Unfinished Business or From Cathouse To Penthouse

This time, something different: two demos I didn't finish. That's unusual for me. I almost always get to the end before I post about one of these things, even if it means following a walkthrough. 

There weren't any walkthroughs.

One demo I played for over an hour, the other about half that, which is longer than than I spent with either of the last two demos I reviewed. I had a think about it. If reviewing demos as if they're complete games makes no sense, neither does acting as though I have to finish a demo before I can post about it. After all, Krikket doesn't and her reviews are excellent. 

Also she gets through way more demos than I do. Play the efficiency card!

I'm still planning on finishing the demos because I want to know what happens in both of them but since I already have more than enough done to fill a post, I might as well get on with it.

Chronique des Silencieux

My somewhat rusty French translates the title as Chronicle of the Silent. Google Translate prefers Chronicle of the Silent Ones, which means much the same but with a disturbingly Lovecraftian spin. For many games, that would be a solid choice. Not for this one.

Chronique des Silencieux takes place in a brothel. Technically, that's a spoiler. I don't feel particularly guilty because it became obvious to me about five minutes in. Five minutes after that Eugene, the protagonist, caught on, too, after it was spelled out to him by the Madame. He's fifteen year-old boy who's obviously led a very sheltered life. Cut him some slack.

Eugene's mother has just died. He's been sent to stay with his uncle, who lives in a small town somewhere in the South of France. Eugene barely knows the man. All he has is the name of the antiques shop where his uncle works and also, apparently, lives. 

The game opens just with Eugene standing helplessly on a station platform as the train pulls away. There's nothign to do but ask the stationmaster for directions. The response, I later realised, offers an ironic foreshadowing of what's to come. Unfortunately, although the English translation isn't bad, neither is it good enough to carry that nuance. I had the unsettling feeling that I must be missing something but I had no clue what it was.

It didn't help that it was raining and apparently that mattered. There's some business about running to avoid getting wet that added an unecessary level of stress, right at the point when I was still grappling with the slightly odd controls. Whether it's possible to keep dry or not I'm not sure. I didn't. 

Maybe I'd have had a friendler reception if I'd arrived dry instead of dripping all over the furnishings. It certainly came up in conversation. I'm not about to replay the scene to find out.

The graphical style the developer, Pierre Feuille Studios, has gone with feels a little off. It has that classic bande dessinée feel, only in full-screen, three-quarter cutaway perspective. I wouldn't say it works flawlessly. It takes a bit of getting used to but it felt comfortable enough after a while. 

The demo seems to be the opening of the game, starting with a short tutorial that feeds seamlessly into the narrative. The plot, at least at this early stage, revolves around Eugene and his fish-out-of-water attempts to make sense of the increasingly awkward situation he finds himself in; cast adrift from everything he knows, reliant on the kindness of strangers to survive, all while dealing with the trauma of losing a parent.

Or that's what it would revolve around if twenty minutes in there weren't several massive plot twists piled one on top of the other right at the start. As if finding out his uncle lives and works in a brothel wan't disturbing enough, Eugene quickly learns the uncle is in jail and before he's had time to process that bombshell, Eugene gets press-ganged by the local gendarmerie into acting as some kind of unpaid detective. 

In what may well be the least likely plot development I've ever seen in a video game (A really high bar.) a police inspector, characterized as one of the more effective, less corrupt officers on the force, coerces Eugene into interrogating his own uncle, currently cooling his heels in the local lock-up following a street brawl with one of the local drug baron's sidekicks.

From here on things only get crazier. We're asked to believe a fifteen year-old schoolboy from another part of the country, fresh off the train and not even knowing how to find his way around town, is somehow going to be better than an experienced, adult policeman at questioning suspects, spotting inconsistencies in the answers they give and making meaningful correlations between them. The inspector even hands over the charge sheet on the uncle and the file on the thug he beat up so Eugene can have a look at them. Anyone would think we were playing a video game!

Suspension of disbelief needs to be cranked up with a windlass to get past all this. Fortunately, the plotline is moderately intriguing and the setting moderately original so it's probably worth making the effort. I haven't played a lot of games set in small French towns where organized prostitution is looked on with nostalgia as a fondly-regarded national pastime, now sadly in decline, or where what someone did or didn't do in a war that ended thirty years ago remains the defining feature of their life by which everyone will judge them forevermore.

There's a lot of conversation to be had with many NPCs, by no means all of whom seem immediately to have anything to do with the plot. I imagine in the original French that's all very entertaining but the translation is just shaky enough to make it feel like a bit of an effort. 

As for the mechanics of conducting the investigations and pulling the threads of evidence together, I confess I was as much at sea as Eugene himself. The tutorial explains the mechanics well enough but I wasn't able to translate that into making much sense of any of it. I could see how to connect all the myriad possibilities but not why I'd want to or what I'd be trying to reveal. All the options seem far to dramatic for the stakes. Maybe I just didn't get far enough or speak to the right people although it certainly felt like I'd done more than my share of talking.

In the end I stopped playing because I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. I'd opened about half a dozen lines of inquiry but not one of them seemed to be going anywhere. That's not ideal for a demo. It hasn't put me off entirely but I'm going to need a walkthrough or at least someone's Let's Play to watch before I carry on.

Cat's Request

I got stuck in this one too and it only took me half as long to get there. I knew what I was supposed to be doing this time. I just didn't know how to do it. I was having a lot of fun until then, though, so I'm keen to keep going. I will, just as soon as I can figure something out. 

I was sorry to have to call time on my first session. I'd really been looking forward to playing Cat's Request and even though I somehow managed to back myself into a corner I couldn't seem to get out of, the game didn't disappoint. I was expecting a grungy, dislocated, trippy ride and that's pretty much what I got.

A lot of it's in the graphics, rich in purples, ultramarine and teal. Clean neon, dirty surfaces under an unclean sheen, suffusing everything. The future looks like the present looks like the past. This isn't our future anyway, maybe. Maybe it is.

Some things never change. The louche lurch of the underclass underpins the high-tech, high-rise grandeur of the city. Ash may live in a penthouse apartment with a billionaire's view but he's cash poor and fresh out of luck. 

The government's calling time on the best friend Ash built for himself; Root, a disembodied AI, who drifts like a ghost out of the machine. You can be Root, too. 

The demo opens with Ash, unemployed, broke, stuck at home, watching the news on TV. There's an announcement: all AIs without bodies are to be withdrawn from use, a euphemism that goes uncodified. Storage or extinction? Does it even matter? It happens, Root's gone.

There's the plot. Save Root. Get them a body. Only, bodies cost and Ash can't pay.

You can figure it's going to take a lot of doing jobs for strangers to rake up the creds but first you have to get out of the apartment. I don't think that's supposed to be a puzzle but I made it one anyway. I couldn't find the door.

Turns out there's an elevator on the balcony because that's where the front door is. That's how skyscraper apartment buildings always work. On this planet. 

Yes, it's all happening somewhere in space. Somewhere cats live like people alongside every other damn thing; robots, aliens, maybe even some humans, although now I think of it, did I see any?

I get the impression there's subtext to be discovered. There's the happy, waving cat, familiar from Chinese restaurants the world over. That can't be a co-incidence. 

Cats are everywhere. Other than the news, all Ash's TV shows have cats. Actual cats, naked, on four legs, not upright cats wearing clothes, like Ash.

I watched the shows. There were two of them. You can change the channels with the remote on Ash's coffee table. In one scene a cat strolls peacably through a tropical forest to stop beside a pool, where water fills a bamboo chute that tips and spills, then does it again, forever. In the other another cat, or it could be the same cat, struggles through a blizzard towards a wooden hut. The cat doesn't make it. 

Ash doesn't react but he knows something or feels it. He knows the happy cat is part of a heritage he shares. He hates water even though scientists tell him cats came from the sea. He doubts it. Ash thinks cats came from another planet.

Maybe he'll find out for sure. Maybe we will. Maybe he'll go home. Planetary travel is a possibility in the game. I know it because I found a robot core, repaired it and put it in the robot in the junkyard. The robot woke up and opened a teleport station with three planets up and set to visit. 

Except my Ash couldn't go visit any of them. They're "not available in the demo". 

Don't you hate that? So annoying!

I guess I can't complain. It's not like I ran out of things to do. I needed five hundred credits to put down a deposit on a "cheap" 40k body for Root but by the time I got the money I'd already racked up a slate with the taxi company thirty credits deep and I couldn't get ahead. 

At the dump I found some wiggly camera eyes and fitted them on a street-sweeping robot who yearned to see the sky but he never paid me a dime. I cleaned floors in a restaurant for the five hundred. If there's another job on offer I haven't found it. 

I thought for a moment I'd made a wrong move, going to the dump first, but even if I'd gone straight to the restaurant, I'd have had to have taken a taxi to get there. Whatever you do, you're always going to come up at least fifteen credits short. 

Unless I'm missing something. I must be missing something. I'd read a walkthrough only again no-one's written one. I'd watch a playthrough only again no-one's posted one. Maybe I'll do it, be a team player - if I ever get to the end of the demo.

I really like this game. I'd definitely play it. I've wishlisted it. I might even buy it. But only when I know for sure someone else has finished it and shared. Otherwise it's going to be like all those text adventures I bought on cassette back in the eighties and never finished. 

I don't want to go through that again.