"Quod" is another word for "prison." That's something I found out after stumbling upon this game. What it has to do with a game about a little robot ambling about, you might have a hunch as you start to play it early on but the ending does extrapolate on it a bit more.

In the game you play as Johnny Fi..., er, R.O.B. the Ro... no, WAAAALLLL-EEEE... actually your character's name is simply "Robot." Yes, Robot. But as it turns out, you had to reformat your corrupted hard drive in the very beginning, essentially erasing your memory, so that name's probably as good as it's gonna get for the time being (at least it's not the one from Deadly Friend). In addition to robo-amnesia, you also find yourself in a massive junkyard of near-apocalyptic scale. This is managed via a compressed photograph of such a place, which is kinda scary when you think about it, such a place existing, though I know there are worse/bizarre things out there (like entire islands composed of garbage formed together out there in the oceans). Usually this attempt at mixed media, with realistic pictures mixed with the simple RPG Maker style graphics, etc. doesn't work, being aesthetically clumsy and killing the immersion. Here though, somehow, it looks quite good even as the next area you enter is comprised of more conventional RPG Maker tiles and objects. There is something curious about this backdrop though, some may notice... what looks like a man in the background just... standing there, overlooking something. He never moves, not even a twitch, as though what he sees is something so overwhelming as to cast him into a deeply catatonic, paralytic state, for what has to literally be an eternity (go ahead, record it as long as you like to see if he moves for you - I'll wait). For a moment I was curious - what wonder or horror could this be that has the man so entranced?



But then I'm like feh, who knows. Maybe something to explore for a spin-off game. We have more important matters at stake here!

Anyway, you decide to venture forth to figure out just exactly who you are/what your function is, and how you ended up in WALL-E's playground in the first place anyway. I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say it has to do with the dead body you find inside the large building almost immediately. A building that comprises pretty much the entire map you'll be scouring through the whole game in fact. Turns out his name is Robyn Gale. Robyn as in... Robot? Ah ah ah ahhh! Well moving on you find more about him through notes you read and auidologs you collect, found all over his mansion of a place. As it turns out, the audiologs, the first of which you find on Robyn's person, shares your voice. And there is some device consisting of two chairs opposite each other and his body is lying in front of one of said chairs... hm yeah I think you can easily deduct from here what his experiment was.

From the rest that we gather, he is the founder of this robotics enterprise and becomes obsessed with his belief that a robot can be a fully conscious, self-aware being. Audiologs indicate that funds are being withdrawn due to his crazy ideas, his lab assistant (?) urges him to stop what he's doing in a more-than-stern tone, and we even get the treatise, John Searle's Chinese Room (not to be confused with the game, or, er "non-game lol" developing studio of the same name, but that's clearly where their name comes from, the more you know...), a somewhat complicated piece of writing that essentially boils down to arguing that computers/A.I. can never be sentient or truly pass the Turing test, since everything they do is merely something that they have been programmed to do, not something they do willingly, no matter how convincing they may seem. Reading through this entire piece you'll occasionally find Robyn's scribbles refuting some things written inside but seems to keep it mostly clean, maybe it's a library copy and he doesn't want to defile it too much.

Obviously this tale of obsession leads to the foregone conclusion of his seeming downfall, seeing how his corpse is lying in his own laboratory. But no matter, time to solve the mystery! Let me just say first and foremost that the main crux of this game is puzzle-solving. It isn't a long game, not at all, and as mentioned, one contained within a building that may be large by the character in the narrative's standards but not so much by actual gameplay standards (there's even only one save point in the entire game, one which you'll probably rarely use even, but it's represented as an Amiga computer, which is neat - in addition to saving your game there you also get the choices to look at its spectrogram and turn on its sound board too), but what'll keep the length going is figuring a few of some of the most devious puzzles I've found in an RPG Maker title yet. Adventure gaming veterans who've long conquered the entire Infocom and Sierra catalog, perhaps even back in the days when hintbooks were hard to come by and the Internet was but a twinkle in a future sociopathic teenager's eye, will find this a cakewalk I imagine, but for others it's time to put on that thinking cap of yours and dive right in. There are a few simple puzzles such as, what is this? A door that requires a six-digit code to get in? And wasn't that a six-digit code in that hole I saw just less than a minute ago? If only I could make the connection! There are a few inventory-based ones (thankfully with this game if you have the item on hand it'll immediately prompt you if you want to use it, easing things a bit). I would say the three "big" puzzles of the game are - getting the laptop passcode, getting through the "maze machine" and finally getting the correct disc configurations for the disc-insertion machine(?).

The first one involves making an interlinking series of associations from one thing to the next, and if you examine everything from your vials to the audiologs carefully enough you should arrive at its conclusion. The second one I resorted to trial and error and figure out, but messaging the game's creator he pointed out a key to solve it without trial and error that definitely would have saved me some time had I known about it. But yeah, once you know which chemical mixtures produce what, it's fairly easy (the other challenge is the "tilt" function which gets harder as you move on but is never too difficult to figure out). With the last one you need to collect five discs scattered about the premises, some trickier to get than others (in fact this is why I contacted the dev in the first place, as there was a disc I had no idea how to get, but he kindly provided me a hint in the right direction, to an area I didn't even figure existed until then - wanna give a shout out with my thanks for that!). You then need to insert all of them into a machine with each disc on a certain setting, with four choices per disc, where then you'll reach the end of the game.

The discs may be the standout element of the game. For the most part the game is a rather quiet puzzler, walking around with just an eerie, minimal piano piece playing in the background (another thing... after a while you can hear the faintest sounds of what sounds like kids yelling in the background - when I first heard this I thought it was the kids outside my own place running around, playing, yelling, doing what kids do - but as I continued to play it and continued to hear it doubts began to overcome that, until I knew, yes, this is actually part of the music - seriously fucked with my head there - I have a really good set of AKG 'phones to thank for that...). But there is a machine outside in which you can insert the discs into and what you get is a sensory overload in the truest sense - a bunch of images flashing in front of you split seconds at a time accompanied by the music act most dominant in this game, or at least the game's credits, renowned IDM/breakcore music act Venetian Snares, in particular music from their Winter in the Belly of a Snake album apparently. From the game's opening screen, which starts with a more minimalist tune, with thudding rhythm followed by glitchy sounds, then later to the kind of brain-breaking rhythmic assaults you'd expect from IDM and breakcore taken to their limits, to softer, more melodious pieces to contrast with the off-kilter rhythms, the game covers pretty well most facets of Venetian Snares, save for maybe their uglier, outright noise tunes, so nothing for you Winnipeg is a Frozen Shithole fans, sorry.

These rapid-fire collage of images, some of them simply a picture followed by another, to the bizarre "Cambrian" disc, make this a game I would not recommend for those with photo-sensitive epilepsy. So, a warning - the use of Venetian Snares is appropriate since these visual presentations are a good equivalent to the music played. And it's not like they are gratuitous either, playing these discs and paying attention to the images is key to solving the puzzle involving them.

Now let's talk about what be the other true standout element of the game - Mr. Robot himself. First, he is fully voice-acted, which you don't see often in an RPG Maker game. And what a voice he has! It is described on the main page as having a British voice, but it isn't like any British voice I've heard. It sounds like some weird bit of Scottish, Welsh, maybe some English in there too? I honestly don't know. I'm a Yank, hardly one to go to for expert talk on accents, but it really hardly sounds like any typical English accent I've heard. And on a few occasions he'll even speak in a mocking French accent. Weirdly enough, the French accent sounds the most natural/convincing of the two. I don't know who the voice actor is, is it a French person attempting an English accent? I don't know, but it's sort of endearing in a way. And of course being a robot the manner in which he speaks must be off-kilter too. Every word seems deliberately accentuated in a funnily non-human way, the stressing of syllables switched around and all. Not unusual for a robotic voice but with the semi-human, bizarro-English of "Robot" it sounds all the more amusing. Adding to it are some of his very keen observations on the things around him.



The very best part is when you come across your companion corpse. Once you obtain a syringe you can obtain a vial of blood from him. The first time this happens freakout mode ACTIVATE. No really this is a part that'll give you a jump if you don't expect it. It is another series of flashing images a la the discs, this time greeting us with images like a flying bat, a picture of lesbian sex (so you know to keep the kids away), and a whole two seconds of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel giving you a stern looking-at. Seeing how flashing images of bats, lesbians and Hegel with a heaping dose of Venetian Snares rattling your ears isn't what you'd normally expect to experience when extracting someone's blood with a vial, unless their blood has been extracted and replaced with a highly potent and hard-hitting hallucinogenic fumigant, you react the way probably everyone else would.



The moment he uttered that I just laughed myself silly. But really it's the way he says these things more than what he says that makes these so good. The way he says "Oh" upon discovering both a dead body AND a Roland 303 synthesizer is my favorite. It's a must-listen. The biggest problem with the voice is the inconsistencies in how it was recorded. At times it sounds like it should, sort of tinny-sounding, with a bit of reverb, other times it sounds like it was in a completely sound-proofed booth. Not a big deal, but it's definitely noticeable.

I did say that the voices of Robot and Robyn are the same. It seems for some reason the actor's voice for Robyn wasn't so convincing. In some audio tapes he sounds OK, others he sounds extremely flat and even boyish sounding. In particular Oh yeah, that's another thing, there are two endings to choose from. One is seemingly more positive than the other. You'll probably figure out which one that is once you get to it.

This brings me to the game's biggest flaw in my mind. Just everything about the story in general. It sets up a story of obsession, the nature of consciousness, science gone wrong, a mystery about lost identity and what it means to have identity and to think... but in so small a game it really can't explore these topics with much substance or depth. In particular at the end where it is revealed how you ended up in the junkyard, it was so rushed-through with a few casually dropped plot points that made me go "...uh wait, can you run that by me again, you did what? WHY." I'm referring to Also, where the hell is Elly? She is frequently brought up in the letters you find as a lover of some sort but outside of her car which is conspicuously parked down south of the mansion, there is no sight of her at any point in the game or accounting for her absence. This is a hole that needs to be filled.

These story weaknesses do hurt the game if only because there is promise of a fairly in-depth one yet it doesn't do much with what it presents (having the whole Chinese Room text makes for an interesting read, especially for those who don't know of it, but it's ultimately rather gratuitous considering that nothing in the game's story rises to its level or even tries to). The story gaps, the predictability, and the parts of the ending that just come shooting out of nowhere and don't fit into anything that we've observed in the game makes for a story that if it weren't for its memorable and endearing main character would probably be an immense failure. But Robot is what really keeps it somewhat on its feet, as well as the occasional bits of symbolism that bring something of interest (the paintings, the disc images... what they represent is probably obvious, and very much literally in some cases at the end, but as a sort of audio-visual representation of memory, at least the flashing disc images anyway, it is an interesting artistic representation of such).

Another flaw is one that is warned of on the front page but still worth mentioning - that of playing this in full screen, resulting in some bad lag. It really only happens in the open grounds area outside the building I found, and not enough to make it unplayable so I went with it. However there were some graphical glitches at one point, in the Maze Machine where you're mixing the chemicals, the syringe animation wouldn't appear nor would the color be visible, making it harder to tell where you're fluid even is while tilting the things. It's not something that happened consistently, there would be one point where I would reset the process and then the animations/colors would come back soooo, fine I guess. As far as severe slowdown is concerned, it did happen during a point toward the end, which was a bit bothersome but eventually cleared itself up. I did try the game for a bit in windowed mode to see if it did run smoother and indeed it did. Regardless, I just went with the slowdown since the windowed mode is too small for me and whatever problems the game has with being in full-screen weren't enough to detract from me playing it.

Besides that, it's a game more to test your mental mettle in terms of solving its puzzles. There are only a few "big ones," with some item-gathering and more basic puzzles in between (like one involving pushing barrels around until they activate a pressure-plate switch to open a door - another is to reprogram a fellow robot to work in tandem with you to open some gates on the way to some key items - it looks intimidating at first but when you see what few choices you have in rewiring the robot to your bidding a little process of elimination should clear things up soon enough) but it'll keep you occupied a good couple hours I'd say at the least, unless you are one of those previously mentioned adventure game vets who figured out King's Quest I's backwards Rumpelstiltskin puzzle - the very first iteration of the puzzle - in your first try, whipped Spellbreaker a new one and totally thinks that constructing a mustache out of cat hair (which you got by putting tape in a hole in a fence where a cat likes to run through) and drawing a mustache over the passport of someone who doesn't have a mustache (which you obtained by distracting said person with candy) to match your stylin' new looks as a means of faking out someone to rent a scooter is completely within the realm of sane logic. That case, this will just be a trifle for you. For people who enjoy the occasional adventure/puzzler in RPG Maker form, this a good title to bide your time, having some of the more creative and challenging puzzles I've seen in one of these games. Plus that Robot character and his voice is just so great.



See even he knows when good alcohol is being wasted. No mere bot would recognize that. "Robot" here just tore the Turing test a new one with this observation John Searle - you have officially been decimated.