The Lantern Game

In these hard economic times, finding a source of income ain't easy. Jobs are hard to come by, and those that do tend to not pay well, or don't pay to your skill level or degree of competence. Some have to resort to help from family if possible, the limited help that charities offer, and government welfare programs that the fat cats want to cut more and more of so they can get fatter and fatter til they explode into a Mr. Creosote of a second economic crash and I should end here before I get a coronary over this. So you find yourself deciding to look for money (currency unspecified - I'm going with either bottle caps or GIL) another way, a decidedly more unconventional way - by gathering said money strewn about a dark cave haunted by ghosts who subsist off of human bones - that's a new one.

Now, it's important to note that this is my first review of a game I have not completed. As such, I really feel in no position to give it a score. At best, it would be around a solid three. But the never-ending frustrations it throws at your face make me hate it more and more with every time I die and am forced to restart. Those times I want to give it something like, er, a 1.5. But having not completed the process I can't find my real feelings, the true center of the matter. So why am I reviewing it anyway? Because the moment you collect any coins to the point a ghost kills you, you've experienced everything there is to know about this game. No, really, the game takes place entirely on one map, of semi-decent size, and you're to collect exactly 300 of these "moneys," dodge ghosts and then head back to the entrance for your departure and no doubt amazing(?) ending.

Immediately you'll notice this is another game with a kind of pseudo-retro style, with your character rendered with no more complexity than a figure on a man's or woman's bathroom sign, and no other colors besides black and white, with black being the predominant color. I'd place the style akin to something on a home gaming system or computer in the early/mid-80s though they probably wouldn't be able to run it as fast as this game runs with the same lighting effects this has and certainly couldn't play its background sound of some looping ghostly cave winds or whatever it is. Mechanics are just as simple. You hit the spacebar to get into the game and use the arrow keys to move around and that's it, though you can also move diagonally which is a nice touch, and very much a necessity in a game with as cruel an enemy as it as. So what do you do, why, you wander around a vaguely labyrinthine cave of some sort and collect coins, the goal being to get the 300 marker (the number of coins) down to zero, and getting your full set of cash and then heading back for the exit/entrance.

So you go about your merry coin-collecting ways when suddenly with the speed of a sniper's bullet something flies at you. Your bones have just been eaten by a ghost! (again, a new one to me) Yeah, so you see, the challenge of the game is to collect all the coins around this cave without getting caught by a ghost. There are a number of problems with this which I'll get to in a bit, but the good side of all of this is that unlike what you'd expect from a game about wandering around caves finding treasure and fending off permadeath nothing here is randomly generated. Same map, same coin and ghost locations, same irritation, every time. They don't come at you just out of nowhere, either, but only when you approach them within your field of view, which is that of a large circle of light from your lantern (oh yeah, forget to mention that - you carry a lantern - the game's title may or may not have clued you in on that already). If you want all 300 coins you can avoid some ghosts altogether but a good number of them you have to lure out and then return. So, you bait them with your lantern, run away like hell, and try to circle around and back if you can, because they'll continue to follow the direction you were just moving away from. And eventually they... disappear? I guess? Well one more load off your back, so you then can go ahead and steal the treasure trove of coins they were protecting from you (or in some cases, just one coin - yeah they can be petty like that).

I mentioned permadeath. Yeah, you have to do all this in one try. Which seems fair enough, this can't really be considered a long game by any stretch of the imagination, and theoretically could be finished in less than half an hour, or even ten minutes if you're actually good at this (and less than that if you're one of those speed-runner types - don't YOU give me that smirk just because you could run around this game in like three minutes!). So naturally without the ghosts and the scent of impending death and much lost progress around the corner there wouldn't be much of a game here. But goddamn, every setback continues to wear and wear on you until you just are sick of playing it. Despite being a fairly nonlinear map, in that you can approach different areas from different directions and figure out which ghost-luring angle works best for you, you of course always start at the beginning having to redo everything once a mistake has been made. And there are only so many strategies you can use before you realize no one is a guaranteed winner.

If I felt there was some consistency or balance in its difficulty maybe I'd be more accepting of it, but as I said I was going to mention earlier, there is something screwy with the ghost A.I. and also the inconvenience of playing this with arrow keys at certain points. Eventually you figure out you're to inch your way to a ghost and the moment they spot you you instantly move away from them and around and that's it for them. If you get too close to them you'll probably get engaged in a manic Tom and Jerry-style chase with the roles reversed, and it's only through the power of changing directions and diagonal movement (which I mentioned earlier) can you get away. Then you move around somewhere and back and they should disappear. But ghosts don't seem to react the same way every time. I've gotten a mere smidgen of their face and they instantly launched like a cruise missile at me, killing me. Yes, sometimes they move at such speeds you either have no time to react or are incapable of out-running them at all. Worst of all, a ghost that you pretty sure you out-ran suddenly decides to not disappear and kill you anyway. The idea is to move far away enough and in a different enough direction and then come back but on a few occasions that wasn't the case. Oh and the many deaths gotten from the ghost chasing and cornering me, or me running away from one ghost and into another ghost. Not a technical problem there, but goes to show how easy it is to feel like you're making progress only for it to be thwarted by such a seemingly slight error of calculation.

And the controls. No there is nothing wrong with the controls, they functional perfectly well. But I am not so sure they work so well with some situations in this game. Like, you move up to a ghost on the ceiling, they spot you, and moving your finger to go downward if they start running at you at Ludicrous Speed is just not very intuitive with keyboard keys. I don't know how well this would play with a control pad or joystick, maybe it would fare better there where instant changes in direction (and use of diagonal direction) would be easier.

But it doesn't the fact that in this big space of treasure and danger, one slight misstep will undo ALL of your progress and everything will restart the same way every time, and after dying at least a couple dozen times I'm putting this one away for a while now. If I ever do play it and complete it I will finalize it with a score proper but these general impressions I have will likely not change, as there are no other aspects of the game where it deviates from its central premise and the experience is pretty homogeneous with victory being more an act of persistence than anything.

The one amusing aspect of the game is its different endings, ten to be exact (I have only witnessed three of them so far sadly). Wait, you might ask, how do you fit ten endings in a game as simply designed as this? Well my hypothetical inquirer it's all about money money money MO-NAY. How much you collect before you exit will determine which text message you get. You exit the moment you start without collecting a dime and you die a penniless, cowardly beggar. One step up you buy yourself some dinner. The best I got was the next step up, where I got to pay off my groceries for the month. The best I made before I got killed (in which case the only message you get is that your lantern goes and ghosts ate your bones - does that count as one of the endings?) was $1800. What would that have gotten me? A month's of dental coverage? If there's any incentive to going through any of this it'd probably be to see what ending a certain amount of money gets you. I have no idea what the ultimate ending is but seeing how you're risking it all in a dark cave filled with ravenous ghosts for what amounts to... wait, how much was each coin worth again? $10 I think. So that would be... what, you're doing all this for $3000? That won't even pay for a year's rent! Unless you have a decent-paying job on the side, this seems pathetically low for all you're put through. And it doesn't sound like you're doing so well according to the messages since the messages indicate this cave is your sole source of income, which gives the game a rather sad background story in a way. Or maybe you owe a lot to some drug dealer, one who's probably even scarier than any number of bone-munching ghosts ever could be. Who knows, I'll probably never know, since I've not seen this end and probably never will. :(

One thing I haven't brought up is the potential problem of even navigating the map and knowing where the hell you are, where the coins and especially the ghosts are. At least you'd think that should be a major thing to bring up in a game like this. Well the game's creator seemed to have thought way ahead of you and so included the ENTIRE map of the game with it, including indicators for where all of the coins AND ghosts are, which is very handy to have. Personally I don't know if I'd find the game even as playable as it is without it by my side. Though because the ghosts in their lo-res glory can easily be mistaken for coins when viewed from a distance I decided to mark them all in red with MS Paint to make it easier on me for navigational purposes. And even with that the game is still a pain in the ass to play. Well, all I can say is, there has to be SOMEONE out there who can or perhaps has finished this. No reviews, barely any comments, not that many downloads, and... I haven't looked on YouTube, don't know if someone's beaten the game there or not.

So, here I sit, offering a most grand proposition to ye rpgmaker.net netizens: are YOU a bad enough dude to complete this game? Whether it's a matter of skill, patience, luck or a bit of all three, do you have what it takes to not get your bones eat up by a ghost? Maybe this would be the one situation where having fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva would be advantageous, since for every bone eaten another would just regenerate, like a lizard's tail, or Wolverine's adamantium whatevers! Is that how it works? I'm not a medical expert.

If you download this game you shouldn't need a map as it already comes with one. But to save you time and if it makes things a little easier I marked down certain important spots. So if you bother to play this game, good luck! And maybe good luck to me too, if I decide to ever pick this game up and play it again...