Game EXP: BAISU (VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for BAISU through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

BAISU

Systems: Windows, Linux

Release Date: May 30, 2024

Publisher: TripleDucks Studio

Developer: TripleDucks Studio 

Time Spent: 5 Hours 30 Minutes*

I actually had to look up the game's name, because I kept mentally referring to it as BASIC because I didn't recognize "Baisu" as a word.  It turns out that BAISU is a Lithuanian word for "awful" or "scary," likely depending on the context of how the word is used, but the story takes place in the United States with an American setting and characters, which we'll cover a bit more later.

So BAISU.  This game was genuinely scary, but in the same way that I found Layers of Fear scary.  You have no weapon, there is nothing actively attacking you.  There is no option to run.  You have one walking speed, and that speed does not imply any kind of panic.  It's a game that relies on the player feeling dread and exposing them to both expected and unexpected jump scares; I'll get to that potential oxymoron later.

BAISU is a first-person exploration game that at times feels like a glamorized point-and-click horror game.  You play detective Clay Kriest (or Klay Criest, both spellings appear in the game) who receives a cryptic phone call from a house where the voice asks for help.  That's what's supposed to happen anyway.  The game starts out in Clay's office after waking up on his desk just before 10pm.  The police station functions as the tutorial level as you learn the basic mechanics of the game.  How to interact with objects, the overly complicated nature of getting a VHS tape to play on a TV, how to use commands with your dog Bella, and what keys will likely look like when you find a locked door.  During this sequence, the phone will ring with that cryptic and raspy voice on the other end directing you to 22 Maple Street.  Except for me, it didn't.  I read a letter on Clay's desk that detailed a resident who was having trouble with intergalactic squirrels with flying saucer-shaped hats, one of which he named "Squirreltron 3000."  So after reading this amusing letter, figuring out the dog commands and the "cameroid" on the Steam Deck (that bit's coming up next), and how to work a VCR, I left out of the front door of the station and when I arrived at Maple Street 22, I was under the impression that I was investigating Squirreltron 3000.

Now that we have some of the context out of the way (but do we really?), we need to talk about how the game plays on the Steam Deck because this is going to affect the end of the game.  The game is not currently rated on Steam as anything in regards to the Steam Deck and as it stands right now, I'm guessing that it will eventually be rated as "Unsupported," and I think that's somewhat accurate.  When I started, I used the default control setting which has to move with the left joystick, and camera movement with either the right joystick or the right touchpad; I predominantly used the right joystick but would switch to the right touchpad if I needed to be precise in where I was clicking.  There are also voice or button commands for your dog although I only got the buttons to work, those seemed to be set to the left touchpad instead of the directional pad, and since the touchpad was working I left it as is.  I also noticed in the in-game controller settings that the flashlight was mapped to the  F-button but that wasn't mapped to any of the buttons on the Steam Deck, so I put it on the Y button.  I also had to map the "C-button" to the L4 back button to pull up the camera since again, the button wasn't mapped to ABXY by default.  Then there was the end of the game, which I won't spoil (now), but I requires you to use a keyboard to solve a timed puzzle, which I didn't realize until the timer ran out and I got ending number two of four.

Once you (mysteriously?) arrive at Maple Street 22 (not the Squirreltron 3000 house), your perspective changes from the first-person perspective of Clay's head, to the slightly lower perspective of his body cam.  This perspective allows for electromagnetic interference to happen to the player's vision, as one would expect with supernatural/paranormal entities, without the effects happening to the character.  I liked this perspective as it was reminiscent of Outlast, Slender: The Arrival, and other found footage video games, but here it gave a reason for the character to be constantly recording and for the player to not constantly be wondering why they didn't just put down the camera and run.  Plus, and while I don't know much about body cameras, I would think that they're not powered by a pair of AA batteries so there were no worries about having to find replacement batteries or not catching something on film to complete the investigation/game.

The rest of the game played around the character as it would require you to visit certain rooms in order for something to happen that would unlock another area of the house or even just a closet.  One of the weaker aspects of the game is that there are at least three instances that require the player to find a key to unlock a door to progress the game.  One key is located in a drawer, which is one of the few times looking in drawers pays off.  The second time this happens is about 25 minutes into the game (depending on how much time you spend exploring and not directly going where you're supposed to go) and likely had tried looking through multiple drawers and cabinets and finding them all empty.  The final key is located on a shelf in a darkened room that is easily missed, I even walked passed it several times before I accidentally came across it on my fourth or fifth loop through this particular area.

The story feels very fragmented and like a lot of games that similarly progress the story, Layers of Fear and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, requires the player to find slips of paper scattered around to have even some glimpse of what is happening in this house and why.  But even then, the story felt very incomplete.  You find out early about the inhabitants, Jack, Jolie, and Annabelle, and that Jolie was a painter and that she started acting "different" sometime after the family moved.  There are a couple letters/diary entries from Jack and Annabelle, but the time frame is sporadic and what happened seems ancillary as during this time you are trying to locate your dog, Bella.  The trailer gives a little bit more information, but it's told through home video recordings that never appear in the game, which seems like the information in the trailer only existed to help TripleDucks ground their story that was never fully told.

Two mechanics that felt a little overly complicated were your dog Bella and VHS/VCRs.  Both mechanics are introduced in the prologue/tutorial area and felt like there was more importance placed on these two features compared to their actual functionality in the rest of the game.  Your dog Bella has her commands that you give either from the controller, keyboard, or through the microphone (although I never expanded on this functionality).  You can have Bella search for clues, follow you, or stay put.  In the early minutes, I only came across two instances where Bella had specific reactions to telling her to look for clues before she was taken for the remainder of the game; the rest of the time, telling her to search for clues and she would not do anything.  Then putting a VHS tape into a VCR should have been easier as you had to select the tape, then back out of the menu to put the tape into the VCR, then make sure that the VCR and TV are on before you click in the general vicinity of the Play button.  Each time I had to perform this series of tasks, I would frequently end up clicking back and forth between the menu and the VCR before finally getting it done correctly.  It felt like an attempt to make this mechanic more simulation than an actual video game, but it just came across as cumbersome and frustrating.

My last critique is how the game ends, which will involve spoilers because there is no other way to get through, and requires a little bit of exposition.  As mentioned at the top, halfway through my first playthrough, I looked up what "baisu" meant because I realized that the title wasn't "basic," that's when I found out that it means "scary" in Lithuanian.  This became readily evident in the final act.  In the final minutes of the game, there is a TV broadcast that sounds like it might've been translated with Google Translate from Lithuanian without a context/syntax editor looking over the script: "This is eighth time that people goes missing in what locals call, haunted place."  You understand the gist of what's being said but it does come across as amusing and takes you out a bit from the game considering it's a news broadcast delivered in a generic "American" accent.

Lastly, there are four possible endings, two kinda-bad, and two kinda-good.  To get either of the good endings, you would have had to have taken pictures of five paintings that reveal letters to use at the end of the game during a timed QTE (this was the biggest issue with playing BAISU on the Steam Deck) and spell out a word based on the paintings.  because I played this on the Steam Deck, I had to manually bring up the Steam keyboard which completely blocks out the word you're typing. There is an ever-so-slight lag on clicking on a letter, so it took me several attempts to get the word spelled out correctly (only after I watched a walkthrough to know the correct word).  Because I didn't have all of the pictures, I had thought that the word could be "DOLLS" which is kinda close, but because again, Lithuanian.  So while DOLLS would work for English, you have to use the word DOLOS, which you would either know from finding all of the paintings or if you already know Lithuanian and simple deduction.  While I do recognize that there were a lot of dolls scattered around the house, there was never any indication from any of the letters/notes/diary entries from Jack or Annabelle that this was the cause of Jolie's madness.  And now that I think about it, I don't recall seeing any letters or writings from Jolie to understand her side of the story.  But 

I realize that I've spent the last six paragraphs criticizing the game which might give the impression that I didn't enjoy the game, but that is the exact opposite.  I had a lot of fun even if that fun stemmed from being scared to look behind me while traversing floors of a seemingly haunted house.  Every time I played the game during my first playthrough was at night while lying in bed and there were two times where I had to turn the game off because I found it to be really intense**.  Even though the story felt lacking and I wasn't always sure as to what was happening for whatever reason, the tension and scares felt well-paced and well-timed.  The game frequently prompted you to just "Search the house," which felt like a "just fine" hint, and knowing that there weren't puzzles to solve apart from finding a few keys to unlock doors, that all I needed to do was to explore a room or a part of a room that I hadn't been to yet; and thankfully the house was not Spenser Mansion-level mansion. True, the ending didn't feel great as I'm not one of the 3,200,000 people in the world who speak/read Lithuanian and I had to use a walkthrough rather than spending 1o minutes to get to the word puzzle to figure out if my guess would be correct after my second attempt.

My thoughts are that BAISU is not an overly thought-provoking game with deep writing, well-thought-out puzzles, or a satisfying mystery to solve, but TripleDuck Studios knows how to build dread and terror along with well-executed jump-scares, often eliciting an expletive from me while playing.  And since the game can be played in about two hours on a first playthrough and as few as an hour on subsequent attempts if you know where you're going and where all of the triggers and keys are, although the scares aren't as poignant.  BAISU is a well-crafted jump-scare simulator, which hopefully means that their next game can be only better.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Racing Through the Vastness

*P.S.  As stated above, my first playthrough took about 2 hours 24 minutes.  The rest of the time was spent going in to do additional playthroughs to make recordings and gather more pictures for this article.

**P.P.S. Stay tuned for Friday's article where we will feature a full playthrough with a handful of comments from moments that stood out to me.