Swery 65 is a bit of an old ball for sure. Coming off of the cult horror/psychological hit Deadly Premonition and its less than stellar sequel, we find him setting his latest adventure in…the English countryside? It’s probably about as left a turn as you could make, but that’s not to say there isn’t plenty of oddities going on here as well – both in the story and the game as a whole.
If you’re not a fan of quirky Japanese titles, then you’ll likely struggle to get invested here as I did. The pace is all over the place, there are far too many systems just thrown at us constantly, and between the often witty-yet-still-tedious dialogue and the incredibly annoying traversal I came close many, many times to just turning it off for good. Much like the aforementioned Deadly Premonition, this seems to be hoping that naff controls and annoying gameplay systems such as pointlessly low stamina bars and the need to shower will attract the same cult following. It might well do, who knows, but for my money there’s far too much guff here to deal with, especially early on.
Beginning the game with TWO prologues was a bit of a kick in the balls too. Not only are they fairly lengthy but they also chuck endless dialogue and boring fetch quests at us expecting us to care and/or take it all in. Luckily I’m a fairly quick reader, but even then the constant flow of text boxes grated no end on my nerves. Worse still when I had to go from one end of town to the other only to be sent back with a new nugget of info or an item that took far too long to get. It’s almost like the game is setting out to purposely push away all but the most dedicated players, and even then I’m not sure they will get a satisfying reward for sticking with it. It feels very much like a game from the late 90’s, where huge open world adventures were just beginning to take shape and developers hadn’t got used to implementing decent flow or creating a compelling and fun world to explore; just lob everything you can think of in and hope for the best.
Having said all that, I did at least enjoy the concept for the story. We play as Naomi Hayward; a New York journalist in massive debt (£30 million!) who is sent to a sleepy village in England called Rainy Woods to discover why it’s called the Happiest Village on Earth. Once there, she discovers that there are several strange and disturbing factors to this otherwise normal looking village, including the people turning to cats and dogs upon a full moon! She learns this power in the prologue(s), after which she can switch at will. Using her journalistic talents, she must uncover why this, and many more mysteries, happen and help the townsfolk solve them.
There are flashes of decent ideas too, such as being able to traverse different areas or fight different enemies in the three forms (Human, cat, dog), or the way the town works to a schedule so we might find clues at certain times or the like. Depending on their animal preference, we can alter our alignment with either cats or dogs which will then lower or raise shop prices for example or even how talkative someone is.
The problem is, well, everything else. It’s be exhausting to list out all the ways the game frustrated me, but a brief summary would be; the movement, the needlessly huge map, the awkward way of tracking quests, the ambiguity of the thousand extra systems and mechanics that get thrown at us, the controls for every action in the game, the overly wordy and not that interesting dialogue… in summary, almost everything about the game is a bit pants.
Take the systems for example: a major one has us taking photos with our camera and then uploading them to an in-game social media site to generate likes which are then turned into currency. As the game has a day/night and week cycle, every Tuesday and Sunday new keywords are put up on the site which will award bonus likes if our photo includes them, such as “Fluffy Toys” or “Potted Plants”. A nice touch to be fair, and something that could have been quite fun to play around with. Where it goes wrong is in the implementation. Naomi can snap as many pics as she likes, but we have to get back to her house outside of town, log in to her PC and upload the photos from there before the Keyword changes. The likes then slowly roll in hopefully, but even a great shot will hardly do much for our bank balance in the long run. Not to mention, if we’re in the middle of a quest it means actively heading out of our way to go home to upload them. Why we can’t do it from her phone is beyond me, and even the interface for uploading them and deleting old or rubbish photos is clunky and unintuitive as all hell. Then, the money earnt goes hardly anywhere thanks to overly pricey food and items, as well as losing a huge chunk if we happen to die with any amount of money on us. Even headache pills (yes, she can get a fucking headache) cost around £100 and if we don’t fix it she loses the will to live… sorry, that was just me.
Take the gist of what I’ve said just now and transpose it to every other system in the game and you get the idea. Some ideas are just pointlessly annoying, and there are even some of the meters I don’t know what they are there for after around 10 hours of playtime. The flashes of enjoyment are sadly outweighed by some truly terrible decisions all round, and while I’m sure there are some who will love its quirky, clumsy nature , I can’t say I’m one of them.
Conclusion
Fans of Swery will no doubt lap this up, quirks and all, but I just could not get on with the game at all. Every time I thought I had finally turned a corner with it some other nonsense turned up that put me right back at square one. Overloaded with poorly implemented decent ideas, this is a one for truly dedicated players only.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox Series S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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