Systems: PC, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: March 9, 2017
Publisher: Forever Entertainment
Developer: Desert Fox
Time Spent: Don't Know (~4-6 Hours)
[The Reason: I really wanted to finish the game with the Good Ending but could never figure out what it was that I needed to do. The game only has an auto-save feature and every time I started my last save, it felt like there was something I needed to do in a certain amount of time, but I could never figure out what it was. So I never ended up writing the Game EXP article for this. ]
A lot of what I could say about Bad Dream: Coma I covered in our First Impressions article over two years ago. I did finish the game by the end of June 2021, but I only got the Bad Ending and I did not feel that I could write an article based on that one playthrough, especially since the game informs you if you have performed an action that cancels out one of the possible endings. So I played through again after my first playthrough with the intention of getting either the Neutral or the Good ending. There were a couple of specific actions I knew I needed to avoid, like killing the crows on the bridge or killing the spiders in the hospital, and I did follow a guide at times, but only when I questioned whether or not an action would have adverse consequences, especially if it had been a while after the game had last autosaved.
Bad Dream: Coma was probably more unsettling and creepy than it was actively scary, but I think that has to do with the fact that it can be difficult, with some exceptions, to make a point-and-click game scary in the same way that Layers of Fear or Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs have point-and-click elements (often) without any real physical threat. But as unsettling as the game became, I never felt that it crossed the boundary into either disturbing or offensive considering the M rating for "blood, gore, partial nudity."
.png)
As far as point-and-click games go, I really enjoyed this one despite not being able to figure out the Good Ending, but there were a lot of elements that I did appreciate. From the game telling you if you did something that eliminated a possible ending to having distinct screens for how many possible endings you have left (i.e. if you can only get the bad ending, the environmental art for your specific location as well as what is interactable and what you can find can change). There are other games in the Bad Dream series, and I really think I should pick those up and I know that part of the reason why I had not was because of not feeling like I had adequately played through and written about Bad Dream: Coma. So maybe that has now changed.
<o>
Systems: Windows, Android, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: January 29, 2019
Publisher: Parallel Studio & Nakana.io
Developer: Parallel Studio
Time Spent: Don't Know (~4-5 Hours)
[The Reason: I pretty much cover in the article why I had such a hard time writing about EqqO. It really just boils down to that I had a hard time trying to find the right combination of talking about the game mechanics and the heaviness of the story itself, and I was never able to find a happy middle ground.]
EqqO is a game that is all about how a mother copes with the trauma of her missing child. The game's story is told from the perspective of the mother telling what happened to her child, Eqqo, after he goes missing following the arrival of a warlord passing through their village. This was a particularly heavy game, especially considering that Conklederp and I had recently become new parents. The ending, in particular, was a beautiful culmination of the story told in the game and through the story that was difficult to watch, but not from a "how could they show this!?" perspective, but because the story itself was so heart-wrenchingly beautiful. I mean, it's a story that a mother is telling to come to terms with the loss of her child.
Thankfully, the gameplay itself is all about solving puzzles and avoiding environmental hazards to continue through to the next room, so all of the heavy emotional storytelling is told in cutscenes and voiceovers between stages.
I highly recommend EqqO if point-and-click puzzle games set in a 3D space are your type of game, but just a very massive big heads up that the story here, while beautiful, does deal with themes of child loss and associated trauma. I am very glad that I played this though.
<o>
Systems: Nintendo DS, iOS, Android
Release Date: November 27, 2008
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Level-5
Time Spent: 26 H 11M
[The Reason: I will get to it in this article, but what really held me back from writing this as a full article was how overly disappointed I was in this game. This was the third game I played in the Professor Layton series (being the third game after all) and loved the first two, so I was pretty shocked by how I felt with regarding the quality of the puzzles and the optional side-quest-type puzzles here. But let us just get down to it then.]
Like the previous two entries in the Professor Layton series, Professor Layton and the Unwound Future plays like a visual novel and point-and-click adventure game where you frequently are asked by characters to solve puzzles in order to progress through the story. What I found most disappointing about Unwound Future, was that, to me at least, felt like Level-5 was scraping the barrel in terms of the quality of several of the puzzles. There were several puzzles (Puzzle #027 and Puzzle#041 come to mind) that felt like the answers were more subjective than they should have been. I also felt that the side-quest puzzles like the Parrot Delivery, the Picture Book, and the Toy Car Courses all felt completely disconnected from the main story. Like what did putting stickers in a Picture Book have to do with solving the mystery as to how Professor Layton, Luke, and Flora were traveling back and forth in time? At least the Tea Set minigame from Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box felt appropriate for something that would be fretted over by the characters and was something that you could use to directly interact with specific characters.
And speaking of Flora, I know that Layton and Luke ragging on her has kind of been a gag throughout the series, but in this game, it came off as very 1950s, women should know their place and stay in the kitchen vibes. Constantly putting her off as an inconvenience, an annoyance, and reminding her of her faults from the first game was very off-putting and maybe I am just more aware of it in my old age, but when Layton and Luke were telling Flora that she should not get involved because the situation was dangerous and that she had no place being excited about their situation (which all characters had shown some level excitement at one point before this interaction) had me very annoyed and our male protagonists. And a 14-year gap between now and when the game was released is not an excuse.
The story, I was fine with, with all of its twists and turns consistent with a game in the Professor Layton series. A lot of the time I just kind of had to go along with where the story was taking me, even if there were a lot of elements that seemed waaaaay beyond far-fetched. I guess if it is not too much to ask the player to suspend their disbelief and believe that all the citizens of a village have been "replaced" by robots, then believing that a near-perfect replica of London was built underneath the actual city of London.
But that is really just my feelings about Unwound Future. Good story, some good puzzles, some bad puzzles, and all bad mini-game puzzles within the context of the story but not necessarily bad in and of themselves; except the Parrot Delivery mini-game which I found to be dreadfully inconsistent with the rules that it tried to create. Not the best feeling to have when closing out a trilogy, but that is just me.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
No comments:
Post a Comment