Progress report: First week of July ‘19 (a.k.a. Shorty-Shorts Galore)

Okay, so… since I know I have much, much more time for gaming now that it’s Summer (despite the weather trying to trick me into thinking differently), I’ve decided to break up my monthly post into smaller chunks to make it easier to read (and post, duh!).

• Captive
  

  3.1 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

• Freshman Year
  

  0.4 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Just, Bearly
  

  0.5 hours playtime

  9 of 9 achievements

• Pink Rage Otome
  

  4.0 hours playtime

  78 of 78 achievements

• Summer Nightmare
  

  1.1 hours playtime

  5 of 5 achievements

• Surface To Air
  

  0.3 hours playtime

  no achievements

• The Kite
  

  0.6 hours playtime

  no achievements

• 永冻之壳 The Shell of Permafrost
  

  1.3 hours playtime

  5 of 5 achievements

Captive - This has easily been my first non-VN pick for this month’s theme, ‘cause for reasons that are unknown even to me, I just wanted to play it for the longest time. Captive is a very short game about a woman (her name’s Alice, apparently) who wakes up on the underground level of an unknown building. She’s also bleeding, so the player’s task is to lead her to safety before she bleeds out and dies. First of all, I appreciate that while similar, it isn’t (or doesn’t seem to be, at least) an RPGMaker game - everything is much bigger than in those games, so you can see everything more clearly - for example, how the player character is bleeding from a thin-looking wound on her leg - don’t think that would be possible to show if the sprite was smaller. The music and the lighting build up the atmosphere, even though I didn’t find the game particularly scary as a whole. There are a few flashing messages that appear at certain points of the game and they were probably meant to scare, but for me they balanced on the line between “a little unsettling” and “annoying”. The story of the game is never fully revealed and changes slightly between endings, but I’m not sure it’s not the good kind of non-reveal - hard to empathize with the character (or not) if you only get a single moment of exposition in the final scene and then the game is done. There’s also a stamina mechanic, but even though it recharges just as fast as it runs out, I didn’t like it too much. And last, but not least, my biggest problem with this game was that you could get most achievements on your first playthrough, but then you have to go back to see all the endings… all the while the game doesn’t allow you to save. I know thirty minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but with how slow the text boxes and the character movement are, I’d appreciate it if there was at least one save slot, so that I wouldn’t have to go back and redo the first half of the game all over again - it’s so linear I ended up memorizing the order of all the tasks I had to do. Not to mention I had to use the walkthrough to get to any of the good endings, because the game is unintuitive enough to not tell you a door in a certain place magically unlocks after you’re halfway done with a playthrough (the first time you try to open it, you’ll get the message that it’s locked, so you probably won’t think to bother again). Oh, and the song used in the credits? Not something I’d listen to in my free time. Not to mention that whatever I discern from the lyrics doesn’t seem to make any sense in relation to the game itself.

Freshman Year - With a game that short, what do you expect me to say? One playthrough takes around 5 minutes to complete, depending on your reading speed. I managed to spend twenty-something on it just to explore all the possible choices. The music might fit the theme, but it made it harder to concentrate on reading, I think. The art style (especially the climax sequence; you’ll know it when you see it) looks like something that belongs in very old cartoons or independent art galleries - I like it, but here it felt more like “meh”.

Just, Bearly - Randomly saw this game on another user’s list and checked it out as the title caught my eye (I love me some puns). Just, Bearly is a short glimpse into the life of Bearly, who is a bear suffering from anxiety. The game consists of several “painfully relatable”, as the store page describes it, minigames. I admit I could relate to a few of them, even though I’ve never been properly diagnosed with anxiety or other related problems. Some of the minigames, however, I struggled to understand, more so in how I was supposed to play them correctly than relaying them onto real life. As far as the “comedy” of it goes (since the dev claims this to be a comedy game), I smiled softly once, maybe twice in the twenty-something minutes it took me to play through Just, Bearly. Other than that, I like the style of setting paper characters against real life backgrounds and the theme song is pleasant to the ear, in my opinion. Other than that, there’s one thing I have to warn you about: if you’re interested in playing, you’re most likely going to have to fix an error that prevents the game from launching properly. Thankfully I figured that out because of a discussion in the game’s community hub, but still… not cool.

Pink Rage Otome - Boy, this one’s a trip. Where do I even start? “Try yourself as a tsundere girl!”, the store page says, but there’s being tsundere and there’s also being an asshole. Guess which one describes the protagonist more accurately. While I don’t doubt there are things lost in translation (as it’s bad and it shows), Horror’s (yes, that’s the main character’s name - oddly fitting) attitude is most likely not one of them. She constantly tells all the guys they’re useless and that they can’t possibly accomplish anything good in their lives, and yet, for some reason, they still grow to like her. Which brings me to my next point - the story is on fanfiction level; not only does Horror manage to have a bachelor fall for her in 2-3 days, the story is also all over the place in other regards. For the first half of my total playtime, if not more, I had no idea what was going on. Now that I kind of know what is the general premise, I can say it sounds interesting if not for the faults I mentioned before. On the good side though, the character designs are really unique and eye-catching, and the CGs are pretty good as well. Shame there’s not a gallery for them, which is a feature that’s easily found in 99% of VNs that feature CGs. The theme song is also pleasant to the ear.

Summer Nightmare - First VN I played to fit this month’s theme. Good lord… I think it tried to be scary? The team behind it is Korean, and I think you can feel that in the horror, but it’s… so… fast paced and incoherent. Not as bad as the achievement fountains, mind you, I believe they tried doing something, which shows in the art. There are a lot of event CGs, even with the protagonist looking at his darn watch or a note he randomly found at one point. The script isn’t as good though. Lots of wrong capitalization, irregular ellipsis, I even found a case of the script misspelling the name of one of the characters in the most hilarious way possible. Back to the pacing problem, the VN presents you with a problem that’s been going on for some time now and then solves it in one in-game day (and night?). The protagonist is just forced to engage and that’s how everything mysteriously gets solved. Honestly? There aren’t any zombies in Summer Nightmare, but I bet you Dead Rising in VN form would have been much more enjoyable, and it lasts three days. Maybe that’s why Corpse Party is so entertaining too, given the fact that there’s no sense of time to speak of? Anyway, Summer Nightmare. A little nightmare-ish and not at all summery.

Surface To Air - A less-than-15-minutes long video about hydrofoiling told through the eyes of members of Artemis Racing. Short and informative, shot very much like a documentary. Personally, when I watch something dedicated to a certain activity or niche, if the medium makes me feel like I could do it even though, realistically speaking, I can’t, it’s good enough for me. Surface to Air did just that and now I wish I could fly around, if not on a hydrofoil, then at least on a quadrofoil.

The Kite - Okay, seriously now, do all the games from Anate Studio have to be about domestic violence? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a topic that is very much real, but I don’t know how long it can hold itself up for. The Kite is the original Little Kite, and I’ve yet to play that and see it more fleshed out. The soundtrack is mostly composed of classical tracks, the art style is grey and sad, and the game took me about half an hour only because I was so unenthusiastic about playing it, that I used a walkthrough to beat it. Not much more to say here, other than that you’ve got to appreciate how it’s all done by one and one guy only.

The Shell of Permafrost - A short (~30 minutes, is what the store page says), Chinese RPGMaker game, originally made for a game jam. It involves pretty and colorful graphics, and magical themes. Seriously, with its length I can’t say more than that or I’ll spoil it all.