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Grease-Stained Horrorstalgia

  • kumada
  • 11/13/2016 01:27 PM
  • 1221 views
Objects In the Mirror

As a kid, Chuck E Cheese was my temple, although I worshiped only rarely. The rapture of flashing lights and oily joysticks would have been too much if I'd gone as often as I wanted to. I have only fond memories of the kinds of ad-hoc communities that sprang up around older kids who were close to beating one of the harder cabinets, or of scrounging on the carpeted ground for tokens when my own supplies had run perilously low. I'm certain that my grandparents hated it, taking me on the rare weekend or birthday to rampage around that cramped space, but I wouldn't have heard you if you'd told me. A place where you could just have fun for as long as your resources lasted, that was sacred.

So, why am I telling you all that?

Bear with me for a moment.

Context is the essence of horror.

Twelve years after my last thin-crust-and-tomato-paste communion, I started working in foodservice. The economy was bad, my prospects were worse, and one of the ways the other shift workers commiserated was by swapping stories of their absolute worst working experiences. Some involved mundane stuff, like an old customer trying to fight the manager for not forcing a family out from his usual table. Some were decidedly more illegal, like the time the bakery owner had a knocked out, concussed victim of a slip-and-fall dragged out the back before the ambulance arrived so that he could claim that the victim hadn't fallen on his property, and therefore he wouldn't have to cover any part of their medical care.

The stories ranged from helplessly tragic to simple and cautionary, but slowly a recurring element began to creep in. Seen from the other side, food-service was horror.

And Chuck E Cheese, it turned out, was a very special circle of hell for grown-ups. It smelled not of luxury and freedom, but of urine and vomit and grease. The kids were psychopaths. The parents weren't much better. The cabinets broke. The music looped. The sounds of the place nested deep in the hindbrain.

What had just been a childhood distraction to me had been some squad of desperate workers' living nightmare.

And Steeze is about that exact feeling.

I recommend it heartily to anyone with a similar experience, as well as to the creepypasta crowd, though not without a few reservations.

Gamefeel

The game page bills it as a soulslike, but Steeze is not really that. It does have a relatively non-linear progression, however, with clues and context dropped piecemeal into the narrative for those who care to look for them. There is a deeper plot that the game never explicitly spells out and a strong possibility that the whole play experience is actually about Some Other Thing - something plausibly autobiographical and properly horrible in equal measure. There are even optional bosses, which were surprising to find in a title that can be played through thoroughly in about half an hour, blind.

Which isn't to say that its brevity hurts it.

Steeze trades heavily on its atmosphere, which is a mix of 80's nostalgia ala Stranger Things, muzak Freddy Mercury, and fridge horror, with an Earthbound aesthetic to tie it all together.

Exploring the pizzeria felt both upbeat and ominous, which is a tough balance for a game to strike. With only a handful of musical tracks to work from, the it pairs fear with silence, and that silence works perfectly for the behind-the-scenes sections of the Steeze. The only way this could have been improved would have been with a muted version of the muzak in some of the fringe spaces between play area and employees only.

If Steeze was purely an exploration game, it would be a good one.

Regrettably, it is also an rpg.

Gameplay

Steeze, unfortunately, is held back by the elements that it did not fully bake. It's an RPG, with battles and progression and gear and skills, but it doesn't really need any of these things.

In a souls-like, leveling up is a finely balanced choice. You can grow slowly in any number of different build-directions, tweaking your build bit by bit as you go. In Steeze, you pay tokens to a girl behind a counter to gain up to five total levels, each of which broadly increases your abilities and offers you no choices at all about what kind of character you want to be.

This wouldn't be bad in and of itself, but combat (while it has a great retro aesthetic) offers exactly zero challenge. Even the optional bosses are quickly taken out in one hit with a skill you get early on, if your gear is reasonable. Enemies respawn every time you leave and re-enter an area, so there is no resource scarcity to add challenge. Endless full heals are strewn through nearly every room of the pizzeria.

This makes combat feel draggy and unnecessary, a speedbump in the way of good content. That's a definite shame.

Overall

Still, the plodding battles can't drag down a game this short. Every time I started to wonder if I was still having fun, Steeze did something that genuinely re-engaged me. Plus, every inch of the pizzeria is crawling with solid, tone-appropriate writing, and the game made me think - which is something I'm always happy to credit.

If you liked Five Nights, or if you like your saccharine with a hefty dose of dark, I could do much worse than to recommend Steeze. On the other hand, if what you're about is specifically the challenge of the gameplay, you may want to give this one a miss.

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Pages: 1
Ugh, that should be "So why am I telling you that?" for the second paragraph.

Brb embarrassed editing.
Pages: 1