I wasn't quite sure where the developer was going with this game for a long while. It opened up seeming like it might be over very quickly, then it turned into being led by the nose through a visual novel of sorts, during which I saw brief glimpses of witty commentary and it looked like a full game might be about to emerge, but then it ended in a way that I interpreted as the writer telling the contest authorities:


I'll discuss the story last this time. The story section WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS. I will hide them, so don't click on them if you want to experience the story for yourself.

GAMEPLAY:
Really not much to say. You are more an actor in a theater "play" than a "player" in a game. Your role is to be dropped into a strange world suddenly with very little explanation and try to figure out what's going on as you try to escape. You waltz around, talk to people, examine objects, and gather a couple necessary items to advance, learn about the mysterious world along the way, and then you fight the contest-mandated RTP final boss. After that you get a final dose of plot that makes little sense outside my theory that it was the creator venting frustration at the contest restrictions. The final boss was way too easy though, and for a boss that easy he took way too long. Essentially you can just mash Attack or Nuclear until one of his spammy Blind/Silence attacks hits you, and then switch to whichever one isn't crippled at the moment. Since this is the only part of the game that goes beyond extremely simple puzzles and visual novel narration, the mindlessness of the fight was very disappointing.

GRAPHICS:
The game adequately sets up that the world you have been dropped into is abnormal. You run across several things that do not make any physical sense, and it works. Some of the locations showed good attention to detail or worked well with the theme of being lost in some other dimension. In addition, the animation used for the arrival of the final boss was pretty neat.

SOUND:
Distorted versions of the default RTP music; very fitting for the parallel universe setup.

ATMOSPHERE:
I at least have to give the game credit here. It did a very good job setting up the parallel universe/alternate dimension/Project Meta lab. While there was hardly any gameplay to speak of, I didn't mind wandering around the world that much.

***Spoilers Below***


STORY:
The setup held promise. After So far so good. We meet some prototypical "back in my day" character who is frustrated with the way heroes don't have to work day-jobs and is apparently in charge of classifying all the RTP heroes based on the role they played in their respective games. He classifies us as silent protagonists. Again, up to that point, the story still holds promise. I was very interested in seeing where this was all going. I got progressively more excited walking through the jail, seeing the lab setup. I thought to myself "oh wow, at first I thought this was all thrown together, but there's some bigger plot behind all of it, some grand scheme in Project Meta Mu that I get to uncover." Except there wasn't, really... At the end I'm just left with the knowledge that there was this mysterious project going on involving the RTP heroes across dimensions. Isn't that what the ending was basically saying? Maybe I'm completely off here, but to me that basically sounded like a sarcastic shot at the contest's rules. That's all well and good, and it was actually rather clever, but it completely left out any sort of explanation! What were the villain's true motives? How did this world originally come to be? So many questions, so few answered. Unless you legitimately plan to make a sequel that was a huge letdown. I did appreciate how self-aware the game was though. We were but temporary actors on the stage of some grand play, is that it? How appropriate, considering that our role was more to fill a piece of the story than to actually play the game. Symbolic, even, but based on that one old man's rant I'd say the writer hated symbolism. And literature class. I smiled though.

FINAL VERDICT:
This game was sorely lacking in actual gameplay, and the plot, while very clever if the ending was what I interpreted it to be, just needed more exposition. If it wasn't sarcastic then it made no sense and ruined the setup, as the other reviewer claimed. Props for the atmosphere, and for keeping me interested up until the end, but the end was quite the let-down.