Developer: Sunset Visitor | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, Sci-Fi
It’s tempting to describe this game as a visual novel disguised as a walking simulator, but it wouldn’t quite make it justice. Although it did have some exploration and light puzzles, the distinct style and narrative really made it stand out from its peers.
A disease from an alien race, the Occupants, wiped out all humanity except one girl, Iris. She was immune, and she created a new society with clones of herself, known as the sisters. They were not immune and had to wear masks, and they worshiped Iris as the ALLMOTHER. They lived in an enormous underground bunker called the Orchard, hiding from the Occupants.
I was playing as the Watcher, a girl with the ability to relive and interpret the memories of the ALLMOTHER through a process known as Communion, made possible by Secretary, my floating AI companion. These Communion sequences were like virtual reality experiences in the past memories of Iris.
I could talk to a lot of NPC, sometimes jump forward or back in time, and there were tasks for finding specific NPC. Talking to these quest goal NPC typically shifted me into a surrealistic scenario zipping from node to node, trying to find the NPC in a cloud of floating objects. The time jumps were typically useful for bypassing blockades like closed doors or force fields.
This game had received top scores by most review sites and an overwhelming positive user rating on Steam. Especially the story and the dialog were praised as an amazing experience. Many claimed they were jealous of gamers experiencing it for the first time. Did I agree with the consensus?
No, I was not that enamored by this game.
In fact, the beginning of the game was very confusing and almost had me quit it after about an hour. The Watcher was inside a Communion in a school and I had to wander around, talking to a lot of NPC with seemingly irrelevant dialog, trying to gain access to a gym. I was questioning what the point was to all this and whether the entirety of the game would be like that.
Luckily, it wasn’t like that for long. The Communion was resolved after talking to Iris’ girlfriend Jiao three times, including those zip point scenarios. Then I arrived in the enormous underground bunker, Orchard, had a talk with the principal, explored the bunker, and embarked upon the next Communion where Iris was a kid living with her parents in a small apartment.
It was only really after the zip point scenarios and the exploration in Orchard that the game really started to grow on me. But it wasn’t so much because of the story. If I have to be honest, I felt it was meandering in a annoyingly artsy fartsy way, while the dialog was often digressing in one way or another.
I was rarely smitten by it.
I could see how it would impress other gamers, however. It was extremely varied, unpredictable, often surrealistic, and it had very unexpected twists. I’m an old bugger now and not easily impressed. But even so, I admit I could feel emotional towards the end of the game, in the way the fate of certain characters had played out. If I had been younger, I’m sure the story would have grabbed me a whole lot better.
The dialog was extremely clicky. Click for next dialog. Lots of “…” moments in between. Those also had to be clicked. Clicking to speed up the typing of the dialog. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
It was both amusing and somehow annoying that the Watcher often didn’t know what common objects in the past of Iris was and needed to have it explained by the Secretary. There were hilarious exceptions, though – like the Watcher noticing a bowl of something on a table and asking “Sphere worship?”
No, the Secretary answered. Those were oranges.
In the school Communion in the beginning, it was all Resident Evil camera. Static in the corner, observing from the side, the Watcher approaching the camera. I never understood the need for this camera style. It’s not artsy, it’s just annoying. Luckily, it went 100% third person behind the Watcher in the Orchard.
Did it require a gamepad? No, I had no problems using mouse and keyboard.
The two hotkeys for time shifts changed between two time periods in the school. In a later dream-like sequence, it browsed the frozen positions of Iris’ girlfriend in a dark street. In fact, this latter way of just jumping forwards in time to experience a linear flow of the story became the most used gimmick.
Orchard was enormous and difficult to navigate. Tons of entangled hallways and areas. No doubt that was a very deliberate design choice, proven by the fact that some findings game me a Steam achievement.
Some chapter sequences were all running sideways, for examples inside a train.
The sisters were often arrogant and condescending towards the Watcher.
We sure were forced to see the cutscene with Watcher murdering Iris again and again.
One gameplay element I’ve generally started to dislike in games is leftover babbling after hitting the “Leave” option in a dialog tree. Please don’t overdo this, developers. This game did it a lot. Respect the choice and abandon the chat. I selected it because I wanted to move on.
I like the part where the protagonist was in doubt of what to do after an emotional discovery, which made the quest goals come and go in seconds, one after another.
The game does the trick of pretending the game is over, throwing you to the title screen. Selecting a menu option throws you back into the next part of the game. It’s not an original idea anymore. I’ve seen it before. Yet, it confused me and so it did the trick.
That interrogation of Watcher (after she killed Iris and was tied up) went on a bit too long for my liking. I can take any kind of bodily molestation in games and movies – except eyes. Good thing they didn’t show her eyes getting stabbed.
Oh look, a real life video of someone driving a car on the road!
I absolutely did not like that a countdown of 5 minutes suddenly occurred in chapter 9. Blue was falling from a broken glass ceiling and I had to hurry up in a complicated zip scenario to reach the top. I only just about made it. So, the game is silly easy for 99% of the time, apart from this one sequence? I really think the developers should have made that differently. You can’t expect gamers to go on for an easy gameplay ride for nine chapters and then suddenly throw a tough nut like that in their face. It’s unbalanced.
Also, Inception would like to have a word with you.
I liked the bit trying to figure out who were the administrator in a group of ghostly human images, time jumping ahead and reading dialog. It felt more like a real adventure game task than normally.
My ending was: Epitaphs (Blue) after 10.7 hours of playing.
Whatever I thought of the story, it’s true what they say. There’s no game quite like this one.