not remappable and there is no control diagram. The X button is used to click through dialogue and interact with the world, while the d-pad or control stick cycles through the interactive elements or menus. 

The post Root Film Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.