If we dissect an RPG with a scalpel, we will find a dense framework of numbers arranged in spreadsheets. I found myself repeatedly tapping my keyboard, fast-forwarding through the battles, which aren’t even challenging after a certain point. You have to fight to get through the game. Yes, yes-I see that I can sob instead of fight, and that I use blood instead of potions but aside from the new dog’s old tricks, what are we left with? The gameplay doesn’t function as metaphor, doesn’t enlighten the experience though it’s the primary way you interact with the world. There is nothing fundamentally new in these turn-based battles. This also has the effect of neutering that very wonderful weirdness, where instead of dragons and princesses, there are headless horses and Squid Pirates. Even if the world doesn’t immediately make sense, anybody who’s picked up an RPG will get the rhythm of the game, even if the melody is foreign and alienating. This gives Space Funeral a sort of power-transporting basic gaming grammar into a weird and wonderful little world. You gain experience points, grow, learn new abilities, move on.
#SPACE FUNERAL 4 BLOOD RED VERSION SKIN#
I love that you start the game next to the dead body of the protagonist, and that everybody tells you it’s too late to do a damn thing about it.īut Space Funeral also pulls this skin onto a traditional role-playing skeleton.
#SPACE FUNERAL 4 BLOOD RED VERSION FREE#
I love that it’s free and was made with RPG Maker, which has probably churned out thousands of uninspired clones. I love that it uses a song by Love as victory music. (I love the audacity of using Japanese ’70s noise rock in a game.) I love that the protagonist is in pajamas and perpetually sobbing. I love the surf-rock-of-the-dead tune “White Waking” that plays throughout. An underpinning of logic infects everything else, even to the detriment of the game. Maybe it’s because games are rule-based systems. In games, narrative cohesion comes at the expense of abstract, emotional responses. There’s a certain maddening need for everything to make a sort of sense. Every interesting avenue became a dead end.
The narrative took pains to tie up every loose end. Then I came to the game’s true ending, and that all came crashing down. By my third play, the reverberations were haunting. Replaying the game had the strange effect of amplifying the allusions made in previous trips. Stray bits of dialogue lingered in the air, opening avenues to unexpected twists in the plot. What stood out for me was the weird flavor some of the bad endings had. The particulars of the game are mostly unimportant. A few months ago I played a visual novel for the Nintendo DS.
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