So... that was incredibly bizarre. I think it might even be more bizarre than the crystal ball "game". It might be even harder to describe than that one, and that one baffled me so much I struggled for half an hour to put that it into words.
There's dialogue in this game so bizarre and nonsensical that normally I would assume it was badly mistranslated, but here I'm pretty sure that's not the case. There's some Portuguese and Japanese text that doesn't appear to be translated at all, and I'm not sure if it's deliberate. Two of the jam's themes are just thrown into the text. The story, as I understand it, is off-beat to begin with, and then it takes a hard turn into the utterly outlandish. I'm not sure if the story is supposed to be coherent or not, because it keeps throwing increasingly strange situations at me. I can't tell who is who, which I would normally count against a game, but here- once again- I'm not sure if that might be deliberate. And then the game almost literally ends mid-sentence. I go to the game's page seeking some kind of clarification on anything and it links me to the Wikipedia article- in Portuguese- for a city in Brazil.
This is the kind of game where if you asked me to rate it from one to ten I'd answer with "starfish in a spaceship" or some other non sequitur.
It does have pretty nice graphics. I find some of them ugly, to be honest, but the style is consistent and it all fits the game well. The music is simple, but it too works.
Building the game in PowerPoint was a bold choice, and I think it worked fairly well, especially given the strange nature of the game in general. The battle system is primitive and clunky but much better than I'd expected from a PowerPoint game. What is sorely missing versus something built in, say, RenPy or Twine is quality-of-life features like skipping through dialogue, going back, save/load, and menus. This game is just teetering on the edge, in terms of length, where that would become a problem.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.