Curate of Curiosities

First, let's talk about the game's final choice for a while.

The Other Ending (click to view)

If you select "Reconsider," Ramona backs down from her revenge mission, allowing someone else to pursue Gacy in her stead. Then she gets arrested, disowned by her parents, and blacklisted from the AL. And then she ends up homeless, because nobody wants to hire a possessed murderer with creepy persuasion powers. At least they managed to arrest Gacy. I guess the moral of this story is, if you find yourself caught in a revenge plot due to your own insistence on being better than anyone else, double down or suffer for it.

Due to this game's title, subject matter, and graphics, I had the expectation that it would be some kind of troll game, and that was indeed not only the initial plan for the game, but also the impression that I got for the first few hours I spent playing the demo back in 2023. While that impression never truly went away, even after multiple playthroughs of the complete version, it became clear to me that it aimed to be much more than that, and not just because of the late-game difficulty plateau or the Xenoblade-style Heart to Heart mechanic. Of course, it more than succeeded at that, despite any initial intentions or misgivings.

While in terms of gameplay, this game is mostly Another RPG Maker Game, it does an excellent job of integrating this game's major themes. The main character's initial goal is to pay her rent, yet a number of her more useful skills cost money to use. And although she becomes a licensed adventurer very early on, most of her skillset consists of stuff like spraying garbage at her enemies and lunging at them with a knife, not something that you would expect from someone experienced in the business. It does give off the feeling that Ramona, and by extension the player, is an outsider to all of this.

The same goes for the way it's structured. The main part of the game consists of a series of gigs with little connection to each other or any overarching narrative. A few of them even have your party working together with other adventuring parties, showing that you're not some legendary destined heroes, but rather just a gang of shmucks trying to put food on the table. While the landlord and the rent you owe to him serve as the main obstacle to overcome, there are other antagonistic groups whose influence spreads further than the city were the game takes place, and as such, unlike most RPG that have a major villain to defeat, the people leading them remain unreachable by the player. Almost like it's trying to emulate the grievances that today's youth feel, hmmmm...

As I mentioned back in my writeup of Memody: Sindrel Song, nowadays, indie developers are making games that are more directly applicable to their everyday lives. Just one look at practically any of the review's on the creator's personal blog or even their other games can tell you that they themselves have had to deal with both job dissatisfaction and anxiety over the various ills plaguing our society, especially those where our youth stand to be most affected. In fact, did you know that Slimes was partially inspired by the 2020 American presidential election?

Incidentally, this may be one of the first of these indie games that directly resonated with me. In fact, I once found myself in a very similar position to where Ramona was at the start of the game. That's not the reason I started playing this game, though; I went in expecting a tough-as-nails old-school style turn-based RPG. Another thing, if I had a nickel for every indie game dev I documented on this site that suffered from some crippling medical issue, I'd have two of them.

Now there's the matter of my choice of story route. You would think that it would be the relatively normal main route that I would showcase here. Indeed, that was the route I went with on my first playthrough. However, my second playthrough was of this route, and that's when I decided that it would be the route that I would document.

Maybe because it further solidifies the game's themes; out of desperation, our heroine enlists the help of the creature who menaced the town years ago to gain the ability to force other people to follow her bidding. A blatant power fantasy, to be sure, yet also serving as a twisted cautionary tale. The main character syndrome that Ramona gets in this route could serve as a parallel to a number of other characters, such as her own landlord, who, just by looking at the enormous, gaudy portait in his room, clearly thinks very highly of both himself and his position, and tries to face Ramona himself in the endgame out of desire for the fame that he would earn from putting down a wanted criminal.

Ironically, this route both railroads you and blocks you off from a significant amount of in-game content, despite it coming about due to Ramona's desire to be free from the usual drudgery of her job. And the endgame, where she loses her party members, yet receives more new powers to compensate, feels not only like an echo of the start of the game, where Ramona was a solo adventurer, but also the logical endpoint of her increasingly self-centered attitude. "You want to be the main character? Fine. Enjoy losing the teammates you've grown so close to!"

All of that from a game that looks like something you'd see in a grade-schooler's notebook. But then again, such deliberately crude presentation seems to be a marker for games made out of anger at society. Just look at Every Day The Same Dream's monochrome paper cutout aesthetic, or We Become What We Behold's big-headed minimalistic style, or, for a slightly higher-profile example, Cruelty Squad, whose art, interface, and even control scheme go out of their way to be as disgusting and disorienting as possible.

One last thing: I checked my Steam account, and found that this game, despite only coming out a little over a year ago, is my most played Steam game, at more than 50 hours in total as of this writing, outdoing other epic, full-length RPGs that I've played there. I believe this alone should tell you how this game has managed to stand out in the sea of indie RPG projects on itch.io and Steam.