Red Peter

Intro

"Red Peter" was a game being developed by 1550 with RPG Maker VX Ace near the end of 2016. Though why this particular game was ultimately abandoned by the developer isn't clear to me. This is because 1550 didn't make a blog post or leave a comment in the game's summary section to explain why this project was being left in the endless heaps of incomplete RPG Maker projects.

To make matters worse this demo is extremely short with it taking the player about 10 minutes or less to interact with every object in the game. Albeit the demo does try to give the player a reason to play the game more than once with multiple endings. Though, I'll get into why I think those endings aren't worth chasing after in a little bit. For now I should probably move onto the narrative.

Story

According to the game's summary page you play as Noel whose brother was kidnapped by Red Peter last year because he was on the naughty list. In order to find his brother Noel decides to be very naughty so Red Peter will kidnap him as well. The problem here is that this stuff isn't explained in the demo through either an opening text crawl or opening flashbacks that help set the stage. If you had jumped into this game and hadn't read the game's summary page you'd be completely lost as to what's going.

I know this project carries the mystery tag, but why Noel is breaking into houses and stealing presents and cookies left for Santa shouldn't be an enigma. Though why the first house has a rope you can use for climbing onto people's roofs in order to enter through the chimney can remain an unsolved mystery since it's existence is most likely a plot contrivance.

On the other hand the multiple endings come across as rather pointless to me since you can get one of three endings based on what you did or didn't steal in this demo. The problem is the only difference between the endings from what I've seen so far are a couple of lines of dialogue at most. As such there isn't much of a reason to experience the various endings since who cares if Red Peter lambasts you about "trying" to be good or for stealing his cookies and milk? Regardless he's going to smash your face-in with a mallet and kidnap you. At least it sounds like he hits Noel with a mallet.

[Graphics

A lot of the assets come from the RTP or commonly used resource packs.



In fact, the only graphical asset that really stands out is Red Peter's smiling face at the end of the demo. And that's because it looks like his face was done up in MS paint.

Sound

Sound wise the game starts out with the song Silent Night, but as you break into houses the game beings lowering the volume of the first song while turning up the sound for an a cappella version of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. A slightly creepy version if I'm being honest. Though, I suppose it fits a game that is meant to be dark.

Conclusion

On the bright side the game actually does use the a cappella version of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town to great effect. On the other hand, the demo does a $#%# poor job of explaining what's going on. To make matters worse this is a dead project as far as I can tell so there's little reason to play this demo in my opinion. As such, I'd recommend giving this one a pass unless your looking for a project you can review in a hurry.