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No accounting for taste.

Calunio’s entry for Game Gale 2010 is a….er… torture porn game made in RM2k3, in which you…. brutally torture random people.

Okay, FULL DISCLOSURE, I pretty much despise the whole “brutality for the hell of it” fad that became popular in movies a few years back, and I’m going to take a minute to pontificate why. This phenomenon probably started with the film Saw in which a twisted genius trapped individuals in creatively designed and very horrifying death traps in order to teach these people to overcome certain personality flaws. These traps were designed around the person’s individual flaw and an observant viewer can even see how the trap can be overcome if the person is willing to accept and correct their weakness. Those who failed were generally subject to horrifying mutilation. Something about this premise intrigued audiences so Hollywood quickly made a series of copycat films that made no effort to capture the original spirit of this film or what made it good decent somewhat watchable. They were simply filled with sadists inflicting brutal torture on hapless teenagers for no reason at all. These films are often equated to pornography for a reason; they appeal to the lowest, basest part of the audience in a lazy and indulgent manner. That’s my opinion on the matter anyway. After playing this, it is my opinion that, perhaps despite the author's best intentions and efforts, this game has more in common with the latter than the former. Since I pretty much despise this genre I am going to be frank and admit right here up front that while I don't think that was the whole point of this game, there is pretty much no way this bias didn’t carry over into the review of this game.

But hey, that’s not to say this is going to be horrible, right? I’m sure this is going to be a perfectly marvelous game! Just look at those lightning effects! So, let’s put an end to my author tract and get on with this.

Our protagonist, Verge, is a high school librarian who moonlights in Dungeoneering, a world-wide online community of sadists who build dungeons in their basement and lure victims, called “sobbers,” into their clutches in order to cruelly and sadistically torture them. They video tape these torture sessions and then load them onto their website for other dungeoneers to watch, comment on, and review. However, Verge’s dungeoneering skills are considered sub-par and his work is generally lambasted by the community, leading him to be quite bitter and depressed. You are free to interpret this incredibly bleak outlook as commentary on the RM community; the developer certainly does, and the irony of equating “RM Games” with “torture” isn’t lost on me for a second. But Verge is determined to improve his dungeoneering skills in order to impress his friend Daily, whom he is infatuated with. To this end he enters a torture contest (seriously) in hopes of creating the ultimate torture video and winning Daily’s heart. The aftermath of this contest will change Verge’s life forever.

This sounds familiar…



Level Design 2/5
Whoa whoa, why such a mediocre score? Just look at those lighting effects! I certainly am not going to argue that visually the game is quite impressive, but that just isn’t enough to make up for the plethora of bad design choices in this title.

From the very beginning of this short game, the atmosphere is clearly well done and the creator obviously put a lot of thought and effort into the maps. Some have a sort of pseudo 3D effect that looks pretty decent, and there are few enough maps in the game to generally maintain a proper level of detail throughout all of them. The game is full of rips, many from Streets of Rage and even Sim City, which were frowned upon by contest rules but does nothing to diminish their impact. Visually, the game is quite striking. Unfortunately it’s also just about the only good thing I have to say about it.

There are two main mechanics in the game, a sort of dialogue-tree minigame ala a dating Sim, and the torture sessions. I will cover the dating Sim part in the characters section. In the torture sessions, your “sobber” will walk along a linear path in your dungeon and your job is to lay down various types of torture tiles in this game. The game pretty much reaches into the bag of horror clichés and pulls out every single classic; chainsaws, drills, razor blades, anything that can make you bleed is here. But tormenting your victim physically is not enough, you also must damage them psychologically. To that end, you can strip them naked, (complete with a unique naked sprite for every victim in the game, really) pretend to drown them, place false doors to lure them into thinking they’re going to escape, or rape them. Yes, that’s right, you can rape people in this game! This is even accompanied by a minigame I will explain later. Causing sufficient damage to both body and mind will result in what is known as a “beautiful escape,” the ultimate goal of every session. Killing your victim is considered mediocre. Ultimately these sessions don't feel much like torture, so don't let it scare you too much, but there isn't a whole lot to do here that is very interesting, as I will explain later.

When the game begins you are sent off to your torture supply shop to pick up supplies for your next video. Here you play a dialogue tree mini-game with the owner, the responses you give him in this instance determine the traps you can use in your first torture session. (The rape option is a bonus item you can find later. Seriously.) After this sequence, I raced off to claim my first victim, only for them to walk through every single trap and escape the dungeon. Game over.

Whoa, what? How did that happen? I used every trap! I immediately redid this session, doing the dialogue tree with my supplier differently and getting a different batch of supplies. This time, when one of my traps went off, a gauge appeared in the upper corner telling me to mash 1 and 2! This caught me completely off guard and by the time I figured out what I needed to do, the victim had escaped the trap and quickly fled the dungeon, giving me another game over. Turns out with certain traps you can cause extra damage by hitting 1 and 2, but nothing ever forewarned me of this. I later found out this was mentioned in the read me, but there was no in-game explanation. In fact, nothing about the traps, the dialogue trees, the torture videos, or how they are rated is ever explained in the game. A tutorial for fist timers would have been very helpful, and even once I was familiar with the mechanics of the "1 2" minigame I was still not sure if I was doing it right and don’t know what effect it actually had, or what the gauge is actually telling me.

Frustrated, I went back to supplier for a different set of traps. I knew that this guy liked to be flattered, but no matter what combination of traps he gave me I just couldn’t succeed. I tried ten times and could not succeed on even my first victim. If I were not a judge and required to see this game through I definitely would have given up on it here. There are certain combinations of starting equipment that are flatly impossible to win with. Your only recourse is to start over. This is a very serious problem and I suspect it would drive many players to quit. Then again maybe I was just really unlucky. Ten times in a row. But I persevered and after many tries found a combination that worked. Having a high chance of rolling an unwinnable combination of traps right out of the gate really soured the game for me. Fortunately, this very serious flaw was corrected in the latest release so I no longer hold this against it.

Once past this point, all real challenge disappeared as from this point on I was given way more traps for each video than a victim could ever survive. Unless of course you don’t know that a trap can only be used once and head into a session with only three traps remaining. Another game over for you!

The only real challenge at this point is to try to execute a beautiful escape, in which only a sliver of the health and will bars remain, but this is really hard to do without being psychic. Too many traps will kill your target or drive them to despair, too few and you’ll get a game over. I suppose if you practiced you could accomplish it, but that assumes you can stand playing for that long. There is little in the way of technical skill you can use to influence this outcome, only through a great deal of repetition would you be likely to succeed in this goal. Ultimately, however, your performance in these sessions is inconsequential as long as the person doesn't get away clean.

Aside from the vague rules of the torture sessions, the game is hindered by very slow walking speed, which is a big problem here because all you do is walk between locations. There are no encounters or any obstacles to dodge, its just crawling along the maps. The maps are small enough that this isn’t a huge problem but it is especially noticeable at the fire station where you have to circle the whole map to talk to the single person to be found there.

The game also has a cool map screen, and by cool I mean it looks cool but doesn’t make any sense at all. The paths you can take to follow along the map are completely random and arbitrary and there’s no way of knowing if you can go in any given direction or not, or even what buildings can be entered at all. You basically have to press the arrow key in every direction on every tile along the way to see where you can and can’t go. Obfuscating the basic navigation mechanics of the game is just ridiculous. At least give a line or some kind of mark on the screen so I know where I can go. Or better yet, a simple choice box probably would have worked much better. Looking cool should never come before basic functionality. Fortunately, this problem has also been corrected in the latest release, so it is not nearly the blight on the game it once was.

Can you tell which directions I can go in? Because I can’t.



Characters and Story 1/5
Way back at the beginning of this review I rambled on about my misgivings about the “torture porn” genre of films. If you didn’t like that, too bad, because here I’m going to go off on a tangent about slasher films.

The reason slasher films are generally not well-received (with some notable exceptions) is a basic disconnect with the characters. In most of these films we are introduced to a group of protagonists who are, frankly, horrible, disgusting and incredibly stupid people who generally do something really, really terrible to the film’s “killer.” While the killer is set up by the film as a ruthless monster and the protagonists are meant to appeal to our sympathies, this falls apart quickly when it is revealed the “heroes” are too dumb to live and that the killer usually has a really good motive to come after them all for revenge. Is it any wonder we end up rooting for the killers in most of these movies? It’s because we don’t like these people and enjoy watching them die.

Why do I bring this up? Because this would have worked here. Assuming Verge takes the role of the killer, with his sobbers in the victim role, if Verge had been set up sympathetically or genuinely downtrodden and the various victims as generally being bad people, torturing them might actually be less repulsive (and this actually does sort of happen at the game’s climax, but by then it was far too late to salvage this game.) But this is not the case. We are given little real understanding of Verge. We are told that he tortures people in order to feel close to them, but since I’m not a goddamn lunatic I find this position impossible to identify with. A basic failure to understand human emotions is not a cause for empathy. The various victims, on the other hand, are mostly pretty nice people. One of them is a pretty young kindergarten teacher with a disabled husband. The game expects me to brutally torture and murder this woman. I would much rather murder the protagonist.

So, before you can torture any of your victims you have to seduce and lure them to your basement. You accomplish this by striking up conversations with random pedestrians. You are given a short little blurb about each character, telling you about their personality, and you must use this knowledge to get on their good side. You’ll have two gauges, a bar that measures the character’s affinity towards you, and a second gauge that does hell if I know because nothing in this game is explained. They’ll ask you various questions and you must answer based on what you know about them. I’ll admit Verge comes across as a fairly smooth operator here, but there are many times where you’ll be presented with questions where no answer is obviously right or wrong ,but you can still be penalized. Get too many wrong and the victim will leave. This obliges you to…leave the screen and come back. It’s just a hoop to jump through, and with the slow walking speed, it’s just an annoyance. With a little more work this aspect could have been made better, but ultimately it comes across as unrealistic that anyone would ever follow this psychopath home after a two minute conversation.

“I have candy.”



This is probably the biggest problem I have with this game. The game invites us to sympathize with a character that is pretty hard to like. Verge is sad, pathetic, and lonely, and his only creative outlet in life is murdering people. The game attempts to humanize, trivialize and excuse his abhorrent behavior as somehow acceptable. The problem for me at least was that I liked most of the random pedestrians more than Verge, and hence this put me in a difficult spot as a player. Maybe that was the point of the game, I'm not sure. But the ultimate object of this game is that you end up torturing likable people for online cred and to impress a girl, and that just turned me off from the whole idea. Whether there was meant to be some greater meaning behind all this is largely irrelevant, because nothing of the sort is ever truly explored in the narrative or in the characters. If the ultimate point of the game is to make me not want to play, it's possible you have succeeded at some sort of message, but you certainly don't have much of a game.

The narrative claims to be a love story, but I don’t buy that either. At least not any kind of love I can identify with so it’s hard to objectively label it as such. Add in some really weird subplot involving Verge’s long lost brother that pretty much makes no sense and isn’t given any proper explanation, and the main narrative falls apart entirely. The dialogue is okay, not great, but the only character who is at all interesting is Daily, who comes across as genuinely twisted, but in the end this just isn’t enough to overcome the other flaws in this story’s construction.

Music and Sound 3/5:
The music choice for this game was a little unusual, what with many scenes playing fairly morose lyrical songs to set the somber mood. It was a little unusual, but I didn’t hate it. The sound effects used for the various traps are appropriate and sound in general was well placed. I really have no complaints in this area.

Overall 1.5/5
Now, before everyone jumps down my throat for daring to attack someone who is trying to be new and inventive in the RM world, for striking down someone trying to break new ground, I will say this. I believe this is a genuine attempt on the part of the creator to approach this subject matter seriously and with gravity. I don’t think he necessarily failed in this respect as much as I feel like this isn’t really a subject that can be approached tastefully. I dislike torture movies but people can watch them passively, in this game you are actively inflicting the torture and this creates a strong dissonance with the player. Stalking people isn’t fun for normal people. Stripping people naked and raping them isn’t fun for normal people. Brutally murdering people in your basement isn’t fun for normal people. I don’t think it is really possible to really enjoy this game, or if it is even meant to be enjoyed, much less ever be able to admit to someone that you enjoyed it. There are some genres that can be adapted to game form, but this is not one of them.

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This review rubbed me the wrong way, and I am attempting to type this reply in part to try to understand why.

Stated as simply as possible, I feel that the polarizing, "love-it-or-hate-it", and controversial subject matter of the game caused the reviewer to focus on the negatives of the experience to such a degree that there is an irresponsible, borderline dishonest, at the very least extremely negligent failure to recognize the merits of this game. This is most apparent in the score of 1.5 stars--my intuition tells me this is an injustice.

That having been said, I need to get some confessions and disclosures out of the way and admit with humility I could be wrong, I have not yet finished the game and also I could be guilty to some degree of making the same error in the opposite direction and over-emphasizing the positives of this game's approach.

I feel that choosing subject matter that is SO taboo will trigger people to overreact, almost unavoidably, one way or the other. Part of the responsibility of a game maker or storyteller is to push some sort of boundary a little bit just to avoid boring the audience. And some storytellers who choose overly provocative subject matter ARE being lazy trying to get attention not for the effort that goes into or the ultimate value of their message but instead just for their "edginess". However, nothing about what I have seen in this game so far suggested there was anything lazy about how this game was made.

The things that impressed me the most about this game so far is that, rather than being cruel for its own sake, the game from the get-go provides the player with the ideology of the dungeoneer, giving enough detailed information about what is going on in the protagonist's (?) head that his actions can be at least understood though never condoned. There is a detailed richness to the backstory of every character you encounter that the player is invited to probe into these backstories with the same cruel intentions as the main character. If people choose not to sympathize with the main character because he pushes the evil envelope too far, that is their choice. It's impossible to evoke an unwilling suspension of disbelief from a stubborn audience. If you are playing the videogame "Rampage" and choose not to have fun because knocking down buildings as a big monster is immoral, that's your choice. Or if you choose not to play Grand Theft Auto cuz stealing cars is immoral, or if you choose not to play any videogame because a clump of pixels is too inhuman to relate to, that is the player's choice but it cannot be argued that there is not enough background in the opening scenes of this story to understand the main character's psyche and to be able to see the bizarre events of this game through the filtering lens of his twisted ideology. I invite anyone who wants to review a game fairly to at least attempt to be a willing audience, I say to you that you should suspend your disbelief and look at the events of the game through the lens of the ideology it presents to you, or else ultimately your review will have as much value as simply saying "video games are dumb cuz I don't want to relate to pixels so stay away from this game."

Much of what I am trying to say may have been said better in other comments and reviews that are out there, I did not have the time to read the dozens of other comments out on the web and on here, I mostly wanted to share my gut reaction possibly to vent after like I said earlier the review rubbed me the wrong way. If the game lacks gameplay or challenge, if the date-sim and torture sequences are closer to minigames than a deep and challenging gameplay experience, that does not disqualify a game from being great, necessarily. Since the days of "Monkey Island" some gamemakers have embraced the idea that one need not have the player in danger of "death" or "game-over" to make it a game, there are always trade-offs when you decrease the challenge and danger and focus instead on immersion and the details of the world the gamer is exploring.

Anyways, sorry I could not be bothered to be succinct and perhaps I was not even all that clear but thanks for letting me vent! :)
" But the ultimate object of this game is that you end up torturing likable people for online cred and to impress a girl,"
D...
DAILY'S A GIRL?!
Seeing HIS name in here, I'm compelled to point out that calunio is no Mr. Big T. Aside from the obvious difference in talent, I can personally tell you Mr. Big T really is sick, disgusting scumbag excuse of a human being and the fact he puts guro in his...most everything is only a natural side effect of his total disregard and apathy for basic human dignity. And this is coming from who actually LIKED Dooms 2 and 3 (albeit, in my defense, in the same way people love a good trainwreck).

...S'yeah. If anyone wants to compare calunio to anyone for making a torture game, I kindly ask they compare him to someone with more dignity and class than Mr. Big T, like Hitler or Stalin.

-Tabris
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
That wasn't really the intention, I just elaborated on some of the things people mentioned in these comments. I will clarify that.
Thanks for the update!

I've read this review times enough to notice that you changed little bits all over the text, not just the ones related to the updated game version. I get the feeling that you tried to point out more flaws to make up for the ones I corrected, or maybe send a reply to those other reviews that didn't agree with you on some points.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
I have updated this review to reflect the new changes made in the new version, as well as to reflect some of the comments made here.
Seriously, is that the only response/defense you have?

Art is art, shit is shit. I have yet to see a good argument for why this is art (I certainly have not seen one yet I, am waiting).

And no, I do not think games with tinted SimCity backdrops and failed attempts at deep plots qualify as art, sorry.
tardis
is it too late for ironhide facepalm
308
comment=32035
asinine caricatures you'd see in something like House




U MAD
Despite
When the going gets tough, go fuck yourself.
1340
OK how about we all just stop making games because we're obviously not good enough
Taking on controversial topics with mediocre writing and asinine caricatures you'd see in something like House does not make something art, I am sorry.

That said, I sort of agree with your second post, Max.
tardis
is it too late for ironhide facepalm
308
max already said everything i was going to say. :P
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
No, it's not, flimsy justifications are given for the actions, and many games don't necessarily state that they've been killed. When you "kill" a slime in an RPG, is it dead? Gory games are usually based on your "killing" being abstract or justified (self defense, etc) and leave those avenues somewhat unexplored.

Whoa whoa, Anaryu, I never assumed that those Evil Corp (TM) security guards/soldiers that my superheroines ran down in Outlaw City were anything but severely dead. And they were just doing their jobs! They didn't deserve to get ripped apart by superhuman freaks. The fact that the game did not even expect us to THINK about their fate or what we were doing to them, hiding it behind an abstraction and dehumanizing and objectifying them effortlessly, makes it WORSE.

Dungeoneer confronts you with the fact that your victims are people.

I'm afraid, even being abnormal, I still don't like this. I'm pretty desensitized to these type of things, and actually pretty heartless on the inside, but I don't feel this should of been made as a game for this site at all, or this contest. It would of been better placed in a small clique outside the site. What I can't agree on at all is the victims being regular nice people, or that you can in fact strip them naked and rape them. There's a pretty strong line between what's acceptable between torture and rape in the gaming industry.

Good thing that the gaming industry has no means to regulate Calunio's creative expression.

Something like this does make me wonder about the creator's own sanity, or the people who choose to play and enjoy it. Even if it is "fictional" there is a big difference between beating up the "bad guys" or even torturing some bastards, to torturing (and raping) random people off the street

What if the whole point of the game is that NO THERE GODDAMN ISN'T. What if the point is that all violence is wrong, and that this piece of violent entertainment ABOUT violent entertainment is an implicit critique of the lax morals of the violent entertainment we're all COMFORTABLE with? What if the point that it is not okay to do these things to people even if you can justify it by saying they "deserve" it?
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
The reason slasher films are generally not well-received (with some notable exceptions) is a basic disconnect with the characters. In most of these films we are introduced to a group of protagonists who are, frankly, horrible, disgusting and incredibly stupid people who generally do something really, really terrible to the film's “killer.” While the killer is set up by the film as a ruthless monster and the protagonists are meant to appeal to out sympathies, this falls apart quickly when it is revealed the “heroes” are too dumb to live and that the killer usually has a really good motive to come after them all for revenge. Is it any wonder we end up rooting for the killers in most of these movies? It's because we don't like these people and enjoy watching them die.

Why do I bring this up? Because this would have worked here. Assuming Verge takes the role of the killer, with his sobbers in the victim role, if Verge had been set up sympathetically or genuinely downtrodden and the various victims as generally being bad people, torturing them might actually be less repulsive (and this actually does sort of happen at the game's climax, but by then it was far too late to salvage this game.) But this is not the case. We are given little real understanding of Verge. We are told that he tortures people in order to feel close to them, but since I'm not a goddamn lunatic I find this position impossible to identify with. A basic failure to understand human emotions is not a cause for empathy. The various victims, on the other hand, are mostly pretty nice people. One of them is a pretty young kindergarten teacher with a disabled husband. The game expects me to brutally torture and murder this woman. I would much rather murder the protagonist..

You know, there are parts of this review that I completely AGREE with (that god damn world map made me want to punch calunio in the face. I even asked him to change it when I played an alpha version of the game, and he didn't.) but this is just such narrow-minded puritanical BS.

What you are saying here is you would like the game better if it was pandering, moralizing tripe and not what it is...art. (Sometimes art is art BECAUSE it makes you uncomfortable.)

Solitayre, moral guardian of RMN, is missing the point here.

I don't think he necessarily failed in this respect as much as I feel like this isn't really a subject that can be approached tastefully. I dislike torture movies but people can watch them passively, in this game you are actively inflicting the torture and this creates a strong dissonance with the player. Stalking people isn't fun for normal people. Stripping people naked and raping them isn't fun for normal people. Brutally murdering people in your basement isn't fun for normal people. I don't think it is really possible to really enjoy this game, or if it is even meant to be enjoyed, much less ever be able to admit to someone that you enjoyed it. There are some genres that can be adapted to game form, but this is not one of them.

Art isn't always meant to be fun, you're thinking of entertainment. And games are not always relegated to being mere entertainment.
I think all of Sol's points are extremely valid, and he justifies his opinion very well. I'm going to try to explain my point of view of this game, which I find rather enjoyable myself:

I feel the premise of this game has more in common with Silence of the Lambs than Saw/Hostel. Instead of a morality battle between the righteous and the criminal, it focuses more on an alternate perspective on morality itself, by investigating the reasonings of Verge (or Hannibal Lecter in the films).

To be honest, I've never watched any of the Saw flicks, or Hostel, cause I'm scared as hell of them, and cannot understand why people found those enjoyable. Although I initially related those films to the game, I later found them to be pretty different - Saw/Hostel focused on the victims (hence the torture porn), while Dungeoneer focused on the perpetrator. The torture sessions felt more like a mini-game rather than the point of the whole game (they made up about an eighth of the playtime).

The odd perspective Verge (and the other dungeoneers I'm sure) had of the world intrigued me, a lot. Especially when he was talking about having a crush on his teacher, then finally killing her because he wanted an irreplaceable role in her life. It reminded me of another story I heard before, supposedly from a test given to ascertain criminal insanity:

Maria was at her father's funeral when she and her younger sister both met and fell in love with a dashing young man that arrived to pay his respects to their dead father. He seemed equally attracted to both of them, but never left his number. Shortly after the funeral, Maria killed her sister. What was the reason for this?

Criminally insane answer: She wanted to see the the young man again at her sister's funeral.


This little story both chilled me to the bone and made me extremely interested at the same time. There were people like this? Why? What was their perception of the world and why was it so different from ours? I got the same vibes from Dungeoneer, which made me very excited about it.

Although the game offered very minimal "gameplay" per se, I felt the interactive portions of the title, when delivered in the context of the narrative, were enjoyable due to the motivation provided by the story. I was making videos for favorable ratings by a community who appreciated them - it allowed me to momentarily participate in Verge's life and see what makes him tick. I shared his sense of victory when I achieved that 4 star beautiful escape, which disturbed me a little, but allowed me to emphasize with him.

I've played my share of violent video games, but none that made me worried about myself. I like this, am I sick? Do I like torturing people? I thought of what my brother told me about Saw and Hostel and promptly shivered with fright, so probably no. (Yeah, I'm such a wimp I had to hear the synopsis from my little brother because I was afraid the internet summaries will come with pictures EEK!) I find this game pleasurable because it offered me a queer experience, and the atmosphere Calunio created around the game was just terrific - it felt like the same world I lived it, yet it seemed... stranger, and more uncomfortable.
DE
*click to edit*
1313
What can I say, I like penetrating sprites :)
I'm hesitant to play this as I played Dooms 1 and 2 and was deeply disturbed by those, so I know it can be accomplished using rm2k. Although I think we're all pretty sure calunio is sane, while MISTER BIG T is most likely a bit psychotic. Nevertheless, I think the whole raping thing in in rm game is a little out of my range of 'fun' .
I'm hesitant to play this as I played Dooms 1 and 2 and was deeply disturbed by those, so I know it can be accomplished using rm2k. Although I think we're all pretty sure calunio is sane, while MISTER BIG T is most likely a bit psychotic. Nevertheless, I think the whole raping thing in in rm game is a little out of my range of 'fun' .
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