Asylum of Pleasure and Pain by NOACCEPTANCE772
- a review by psy_wombats

I looked at a couple screenshots from Asylum of Pleasure and Pain and thought it had one of the more interesting graphical styles I'd seen recently. Most other people instead thought it was hideous and inexcusably ugly. So in an attempt to discover whether this was an intentional style choice, I ended up completing the longest RM game I've played this year.


Story
Completely incomprehensible. The game opens with the player controlling the newly-dead James and an angel named Clarise. They seem to be stuck in the middle of a battle between a haven of lunatics and grotesque, fleshy monsters (the asylum) and a group of deformed super-soldiers (the E.N.S.D). I still have no idea what either of these groups want, because perspective switches so rapidly between one group of characters and another that there's never quite enough chance to grasp what's going on.


That's not to say that it's entirely incoherent. There are definitely certain "themes" that keep coming up, but they seem so entirely unrelated from everything else as to be a joke. There's enough talk to make it seem as if you're missing something, and to hint that the creator had this thing all figured out but you keep missing it. It sort of reminds me of Schizophasiawhere the words are just strung together to form something resembling language but with no real meaning.


There's some character dialogue to move from point A to point B and Clarise gives some exposition at some point, but it's mostly nonsense. What little dialogue that would be in earnest read like it was written by a twelve year old.



Gameplay

Asylum of Pleasure and Pain employs several different gameplay styles. Most of the time it's the RM2K3 DBS, either through touch or random encounters. The touch encounters sometimes turn invisbile, move at insane speeds, or jump into the background and remain stuck. The battles themselves feature bugged-out battlesets, a hodgepodge of unidentifiable fleshblob monsters, cryptic skills, and a total lack of any guiding theme.


Mechanically, they were alright. Clarise had the ability to heal and revive everyone, but she was the weakest character HP-wise. Everyone else had one or two useless skills and a bunch of weirdly-named trash. The enemies were very slow for the most part but had huge HP values, making most fights just battles of attrition.

But then there's also other gameplay forms that APP moves into, without any warning. One map is dodging touch encounters, and then a transitionless door later and it's a crude event-driven platformer, then a stealth game, then a point and click adventure?


The gameplay was a little annoying at times and I mostly used CTRL to dodge some touch encounters to continue on the psychotic story. In most games, I'd say just cut out the filler battles, but in this case, it's all part of the experience. The shifting timelines, characters, and gameplay modes tie in too well.


Graphics

This is why anyone would want to play APP. The graphics are taken from a ton of a different sources, including RTP, SNES horror game rips, MSpaint, refmap, and tons of stuff I didn't recognize. In fact, I only noticed the refmap while playing and I had to hunt for sources later just to be sure the creator didn't make all of these. There is no sense of style, no graphical cohesion, and no thought even put towards matching things up.


I don't know what happened here. The creator obviously has some technical grasp on how to use these effects. There are some neat film effects, some cool static transitions, and good use of pictures, not to mention the event work for the different battle modes. So what the hell happened here? Did the creator not notice that this is an incoherent graphical mess? Maybe there's some master vision behind all of this but I can't see it.


There's a saving grace here, though. This game tells style to get out and then kicks it in the face. Its complete disregard for graphical coherence is in itself an art style. Everything's so chaotic that it just blends together. The pixellated blood, the random screaming head battle animations, the occasional anime insert... It's part of what makes this game so entertaining.


Sound

This game's size is mostly due to its sound effects and music, which it uses a lot. Ten seconds didn't go by where I didn't hear footsteps, low samplerate screams, or the chattering of the asylum maniacs. The music varies from game MIDIs to generic rock, to music so heavily downsampled as to just be a mess of noise and bass. There's also some low quality Japanese stuff in there too for good measure. It's basically the audio equivalent of this game's graphics. APP isn't worth playing with the sound off.


Summary

Asylum of Pleasure and Pain was meant to be a horror game. It suceeded, though probably not in the way that was intended. Most horror games rely on the old devices of jumpers and screamers and gore to get their job done, or else take the "psychological" approach with creepy shenanigans. This game was neither. Instead, all I could think about was the mental state of the creator. What sort of mind produces this?

If you think of games as an artform, then putting on the headphones and hitting F4 for fullscreen is like a brief glimpse into their thought process. Whoever or whatever created this game is only loosely human. I refuse to believe that any sane preson could make this game.

I'd definitely recommend this game as one of the most entertaining things I've played through in a while. I doubt anyone agrees with me, but I certainly found it a lot more interesting the rehashed ideas that seem to surface again and again in most beginner works. If you played some of the summer games 2011 surrealism entries and didn't think they were "surreal" enough, this is the game to play.


Final Rating: 3.5/5

(some scoring notes: it's kind of hard to score something like this where the merits of the game come almost sheerly from its novelty, so I just gave it a rating based off of how much fun I had playing. The long battles and some laggy areas got a bit repetitve, but that's my only complaint. I've uploaded a slightly edited version here that has all the resources included as well as fixing the lag/HP)