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A good fantasy adventure game, but not a horror game.

  • Gretgor
  • 02/04/2018 12:04 AM
  • 3166 views
When I first played through Ib, getting every available ending and exploring every inch of its bizarre world, it kept me wanting more. Something about its charming, slightly spooky atmosphere really drew me in, and I was kinda bummed when I ran out of things to do in the game.

Several months later, I lay my eyes on this game called Aria's Story in RMN, and get immediately interested. The short demo that was released a few years ago got me really excited, and I followed the project ever since. The characters, the setting and the theme were all adorable, and I eagerly awaited the release of the full version. After the translation took well over a year to be finished, the game was made available at last, and I was really excited to finally lay my hands on this adorable little piece of atmospheric adventure. When I sat down to play it, it was a good experience. Not as impactful or as lasting as Ib, but definitely a well put together and enjoyable game.

However, I feel like this game lacks focus. It's like it can't decide if it wants to be an upbeat fantasy adventure, or a dark horror adventure. For a game that advertises itself as "horror", it had me smiling way more than it scared me.

Complaints aside, I really enjoyed this game, and it managed to get a special place in my heart.

PRESENTATION

The first few things you'll notice upon loading up the game for the first time are the cute tilesets, the adorable manga-style character arts, and a relaxing song evoking the feeling of being at a library in the middle of a peaceful forest full of bunnies, where Aria's every footstep makes a gentle tapping sound. I fell in love with cute little Aria from the get go, as she's a real sweetheart, and everyone at the library seems to share this feeling with me. The game never fails to evoke an air of wonder and adorableness, and it warmed my heart. The same can't be said about its attempts to do horror, unfortunately.

A good adventure with bad horror


The game never really manages to build up a tense and scary atmosphere. The songs tend to be way more upbeat than they'd have to be in order to manage that, and there's never a strong buildup of fear and uncertainty that's characteristic of good horror. I mean, I can notice that it tries, with creepy enemies flashing in and out of sight in some situations, and eerie things happening all around like statues mysteriously moving and a few jumpscares, but it falls short of its attempts due to its failure to build an atmosphere of isolation, unsafety and tension.

Notice how in Ib, from which this game takes a lot of inspiration, the tension is built up for the beginning of Ib's journey, and her entry into the supernatural gallery: the music suddenly stops, the lights go out, you hear no sound at all at first, until weird things like strange figures banging on windows and red paint dripping on certain places suddenly break the silence, and then you enter the supernatural gallery itself. The music is perfectly tense: slow-paced, no percussion, and a dark and mysterious melody. You feel alone and isolated as you walk down a corridor, pick up a flower, and learn the sinister connection it has to your life in this strange world. Arms sprout out of the walls with a creepy roar and attempt to grab you. A strange statue comes to life and chases you, as an even more sinister song plays.

Aria's Story attempts to emulate this for the first part of the game, but ends up failing. It starts out pretty promising: the library goes dark, nobody else is around, and you have to find a way out. The cute library song changes into a more mysterious and foreboding piece. The painting at the library's entrance is decidedly more disturbing than before, and the front door is locked. You get the librarian's key, and some books start falling over as though they had been pushed by something unseen. The key you just got can't open the front door, which makes us even more tense. A note, saying "PLAY WITH ME ARIA" in capital red letters shows up with an audible 'thud' sound, as though it had been slapped into the wall by an invisible force. Strange bloody footsteps leading to the side of a bookshelf appear. Aria moves it and discovers a door leading to a secret chamber with a stone floor and walls. A strange laughing voice behind a large wooden door asks for a password. Returning to the room you dozed off in reveals a strange riddle, which in turn reveals the password. As you turn back to leave, a creepy ghost rabbit appears behind you, which leads to a death event if you turn back.

Then you go back to the large door to say the password, and the atmosphere is broken almost instantly. At first it's okay, you are in this strange (but completely safe) corridor full of bookshelves, and you solve a small puzzle. After that puzzle, you reveal a friendly, talking book NPC, which then commands a ton of friendly books to improvise a staircase for you. At the top of said staircase, you meet yet another friendly NPC, a very nice narrator, completely dropping the atosphere of isolation and unsafety, which the game never bothers picking back up. The attempt to retain the dark atmosphere by giving the narrator a creepy theme song doesn't help.

After that, the game's attempts at horror comprise of small things like tiny jumpscares, a few creepy enemies flashing in and out of sight occasionally, and a few places with slightly scarier music than usual on some occasions. Those things are, unfortunately, too wide spread and too inconsistent to effectively build up tension. Most of the game's maps are full of friendly NPCs and have a background song that fails to evoke fear and isolation due to how "busy" and full of life they sound, which further impair any attempt to make things scary.
Upon realizing the fourth chapter's name was Horror, I was hoping the game would pick up on the horror and tension, but it didn't. The whole chapter just looks like a library decorated for Halloween, and it doesn't play out very different from the previous chapters.


Now, that's not to say the game isn't a delight to play and experience. While the game fails in the horror side of things, it still manages to deliver a very endearing atmosphere of wonder and fantasy, which makes for a really cute and interesting world to explore. I particularly adore how many bookshelves contain real books, with their names and authors, and you sometimes actually have to use this knowledge in the game. It's basically teaching us literature without being boring!

There could be more animations

Okay, this may be a minor nitpick of mine, but it annoys me how whenever something meaningful is about to change in the scenery, the screen fades to black instead of showing us what is going on. It'd have been delightful to see the books fly out of the shelves and assemble into a staircase, for instance, but alas, all we get is a fade out and a fade in. I understand that it's really annoying to animate all these little things, but I'd have loved if at least some of those scenery-changing situations had an actual cutscene to display them.

STORY

I didn't expect it at first, but this game has a nice and original story (to my knowledge). The beginning of the game made me expect a mere rehash of the story we had already seen in Ib, but I was glad to be proven wrong as it all unfolded. Throughout the game, Aria explores this bizarre supernatural library, learning more about its mysteries, its purpose and her place in the grand scheme of things. Alongside her there's a couple of interesting characters with their own motives and objectives to discover. Aria herself is an adorable, nice and intelligent little girl that treats everyone around her in the sweetest, kindest way possible, and I basically want to hug her all the time.

The game does a decent job at foreshadowing and keeping a mysterious tone, and the story overall is pretty good. Depending on which ending you get, many of this mysteries are likely to remain mysteries, which adds some replay value, as you'd need to go through the game again to see the other endings.

Some interactions between characters are legitimately adorable and put a smile on my face from ear to ear. For instance, that one scene where...
Aria tells a bad joke, everyone applauds, and she reacts adorably.
And there are more where that one came from, take my word for it.

Overall, the story is good, and worth going through. It manages to strike some very sad and heart warming notes here and there, which is nice. It's not ground breaking or life-changing, though, and it does feel a little bit cheesy at times, but it's still good.

GAMEPLAY

Aria's Story, appropriately enough, is a graphic adventure, involving the usage of items to solve puzzles and open paths, with puzzles that are overall pretty nice. Most of them involve simply getting an item and using it at the right place, which makes for a pretty satisfying feeling when you finally obtain something that you can use in a place you previously encountered and could do nothing about. Some other puzzles involve block pushing, which are mostly alright, some involve riddles, which are also alright, and some involve logic, like...
the one with the clown dolls pointing signs at each other, which I really liked.
The puzzles are mostly easy enough to go through in a few minutes, but not so easy that it becomes insulting, striking a good balance that I enjoy a lot. There are, however, some parts where I got stuck, and those frustrated me a lot. Usually, those parts involved finding out that I could interact with certain items that looked like mere decoration, and they kind of angered me a little bit. Thankfully, there's a handy guide the player can consult at any time on the game's Tumblr page.

One thing I really like in this game, and which it does better than Ib itself, is that you actually need to use items instead of simply interacting with an event and have the right item be used for you. It feels more legitimate this way, even if it doesn't change gameplay all that much.

Cheap deaths all around

Like Ib before it, this game includes the possibility to get hurt, and that's one of its weak points in my opinion. Unlike Ib, you only have one hit point, meaning that, if you encounter a trap, you'll die. It kinda reminds me of The Witch's House in this sense. Dying in one hit wouldn't be a big problem if the deaths weren't cheap as heck. Most deaths happen in situations where you couldn't possibly see them coming or have enough time to react unless you've already experienced them. If you forgot to save before encountering such traps, you'll have to spend a long time redoing things you've already done, which made me developed a compulsive habit of saving whenever I see a blue feather, even if I haven't accomplished anything since the last save.

That's not to say all deaths are cheap, though. Some of them make sense, and made me feel stupid for not preventing them, and there's one in particular that made me laugh out loud due to how clever and well executed it was.
I'm talking about the Goldilocks themed one. You know, the one with the damn bears that I should have seen coming.


Overall, the gameplay is pretty nice. It's a well executed graphic adventure with some great moments. The cheap deaths hold it back a little bit, but not enough to ruin the experience.

FINAL WORDS

Aria's Story is a good game which delivers many great things, but fails to deliver the horror it promises. The inspiration this game takes from classics like Ib and The Witch's House is clear from the start, but it still manages to do its own thing instead of limiting itself to the role of a "fangame".

What this game boils down to is an adorable, interesting and sweet fantasy adventure game with a very thin layer of horror that's not thick enough to scare. It does, however, manage to keep the player invested in the experience all the way, with its lovable and kind main character and cute fairytale atmosphere.

I highly recommend this to graphic adventure fans, but not so much to horror fans.

Posts

Pages: 1
Gretgor
Having gotten my first 4/5, I must now work hard to obtain... my second 4/5.
3420
God dammit, I only now noticed the sheer amount of glaring grammar mistakeas I overlooked when posting this review! D: Now I can't edit it anymore :'(
author=Gretgor
God dammit, I only now noticed the sheer amount of glaring grammar mistakeas I overlooked when posting this review! D: Now I can't edit it anymore :'(

I think you can edit it if you go to your submissions page and click on your review's "edit" button.
Sounds about right, the tone of the entire game was very similar to the first arc of pocket mirror.
Frogge
I wanna marry ALL the boys!! And Donna is a meanc
18536
author=bicfarmer
Sounds about right, the tone of the entire game was very similar to the first arc of pocket mirror.


It was very similar to the entirety of pocket mirror.

The sun and moon bits from the third chapter in particular reminded me a lot of Harpae's library.
Gretgor
Having gotten my first 4/5, I must now work hard to obtain... my second 4/5.
3420
Having now gotten the true ending, I can assure you all it's worthwhile.
Pages: 1