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Great questions, terrible answers.

  • Pancaek
  • 07/11/2016 03:03 AM
  • 1029 views
For this review, I'm going to try and make it as spoiler free as possible. If I do mention a spoiler, I'll put up a warning first. I'm also not going to waste time with a summery. If you want a summery, you can read the one given by the actual game post.

Writing: 4/5
There's not much dialog in the game as far as characters talking, which is perfectly fine. It doesn't need it, and if it did have it it would probably just slow down the pacing of the game. The main bulk of the dialog comes in little notes you find around the school, in which you read to learn the backstory about turtle head. They're pretty well written, and pretty interesting. I'll talk about that more later.

Gameplay: 2/5
There's a lot of backtracking in this game. Like, a lot. Pretty much the whole game is going back and forth between rooms you've already been. This is kind of understandable, since it does take place in a school, but it's still really tedious. All you'll be doing really is looking for keys and other objects, reading notes, and occasionally running from the bad guy. The puzzles are pretty unconventional, which is both a good and a bad thing. They can be fairly hard, not because they're well crafted, clever puzzles, but because you have no idea what you're suppose to be doing in the first place. For some of them though, they do make you feel pretty smart once you actually figure out what you're doing. It's also really annoying that you have to press enter to go through a door. I don't know why anyone would go up to a door if they didn't want to enter it, so there's no reason to not change the activation trigger to player touch.

Art: 4/5
it's pretty basic for the most part, but there's nothing wrong with it. It's not super interesting, but again it's not bad either. It suits the style of the game, and works for what it is. (Although I don't know why the urinals are so high up on the walls.)

Atmosphere: 3.5/5
Much like Corpse Party, and 50% of other rpg maker horror games, this game takes place in a school. It can be creepy at some points, but at others not so much. It's a pretty good scene for finding the little notes and stuff that you need to learn the story, though.

Mystery: 4.5/5
For most games I'd usually put an over all story rating, but for this game because there where so many ups and downs, I'm going to put the story into two different categories, starting with mystery.

The mystery feeling in this game was really, really well done. There's a bunch of little notes and hints scattered around everywhere, which all add a piece to the puzzle. They're really well written, and interact with other hints that you find here and there. It really makes you feel like like you're solving an actual mystery, and it keeps you asking new questions through the whole thing. The worst thing about this game is that it really never answers those questions, and completely destroys the sense of mystery that was building up, and I'll get to that next.

Ending: 1/5
Obviously this part is going to contain some spoilers, so just a heads up.

I cannot stress how much I hated the ending to this game. There are a few endings, but I'm going to focus on the only one that's really interesting, which is where you shoot the turtle head guy. There where so many endings this game could of had that would have been a million times better. I was really getting into the mystery, and then the ending is just like a giant middle finger to everything else the game set up.

First off, I was convinced that the person you saw writing to turtle head in the notes around the school, was going to be one of your friends that you came into the school with. That would have been brilliant, and it would have made so much sense. But instead it was the principle of the school. So, obviously that's just a personal preference that I thought they could have done better on, but on it's own it's fine. What really gets me, is when they play the supernatural card, when there was never any indication of anything supernatural going on in the game. At the end of the game, you find that turtle head is actually the son of the principle. Then, they say that his son has been dead for a while, and it just leaves you on the note of "oh well how'd he kill people if he was dead" which I felt was a really lazy attempt at creating more mystery that wasn't needed. Maybe it wasn't trying to be supernatural, and it was saying that someone else was turtle head, but either way it felt like a cheap attempt at being mysterious, when it didn't need to be.

A theory I had was that the whole school, or a lot of the school, was some kind of cult, (as you see multiple people dressed as turtle head towards the end) and that would have been brilliant. If that was the case, why didn't it just come to that note on a conclusive ending? There's no reason to keep the player guessing. Having unanswered mysteries is fine, as long as it's not the whole point of the game. Bringing up a little question on the side to make the player think about the bigger picture is fine, but when your whole game is made to ask the player a question you'll never answer, you're doing something wrong.

Overall: 3/5
I really enjoyed playing this game, despite the tedious gameplay, just because it asked so many interesting questions, and made you really think about what was going on. The whole reason I played was to get to the ending, because the game really made you feel like all of the digging you did through the papers would mean something. It felt like it was going to answer your questions, and that it would be awesome. Unfortunately, instead of answering your questions, it gave you even more that you didn't care about.