Dwoemer of the Drill Faced Goddess

Dwoemer of the Drill Faced Goddess is a game made for the Retromania event in 10 days. While made in RPGMaker VX Ace, it's actually a visual novel, and emulates the retro VNs as opposed to retro RPGs. Moreover, the key storytelling inspiration is clearly Lovecraft, and the game is very faithful in attempting to live up to his key themes. With more development time, this could have been something of a classic. Unfortunately, aforementioned 10 days of development time have condensed the narrative and your role in it to the point much emotional impact is blunted.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



You are greeted with a risqué menu image that looks like one of those metal covers, and some creative static noise alongside it, through which you can hear scattered lyrics. Afterwards, you have artwork done in shades of red and green. It’s a very unique look, one which I suppose was mainly seen in the DOS-era adventure games. It often appears to be intentionally indistinct, so that you would rely more on your imagination and the text description for each vista (i.e. “Warm wet air blows gently from the deep, like the throat of a slumbering giant.”). The initial soundtrack can get rather droning if you linger on, but later tracks change their style several times, to the point horrific scenes are accompanied with practically cheerful music as a point of irony.



Storyline

The game immediately starts off with your character in front of “a cave hewn from the wall of a great mountain far to the east of your village.” They are there because a dream told them about an extremely powerful artifact called “Hecka Bone”. Yet, “Something about the cave disturbs you greatly, and you cannot look directly at it without mild pain.” Hence, you get the choice to leave, and obviously, I couldn’t resist going for it first. The result was quite pleasing, stating that you feel relieved the further you get away from the cave and soon * YOU HAVE WON * “But in a way, you have also lost.”

The next choice is reminiscent of Kingdom Hearts’ stat selection. Remember, the one where you had to first pick your proficiency, and then your weakness, represented by sword, shield and staff? Well, here it’s a broken sword, a cracked mirror and a tattered robe, with one artifact chosen and the other supposedly destroyed. Afterwards, there’s long descent, where you have one way to die early on, but which is otherwise an unbroken series of stills and immersive descriptions of the otherworldly place you are entering. It’s very much like Lovecraft’s The Nameless City, which also happens to available in interactive form for free: just check out The Silent Conversation. Unfortunately, these descriptions are soon allowed to override just about everything else, and lack of contrast means they begin to blend in with each other. Nothing is even close to mundane or recognisable; just about every paragraph seems compelled to state how ancient, enormous, ominous, depraved and/or indescribable whatever you are seeing/encountering is.



Even the aforementioned Nameless City had more moments where the main character struggled to relate what he saw with his own past experiences, and we could feel the subtler themes involved (i.e the implicit comparison between the grandeur the creatures who once made up Nameless City used to enjoy and the seemingly unstoppable strength of the-then British Empire.) I would have liked more elaboration on what our character hopes to do with said Hecka Bone in the end, so that we could understand why it matters, and actually emphasize with them and their quest beyond a typical's player need to get to the end. As it is, the ending, while mechanically interesting, has little impact besides "That final screen was neat!" The main "twist" may not even be foreshadowed per se, but you are never given much reason to expect a substantially different ending.

Typos:


Gameplay

It’s a visual novel, so you just pick one of several options as presented for each situation. As I said before, a lot of the time, you simply look at the incomprehensible artwork and read the description of it/reaction to it. Choices do appear at times, but they can just as easily disappear when you would expect them to be present, and the latter always tears you out of the narrative. See below:





In both instances, the nameless, faceless character who is for all intents and purposes me (even the ending directly refers to "you" and your "reward" for playing the game.) suddenly goes ahead and makes a decision completely independent of my input, and it's one of the worst things that can happen in such a game. I would have even understood if it happened as a result of character losing sanity as the game progressed - Subject had a very effective instance of your agency being taken away in such a manner, leading to not one, but two memorable bad endings. However, the above is obviously an oversight.

Compared to this, the way any combination of the 2-3 choices you get is quickly merged into the same ending is practically par the course for Lovecraftian fiction. It's still disappointing how little the three artifacts you choose from at the beginning ultimately matter, though. All they ultimately do is allow you to bypass one of the three riddles separating you from the ending, and those are ultimately solvable enough - to the point you can actually lose the artifact and still finish the game. It's not that you can't avert the ultimate outcome through them (this is entirely in keeping with Lovecraft) - it's that you do not even try. A cracked mirror reveals a certain character is lying? You can do absolutely nothing about that! You possess a powerful artifact sword? A human attacker appearing as a result of one of your choices can still kill you immediately and take it, like he would any other artifact.

Conclusion



Dwoemer of the Drill-Faced Goddess is still a relatively unique game as far as RMN goes. Its visual decisions alone is something a few aspiring developers might want to study. I do believe it deserves to be seen by more people, but I would suggest they check out the aforementioned Subject first. There's also Goblet Grotto - not a visual novel (though its gameplay elements matter so little it may well be one), and more Kafka then Lovecraft. However, it might well make for a good companion piece, given the way it allowed you to personally experience things so absurd you could hardly comprehend them, and subtly portrayed your main character going insane over the course of the game.