DISCLAIMER:
If the game's creator wants my actual advice, I will be happy to give it, but this review is not that. This one's for the audience.

BOTTOM LINE UP TOP: Until We Get There is bad looking, badly translated, and so buggy as to be unplayable. Easily the worst RPG Maker game I've ever played to completion, it's narm/laugh value, however, is not to be underestimated.

It's ironic that giving a game a bad review is the best possible thing you can do for its download count; people gravitate towards bad games. And the last thing I want anyone to do is gravitate toward this game. I should give this game credit because it calls itself a psychological horror game and it did actually cause me psychological horror...although not the way that I suspect the creator intended.

I'll be honest; I never set out to review games I don't think I will enjoy. If every game was as fun to me as it looked, I'd never give a game less than 3 stars. I never see a bad-looking game and think, 'hmm, let me eviscerate that it'll be funny'. So when I do write a negative or scathing review, know this: it is because I feel betrayed.

I was excited to play this game because I obviously like the psychological horror genre and I have a soft spot for theodore horror games made in RPG Maker 2003. The foreign ones, especially, are pretty awesome. I turned down the lights, turned up the volume, and prepared to be scared out of my wits and hoping to be made jealous at someone else's ingenuity and be inspired to work on Backstage 2.

But this game is no Taut; it's a turd.

Story
Honestly, I have no idea. The save game file tells me that you're Karl Benton, and the game page tells me that you're some kind of investigation detective. If not for those sources, I wouldn't have been able to piece together even that.



Basically, Until We Get There does not have a story, and your "character" just randomly teleports from one place to another for no discernible reason. Due to problems with other categories (read on), however, I wouldn't have been able to get far into the story without cheating.

I was going to do what any sane person would do and stop playing this game at about the ten minute mark, except that's when my girlfriend got home. Her love of bad things is...epic. I told her about it and she immediately said "I want to play it!". So I watched as she played through the entire thing...hellacious lag and all...to get to one of the four endings. The game has this much going for it: it's not long. We cackled at it as we played, mainly at the completely inscrutable translation, and I feel a bit bad about that, but this game honestly has problems beyond the translation.

So basically, you're a San Francisco detective investigating cult murders, which...matters not at all, and will have no bearing on the story. You come unstuck in space (but not time!) for no reason and are randomly teleported around various places where occasionally, monsters want to kill you, most notably a guy with a "great" knife named F.J. Carter. You shortly meet a waitress named Jenna, a mysterious guy named Bezurius, and another mysterious guy named Johnatan (not, apparently, a typo). Jenna will eventually explain she is a waitress, while Bezurius and Johnatan will each explain that the other one is lying. Literally no character or in-game document will EVER EXPLAIN ANYTHING ELSE ABOUT THEMSELVES, EACH OTHER, OR THE PLOT. Throughout the entire plot no character seems to remember anything else that has been said previously in the game. For instance, one of the VERY FEW things Bezurius tells you is that F.J. Carter used to be a human, like you, but getting randomly ping-ponged from dimension to dimension drove him mad. Nonetheless, on relearning this fascinating piece of exposition from the diary of F.J. Carter, you immediately remark: "BEZURIUS DIDN'T TELL US. THAT BASTARD.". I loled. True story.

Based on this astonishingly limited information, you are forced to choose which character to trust, very, very abruptly after meeting the three principal NPCs. With nothing really to go on with this choice, I went with Bezurius. I mean, he seems trustworthy, right, with a name like that?


Maybe the other endings lend the game some sense of coherency...but I doubt it. Likewise, I'm sure a better translation would have helped somewhat...but there are real problems here beyond that.

SCORE: 11/100

Visuals
Bad Theodore mapping (most maps are large bland rectangles with almost all tiles being just the plain wooden floor) couples with an agonizingly buggy overlay/screen brightness adjustment system (the most pointless piece of probably quite difficult coding ever in a game where the mere presence of overlays or screen tones somehow inexplicably BREAK THE GAME) to really make this category not shine.

Besides being boring and way too big, the maps also have obvious errors that really bother me. One that particularly stands our is the carpeted bathroom; that's exactly what I want around the toilet where I piss. Wall to wall carpeting. (The bathroom is also MASSIVE, the same size as most other rooms in the game; 17x20). The maps I chose for my funny screenshots are actually some of the better ones.

SCORE: 38/100

Audio
There was no title music, which I thought was strange. The default RTP sound effects were used in an unremarkable way. The music tracks were literally the same ones I used in Backstage and were used in the same exact way, along with many of the sound effects so, I liked them... and therefore am giving a fairly high score in this category.

This game's resource folders (all of them, chapsets, sprites, sounds, music, etcetera) contain nothing but a dump of all the resources I harvested for Backstage I/II, including sprite edits that myself and some of my old Backstage II team members made. Considering how diverse the sources were that I initially stole these resources from, there's no possible way we could simply have accreted the same resources by mere coincidence. I'm not taking any points off for this, nor am I upset, like I just said, I stole 90% of them myself. It's still funny, though.

SCORE: 69/100

Gameplay
Tell me if this sounds like a good "puzzle" to you. The hero must navigate a narrow bridge, and if he touches the blackness off of the bridge, he instantly falls to his death. On top of RPG Maker 2003 controls, the game will also RANDOMLY MOVE THE HERO IN A RANDOM DIRECTION on the 1-2 tile wide bridge with no discernible pattern or regular interval. If the game moves the hero off the bridge this way directly or indirectly, the hero dies and there is a game over screen.

If you answered "yes", then congratulations, you must be Grigor, the creator of Until You Get There.




Besides simple bad game design, UYGT is also laden with glaring bugs, from the merely obnoxious to the glaringly fatal. For some reason I literally cannot discern, one thing you are unable to do properly in the first playable section of the game is MOVE. Whenever you press the direction buttons, your character does not step in that direction. Instead, the game hangs for a few seconds and then you take TWO steps in that direction, with the game glitching along at around 5FPS. Initially, I thought yet another RPG Maker program had gone belly up on my computer, but this apparently is something that the creator of this game did wrong to cause this, because the problem DOES not recur during cutscenes or any map without screen tones/overlays. I don't know how he managed to break his game using basic screen tones and overlays, but he managed it, since maps without overlays worked fine and maps with overlays were constant fail. I think it is all caused by the fundamentally bugged custom lighting system, which handles things like basic screen tinting through an endlessly looping common event.

The fatal error I ran into is actually a pretty common one. Instead of using the default menu system, when you press escape in UYGT you go to a brightness adjustment screen. If you press the escape button on the brightness adjustment screen...you get locked into an endless loop where you can never leave that screen and you must force quit the game. Considering this is a fairly common error with beginner attempts at CMS-style systems, I don't know why this is something people don't look out for. One-button press fatal error is a game killer.

After I cheated to get past the impossible bridge sequence, every map had an overlay and playing the game was just too tedious to continue. Fortunately, the map that I was on when I met the game's first monster/enemy had an overlay, and hence the game was too slow or buggy for me to try to escape the monster, I ran into it to see what would happen. What happened is that the game hung for about a minute and wouldn't accept my input, making a squishing sound and flashing red intermittently, then I got my old friend, the game over screen.

I'd have stopped then but my girlfriend came in and she wanted to play it so I watched/helped her play through the whole thing, cheating past the unplayable bits. And there are some unplayable bits. And long distances between save points.

The game calls itself a puzzle game, but it doesn't have any puzzles. The game has a battle system of sorts, which is, run away from monsters or die. One Night had this battle system too. It's not a very good battle system. You just pixel hunt through the environment hoping to find the next password to unlock the next area. That's fine...a lot of games do this, and to a degree I'm guilty of it myself.

The problem is, not only didn't Grigor bother to write interesting description for most objects, he sometimes doesn't bother to write descriptions for objects AT ALL. So after map after map of embarassing every shelf and vase, it's annoying to find out that the CRUCIAL PASSWORD YOU NEEDED TO PROCEED was one that you needed to examine the lower corner of the book case in identical rectangular theodore room #23333395 to find out.

Compounding this is the fact that the game DOES NOT ALLOW BACKTRACKING. At one point you are expected to memorize a SIX DIGIT NUMBER which is displayed by an object in an area you CANNOT RETURN TO. If you can't remember the number, I hope you saved in another slot; otherwise, back to the beginning of the game with you, my pretty, enjoy the lag.

I can forgive bland mapping, an incoherent story, terrible translation, and excruciating lag, but badwrongbad game design is another story.

Random and pointless: you can collect shiny pearls in this game. You can in fact exploit a bug to collect an infinite amount of shiny pearls. But as far as I can tell, the pearls, the only item you can pick up in the ENTIRE GAME, serve absolutely no purpose, ever.

SCORE: 2/100

-THE BOTTOM LINE-

UYGT is a very very very bad game. Some of that is not the creator's fault--bad translation. Some of it undeniably is. Derivative, poorly written, poorly coded, and poorly mapped. However, Until You Get There has one redeeming grace; it is unintentionally hilarious.



FINAL SCORE (NOT AN AVERAGE): 20/100
Some games are worse than the sum of their parts. At least this one is pretty funny.