Name: Blue Memories

Developer: JuneFlowa]

Story: You play a runaway. You sneak into an abandoned elementary school to spend the night. You go exploring. There used to be a cult here. One dude got stoned and baked. Now there are eyes everywhere. Oh, yeah! Almost forgot! It's in four shades of blue. The story relies mostly on humor based on porn and drug use. The color that the game is made in is the only real connection with the title, and I have no idea what "Memories" has to do with anything, especially since the whole game comes off as more of an hallucination. I don't think I need a writing section for this review but there is one, single diction error that whenever I see it, it drills into my brain. Please don't shoot the canon with a cannon. Thank you.



Gameplay: Hit space repeatedly. This is an exploration game where absolutely everything you do requires actually pushing the bar for an action. It's great for taking screenshots at cutscenes, such as above, because not even the pictures will move unless you hit space/enter. Press enter to pass through every door. Literally the only exception comes in a pair of conjoined classrooms where the door to one is jammed shut. You enter the working door and then pass freely through a hole in the wall to the next classroom. I understand the concept here, allowing the player to think about every action, but it's largely unnecessary and a bit annoying.



What do you do in an exploration game? What else? You find stuff. You can't progress unless you find stuff. There's actually quite a bit to find, such as diary notes, and juvenile graffiti, with each graffito being mostly eyes, but sometimes painfully juvenile, prurient humor, although only a small portion of it is actually needed to progress. Will also find a strange assortment of keys that you will need to open doors. Keys include a keycard (for an abandoned elementary school), an animal skull, and a porn magazine. Yeah, I said one of the keys was a porn magazine. You need it to get another key.

If you beat the game, you will be told how to find a secret room. Go to a previous save and check it out. Inside the room, there is a special jacket, a passcode protected door, beyond which is a mask, and several items which the developer has left 4th wall breaking notes to the player.

Graphics: It's an imaginative hook, but it has some crippling problems. If we're only looking at four shades of the same color, a different approach may be needed. I would expect a game like that to take a more abstract approach. It's a very beautiful style, but it's difficult to see details to the extent that it hurts the eyes. The way this game presents items is that you see all of them. This isn't blind exploration, and yet it may as well be. A large portion of playtime was spent backtracking because of everything I missed. The fact that this game is mostly dark doesn't help. Looking for items that blend in with the background has a pretty big potential for eyestrain. Then again, this may have been the intent of the game considering that there is so much focus on eyes, and so much eye symbolism. There is even a rather gruesome scene of eye extraction.



Music: Oh! My poor ears! Not content with straining your eyes, the dev uses chiptune style music that very heavily uses droning, headache inducing beats, or low pitch, piercing synthesizer drones. The opening cutscene, and the drug-den-glowing-eyes-everywhere room are the worst ones. None of the music is bad, and it's not boring, but for the love the lord and lady, don't listen with headphones, whatever you do! If you go through a certain sequence of actions, you'll also hear a pretty cool chiptune version of Smash Mouth's All Star.

Conclusion: This game has myriad issues but all of them are purely aesthetic. Overall, the game is very interesting, fun to read, and short enough to get away with its more annoying traits. This game is definitely worth a look and has a very high appeal. Fun and playful, I highly recommend this game.