Demo Review: Might be the single worst-researched game on RMN

  • NTC3
  • 04/18/2018 07:10 PM
  • 4743 views
I generally avoid games that already have a review, especially if those are as short as this demo. However, Norilsk is an exception, one which immediately made me raise eyebrows when I first spotted it on RMN. It’s not that I am against the idea of foreigners (in this case, the creator is Canadian living in Taiwan) making games or other media about Russia or Russians: my review of Apocalypse Never can certainly attest to that. However, Norilsk is about one of the last places in Russia I would ever imagine anyone turning into a setting for a bright, anime-styled romance VN.

Here’s a location primer, written largely off the top of my head: it is one of the coldest cities in Russia alongside Archangelsk, Magadan and Salehard – fellow cities located beyond the Arctic Circle, (though all quite far from each other), where there’s polar day and night and temperatures can reach below -50 degrees Centigrade. For a such a distant place, it’s decently sized (180,000) and is the northernmost city of that size, as well as 2nd largest beyond the Arctic Circle (first is Murmansk, the destination of land-lease’s PQ convoys). In Russia, Norilsk is known for one thing and one thing only – its enormous nickel refinery, which is practically the only reason for its existence. (the first house in that entire location wasn’t built until 1921, and is now a museum exhibit, “Norilsk’s first house”.) When the plant was privatized in the 90s, the owner of “Norilsk Nickel”, Mikhail Prokhorov, became a billionaire and made headlines twice: for getting caught with prostitutes in the French ski resort in 2007, and for challenging Putin in the 2012 election, getting 8% and securing a third place behind the Communist candidate Putin himself. (Suggesting a legal pathway to a 60-hour working week probably didn’t help.) Lastly, since Norilsk exists largely to serve the needs of its metalworking industry, it is also the single most polluted city in Russia, and one of the most polluted in the entire world.

In all, I suppose a romance visual novel taking all of this into account is not impossible, but one would certainly have to try very hard to create one. Going in, I had a feeling it would not live up to it, but left open possibility I could be proven wrong.

Gameplay

Well, it’s a visual novel, and we know how these work. They may or may not include minigames (this one doesn’t seem to), but the most important distinction between them is the degree of choice afforded to the player, from fully linear “kinetic novels”, to ones that allow truly enormous choice. Sadly, there isn’t a single choice of any kind in the demo, so all you can do is advance the text, or set it to auto.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



Here’s the list of the stuff used in the game. All of it is generally decent on its own. Explaining why it doesn’t work in a particular game called Norilsk will have to go into the next section.

Storyline

What is present in the game is very brief, as commented on in the other review. There’s also so much wrong in it that I’ll have to comment on practically every screen to truly take it all into account.



So, the menu screen clearly uses some very plain default fonts, which is concerning. Still, great games can have poor menus and vice versa: Let’s just click new game and…



This is the first screen, and lush tree in the window outside is questionable, but ultimately plausible: Norilsk does have some greenery in the summer. However, if you look closely at all the posters I crudely marked with arrows here, you’ll see that they all feature Japanese (or perhaps, Cantonese, since the developer is from Taiwan) writing (in a physics class, too), which is obviously wholly ridiculous.

The next screen already has a typo (“Like before, she didn’t look to pleased). It shows character busts, and while anime look is one thing, the uniforms also look rather suspect for a modern Russian university: for one, the vast majority of them typically don’t care to impose one in the first place. The only one here in Saint-Petersburg that does it is the Mining University (which mainly pumps out future oil(wo)men to serve Gazprom), and it looks more like a Tsar-era military uniform, all-black and complete with shoulder marks. The red ties are interesting; they would have been appropriate for USSR period game, when they were associated with Pioneers, but now, wearing one is likely to get you mocked because of the same association.



What I am talking about. Also, this is the person you are forced to play as.

So, the story itself has Iosif here undertake research assignment with a pushy girl Karina, and another one, Sabina, who is immediately portrayed as a total weirdo. I should say that while Sabina is a real name in Russia, it's rare, and is mainly found amongst our Asian minorities: Yandex image search for that name mainly throws up images of a Kazakh volleyball player. As it is, the character is a brunette, but I don't think that's close enough. There's soon another typo. “Is it necassary to get so angry about it?” Then, they get to the library (the only other location image in the game), which is not recognisably Russian, but at least it's no longer recognisably Japanese (Taiwanese?). Then, there's this:



GPA is a Western concept. A Yandex search does return hits…to websites giving advice on how to study abroad. Granted, Russian universities whose degrees are accredited under International Baccalaureate do include an equivalent, but it' highly unlikely that appies to Norilsk's ones (see below.) To further dispel any doubts that the author doesn't understand Russian education system, we have this following screen:



There are no As, Bs and the like in the Russian education system either. It uses numbers, with 5 being the highest, and 1 the lowest.

Some last images from Sabina.





Apparently, it showcases her quirks. Don't let the fact you are far more likely to find someone eating shawarma in Russia than either of the foods above get in the way!

Conclusion

Norilsk is one of the most baffling games I’ve seen on RMN. I just don’t understand how one can pick a relatively obscure city here as a not just a setting, but a title for your whole game, and yet not bother at all to go for authenticity of any kind.

Now that I think about it, the premise itself is deeply implausible: the description on both here and Steam states that he’s been travelling for 12 years but decided to return to Norilsk to study in university there. I don’t want to say this couldn’t happen; many Russians here find my own path from St. Petersburg to Adelaide, Australia and back hard to believe. Nevertheless, there’s a world of difference between St. Petersburg and Norilsk, and the idea of returning to this particular city for the sake of studying is… Well, long story short, here’s how Norilsk’s places of higher learning (all four of them) rank in Russia: the highest-rated is at 601th place. If kory_toombs really wants to pick one of our less-known cities as a setting, I would much rather suggest Tomsk: practically the only city in the Asian part of Russia whose state university can compete with those of Moscow and St.Petersburg. It would also allow some screenshots from the Steam store page, like that of a Chinese market below, to make sense:



However, that would obviously require remaking the game, and making a whole host of other changes. Right now, it's set for release in two weeks on May 1st (which is incidentally a public holiday in Russia, being the Day of Labour.) and I can't imagine the Russian players on Steam (who, let's face it, will make for the majority of interested parties) being any kinder to it then I am. At best, it'll be largely unnoticed; at worst, it'll be found by one of our YouTubers and become a total meme (in a way Hunt Down The Freeman is right now); an outcome kory_toombs is probably not interested in.

Posts

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SunflowerGames
The most beautiful user on RMN!
13323

An interesting review. Since you used the credits in a screen shot I can sort of semi quote it from here, "This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental."

Looks like a cool place though:




"Hunt Down The Freeman" appears to have a lot of sales. If my game can make that many sales I'll be pretty happy either way.


Well, I'll again say this: if it's going to be fictional to the point of placing Japanese posters in the classroom, then what's the point of naming the game after a very real locale in the first place? It would be like me or my compatriots making a game "San Fransisco" and portraying it indistinguishable from a typical post-Soviet city, with tower blocks all around the place and abundance of trams and trolleybuses.

The image above is apparently from the main street. It does have some good vistas, as can be seen here.



However, it's worth keeping in mind the aerial shots may look a bit different:



And HDTF didn't sell more than ~1500 copies or so, according to Steamspy before it was rendered obsolete by Valve's privacy changes last week. I suppose that might seem a lot when comparing to RMN, where decent games can take years for a similar number of people to download them for free. For a game associated with Valve's founding IP, on Valve's store, however, that is a dismal failure. It did result in some cool videos, though:

SunflowerGames
The most beautiful user on RMN!
13323

I don't know how someone went about getting the rights to Valve's IPs. But I will count it successful if the Steam sales meet 1000 USD, in which case I will have made my investment in art back and Steam will refund my 100 USD. 1500 copies would be 10 times more than my minimum expectation.

I bet if I was writing a story about that Norilsk place I could have some cool sort of snake monster that lived in that giant hole in the ground. And the red in the rivers is actually the blood of dead workers. I mean if I ever go into the horror genre.
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