Backstage by Devon Oratz (Legion) reviewed by Maladroit Him (Brandon Abley) Medium: RM2k3 (of fucking course) |
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Impression
This is a game best described as fucking Emo. It is, in all sorts of ways, brilliantly creative, overbearingly heavy-handed, intolerably unfair and frighteningly atmospheric. Before I get on with the rest of the review, be sure to keep this in mind: we are talking about a survival horror game that uses cute little sprites drawn with a 256 color pallete that have been mangled into all manner of gore. It's a weird juxtaposition that is often extremely difficult to accept. But, in some weird way, and for some reason, the whole thing somehow works. And I like it. The visual presentation was probably this game's major drawback. It just didn't fit. Here we have a game that tries to come off as something legitimately scary and creepy, but from the outside simply looks like an RPGMaker game. I am used to seeing grotesque abominations ambushing me from the darkness in glorious, grainy 3D; not hearing a well-placed sound effect and watching a poorly-animated sprite I've seen in umpteen other games jerk across the screen. And when we make contact? I hear a shotgun blast, but I see engine's stock animation for a punch. And some weird, brightly-colored globules of something that are probably supposed to be blood, but look a lot more like cartoon testicles. Though a monster whose exterior is covered with thousands of cartoon testicles is scary in its own right, I somehow think that wasn't the goal here.
Not ALL of the graphics are as disappointing as I make them out to be. Legion's mapping isn't phenomenal, but it's used well enough to provide a (usually) convincing array of environments. These range from haunted hotels to a mausoleum, which, strangely enough, doesn't seem to be haunted. Legion's selection of graphics (taken entirely from public domain, with very minor edits on his part) is generally tasteful, and there's a certain gritty modernity to the game. He is always tinting the screen all sorts of colors, which definitely adds to the mood -- usually, the colors are all dulled enough so that his resources don't clash as much as they should and there certainly aren't any bright tones. The whole game, in a weird way, looks like a badly compressed JPEG image. This works in the game's favor. The case is not that the graphics are particularly BAD, unpleasant to look at, or in any other way a huge shortcoming in an RPGMaker title. The case is that the format just doesn't lend itself to scaring with me with anything it could possibly show me - leaving the burden on sound design and writing to get me sufficiently creeped out.
But, graphics are only half the battle, right? So there's still room for redemption. And that battle for visual presentation was not entirely lost, so if Legion delivers in other departments, he's a winner. And, overall, I'd probably have to say that he is definitely a winner. The writing is almost universally excellent. And at the very least, it beats the living shit out of garbage like the dialogue in a Resident Evil title or the obtuse, pretentious rambling you'll see in Silent Hill. This is a huge accomplishment with a game that tries so hard to be Silent Hill, but just doesn't have the same financial resources to do it the same way. There were a number of scenes where I was sorely disappointed by what was going on, but, for the most part, Oratz' mastery with the literary presentation made up for his less-than-ideal visual offerings. His plot had a twist or two that I would never have seen coming, and the characters were each and every psychotic in their own ways. If I were to identify a single theme here, it would definitely be delusion. I wasn't even sure if half of the characters in this game were real or not, and of that half, I was absolutely certain that they had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. It's hard to say what had or had not happebed or who had done it, and I like it that way. Backstage leaves you feeling uneasy, because you are never sure of anything. For example: I once entered a room in the hotel. It looked like every single other room in the hotel. It had nothing in it, and probably used the same empty map file. However, when I left, I was like on a completely different floor - but in an identical hallway. The whole experience left me feeling violated and weirded out. From that point on, I could never be sure that my mental maps and my sense of spatial relation could be trusted, because the game was fucking weird. I fully understand this trick was lifted straight from Silent Hill 1's schoolhouse, but it worked just as well here as it did there (perhaps better, since I had a handy map feature to set me straight in Silent Hill). While it may seem like sort of a cop-out to throw all sorts of random shit at the player from behind a shield of insanity, it didn't come off that way here. It worked, okay? I can't really explain it in any way other than that it worked. Backstage's strongest point was probably its sound design. Again, a lot of sounds were "borrowed" from Silent Hill or Resident Evil, but they were used expertly. So expertly, in fact, that there times I was legitimately frightened while playing this game. A few times, the cat would brush against my leg or my girlfriend would tap me on the shoulder, and I would jump; all of the pounding noises and the backwards voices being blasted into my scared little eardrums had left me all riled up. So, there you have it - Legion proves that nothing can scare a person as well as a few (or in this case, an onslaught) of well-placed dissonant noises. Leave your buckets of blood at home, because they don't effect me. This is not to say that all of the sound effects were great. A few of the squishing noises sounded really fucking silly, and whenever I heard that pitiful attempt at a kissing sound I wanted to go to all the trouble of installing Windows 95 on Legion's PC so that he would be vulnerable to a WinNuke that I would send his way in lieu of retribution. In the end, though, if you play this game in the dark and turn your headphones to 11, you will probably get freaked out. Noises are scary. In a nutshell, this is a a title that seems really fucking absurd if you think about it too much. The trick is to just sit down and enjoy it, because it has some things really going for it. Technical Graphics As is generally the case with games designed with this engine, there isn't a whole lot to be impressed by in the whole technical-mastery-with-graphical-presentation department. Oratz sort of pretends to have some particle effects at some points, but nothing that probably took more than a few minutes to code. In fact, many things, like the tussles with the monsters, seem strangely rushed, sloppy, or just plain lazy in the way their overall execution. One neat trick I've mentioned before is the use of screen tints. Backstage's graphics were borrowed from god knows how many sources, which means there are literally dozens of different styles being used. He is able to cancel out what would otherwise be a hell of a lot of clashing resources by dampening the colors a bit and dulling the saturation on everything. This reduces every graphic to the same limited, almost-entirely-gray color pallette and helps mostly everything fit together. There were a few spots where I had to think, "What the hell?!", but generally this single neat trick served Legion's purposes very well. Code
I'm sure just about anything reading this review has at least a slight interest in RPGs, which means that you've probably played a Dragon Warrior game somewhere along the line (or probably not, if you haven't been playing games for more than 13 years or live outside of Japan, which are becoming satisfied conditions on an increasingly more consistent basis). And in that case, I'm sure you can recall those lameass text menus. Backstage's text menu is even more clunky and sucky, and just a few hours' worth of work would have yielded a substantially better interface. While I appreciate deviating from the stock RM2k3 interface, I can't help but be at least a little bit disappointed. There were also all sorts of weird bugs associated with the menu (saving during cutscenes). Everything else that was programmed for the game was entirely utilitarian and generally basic. A silly animation representing the monster hitting my guy, a few variables being passed around to document the exchange, things like that. Backstage does, indeed, represent a simply enormous volume of programming talent opposed to the average RPGMaker game. This is only true because most RPGMaker games suck total ass. Basically, Backstage's code is optimized such as to provide all the essential functions but not such as to make it pretty or smooth. Sound The creativity of the sound design in Backstage is the highest in any indepedent game I have played for a good deal of time. It's easy to find a game with high-qualiy sound effects or appropriate-sounding gunshots or whatever other bullshit you want to throw in to emulate reality, but rarely do you find a title that uses sound in an exceptionally effective and creative way. Depending on random coincidence and which direction you were coming from, the "music" in the background could change entirely. Nearly every monster is introduced in a loud, startling way, and the sound engineering makes it so much more effective. Every casket lined up on the wall, every stained glass window, and every locker is suspect; you start to be legitimately afraid of some pixellated terror bursting through said window with the express purpose of cheating you of your last bullet. It's not just the startling noises, however, but the throbbing, screaming, and whispering in the background. I am positive that most of these tracks are borrowed from our favorite survival horror enterprises, and Oratz doesn't pretend otherwise. What he does do is use them effectively to leave you unsettled and unsure. This, I believe, demands a lot more praise than your average Half-Life mod's movie-sampled gunshot sounds. Artistry (also known as the BRICKROAD CAN SUCK MY COCK category) Since this game has a distinct style, it has a sense of artistry. There is something about the combination of excellent aural work and more-than-decent writing that makes you want to keep going and makes me want to write a positive review on the whole affair. Backstage is a great example of why I often like cheap RPGMaker games markedly more than overbudget late-Fall (since games never make their fucking summer release dates anymore) professional titles like ESPN MONDAY NIGHT LACROSSE YEAR 2084 EDITION or TOMB RAIDER 18: THE SEARCH FOR A NUDE CODE OMFG COMPUTER TITTIES!!!. Backstage has a real sense of personality. It is fucking Emo and it doesn't care that it isn't as meaningful as it sometimes seems to be. It wears its flaws with some sort of stylish charm, because Legion is well aware of what people are going to like about his game and what he is capable of doing well.
In the end, Backstage boils down to this: It is an incredibly low-budget Silent Hill title with significantly improved writing and just as much overall style. If you're a fan of survival horror (and I know some of us are still out there), and you can get past the sometimes just-too-unsatisfying visual presentation, you'll be able to appreciate a genuinely worthwhile piece of software. Play or Not? Play.
Reviewer's Notes I didn't take any fucking notes. I remember when I suddenly died, and saw my character's head impaled on a wooden stake. That was cool, and sort of frustrating. I also remember closing the game by accident before having had a chance to save, which sucked. |
