#pixelquietplays

[pixelquiet]

Pixel Plays 01: Heisei Pistol Show

I’ve decided that I wanna write blog posts about games I’ve played recently, how they make me feel, and what lessons I will be taking from them moving forward as a developer.  This entire thing is all because playing this game gave me a ton of brain worms and very few people are talking about it online.  Lets get to it!!!!

I first heard about Heisei Pistol Show (HSP from now on) by the developer Parun in a lovely video by hazel about one of his other games Re:Kinder.  She mentioned it briefly, about how it stars a boy in a lolita dress (which immediately intrigued my gender sense), and how a subbed playthrough could be found on youtube.  I tried watching that playthrough, but honestly, the translation was incredibly rough, not to mention hard to follow with how busy the art style is and how fast paced the recording was.  I decided to wait on it if a fan translation ever came out, and sure enough, just a year later, we got one!  I was super excited that I would finally get the chance to try it out

HSP is primarily exploration based, with Heart, the aforementioned boy in a dress, exploring a strange yume nikki-esque dreamscape with his best and only friend, a talking pistol, by his side.  His goal is to find and kill the top three assassins who are standing in his way from getting revenge on his ex-boyfriend.  The game loop revolves around exploring to find cash, buying a new gun, and using its special properties to defeat the top three in a sort of turn based puzzle fight.  There are no enemies beyond the bosses, so defeating them is more about using the unique properties of the guns to take them down before they can do the same to you.  I ended up just running away from all of them upon first encounter to instead find all the money in the game, using it to buy every pistol, and then using the information memos to figure out which ones to equip.  The boss fights are really clever, seeming impossible at first glace, but not too hard in the end.  The game also offers an easy mode that lets you kill every boss in one normal attack, but where’s the fun in that?!

The part of the game that really gripped me is the art and story.  The artwork feels very homemade, but also exudes effort.  Lots of bright, flashing colors and intricate programmatic animations precede every first encounter with a boss in a little musical number.  The character sprites are very charming in that oekaki sensibility as well.  The characters talk to each other like good friends with a lot of history together, which makes the rest of the story that much more tragic as it unfolds.

I’d like to delve into some spoilers as I describe the story here, so if you are interested in playing this game, please please skip this paragraph.  Heart’s story was really familiar and difficult to me, as a trans woman.  We are shown scenes of his (I will be using he for consistency, but this is debatable in my opinion) childhood in which he wishes to become a princess, and sings along to a princess-themed idol’s song, a pastiche of twinkle twinkle little star.  At first, Heart claims the singing made his father happy, but later on we are shown him being abused by his father, seemingly due to that femininity and it’s resemblance to that of Heart’s cheating mother.  As the story goes on, we can see that this pain led to an inability to form healthy relationships, as Heart attached himself to his clients as a sex worker, to the despair of the Top Three, who are seemingly representations of the other sex workers, and also ambiguously trans in the way Heart is.  Heart’s story is tragic, a trans sex worker, abused and clinging to love, falling to violence and eventually being killed by police.  Despite all of this, Heart never loses his cheery attitude and hope that he can one day find happiness, although this takes a dark turn when he believes revenge on his lover is what will bring that happiness.

I really found the story and it’s themes of clinging to hope and happiness in the face of unending misfortune, as well as its thematic interplay of sex and violence challenging and fascinating, and I think it explores the topics it does with a level of nuance greater than many works made today, despite having been developed in 2008 Japan.  I also think it succeeds in a lot of the ways recent indie darling Omori, fumbles, especially in regards to story and managing to make a dream world have consequences and meaning within the narrative.

I think some of the lessons I’ll be taking from this are in regards to the art and story.  First, I think I will try to allow myself some ambiguity in the stories of my games, especially towards the beginning.  For the majority of the game, I had very little clue what was actually going on, and things became more clear over time in a very satisfying “ah-ha!” moment.  I’d love to replicate something like that in my games in the future.  Secondly, and this is a lesson I’ve learned before, a game having “technically” bad art doesn’t make the art bad.  Parun’s artstyle isn’t the most impressive, but it has a lot of charm and beauty, and is completely unashamed of itself.  The game allows itself to be loud, colorful, and messy, and I think there’s no other way this game could have been made.

All in all, please give this game a shot!  It’s free and pretty short, less than an afternoon’s time (also I need more people to make fanart of Heart he’s so cute).

https://patchy-illusion-team.itch.io/heisei-pistol-show

[pixelquiet]

Pixel Plays 02: Signalis

I’m back for my second post about a game I’ve played.  This time it was Signalis by rose-engine, a retro-futuristic survival horror game that came out recently.  This post will go into some heavy spoiler territory later on, but I’ll mention beforehand so you can leave if you wish.

Signalis is a game that I would describe as a justification of the medium of games as a whole being considered an artform.  The game is dripping with atmosphere, the gameplay and puzzles are tight and interesting, and the story telling certainly relies on the medium of a game in order to be told properly.  The game wears it’s inspiration on its sleeve, with many literary references, and riffs on its ancestors, with resident evil style safe rooms containing a persistent storage container, and save monitors displaying a red square like the save points of Silent Hill 2.  The gameplay itself is a top-down riff on those two games previous mentioned, moving from room to room, juggling resources, and solving puzzles.  The enemies mostly consist of slow-moving zombie-like creatures, with a few unique ones mixed in, like the railgun wielding MYNAH and the psychic KOLIBRI that requires you to tune your radio to create a feedback loop and make them vulnerable.  Besides enemies and puzzles, the player can find notes and surviving NPCs littering the facility that will explain some of the lore of what happened, as well as the political reality of the Eusan nation.  I always stopped to read the notes and look at the propaganda posters, and the game even features a diegetic “memory” function to review any of these you have seen to refresh on concepts as necessary, or just for puzzle solving.

The one criticism I have of the gameplay, and honestly the game as a whole, is the inventory system.  Like other survival horror games, Signalis uses a limited inventory to ensure the players plan out their actions ahead of time and conserve resources.  I would argue this is a good mechanic (I will be doing something similar in my upcoming survival horror game) but I find the “rule of six” as it is known in-lore a little too frustrating.  Most puzzles require at least 2 inventory items to solve, but the player is also basically required to carry a weapon, ammunition, healing items, and a piece of equipment to survive.  This does equal six, but if your equipment slot is a flashlight and you pick up a taser on the way, that will have you backtracking to the storage box.  A huge portion of my time with the game was backtracking to the storage box, even from a few rooms away, due to this issue.  If the game had let you carry 8 items, or even just allowed weapons and ammo to take up the same slot, I think this issue would have been mitigated greatly.

I’d like to talk about the story now for a bit, so please skip this paragraph if you are interested in this game at all.  The story of Signalis kept me guessing all the way through, and even now, with a greater understanding of the events, I still find myself with a lot of questions.  The game opens with Elster, a bio-mechanical gynoid “Replika” waking up on to find her ship crashed on a mysterious snowy planet.  She enters a strange hole to find a mysterious room, and we are then shunted into the game proper, with Elster (the same or another?) arriving at a derelict mining facility looking for a woman named Alina, in a premise intentionally reminiscent of Silent Hill 2, bathroom mirror and all.  As the game progresses, you learn the facility has been taken over by some kind of disease turning the other Replikas into monsters, and the true purpose of your mission was to find a woman named Ariane, Elster’s human girlfriend and pilot on the ship that crashed in the intro.  It’s left up to the player’s interpretation whether the events of the game really happened or were in the dying dream of Ariane.  My personal interpretation was that the facility stumbled into some sort of lovecraftian creature that was able to tune into Ariane’s dying “bio-resonance”, a sort of psychic radio wave, and transport her ship to the hole under the facility.  It also causes Elster units to repeatedly obtain the memories of Ariane’s original Elster, giving them an insatiable desire to go to the facility and find her to fulfill her promise, but this memory corrupted causing the confusion with Alina.  I think this interpretation gives meaning and weight to the events, they can’t be brushed away as a dream, but also explains the multiple Elster corpses and adds a bittersweet tinge to their love story.  I got the memory ending, in which Ariane can’t recall Elster, and they die together, which I found bittersweet and fitting with my interpretation.  I also saw a lot of myself in Elster, a tall, quiet, and infinitely determined butch robot girl, and I will always get behind portrayals of tragic gay love in games.

Some final thoughts I have about the game are that I absolutely adore the art style, the mix of pixel art and ps1 style 3d was composed perfectly, and I still don’t quite understand what parts of the environment besides the characters were fully 3d or not.  The lighting and sound design were fantastic, and the interactable technology around the station was lovely to play with in the way retro tech always is.

Overall, as a game developer, especially one currently working on a survival horror game at the moment, I will be taking away a lot from Signalis.  On the negative side, I will try my best to balance the limited inventory away from frustration while maintaining tension.  On the more positive side, it gives me hope that games tonally matching the kinds of works I desire to put out there can exist and succeed in the indie space.  I hope to take the intricate writing, tone, and worldbuilding from Signalis, and the way it is satisfyingly drip-fed to the player.  This game felt like something that will define horror and indie games in general for a long time in the future, and I highly recommend it!