DATE: APRIL 21, 2021. [Julian Date #111.]
This Game is... confusing. I had to play it for half an hour before stopping, since my mind felt like risotto. What we have here is an ambitious Concept that could not possibly have been executed believably and relatably in one month, I'm afraid.
A nameless, unseen Monster distinguished for his "silver tongue" is tossed into a series of face-to-face interactions with a diverse smorgasbord of unsightly, misshapen ghouls and spooks. Each of these abominations is allegedly depicted as an autonomous Individual with a unique Personality, Psychological Defences, and Weaknesses. The objective is to employ a spectrum of manipulative "skills" in the pursuit of an undefined and vague ideal. Players are encouraged to deconstruct each conversation in order to assert some sort of dominance over the stubborn and unyielding N.P.C.'s, though the motivation and the justification for doing so is never made apparent.
The first source of confusion must be the Soundtrack. Clearly, the mixing and mastering took some work, yet its applications reduce all of that effort to waste. The sound effects are gruesome and loud, as is the Music. Hip-hop drums with loud bass frequencies disrupt a Tutorial section whose writing feels like a manual. Saturated ambient echo effects loop incessantly without much in the way of development or variation, though it's all much too intrusive to feel ambient and undistracting.
It does not help that the prose is somewhat turgid and hard to follow. There doesn't appear to be any distinct rhythm to any character, nor any kind of character to the rhythm. Each monster speaks as if rattling off data in a Soviet propaganda film. To add to this Orwellian nightmare, it becomes a real struggle to find any one consistent POINT to these dialogues. Hope is fleeting when the first prospective client, whose identity fluctuates between being an Individual and a Group, begins to make statements of an epistemological and a metaphysical nature. I may come back to this part after upgrading my Protagonist's "Intellect" to the greatest possible status, because this rather dimwitted sociopath does not seem to know how to engage in an ordinary discussion at this point, preferring to divert his attention to minor, distracting details as though he were Holden Caulfield. The Mist Colony proceeds to develop some potentially engaging lore about the various levels of ontological/epistemological Hell, but my pseud of a Protagonist simply dismisses him internally as a self-centred Solipsist rather than a Cartesian: a bizarre turn indeed when confronted with the classic "Evil Genius" meme we all know and love. The lore is wasted on the point of view, since we don't SEE these various stages in action but must be TOLD what they are. Perhaps none of us are innocent of doing this, but it would help to offer some actual diversity in terms of characterization, storytelling, and scoring if we are to work our way up to this freshman lecture.
The mess is muddled more so, as aforementioned, by the extreme ambiguity of who is speaking to whom. The Protagonist is never shown, to the beast of my knowledge. He is never given a name or gender except "Silver-tongue" and "You"; I must default to the generic "he" only because I do not wish to call myself an object, and the Second Person implies I have artistic license to project my own gender UPON him. Part of the problem is that the non-playables are often referred to as though they were Groups, Colonies, or Hive Minds, despite behaving as if they were mere Individuals fighting to preserve their own autonomy in Hegelian/MacIntyrean fashion. I understand that it has become fashionable to surrender time-honoured grammatical Law in favour of the incidental ambiguities in the English Language, but, like MOST forms of manipulation, this is no excuse. Either the Monster is a Group, or it's a Person. If it is a Person, yet to call the person "it" is much too mean, at least a writer should give SOME thought to the Monster's Gender Identity; it's not like any of us really inherit a personhood which is independent of our assigned roles, and those roles traditionally play a much greater part in our social integration than the secondary roles we assume online and among friends. Besides: it's not like one intent on MANIPULATING the N.P.C.'s will be tempted to regard them as anything other than Instrumental Objects possessing Individual Egos, and knowing the Monster's Sex/Gender would of course be far MORE effective in bypassing outward, self-defined forms of autonomous identity by hacking the Personal Unconscious. Were this Game a Foucaultian exploration into the Will and its relation to Identity, I would permit it its conceits, but since the Protagonist clearly has NO interest in honest conversation, the pronoun usage comes off as pretentious and all-too "millennial". Even using the generic "he" would have made more sense... you know, as MOST literature does.
None of this is to say that I was not disappointed by virtue of this Concept's Potential. Like many overrated Games, it gets downloaded because its premise is intriguing. Unfortunately, this Concept has yet to be Developed to Perfection. Everything is boiled down and expressed as though the audience were ten years of age, which I HOPE is not the target demographic. It reads like a Design Document rather than a Game, and that is why I had to stop playing: not only because I came in expecting a Psychological GAME, but ALSO because this piece of software retains so many of the elements OF a Game, from its deliberately sloppy visuals to its overproduced sounds, that I cannot rightfully begin to guess at where the Developers were GOING WITH IT.
I don't mind having to guess; that can be part of the Fun!! Even a Game made deliberately to "feel unfinished" has that timeless Zen quality which leaves a lot to our Imaginations. Yet the Game was presented as though it were a Completed Work. Its Science must wait on its Art to reach fruition.
Rinzai Gigen,
Subliminal Mind Games.
[({R.G.||S.M.G.)}]