Schuld (English Translation)

The man behind Desert Nightmare follows up with another horror game, but this one differs greatly from that game. This game is, for one, much shorter, the narrative more fragmented and abstract than the more traditionally structured narrative of Desert Nightmare, it's more linear, and finally the game builds to an ending that completely pulls the rug underneath your feet. While the plot of Desert Nightmare does develop in a way to eventually lead to some new revelations to close all the gaps in the story by the end, it develops at a gradual enough pace that every new turn in the story is natural and never throws any curveballs your way. Not this game - this game features the kind of ending that sheds a totally different light on everything you experienced previously. Although in some ways it also renders them meaningless. More on that later. Still, overall, I'd say the story here, though lacking Desert Nightmare's patience in its narrative development, also avoids some of the more embarrassing features of Desert Nightmare's story. Nothing equivalent to the wise, magical Indian chief here. Though you do have some seemingly wise, magical character as your guide in the game, his role is decidedly more interesting as you find out later in the story.

I just want to say that this is one oddball game. I like that about it. Even if it overreaches in places, doesn't always make sense or skips over entire reasons for why your character had to go through certain experiences that he did and what makes them so relevant to the main thrust of the story, it is nonetheless fascinating to see it all play out and to see where this crazy train through hell will take you next. Desert Nightmare's setting was largely homogeneous, but here you find yourself in all kinds of weird settings and situations. You go from one place to another, never predicting what that next place will be.

So with that the game has a beginning as odd as the rest of it. You're a man who was seemingly traveling the road on foot when you stop in front of a town. You have no idea what this place is or why you wanted to go here but you feel for some reason you're supposed to be here. Even stranger is the only item you're carrying, a list of the seven deadly sins, written in what I presume to be Latin(?). Well time to investigate to see what this town is all about. Another strange sight. A literal river of money. Just, dollar bills, floating by underneath the bridge. Something clearly is not right here. Still, you can stand next to the river and collect as much money as your heart desires (not that it'll be any good). You walk forward and find a destitute man, telling you that money's no longer any good in the town (told ya) and you're just wasting your time. Right after a giant vehicle approaches, the man tells you to run, which prompts the save screen to appear (when that happens in a game you know something very bad is about to happen). Strange men completely covered in masks and gear then chase after you, and, well, there isn't anything else to do but run. Yeah, just, run. But remember to head down the little alleys to hit the switches that open the gates in your way. The first gate only uses one switch, the next one, two. I game over'd sooo many frickin' times over this sequence I wanted to strangle someone. In particular the part where you hit the two switches. It seemed hopeless. As I ran, more of these weird guys in suits crashed through some windows right on my ass and the precision needed to hit the switches on both sides needs to be just about perfect. However even when I thought I had a good opening to get through, I ran out, and so many times one of these guys, simply being diagonal to me, not even touching me or parallel with me, diagonal, it'd game over me. And again, another game that only has four-directional movement making sequences like this more frustrating than they need to be. If I could just shimmy around the corners up to the switches I'd have a much less hassling time. Well, eventually I mastered my switch-pushing skills enough that I could get through the gate and get away from whoever the hell those people were. Then you end up in a hospital and you see something very, very horrible is happening to the town's residents that nobody can seem to stop. You, however, would seem to be the town's savior. But not in a good way. More in a way that requires them to mutilate you horribly. What is this affliction you might ask? I don't want to say any more, just play the game, but I will say it is pretty horrific, definitely the scariest series of events this game's creator has come up with yet.

Eventually you meet up with the mysterious, magical guide I mentioned earlier, named Vergil. As far as I can tell he has neither to do with the ancient Roman writer similarly named (except it's Virgil) nor does he with the Devil May Cry character. He would seem to be a guardian angel of sorts, except he would appear to be the worst guardian angel ever just going by your initial interactions with him. He speaks so cryptically he may as well not speak at all. Every question you ask him he says he cannot answer. He says he is your "guide" but he is hard-pressed to guide you to anywhere safe and not filled with horror and insanity. Who is Vergil anyway? And what is he here for? What does he want to do with you? All these will be answered by the end, and they probably aren't the answers you're thinking of. Well, without giving too much away, you end up in a decidedly nicer place at the end of the chapter, and there is a little girl who is need of something. You offer this to her, take her to where she wants to go and... well, it's far less pleasant than what you or she was expecting. But it's the thought that counts, and so on to the next chapter. You then notice one of the sins crossed off your list. The one related to the place you were at. It is presumed then, that this is a game about going through areas all representing these sins and redeeming yourself somehow by going against them, as what you did for the little girl (not gonna say any more, just play the damn game already!). This area is where the "horror" aspect disappears almost entirely (can't blame him, he really did exhaust every possible anxiety, terror and unpleasantness he could from the beginning chapter) and in its place something that still could be considered horrific but for different, more "human" reasons. All I'll say is that, while it doesn't explicitly say what sin this is meant to represent I'm gonna say it's wrath. Definitely wrath. Other story elements come to play. You see a woman you knew from your past, a married woman you had an affair with. What is she doing here? Why is she running away from you? Vergil is still doing dick-all to help you figure out what the hell is going on, the little shit. It is directly after this chapter when the turn begins, when the ultimate revelation of everything that has happened comes to you. And what a revelation it is! It changes not just the story but even the genre of the game entirely.

Before talking about the story, what I liked and didn't like about it (I'll "hide" as many of the bigger spoilers that I can), I just want to briefly lay out how the game plays and what you'll be doing to reach that end. Like Desert Nightmare, some inventory and logic puzzles. None too many and none too difficult, it's a game that wants to stay on track as much as it possibly can. Now, I can't remember if it was this game or Desert Nightmare that had this puzzle involving lining up the order of the moon phases listed on a door and based on a calendar you find to open it. All I know is in one of these games, all puzzles like it I figured out fairly quickly, but that one just left my brain numb. I eventually had to resort to a walkthrough online (and one in English too, yay!) and it gave the answer and explained the logic. It makes more sense to me now, but I'm not sure if I'd ever have arrived at that conclusion by myself. Problem-solving from multiple angles, "thinking outside the box," not especially things I'm very adept at. Then, also like Desert Nightmare, there are scenes where you must contend with an enemy of some kind. There's the obligatory chase sequence in the beginning that I just talked about (really I've come to HATE these things in these games - at least the ones that provide no alternatives besides "run fast because if it touches you, you will die." Thankfully that's the only one of its kind in the entire game. There is an encounter in a room involving throwing every object you find in the room at a hostile, another that's basically a mini-QTE, and finally even a boss battle! Yep, unlike Desert Nightmare, you get to actually fight someone! It's not a turn-based battle, but rather real-time "action-y" combat. Each of you brandishing some kind of gun. I died a lot of times in this fight, but looking back it's not really that difficult, I was just careless. I will say though because of the restrictive four-directional movement, the near-perfect alignment you need to get a hit in, and that he's only standing still when he's about to launch a volley of bullets at you, there are some annoyances when trying to combat him. And... that's it basically. It's like how Desert Nightmare was. Not so much exploration due to the restrictive, linear nature of the levels, but puzzle-solving and the variety of survival situations to deal with and the variety of means you must deal with them stay true to the creator's game design philosophy for these kinds of RM horror titles he's produced so far.

Now, to return to the story, the ending in particular being why there's such a buzz around it. Before getting into spoiler territory (which I will graciously hide from innocent eyes all over) the whole purpose behind the seven deadly sins is never made really clear. It is an aspect really only partially explored, and one of the few sins you deal with doesn't even seem to pertain to anything about your character, making its inclusion feel seemingly gratuitous. This game was apparently made for a contest so there is the possibility a lot of content was cut out to make it to the deadline. Although I have my own ideas, they may be not at all what was intended, but to me it helps make more sense of this game's handling of this aspect of the story. What I see is that every of these sins is in fact represented, it's just that not all of them are presented the same way. In order to properly put down my thoughts on this and other aspects of the the game I'm gonna have to load up the hide tags and talk about it the only real way I can, in the context of its ending, which is what the whole game is about, and has been from the start. So. here we go, deep into spoiler territory, starting first with what actually happens at the end:

I just want to say, bravo! The ending is great not just because it's unexpected but because of the way it's handled. You can taste the bitterness of its conclusion, the meaningless hatred seeping from the screen. And the abrupt cut to credits, it makes the ending hit harder. This is far from a happy story you're getting here; its very title, meaning "Guilt," drives the point home, and the ending, giving it more context, drives it off the edge.

OK, so now we've established what the ending and what the various other story-spoiling elements are. As to what the sins could be about, I may be pulling this all out of my rear but it's worth a shot:

So yeah, it's a pretty great story tightly packed in so short a time, even if the way it is told may not be to your liking, if not make you feel outright cheated altogether. The other aspects of the game don't quite live up to the story even if they have their merits. It has some decent puzzles, a very good, anxious atmosphere, at least initially, and a few "action" sequences that are a bit tacked-on and sometimes clumsy and frustrating, but they do give the game variety. Perhaps it could have been done outside contest parameters in order to expand on its story ideas further, to make more sense of some things that may not add up or feel irrelevant, but overall I don't have too many complaints.

Now what else is there? Oh, yes, one more thing, the music. I have a few words to say here about it. Much of what I said in my Desert Nightmare review could apply here, but overall, there a mix of great, creepy music that adds to the nervous tension experienced, use of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie which I don't like (I just don't, 'k? I've already gone over this in my review of I'm Scared of Girls - go there), but in any case, the worst offense the game commits is not crediting any of the music used here. The same offense was committed in Desert Nightmare. One could forgive him one time, thinking "Well, maybe a beginner's mistake, he'll learn the next game..." Nope! Unless you are familiar with all of the music here, you either will have no idea what the sources of the music used here are, so if you like the tunes and want to look for them, tough, or more egregiously, might get the impression the creator of this game made them. I recognized a track from Silent Hill 3 here (the Otherworld Office level I think it was) and of course Satie. All the other music might have been used from similarly third-party sources. Whatever your thoughts are on laws surrounding using commercial music in non-commercial creative works as this, and I won't rant on about that since I exhausted my head on that already in my Desert Nightmare review, I will repeat, it is only a courteous gesture that you put in the credits where everything, including if not especially the music, came from. Why he won't do this I have no clue. If he has a third game out I'd be curious to know what he did there. If he's working on another game someone should tell him to do this. It shouldn't take any effort on his part and it would just be a polite thing to do in the long run. Don't be the Led Zeppelin to your music sources' Jake Holmes, dude!

*sigh* Anyway that's all I have to say about Schuld. It is better in a lot of ways than Desert Nightmare, but also different in ways that it's hard to compare the two. They both suffer from that problem of not crediting at all its music obviously taken from third-party sources which is a black mark on it, some might find its narrative obfuscating, or at least completely meaningless when the end arrives, and it probably could have done more to explore its themes left dangling by the end leaving me to jump to wild interpretations to help fill in the gaps. I will say that Desert Nightmare's story was better told, while this game's story is simply better even if it does jump around a lot. Gameplay-wise it's about the same as what you had in DN, just less of it. So if you like psychological horror with a touch of drama, I definitely recommend this. And if you're more of a Satie fan than I am you may like this even more than I do whether or not you care that he's not even credited!