Where's my Mom?

After I played the recent demo of The Book of Paradoxia Whispers, that painfully slow and boring “adaptation” of a Neverending Story rip-off, I had very little reason to expect that this earlier work by the same developer would be any good. Still, I knew for a fact this was short, and decided I might as well play through it quickly. Yet, the game managed to somehow plunge beneath even my already low expectations. Rather then being merely underwhelming or even conventionally bad, this is quite clearly one of the worst games ever put onto RMN.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



VX Ace RTP, of course. Why would you expect anything else? The mapping by itself is not the worst: definitely not ideal, but still likely the best thing in the game. (It would've been really ironic if the self-professed "City Mayor Games" couldn't even make a city map like above.) The one thing that’s probably not RTP are the font effects used in the cutscenes, which have the letters sort of flow in, and then wobble out, as well as these lightning strike effects, which are a part of a single cutscene animation going on for 20 seconds or so and appear twice in the game.



Lastly, there’s also a horrible farm where all the sheep + a horse are seemingly frozen in place, and don’t move, even though nothing unusual happened to them and they are clearly alive: the creator was just too lazy to animate any of them.

Storyline



Just like The Book of Paradoxia Whispers, the game surprises even before it starts, with a vainglorious install screen (Paradoxia Whispers' one had an actual rendering of an open Bible on it, even though the game had nothing to do with religion). Afterwards, we get the premise immediately said to us in a complete violation of “show, not tell”, as we are also unsubtly shown the controls and such (just like how Paradoxia Whispers did it).



Then, we get the aforementioned lightning strike cutscene, complete with annoying whispering over it, and the “Wake up, etc.” writing in the wobbly font. Then, we are again shown the name of the developer and of the game, as animated text on black background goes “City Mayor Games / Proudly Presents / Where’s My Mom?” and then, this screen is shown to us for no reason.



Once the game finally decides it’s done with the introductions, it tells you to search around the house for mom’s letter. That’s another thing about the game: it has an insane propensity to handhold, not only duplicating the information about Oliver’s goals that he already says through dialogue via “Objective” messages, but also regularly butting in with obtrusive suggestions to save from Oliver’s imaginary friend Grisabella. Yet, the main reason why you would need to save is often the game’s own eventing, which is truly the worst I’ve seen. Right as you start the game, if you’re unlucky enough to move Oliver backwards from his starting position, then the entire opening is all repeated AGAIN, because the event that triggered it was clearly a contact one, and it wasn’t removed at all.

The same problem of contact-based narrative events not disappearing after they did their job was also present in The Book of Paradoxia Whispers and Fishermen and the Worm, though it wasn’t as extreme in either of those. Here, that problem literally never ends. Pretty much every single time Oliver stops to say a line or engage in conversation as you were walking? Prepare for that line to be repeated again if you pass over that same square, even if it's in the doorway of a house and you basically must do so. It even restarts a whole cutscene again later on due to this, and triggering a final boss battle is extremely difficult because of the ridiculous eventing too. I had to consult “thesacredlobo’s” 2015 LP of it to do so. (Basically, you have to walk into a specific square near the boss while also pressing the interact button.) Why sacred couldn’t follow up his LP with a review is beyond me. Perhaps, he assumed the developer might yet fix all these bugs, even though the game was already up for two years by that point. Either way, it’ll be another two years since his LP soon, and absolutely nothing in the game had changed.

Now, sometimes a game can have reasonably interesting writing in spite of such bugs. Fishermen and the Worm certainly had an unusual narrative with a few strong points (even if it was also tonally inconsistent as all hell and had plenty of horrible ones, too), which helped one persist past the similar bugs it had. However, the content in this game very much matches the execution, with zero depth of anything and horrible flat lines from pretty much everybody. “I’m here to save my mother and kill your master!” said by Oliver to the skeleton guarding Ghoul’s castle is actually one of the better ones, for instance. It’s certainly not as bad as when he briefly thinks his mother is dead and freaks out unconvincingly, before seemingly forgetting all about it as he flatly chats with a girl next door. Or indeed, the time when a farmer asks Oliver to find his horse before he helps you, then literally tells you where to look for it, which is on the same map. There are more then a few typos, too, but let’s be honest, they don’t matter much relative to everything else, and it’s not like they’ll ever be fixed anyway.

Gameplay

It's not present in the game besides combat, and there was zero thought put into it as well. I suspect that they just went with all the default attributes and values for both Oliver (who actually has his class listed as “Soldier” in spite of obviously being a child, the “creator” not even bothering to change that line to something else) and the enemies. It would certainly help explain how the first battle in the game against the aforementioned skeleton is probably the most difficult one. You don’t have any skills or items, and while he doesn’t have them either, he does have that default Blind chance, as well as dealing more damage then you do. It’s thus very much possible that he can kill you, and winning that battle is purely a matter of luck (being strategic, like trying to guard when Oliver is blinded, doesn’t help, because Skeleton acts faster then you do, and so can blind you again just as you start to attack after spending the previous few turns recovering from the earlier Blind.)



And even though the skeleton’s dialogue literally says “YOU SHALL NOT PASS”, he won’t attack you on his own and so it’s totally possible to walk behind him, as the screenshot above shows. However, you can’t enter the castle if you do that, and so you must walk up to him and interact in order to start the fight, which is also the case for every enemy in the game. However, I decided I had enough of this after that fight, and chose to just try running up towards the final boss, pausing only to pick the treasure chests right in front of the enemies. It worked, and while getting the boss to actually fight you is a challenge because of that eventing, the actual battle is much easier then the skeleton one, since I defeated him on the first try and didn't die once. I suppose I might've gotten lucky there, since he had multiple actions per turn, but wasted most of them on several no-damage Confusion Songs in a row and such. Most of his damage-dealing abilities are actually weaker then the Skeleton's regular attack, too, dealing 20 or so damage, to Skeleton's 30-50. The one exception, Nuclear, takes away ~300 HP, which is close to half your health, but again, he only did this once, and died after my 4th-5th attack, while Skeleton lasted a bit longer.

Conclusion

I’m honestly not even sure how this game got accepted on RMN in this state. I suppose none of its bugs crash the game outright, but they feel truly extreme regardless. Moreover, there’s literally nothing else special or worthwhile in the game besides them.