DEAD MAN

Introduction

Dead Man was an entry in RPG Maker.net's 5th Anniversary contest whose theme was bad adaptions of books, movies, TV shows, and etcetera. The only caveat was that the game couldn't be a bad adaption of a video game and that the developers only had five hours to complete their projects. And as you can imagine that time limit seriously hampered anyone's ability to make a quality title. As such you can expect Dead Man to be a mess.

Story

Dead Man is meant to be an adaption of the 1995 movie by the same name. Of course, like many of the entries that were submitted to that contest I'm not familiar with the source material. As such I can't judge just how bad an adaption of the original work this game is, but considering it turns a two hour movie into a two minute game. I'm going to assume that it definitely qualifies as a bad adaption. It also doesn't help that I can't really read any of the dialogue in this game which is presented in the form of poetry.

Gameplay

Dead Man has very little going for it in terms of gameplay. All you can do is interact with a few objects and people and the amount of options you have for meaningful interaction is two. You can either shoot the object or person you are interacting with or you can recite poetry to said person or object. Of course, the shoot option is a bit bugged when you shoot story relevant characters. Instead of giving you a game over the game allows you to continue to wander around, but since you killed a story significant character you'll be unable to advance through the game and thus finish it. So, if you kill a story relevant character you'll basically be trapped in whatever area you are in and will need to manually return to the title screen or get yourself killed as the case may be.

Graphics

On the graphical side of things the game is rather weak in my opinion. To start with I'm of two minds about the game being in black and white. On one hand this design aesthetic gives the game a unique feel and helps to differentiate this title from other games that utilize your standard color palette. On the other hand this look also makes the game feel highly antiquated.

Moving on though, I'm not of two minds about the character models in this game. While I find the simplistic design of the main character to be sort of cute in an odd sort of way. I find that the game hurts itself by not being consistent when it comes to the design of its human characters. While the bulk of the human characters are represented by the sprites of monsters. A few of the human characters still clearly have human sprites.

I guess one could argue that this decision was motivated by the theme of the contest. Since this inconsistency definitely adds to the "bad" part of bad adaption, but I'd argue that changing all of the human characters into dinosaurs would have still been just as effective in this regard and would have made the game feel less sloppy in its approach.

And on a final note this game contains a noticeable graphical glitch. This glitch is activated by telling your compatriot near the end of the game that you didn't kill the man who shot you.

Sound

On the sound side of things the game only contains two soundtracks that play in the background and a loud sound effect that plays whenever you or someone else discharges a round from their firearm. Oddly enough the sound off a bullet being forcefully discharged from the chamber of a deadly weapon is probably the most memorable aspect of this game.

The soundtrack on the other hand is split between a rather generic song that attempts to give this short title the feel of a proper western and a song that tries to invoke a sad mood at the fact that the main character is dying. The sad song in my opinion doesn't really work though. The game is just way too short for me to get attached to the main character so his death doesn't mean anything to me.

Conclusion

Dead Man is a difficult game to judge in my opinion. The lack of time the developer had to work on this project practically guaranteed that this game would suck, but things are only compounded by the fact that this game is so short that its near impossible to get a feel for it. As such I'd only recommend this game to those looking for a rather short experience that doesn't leave a lasting impression.