Curate of Curiosities

So, unlike The Demon Rush making its mark on Something Awful, and sites that were adjacent to it, and Skylight gained some notice simply by association, Skylight 2 may as well not have even been released given how little attention has been given to it. In fact, I may be the very first person to ever finish it.

But The D is nothing if not tenacious. Shortly after Skylight 2 came out, he started developing another game. It has the distinct honor of being the first of his games to never be released for free.

As such, given that he later took down the downloads from his website, this is the first game of his that I will not be able to play to completion. A good thing too, I'm not sure if I can handle 10 more hours of The D's game design choices. A demo did get released, and consequently archived on the Wayback Machine, so it looks like I don't have the option to skip it over completely.

It's like Skylight 2's title screen but with more characters!

Unlike all of The D's earlier games, this game has you playing as a fully customizable character. The screen where you customize your character might be the most well-made, detailed thing in this entire game. There are at least two dozen areas to customize, including things as specific as whether your character has one glove or two!

This game has you in the role of the leader of the remnants of Severin, which, as you probably know from Skylight 2, was responsible for the titular symbiote and the nation-spanning firestorm that resulted, and had its leadership systematically murdered by Melissa and the other members of GTAL. It's also set in the Canadian province of Manitoba, even though Severin's former leader made his base in Toronto. I guess this True Symbiote business really did a number on their reputation if they felt the need to move halfway across the country!

Also, the NDC is inexplicably still around. I guess that's the advantage of a non-centralized ideology like theirs: they can survive whatever disaster that gets thrown at them. I suppose it also helps that they have a pretty much bottomless supply of illegally obtained firearms and explosives.

What's worse, they're somehow still too much for Severin. Fortunately, there's another group headquartered nearby known as the Liches, who seem to be holding their own against them. Yes, they're called the Liches. Definitely a name we can trust.

Whoa, slow down there! You can't just throw eight party members at us at once! At least try to pace out their introductions like pretty much every other party-based RPG out there, or even The D's earlier games!

Anyways, our first destination is a university the next town over, that's named after a premier who supports the NDC. Okay, why? Why would the man leading the country align himself with a group explicity dedicated to destroying everthing that it stands for? You'd think that would be political suicide, not something that would merit having a college named after you!

This game makes use of the oft-maligned quest markers, but, as is expected when it comes to The D's games, implements them in such a way that they're practically useless. They do appear over the area transition that leads you where you need to go, but only if you have a clear view of it.

Talk to Colonel Sanders to receive our next mission: take out some NDC goons hiding in the sewer right outside the campus.

Now let's get into the combat. The best way that I can describe it is if Skylight 1 were an MMO. It has the same ATB system as that game, but you can only control one party member at a time. When your ATB meter fills up, you can either press the space bar to do a regular attack or press enter to bring up your skill menu, where you can either change your equipped weapon or use one of your skills. The controls for these are about as awkward as you'd expect; for example, since changing the party member you're controlling is mapped to the mouse wheel, it's possible to end up clicking the mouse wheel by mistake, which switches what enemy you're targeting. Even better, something similar can happen if you're using the keyboard for this--switching your party lead is mapped to the Q and W keys, while switching targets is mapped to E and R.

Most of the enemies in this game are some variant of "guy with weapon," like in previous Skylight games, but there are a couple of new enemies thrown into the mix such as Lifeless, which blow up in the party's face after a certain amount of time.

Speaking of weapons, this game introduces two new weapon types: chainsaws, which tie into the stealth element that the game says it has but I never really had to engage with, and Jupiters, which shoot lightning.

And the boss is an Indestructible. Nothing to say, just be sure to bring fire.

We're told that we need to meet up with someone called the Polydegmon, the leader of the Liches, and then the demo ends. Yeah, aligning ourselves with someone who doesn't seem to have a proper name, just a title that almost has the word demon in it, is certainly necessary to deal with this anarchist group.

The next game, the direct sequel to Skylight Freerange, bucks the trend of taking two years between games by being released only one year after its predecessor.

Not only that, but it represented the single most important milestone in the D's career. It was the very first of his games to make the jump from PC to console (after a failed attempt to get it approved on Steam Greenlight, which, once again, should tell you all you need to know about Sony's standards). It was released for Playstation Vita in September of 2016, with a Playstation 4 release coming four months later.

Some of you might be asking, why not the Switch instead? It has a good track record with indie games, right? One's first instinct might be to answer that it's because the Switch has actual quality standards, but the abundance of games with titles like Hentai Puzzle on the eShop would say otherwise.

Yep, it's that game. The very same game that was not only allowed to be hosted on Sony's storefronts, but was openly promoted by their YouTube channel, to the shock and horror of the gaming community.

It doesn't take long for it to be clear why this game took only one year to develop: a lot of elements were recycled from its predecessor, such as the character creation system, complete with the camera controls making it nigh impossible to get a good look at your avatar.

Even its premise is a partial retread; you play as the head of a secretive organization dedicated to bringing down a cult that has taken over Canada's maritime provinces. This cult is responsible for regulating the use of the Skylight Symbiote, and I'm surprised that it took this long for someone to get the idea of putting enforcing any kind of restriction on its rampant usage, especially after it came to light that it was the catalyst for a disaster that no doubt killed millions. Tell me again why they're the bad guys again?

Oh right, the cult of personality and historical revisionism. Right after the intro, we have a scene where a bunch of college students are receiving a lecture that's run by the cult, that's all about how their glorious leader came to free the province of Nova Scotia from the risk of another nationwide firestorm.

I take it after three whole games, the NDC has completely ceased to be a threat, or more likely, that The D was getting tired of them. So here's a blatant substitute, here to blow up the innocent civilians that just had the bad luck of being forced to patronize cult-run facilities.

From there, we go on to combat, which is basically the same as in the last game. The only main difference I can see is that there are a few new weapons for you to play with, such as the Glacier, which can disable enemies' special abilities. Sounds useful, but you still have to contend with the beyond awkward camera and UI controls to actually use them, by which point the enemies will have used said special abilites to mangle the party.

Like last time, there's a subway connecting the different cities of the province. I wonder why they couldn't make it an ordinary train, which would make a bit more sense.

One of our eight party members has family in a nearby town, so we're heading there first.

Great, not even when you're outside of cutscenes are you safe from The D's exposition vomit. This is not how environmental storytelling is supposed to work!

And in case you somehow want to read what all that says, here's the full image.

Yeah, I can tell. Nature abhors a vacuum, so there must always be a violent anarchist group around to terrorize the civilians.

And what would that message be, pray tell? We have explosive bioweapons and we're not afraid to use them? Bioweapons that are presumably, made up of living human specimens? I'm not exactly sold on this cult, but what you're doing isn't exactly helping your cause!

We find out that, surprise suprise, the cult is using its stocks of the symbiote to make monsters out of human specimens. Yeah, typical, the faction that's cracking down on unauthorized use of the symbiote just wants to maintain a monopoly over its use.

We finally make it to Halifax, and are immediately asked to take part in some cult propaganda. They make North Korea look subtle, so no.

The D has had nearly a full decade to figure out how to make things readable to the player, but this screenshot may well be from a theoretical 3D remake of The Demon Rush. But it's not like he would ever do something like that right? Right?

Oh right, this enemy took me quite a while to get past. It's called a Miner, it has swords for hands and ludicrous defense. I'm sure it has some weakness, but the game's reference menu does a very poor job of explaining what it is.

While in Skylight Freerange 1, the boss of the introductory mission was just a single Indestructible, the boss of this mission is...a bunch of naked mannequins mutated by yet another Symbiote strain. And yes, The D went to the trouble of modeling their bits and everything.

And this is the Cult's doing? And just when I thought that The D had accidentally made them a bit too reasonable...

After that, you're treated to yet another of The D's trademark overlong exposition dumps. You think you can just absent-mindedly skip through the dialogue like usual, but then before you know it, two of your party members are having a roll in the hay!

There was a similar scene in one of the works that I have showcased. Like here, it caught me off-guard, for several reasons. Then there was this trait that one of the people involved had that they themselves definitely seemed to think would hinder them from getting under the sheets with someone, as well as the fact a scene of this nature would be distinctly out of place in something aimed at the work's target audience. However, I believe that it handled its scene far more tastefully. For one thing, it was entirely...offscreen, you could say. Another thing, both of them had very different facial structures. And we weren't subjected to either character's horrifyingly rendered nipples!

Now that I think about it, what on earth possessed The D to think that adding a full-on sex scene to his game was a good idea? Did he really think that someone out there would look at the nightmarish homunculi that he calls character models and think, "man, I sure would like to see them naked!" It speaks to some real messed up priorities on The D's part: he'll make sure that the carpet matches the drapes, but do nothing about the fact that combat encounters are still as much of a blurry mess as they were in a game made nearly ten years ago!

So that's the very end of the demo. It's definitely just as bad as the commenters on that one trailer made it out to be. I did look up a playthrough of the full game on YouTube in hope that I would get some more insight on what this game was going for. The plot, or what passes for it, is a mess, as expected, and I can't even begin to describe what it's about other than generally antagonizing the cult and occasionally the anarchist group opposing them. One thing did stand out, though. Melissa from the first two Skylight games is back! Now that her organization's been dissolved, she's decided to get into politics, which naturally puts her in the cult's crosshairs. This woman just can't catch a break, can she?

We're on the home stretch now. There's just one more of The D's games that's playable on PC for me to get through. Will it be an improvement, or will it be, well, a game by Dragoon Entertainment?