Developer: Dim Bulb Games, Serenity Forge
Publisher: Good Shepard Entertainment
Rrp: £14.99 (Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam)
Released: 28th February 2018
Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam
Played Using: An Xbox 360 Control Pad
Approximate game length: 16 Hours
Stories, the world is full of them. Everyone has at least one to tell, usually a hell of a lot more. But imagine if your job was to collect them, nurture them and make them grow. In honesty it wouldn’t take that much work, just time. Stories have a tendency to shift in the retelling, becoming embellished and eventually they barely resemble their former selves.
I don’t think I’ve ever played a game like this before. I could call it a Walking Simulator because this game does feature a vast amount of that, it’s also something of a visual novel and its open world. I think its safe to say this game doesn’t fit neatly in any genre.
The game is set during the great depression and you play as a wanderer (a hobo if you use the parlance of the time) who after a losing a bet with a supernatural creature is transformed into a skeleton and tasked to wander the USA and collect stories. It should be added that no one else can see that you’re a skeleton.
You skeleton wanders the world of the USA, you see towns and cities go by as you pass. Some will have indicators that mean that a story can be found there. Once you interact with it the visual novel element of the game makes its appearance. The buttery smooth voice of the narrator will describe what’s occurring in lavish detail and then you get to make a choice. What choice you make can change the nature of the story and therefore what kind of story it is. Did you just make what should be a story of horror kinda comical? Then it may just fall into that category, it all depends on who you tell it to later.
If I have an issue with this game it’s that the skeleton is pretty slow. You can speed up your walk speed by playing a mini-game where you press control pads buttons in the right order to the sound of whistling, which is a novel idea but I found that if I paid attention to the minigame I’d miss the stories that I should be finding. However, there’s a great quality of life feature in this game which is the ‘auto walk’. It can take a while to get anywhere (you can hitch-hike and jump into boxcars too but most of the time you’ll be hoofing it). With the ‘auto walk’ you simply set the direction and your skeleton keeps going in a straight line, you’ll have to course correct every so often of course.
What makes up for the slow walking speed for me is the music. I love the music, its very soulful I can’t bring to mind the genre even though I’ve heard music like it before. And much like the music I also loved hearing the narrator (as voiced by Sting) who has a wonderfully deep and gravelly tone.
As you wander and collect stories from events you witness or are a party to you end up meeting people to tell the stories to. They’ll ask for specific type of story, perhaps one of hope or thrilling adventure. The stories come in different genres, you need a variety to really do well in this game. Its no good having only funny stories when the listener wants a spooky tale. However each of these stories that you tell you’ll later hear again except this time they’ll have grown and become embellished with the telling, in turn making them more effective.
This game has a distinctly American flavour, especially as its about spreading tall tales and urban legends which really aren’t common elsewhere. Sure we have folk lore and history but there’s something different about the ones that exist in the USA.
This game is exactly why I love indie games. No big publisher would give a game like this the time of day, its not graphically impressive, there are no big action scenes and even the cutscenes (the few there are) consist of perhaps a few frames. But the concept and story carry this game and the art style the developers have chosen really suit the game.
Honestly I really think this is a great game, but I can’t recommend it to most people. It’s very slow and plodding and though the art style, music and general tone do a lot to elevate the game its mired by the terrible walking speed of the skeleton and the extremely niche… well niche this game has made itself.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
I truly can’t think of any game even remotely like this
