fart town usa
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Released: November 6th, 2018. Exclusive to PSVR.
I played through this the other month. It's a really incredible piece of narrative and overall experience.
Gameplay is classic adventure style but really simplified. Most of the puzzles make sense and it's basically interact with what's available until the next scene is triggered.
You play as a Faerie who roams the grounds of a boarding school, the first few chapters involve interactions with the students in an effort to convince them that Faeiries exist. In typical FromSoftware fashion, there's something much darker at work.
You play with dual Move controllers, each represent a hand and that's how you interact with things. It's grid based movement, the game seems to justify this because the Faerie is in-between time and isn't actually present. Grid-based movement is controversial for some but I think it works incredibly well in Deracine. There's so few things to interact with so wandering would just drag the pacing to a crawl. Movement is very quick and you still get full exploration of the school building and surrounding grounds. The narrative jumps back in forth through time and the interactions you perform cause changes in the overall timeline. Think Back To The Future rules.
Everything is scripted, you can certainly miss out on things but the narrative will always play out the same.
There's also a dozen or so cleverly placed coins to find and it unlocks some kind of special item.
Maybe it's because I was baked while playing but this game had me legit terrified beyond reason at times. The game doesn't go out of it's way to be frightening but the atmosphere is so damn thick. As the story progresses you really start to get concerned about these kids and with the way the story plays out, you start to question who your character is, etc. <- Not even a spoiler either, you won't ever guess or predict where the story goes. But back to being terrified; since you're in-between time, you're always witnessing things kind of after the fact, so as the dark themes start to surface, I was on pins and needles just waiting for something sinister to crop up and when it eventually did, I found myself in this panic, racing around to interact with the kids and the way that section of the game plays out, it just rips at your heart strings. Keep in mind too that you have a VR headset strapped to your face so you are fully immersed in this strange videogame world. It is truly fantastic.
With the game being exclusive to PSVR, I would suspect that 99/100 gaffers haven't played it, or will ever play it. Thankfully there are people with much more useful talents than I possess and among these people, VaatiVidya made a succinct playthrough of the game and then an accompanying Lore video.
The story is relatively cryptic but the major themes aren't hard to grasp. The Lore video though. Holy smokes. There is so much stuff I missed and after watching it, only then did I realize that the game is far more dark than I initially thought. It's truly brilliant what Miyazaki and FromSoftware came up with. Sony published too. #SonyAlwaysWins
Here are those videos incase you have an hour to burn and enjoy FromSoftware style narratives.
Anyone play this game? Did you enjoy it?
NO SPOILERS PLEASE!