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Extremely conspicuous assassin attempts to murder dead mayor. No one seems to care.

To continue my rash of reviewing adventure games, I come to this title by Shinan. By the creator’s own admission, the game is somewhat buggy and not quite complete, but it is playable from beginning to end. It’s a very short game, about fifteen minutes or so depending on how long it takes you to figure things out.

You play the role of a mysterious cultist who seems to be a clone of some kind who has been sent to assassinate the mayor of a town called Reality. (Exactly what the cult is, or what their motives are, is never revealed or explained. Judging by their uniform, I’m gonna go with Organization XIII.) As it happens, the mayor of Reality turns out to be an undead monster, so you will spend most of this short game acquiring the special ammunition needed to destroy him, as well as securing a proper weapon and vantage point to carry out your assassination, Along the way, your character makes small talk with the various residents of the town.

Level Design 2.5/5:
The evil cult literally dumps you into the middle of town, still tied up, with nothing but the clothes on your back and a note giving you your instructions. From there, you are free to explore the town at your leisure. Your instructions seem to imply a time limit on your task as the mayor was to be somewhere at a very specific time, but as far as I could tell you could take as long as you wanted. Mostly, conventional adventure game mechanics are at work, you simply wander around for a while acquiring various tools to help you, eventually you will uncover ways to use these tools to further your own objectives. Your goal in the game is three fold, once you have attained all three necessary items, the game proceeds to its conclusion automatically. For the most part the game plays decently enough, but unfortunately it is often very hard to tell where entrances/exits are on certain screens, meaning you most randomly click around in hopes of finding the magic “spot.”

There are also various signs of the game’s incomplete state. A few items made their way into my inventory that I was unable to identify anything to do with. I also felt like that, based on my game’s conclusion, perhaps I had done something wrong and attained a “bad ending,” but was unable to figure out what or where else to go or do.

Story and Characters 2.5/5:
The game is set in an established setting called “Reality on the Norm,” which appears to be anything but as evidenced by the bizarre antics of the town’s inhabitants. The dialogue ranges from generic to slightly humorous, with you being able to choose many of your character’s lines, allowing you to do such amusing things as announce to everyone you come across that you are an assassin here to kill the mayor, to which no one seems particularly surprised. I guess maybe assassination attempts are a regular thing? Also, based on some very brief backstory I got by checking this setting’s website, I noticed a few signs of recurring plot threads in the universe, but likely only someone very familiar with the setting would fully appreciate most of the humor.

The script also suffers from an abundance of typos or other grammatical oddities that lower the score somewhat.

Honesty: The best policy



Music and Sound 2.5/5:
Only a few musical pieces were included in the game, with one in particular playing for most of the game. This song got repetitive quickly, but fortunately a few other places offered the opportunity to change the music to one of your liking.

Overall 2.5/5:
Since this game is not really complete, it is hard to judge as a full game. But for the most part it is executed well enough that you’ll be able to figure out everything you need to do with a minimum of frustration while still being able to spend the time exploring and experimenting with your environment that makes adventure games so much fun in the first place.