Full Games List
Featured Games
New Games
Reviews
Media
Images
Blogs
Game Updates
Images Feedback Summary
Game Design Highlights
Tutorials
Articles
Scripts
Utilities / Plugins
Resources
Engines
Engine Bulletins
What is Makerscore?
Past Events
Achievements
Misaos
Forums
Post History
Chat
New to RMN?
Full Store List
RMN Music Pack (free)Must've Had Some Serious Time Constraints
Frogge- 09/26/2018 01:14 PM
- 269 views
Show Me Your Homework by AliceMisaki
Length: ~10 minutes
AliceMisaki is a developer who I have been keeping up with for a while. I remember when Annice first came out and it looked like a very interesting game. I have since seen them work on Nemesis and Black Dog and have been really interested in how coherent their works looked. They have a very distinct art style that's pretty cute and charming. And sadly, that's probably the only thing that made "Show Me Your Homework" good, making it a not very great introduction for me into their works.
Since we're on the topic of the game's visuals, let's look at them a bit more in detail. The game looks pretty decent for the most part with good art and good mapping. Alice's tiles do clash with the stock rpg maker stuff for sure, but it's not glaring enough to ruin the aesthetic. The windowskin looks pretty good, save for that one pixel moon clashing with everything else that is antialiased. It's not an amazing looking game, but it's not particularly bad on the eyes either.
In terms of presentation, I would say sound design was a much larger issue. The game only has one song on loop the entire time, a very sombre track that does a decent job near the start, but does not fit the more bloody scenes later on. It does cut the audio out for said scenes, but some darker tones would have fit much better than no music at all. The same can be said for the sound effects - there's a huge lack of them. What you're seeing usually doesn't coordinate well with what you're hearing. Some sounds of blood splashing or characters giggling or something would definetly make the scenes easier to follow.
The gameplay is just your simple adventure game stuff. You interact with objects and progress the plot. There's one anagram "puzzle" midway into it and one choice you can make near the end that will land you one of two(?) endings, but other than that, nothing much to see here.
These anagram puzzles aren't really all that hard when you're making me choose between three options and two of them aren't even actual words.
The plot is very basic, and does support a fair share of issues.
You play as a little girl who moves to a new school and is assigned homework - to look after a plant. If the students behave, their respective plants are meant to bloom by the next day, and even flower if they act nice enough. Straight off the bat, I have a few questions, but I'll save those for a bit later. So Aura goes home where she reveals to the player in a very sudden and forced way that she is a witch and that she can use black magic to bring her plant to life in the form of a humanoid flowergirl (basically a dryad), despite her mother's warnings. The next day, she brings her now sentient flower to school, raising a whole lot of other questions.
So here's my biggest question - is magic just common and accepted in this world? Is the school run by witches, which is why they can give you magical plants that are somehow supposed to bloom if you're good? Also, what kind of homework is that? As someone who's still in school, I can safely say I've never gotten any homework about looking after a plant as much as I've gotten homework to do trigonometry. I do not prefer the latter, but sadly that's how schools work, they give you homework as excercise for home, and it's meant to help you understand the topic being taught at school better. How is looking after a plant exactly going to help these girls? The only thing I can think of is that the school is trying to teach them to behave and be nice. I mean, is this homework graded? Do I get a low grade if my plant doesn't bloom? I can only assume this makes sense if the characters are like, 4 year old kindergardeners, but the class board has third to sixth grade level maths on it, so I would assume that's not the case.
And going back to the topic of magic being accepted in this world, when Aura shows off her plant monster thing to the rest of the class, they don't react at all first, and the teachers calls it amazing. So are they just not surprised that her plant is suddenly a humanoid? Is plants turning into humanoid creatures just a common occurance in this world?
It can also get fairly hard to follow along what's happening due to the grammar issues. I understand that the developer isn't a native english speaker, but there's still a lot near the end that becomes very confusing due to that. I had no idea what the rest of the class was complaining about.
And yeah, about that scene, what the hell happened, exactly? They started calling Aura ridiculous insults (if the developer was trying to go for a serious bullying scene, this was definetly not it, because I was moreso giggling at how Aura could possibly take the slightest offense to what was being said to her when she was getting like 10 year old insults) but I don't see how any of the things they said made sense. It could be due to the grammar issues, but they call Aura a "liar", but I have no idea what she would be lying about. Making a living breathing human plant thing?
And then I also got totally lost in one of the endings because it was so abrupt. You leave the plant thing and run to the teacher who... kills the plant for you out of nowhere? Does she have a knife or something? A gun? How did she kill the plant thing when the plant thing literally had thorn-swords that she could attack with that would probably wreck the teacher to the ground before she event got to move?
The one other thing I could complain about here is that there is literally no establishment on any sort of relationship between Aura and her plant creature. One of the endings lets me side with it and kill everyone and run away, but why would I side with the dumb plant thing when I've only seen it for 2 minutes where she's done absolutely nothing of value to bond with you, and hasn't even said a single word?
So here's my biggest question - is magic just common and accepted in this world? Is the school run by witches, which is why they can give you magical plants that are somehow supposed to bloom if you're good? Also, what kind of homework is that? As someone who's still in school, I can safely say I've never gotten any homework about looking after a plant as much as I've gotten homework to do trigonometry. I do not prefer the latter, but sadly that's how schools work, they give you homework as excercise for home, and it's meant to help you understand the topic being taught at school better. How is looking after a plant exactly going to help these girls? The only thing I can think of is that the school is trying to teach them to behave and be nice. I mean, is this homework graded? Do I get a low grade if my plant doesn't bloom? I can only assume this makes sense if the characters are like, 4 year old kindergardeners, but the class board has third to sixth grade level maths on it, so I would assume that's not the case.
And going back to the topic of magic being accepted in this world, when Aura shows off her plant monster thing to the rest of the class, they don't react at all first, and the teachers calls it amazing. So are they just not surprised that her plant is suddenly a humanoid? Is plants turning into humanoid creatures just a common occurance in this world?
It can also get fairly hard to follow along what's happening due to the grammar issues. I understand that the developer isn't a native english speaker, but there's still a lot near the end that becomes very confusing due to that. I had no idea what the rest of the class was complaining about.
And yeah, about that scene, what the hell happened, exactly? They started calling Aura ridiculous insults (if the developer was trying to go for a serious bullying scene, this was definetly not it, because I was moreso giggling at how Aura could possibly take the slightest offense to what was being said to her when she was getting like 10 year old insults) but I don't see how any of the things they said made sense. It could be due to the grammar issues, but they call Aura a "liar", but I have no idea what she would be lying about. Making a living breathing human plant thing?
And then I also got totally lost in one of the endings because it was so abrupt. You leave the plant thing and run to the teacher who... kills the plant for you out of nowhere? Does she have a knife or something? A gun? How did she kill the plant thing when the plant thing literally had thorn-swords that she could attack with that would probably wreck the teacher to the ground before she event got to move?
The one other thing I could complain about here is that there is literally no establishment on any sort of relationship between Aura and her plant creature. One of the endings lets me side with it and kill everyone and run away, but why would I side with the dumb plant thing when I've only seen it for 2 minutes where she's done absolutely nothing of value to bond with you, and hasn't even said a single word?
It's not a particularly well written story that leaves a lot unexplained. A lot of things are off, from the pacing to the lack of realism. It's not horrible, I've seen a lot worse for sure, but it does still leave you disappointed.
But the absolute biggest deal breaker for me here was the lack of polish. Oh boy, cinematic, this game is not. There are tons of sudden cuts or images that appear out of nowhere with no fades at all in between. Characters can often just teleport into the map during cutscenes, and a lot of collissions are off and I can't step on places I logically should be able to stand on, or go behind things like the house gates or the top parts of trees. The cutscenes, as I have mentioned before, are very anti-cinematic with little to nothing impressive ever happening in them. Even when you get a game over, the game just flashes the picture out of nowhere (accompanied by no sound or anything, I should add) and then when you press space, it quickly gets deleted, shows the map for a few frames and returns you to the title screen.
You okay there, Aura?
"Show Me Your Homework" is a game that was made in under three days, and for that, it's not the worst game out there, but it could have been much much better. It doesn't make me want to not play the developer's other games, but it does make me slightly skeptical about them to say the least. Hopefully, they will be much better in regards to polish and story, and I'm excited to see if they are.
I give this game two murderous humanoid plant monster dryad thingymagigs out of five.
