Mystery Falls - Director's Cut

Name: Mystery Falls - Director's Cut

Developer: RichterW

:::BE YE WARNED, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS:::

Story: A hard-boiled detective story oddly reminiscent of a certain movie...

You play Dave Parker, an FBI Agent exploring Mystery Falls searching for clues about the mysterious disappearance of a young girl. The more you investigate, the stranger the case gets until you're wondering just what kind of place this is.



Writing: I'm sure it's fine in Portuguese, but here, the grammar and syntax is very broken. Anyhoo, the story is pretty common. SUPER MEGA SPOILERS HERE, SO I'VE MADE THE FONT TRANSPARENT. Girl disappears. Cop looks for girl. Cop talks to a bunch of people that don't know anything. Cop discovers secret cult in the woods. Cop battles zombies. Cop gets abducted by aliens. Cop becomes a Sith Lord and destroys all life. OKAY. IT'S SAFE NOW. Pretty standard stuff. All in all, with the all the references here and how the story ends up going, I'd say this is basically Twin Peaks meets the Simpsons/Family Guy/Pick your chosen subversive parody. Why I say that is because of the odd things like, the mascot of the local pizza parlor is an Illuminati triangle, except a pizza slice, or the fact that you can pass numerous dead bodies and just not give a shit no matter how hard you try. See the above screen cap. That's literally just the tiles. There's no indication he sees dismembered corpses and he never brings it up. The missing girl's mother is still at work like nobody's business. Dave even quips that after he's done searching for her missing, possibly dead-somewhere-in-the-woods daughter, he hopes he can make back in time for a bite to eat. For that reason, I'm leaning towards "parody".

I have to say that the writing was especially disappointing because there are so many interesting ideas here that never get explored. When I got to the cabin in the woods and the flash of light behind it, I went exploring and found that object that sent you where you needed to be. The way that bizarro scene was presented, I expected the story and game to really begin and the interesting stuff start to happen, because at this point, you've only asked a few questions around town and you've only just come to the first really intriguing part of the story. Instead, the game fast-tracks you to a pick-your-adventure style, three choice ending that's really a two choice ending. Neither of these choices satisfy the player because A) One just tells you that nothing you did matters and condemns you to being a loser for the rest of your life, and B) The other is a cheap joke played for laughs. Maybe there's a message in both of these, but in reality, they just feel like a cheap way out for a dev that got bored with the project.

I think ending A) could have been really good and it really seemed to be the most in keeping with the kind of stories that David Lynch tells. It's just that you're railroaded to this ending so unceremoniously with no effort to elaborate on interesting themes that the game has successfully developed, that it just feels like a fake out, and you're asking, "Okay, so where's the game?" You know, now that I think about it, it kind of actually is like a David Lynch movie in that regard. The thing is, Lynch didn't skip the story because he was impatient to tell us that it didn't really matter, anyway. It's just the story gets really good and then doesn't bother to follow through. It just throws you into the ending without any buildup and with thoroughly incomplete development.

Giving it even further thought, both endings actually work if you take the game as parody. I still just wish the developer had chosen to elaborate on the more fascinating themes that s/he developed.



Gameplay: Quite good. It's mostly an exploration game where you advance the story by questioning NPCs. A very interesting story develops here, but the second act gives way to a zombie shooter. All in all, this is paced very well. A story telling sequence is followed by a brief action sequence and as disparate as the two methods of gameplay are, they don't feel out of place. The zombie shooter really feels like the next logical step, because now, we're really getting into the substance of the story and this is the mystery. The interesting mystery that you never get acquainted with. The town is large, realistically so, with a residential area, a business area, slums, police department, hospital, supermarket, bar, gas station, church, a museum, and it is surrounded by plenty of woods. You get a car with which you can explore this area. The game follows a reasonable semblance of traffic rules. Stay on the right side of the road, and you'll be fine. Drive on the left and expect to get into an accident. There are plenty of obstacles in the road, too, such as fishermen, mothers walking babies, deer, cats and dogs, and other such obstacles. You can't wreck with these, thankfully, but even out of your car, you can wreck with other cars. If this happens, you simply need to find a vending machine.



Graphics: You can really tell a lot of heart went into this game when you see the graphics. I'm pretty sure they're entirely custom. Looking at the screenshots, this game creates an entire world that's just very interesting to explore.

Music: I didn't pay much attention to specifics here. There are a number of jazzy type pieces that I'm pretty sure I've heard on the Incompetech website. Don't quote me on that, though. They do a very good job of setting the mood of the game. Hard-boiled detective type music with copious plucked bass, or alternatively, dirty saxes.

Conclusion: The game is worth a look. Good for exploration, just to see what kind of world you're inhabiting. It starts out as a good little detective story. Just be ready for the narrative to jump off a cliff. This game came sooooooo close to getting a high star rating from me.