Roaches

WOW, just wow, the English in this game is turrrrrrrible. Obviously this isn't the first game to have bad English, translation or otherwise, far from it, let alone the first indie game (I've seen some Amnesia: The Dark Descent custom stories you know, just look at Lost the Lights to see what I mean) and in fact there are games probably much worse out there, but this is the first one of its kind I've both actually played to the end (the many infamous NES classics I've still yet to get my hands on or finish, i.e. the first Zelda) and the first one I went into unexpectedly. Meaning, I didn't know what I was in for going in, but the first thing off the bat was the no-so-well English.

Thing is, it doesn't quite hit you right off the bat. The first few bits of writing, while a couple bits somewhat clumsily written, aren't really that bad grammatically speaking. But then...



OK, well I don't know if it was necessary to put the "out" between "ran smoothly" and the use of an ampersand is a bit unusual in a dialogue box but I'll give this one a pass. Certainly a case of a not-quite-perfect but still reasonable transl...



...uh...



...welll...



Alright clearly English isn't the first language of whoever translated this game. Kudos for trying, I guess? Unless they just used Google or Bing translate, then in that case no, just no. Actually, hell with it, NO, just... NO either way. This is pretty much the kind of writing you'll be getting the entire game so any semblance of seriousness that the game might have is thrown out the window. Thankfully though it's not a drama save for maybe the backstory of one particular character but rather cheesy creature feature kind of fare. Consider this the equivalent to a Japanese B-monster movie with bad English dubbing, and approached that way it kind of works, and you might have a good time with this. One thing that I was afraid of was that the translation would cause serious issues when reading clues to solving puzzles, a la Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, but thankfully that wasn't the case at all. In fact the game for the most part is pretty easy; the biggest challenge you'll be facing probably is getting around the frequent hurdles of "giant stamina-sapping roaches."

Before we get into that, let's begin with the story, which believe it or not is still very much legible despite all the grammatical flubs you'll be enduring the whole way through. You are Yumi, the absolute best roach killer in town. So much so you've driven them all pretty much to extinction in this vicinity. They don't call you, uh, "The Roaches Killer" for nothing. That is, until you get a letter requesting your services in a particularly derelict area of town set to be demolished, called simply the Slum, er, sorry, the "Slump" (the game does go back and forth with both names but "Slump" seems to be used the most often) with only one, mysterious resident left there who people know little about, named Ai Mada, the person requesting your services in fact.

So what makes your roach-murdering skills so badass you can obliterate entire colonies of them in any building or town you step in?



Indeed, dedication, passion, for your occupation is what it takes to succeed in your line of work. One of the things you pride yourself on, from interacting with the name of your business painted in front of your building, is that you do all this without using any chemicals whatsoever. This is certainly remarkable, what then is the secret method to your overwhelming success?



Ah, I see, that is some truly innov... wai... wait a minute, WHAAT?! Excuse me? Your bare hands? Are you one of the X-Men, with superpowered hands of some kind? What, what do they do, do they render everything they touch infertile, alter the brain chemistry of the pest to go and attack the rest of the colony, make them all explode (actually, as you will see while playing the game, it is the last part, definitely the last part)? Apparently she just... smacks every one of them she sees, killing them, and also their colonies completely as a result, even though I'm pretty sure this is neither how proper pest control works and is also exactly the same method thousands of desperate people also use when they see a gaggle of roaches infesting their place (only with a boot, or an object like a paper towel roll or baseball bat if you're in a really crazed mood; I guess more people should get the memo that bare hands were the real natural insecticide this whole time). I just hope that she washes her hands and sterilizes them frequently after her work is done, because I wouldn't want to be shaking hands with her or want her handling my food (the latter of which is actually a task you must do somewhere in the middle of the game, ew) if she isn't.

Ickness aside (then again, what do you expect from a game called fucking ROACHES), you decide to catch up with friends and fellow villagers after a weeks-long vacation. Turns out something baaaad has gone down during your absence, with people having gone missing, buildings decimated and even a veggie garden partially stomped on! What to do - well as you're meeting up with friends a talking book on fire suddenly appears and tells you to find five clues to the mystery of the situation before you can move on to your duty for the day in the "Slump." Now HOLD ON one friggin' second here, I just jumped into what is meant to be a horror game about roaches in a banal setting and then you throw a book in flames that can speak at me? I just... just... well fine let's just roll with it (the book makes occasional visits throughout the game to tell you what your current objective is if you need to be reminded, it seems there more for a hint-delivering stopgap than anything and doesn't try to logically fit in the game's setting - still, it's disconcerting to see when it just pops up out of nowhere in the beginning).

So you go around talking to people and reading notes, getting your clues, which all tell of a mysterious man acting all mysteriously and then some monstrous entity witnessed by many. Some gravedigging has even taken place recently.



Really, did she actually yell out "OMG" for real. Sorry but, as bad as the grammar may be, it at least might be an accurate reflection of how someone who knows little English might speak, but nobody would actually react with an Internet acronym out loud. This isn't the first time "OMG" will be used in the game either. Was there really no space to write out "Oh my God," "Oh my gosh," "Oscillating Magniloquent Gyrocopters," whatever? Whatever...

Anyway, as you go on I'd think it would be pretty safe to jump straight to your original objective the moment you get goddamn security camera footage of a gigantic roach just waltzing into a grocery store and messing shit up. It's not like vague Big Foot footage or anything either, it's in pretty plain sight right there! That nobody in town, not even the police station which you pay a visit, with this smoking gun of evidence right there (not to mention a pretty convincing witness account from another lady) decides to gather their weapons and tear the Slump apart going Starship Troopers on the place and maybe looking for the missing persons there is something I questioned. But, OK, fine, so you go to find your five clues, doing so mainly by doing basic tasks for people which will calm the person you're helping out down enough to get some information. After all this, the road opens up...

I forgot, in the middle of all this, you meet an... odd fellow to say the least named Adam, featured in one of the screencaps above, standing around in the filthy alleyway with roaches crawling over the wall, to which he watches, entranced, leading to the old house you are headed towards. He would seem to be an angsty kind of guy and sees cockroaches as "beautiful" creatures and that it is really us, the humans who "never tries to understands them" who really are the problem. Yeah a kooky fellow, probably not trustworthy in a game like this, but as he's causing no harm so far, so now, it is time, time, to move on...



Yes. For I am a woman. A woman on a mission. A mission of retribution. Roach retribution! That's right, those skittering sons o' bitches are gonna get a taste of my palms of steel but once again! They will pay for their mere pathetic existence. I will hunt down and track every single last one of them until they are all nothing but goo between my fingers. For it is time. It's roaches killing time motherfuckers! Fuuuuuck yeah!

Anyway so you find the building, go through a series of basic actions leading to getting to the key to the place, smash some roaches (some more well-hidden than others) in order to proceed... I don't want to say anymore, but you eventually meet with the giant roach itself face to face who smashes a plank you're standing on leading you to fall down the floor below. And so the game REALLY begins!

So not to give too much away even though the plot isn't that important and the ending really predictable, the crux of the game is basically trying to get yourself out of this grimy hole you've fallen into. It's a matter of going around, finding keys, solving basic puzzles, all with the end goal of getting to the out-of-reach emergency ladder to get yourself out of this place (you see, the place has an emergency sprinkler system which will lower it down once it's activated. But you're faced with some setbacks, like the water tanks all either being broken or empty). The ladder is indeed out of reach for you, but... well there is a bit of a logic hole here I may talk about later in hidden text, but not right now.

This all seems easy enough, which it is, honestly, except, well, there's a giant roach on the loose, along with a bunch of smaller but still too-big-to-deserve-to-live roaches in more plentiful numbers in the way. I brought them up before. "Stamina-sapping roaches." What do I mean by that? If the "small" ones touch you, your speed is reduced to a crawl. In fact there are a few deadly-seeming objects in the game that will also kill your ability to move quickly if you touch them or touch them incorrectly, most of them related to high voltages of electricity. However, no matter how many times you get shocked or hit by a roach you can never actually die. It is a mere inconvenience, a setback that prevents you from getting things done quickly. At least it would be if it weren't for Gigaroach roaming about, the one and only thing in this game that can actually kill/game over you. Now, you encounter this fella very rarely, and when you do it's always in one room where escaping it will make it go away immediately (there is only one section at the very end of the game where its presence will present any kind of challenge). Still you don't want to be caught with your pants down, so to speak, and ending up in a room with it with your stamina sapped will mean instant death.

What to do about it? There is hope! There are these items you can collect scattered about that are like these Gatorade-style drinks or something(?) where a press of one key ("d" to be precise) will immediately restore you back to working condition. The game warns you that these things are in short supply so be careful about using them and moving about. It's true that there aren't very many... that is unless you're not someone with an exploratory mind. Probably the very most enjoyable/rewarding thing about this game is finding all the secret areas, switches, items and puzzle solving that you can optionally do that will open up treasure troves of this stuff. I did find myself using these a lot, but still by the end I had a supply of at least over 40 of the drinks left. Preservation is still a good idea though since you never know when La Cucaracha Gigante is about to show up (a few times he'll give you a warning by showing his presence in the opposite room, other times he just appears fuck out of nowhere). You can do this either by save/reloading, the more annoying option but if you find you've wasted too many drinks go ahead, another is to just stick with being a slowpoke and deal with the annoyance of being conked by roaches repeatedly if you're pretty confident you're safe to move (in cases where you're going through a room you've already been through before or are in the middle of solving a puzzle you just started that spreads across a wide series of rooms you're probably OK), and another is to just try and master the "mini"-roaches' patterns as best you can.

Here's how they work: the vast majority of them move about in these fast-moving patterns. Of the pattern-based ones there are two kinds: ones running back and forth repeatedly either up and down or left and right, and the most annoying one, the ones that move around in a circle, or, since this is an RPG Maker game a parallelogram type pattern. Then there are others you can trigger in certain rooms that will simply slowly pursue after you until you leave the room. Sometimes they appear if you pick up an item you shouldn't have, others simply show up and are there to stay. As you continually progress through the game more and more of these things will start to show up making treading through these areas that much more a problem.

Like I said before these things can't kill you, just inconvenience you, so they're a nuisance more than anything. But there are times where you might find yourself frustrated since they move at such high speeds around a certain perimeter that it's easy to get hit and then have to use up a power drink, and with the ones moving around at right angles, it can be hard to judge sometimes where the borders of their patterns are (due to, have I said it already, MOVING SO GODDAMN FAST), let alone when it is safe to cross making these the easiest to get hit by. The ones that come after you, these ones are definitely creepy. Even though they're harmless in the long run, being pursued by a gang of large cockroaches because I picked up spoiled food or opened up the wrong barrel of biohazardous material or just because I stepped on their turf, these are probably the only moments in this game where I felt in any way tense. Even moreso than being chased by their bigger brother(sister?) even, probably because of how rarely the big guy shows up, and how creepily deliberate the smaller ones come after you. Probably just a visceral thing. The other couple sort-of creepy moments are in the pit where interacting with some graffiti will reveal a couple pairs of large red eyes in the dark background before disappearing, and also where interacting with some holes in the walls will simply return the noise the insects make back to you, the last one again probably a visceral thing. It's just not a very nice, non-threatening sound, and in fact just makes you want to walk away from the walls in case you think you just triggered for them to come out after you (which it doesn't thankfully but still).

So there you go, if you can deal with a lot of roach-dodging maneuvers, you should be OK to go with the puzzle-solving which is as I said before very easy. This might be one of the easiest games of its kind I've played in fact. Some hints are just blatantly spelled out for you. Besides just the inventory/place item here kind of puzzles (made easier by the fact that the game automatically puts the proper items in place for you once you have them and interact with the appropriate object) there are other kinds like a clock puzzle, where you have to wind three clocks at specific times in order to open up something. Reading the "hints" if you have even the most basic concept of counting time it is laughably easy, made more so when you actually interact with the clocks and find you don't even have to wind them, you just pick from three different times which one may be the correct one. Others include instructions in laboratories that tell you exactly what to do. As far as the puzzles themselves are concerned, most of the challenge will come from finding the items in the first place. Like, some keys will be hidden in holes in the wall, so be sure to check on those, or simply locating an item already in plain sight that might be blending in with the background (one of only two areas I got stuck was one of these - I needed a pair of gloves but didn't know where they even were - it turned out they were in a particularly, er, dangerous area where it'd be pretty easy to miss - the other area I got stuck was trying to cut down some dangling rope with a crate above - my confusion was where to cut, since I had no concept of where the ropes were located respective to me and the rest of the room). Otherwise, someone going in for a casual run should have no issues with finishing this game, which is around 3 hours of gameplay, more or less.

Now the bit of "fridge logic" that came to me after having played this game regarding the emergency ladder. Spoilers hidden as always:

Probably the most severe flaw of the game is that there seems to be as many bugs as there are in the game's own story. Actually I only encountered three, but all of them were bad enough to force me to restart my game. One, there is a picture in a room where you'll find the largest number of the roaches moving about. Upon examination all it is is a picture of where the four cardinal directions are in relation to you (so you don't have to bother looking, it's the same as the directions you're facing in the game, up being north, down being south, et al). Then the game froze on this picture. Apparently I could still move around but all I could see was the picture of North, South, East and West. I could go into my menus and see those fine but I couldn't get out of this damn picture! I restarted, and looked at it again to see what the dealio was, I was able to exit out, looked at it again, and then it did the same thing as the first time. Restarting again, I realized that I got the idea and didn't need to look at it again. There was another close-up picture in the game, forgot which one it was, that also froze on that image, forcing me to restart. And finally there was one that locked up my game entirely; I was in "slowpoke" mode and just ambling away from a couple of roaches pursuing me, me deciding to hold off on the power drink for now. They caught up to me, bashed me repeatedly, then the game froze. I couldn't move, go into my menu, nothing, so I closed out. I think a QA person or two with bug-smashing iron palms of their own needed to be sent into this game before release!

And that's about all I have to say on this game. The ending of the game hints at a sequel, kinda, sorta. I probably wouldn't mind playing it if it ever came to fruition, assuming that all of this game's problems were sorted out, it was a good bit of silly fun, a nice way to expend a few hours. My biggest piece of advice: it's nice that you're practicing English, and if you're a Japanese speaker it's all the more impressive considering how divergent the two languages are, but, dude, keep the practice out of the games you're actually making! There are plenty of people who you could hand over the text to who could, if not translate it, then at least fix the grammatical errors after you've translated it yourself. Keep the practicing up though!

Consequently, the dev also made a game called Ningyo Heart, a game which I had downloaded a while back. Haven't played that one. I'm curious to see how that one fares. Well, so concludes my review, if you can tolerate... well, everything mentioned/screencapped above, then you might enjoy this. Otherwise... then I guess you won't? Either way, though I've been ragging on the game hardcore in this review, especially in the beginning sections that is nothing but prickly sarcasm, I had some fun, so I recommend giving this a go as long as you know what you're in for.




Oh yeah, the music. It's pretty decent. Don't know how much of it is stock RPG Maker tunes, which is third-party (or public domain?) music and which is custom but I really dig that orchestral theme on the title screen. I swear I've heard it before. I looked it up in the BGM files for the game and it's only credited as "Halloween music." So that doesn't help. Where do I recognize the tune from? Hmmm... oh yeah I said I'd conclude this review the last paragraph. OK NOW I'm concluding it for real this time. So... bye! Enjoy! This story is happy end, thank you! ;)