Death Girl Mows the Lawn

Death Girl Mows the Lawn is a rare instance where I avoid give a score to a technically complete game. This is because of the way in which a short, yet touching and meaningful story is pretty much evenly counterbalanced by some embarassing beginner's errors throughout it. Some were fixed since its initial release; you can still see them under the spoiler tag below.



Thankfully, all of these are fixed now. The game as it is now is clearly more competent, but still has a considerable room for improvement.

Gameplay

DGMtL is another example of a “cutscene game”, so to speak, and I certainly have been playing a few of them recently. I even wonder if this can be described as the delayed outcome of To The Moon becoming the most prominent example of a good rmk game: much like how it was first traditionally thought rmk was for “unofficial” Final Fantasies in an alternate world where VII never came out, then Desert Nightmare’s translation sparked a horror wave, Yume Nikki inspired the move into surrealism, and now, we have this. It seems to make as much sense as anything at the moment, but I feel like I’m inevitably missing a factor or two at play.

Anyway, so you mainly walk, read description of some things and sit and listen when the cutscenes happen. There are two instances where you’re allowed to make a choice out of three options, but unlike something like Her Dreams of Fire, where these were central to the outcome and the experience itself, here it only contributes to the atmosphere of the moment, but doesn’t change anything beyond the next two-three lines of dialogue. Instead, its one unique point is the titular lawn-moving, as you walk and cut down the squares of tall grass through simply interacting with them, in what is still a simple, yet strangely calming process, much like it is for the character we control. There’s even an attempt to boost interactivity through the blue blocks of grass, which provide a speed boost when cut down, one which is refreshed by cutting other grass, combo-style. This crops up about three times, and the surrounding grass is placed in such a shape you can actually remove all of it in one uninterrupted movement, which is weirdly fun.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

This is by far the weakest part of the game. It starts off well enough, sure, the custom menu screen above and a nice menu theme. Once you start playing it, though, there’s no music at first: indeed it is entirely absent about as often as it is present throughout the running time, and this rather hurts the game. RTP sounds and effects fit the situations they’re used in (mainly, the slashing effect + sound when cutting down the grass), and there’s not much more to say about them. Protagonist’s default, highly masculine sprite looks really weird at first, but that is likely the point, it being the way her teenage character presents herself normally. The Death Girl costume looks better, which her father even makes fun of at one time. Lastly, the mapping is regular RTP, and while the most embarrassing mistakes have been fixed, the maps still look rather plain at best. The strange lack of doors on the outside of buildings also failed to get fixed:



Storyline

The opening addresses you as a player, and asks you to guide the protagonist, named F.G. to the shed, and do nothing else. It’s a strange move, as unlike games such as OFF, Oneshot, or the aforementioned Her Dreams of Fire, you’re never really referred to again, with all the later writing being about F.G. herself and her struggles, never naming you as a separate, omnipotent power behind the scenes again. Either way, the initial writing is not very engaging, as you do not yet know what makes the shed special, or the title relevant to the story, and so you instead notice both the total lack of music, and the almost total lack of the environmental description, which is often the main tool an rmk game can give context to the main character and setting from the start without feeling unnatural or overloading the player with unskippable information. Again, Her Dreams of Fire is probably the most tonally relevant example here. On the other hand, The Swallow's Descent is a far more light-hearted game, but it provides a truly great example of how this technique can be used regardless.



Also, you can get in between people and their tables in there, and no-one will react. All those people are basically frozen in place, unreactive and only relevant for one moment in a cutscene where they'll turn around to stare at you.

Once F.G. actually dresses up as the Death Girl, and we learn the context behind it, the writing improves, and significantly so. It’s a short story about grief for the lost sister, and the creator has managed to believably capture the central character with all her teenage self-doubt and idiosyncrasies. The “Death Girl” costume she dons at the start represents a character from the anime both of them used to watch, and is thus a way to escape both to the world where she was real, and to the past where her sister was still alive. When her father sees her in it, she can respond with varying degrees of conviction and self-seriousness, but he’ll always just shrug wearily, more-or-less. From his demeanor throughout, it’s clear that he understands the frailties of her age, and suspects the real reason behind it, but chooses to act normal as he sends her to do the titular activity. Still, he isn’t ready when she finds enough strength in that persona to confront him about his own failings in dealing with the very same grief, and then F.G. is left to wonder about her decisions in the final scene that brings up more questions then it provides answers, much like how real life often does.

Lastly, the typos for the creator. Unfortunately, pretty much none of them were fixed in this update, for some inexplicable reason. I would honestly advise him to copy-paste the lines from the game into a Word document, to see where it'll pick errors. (It's especially relevant for the scene at the sandwhich shop, where you get 3-4 typos in quick succession):



Conclusion



In all, Death Girl Mows the Lawn is a short, yet rather mature story, contained within a framework that's passable, but certainly isn't used to its full potential. I hope the developer will try improving this project a bit more, and definitely take the lessons from it into whatever they'll create next.