Curate of Curiosities

I Hate You, Please Suffer runs on the premise "what if our modern world was a JRPG?" While this may seem rather unique (or uninspired and trite, depending on your viewpoint), it's not the only game that the developer has made with this premise.

Although they have made several RPG Maker games before constructing this universe, I will be focusing solely on the games that are set in said universe.

First, Fishing Simulator, released to itch.io in March of 2018. Unlike most of their other games, it is a visual novel, made with an engine I've never heard of before. It is about Roselle, an adventurer on a quest to defeat a Dark Lord, but has to do this fishing sidequest to get 100% completion.

However, she's not really the type to wait patiently for a fish to bite. Punching monsters with her bare hands is her wheelhouse. She hasn't even bothered to buy proper armor!

Also, this game was made in two weeks or so, so the creator couldn't draw a proper sprite for the sage.

Eventually, after hours of waiting, her own reflection appears before her. Or maybe she's just delirious from boredom and it's making her hallucinate, I'm not exactly sure.

The reflection tells her that she's become so focused on her quest, that she's at risk of losing everything that makes her who she is, eventually just becoming a faceless cog in the adventuring machine. If you just replace the word "quest" with "job" in that last sentence, you have the game's message right there. That's Allegory 101 for you, featuring special guest Today's Economy. Moving on.

The sequel, Fishing Simulator 2, has a lot more going on. Once again, we follow Roselle as she returns to the fishing shrine, depite having already completed the relevant sidequest. Plus, the sage now has a properly drawn sprite, rather than one taken from the public domain.

While the Dark Lord is still at large, she thinks that he can wait.

While fishing, she notices her own reflection speaking to her. It tells her that there's no need to be in a hurry, that she should take the time to enjoy herself for once. This may be the first time since her adventure started that she's done something that isn't in the direct service of the quest, after all. Besides, once she defeats the Dark Lord, will anyone stll care about her?

Just then, a woman named Nicole (no relation) comes to the shrine to meet with the legendary hero, only to find that she can't get her attention. Both she and the shrine's sage are concerned about Roselle since she's already spent hours at the fishing pond, but neither are willing to try to pull her away.

The game has a total of 26 different endings, four of which are "main" endings, in a setup inspired by Nier Automata, that can be unlocked by inputting different passwords at different points. Through these endings, we find out more about our heroine, the woman who came to visit, and the voice speaking to her from the fishing pond. And yes, you can bet that it has quite a bit to say about the job market--I mean, the nature of the adventuring career.

The first proper RPG set in this universe is Slimes, released in 2020.

the very first thing you should take note of its that the game uses only three colors: white, black and red. It's quite an interesting graphical choice, and one that fits the tone of the game.

Remember the alien that I brought up earlier? This game is set not very long after it arrived and infused the world with magic.

You play as Julius, a crusader working on behalf of the church. Yes, the same church that offers spiritual healing also has a standing militia. His mission is to clear out a den of the titular slimes. However, there's a problem--slimes aren't like most monsters, so no one has ever successfully cleared out a slime den before. So, remember our old pal Uzbek? He's secretly the spawn of the winged space god that landed on the planet decades prior.

Right when he enters, he meets an initially-unnamed "Healer." Julius expects him to be a conventional battlefield medic, who will bandage up the injuries that he sustained in fighting, only to see him use a healing spell on him.

One would be very tempted to call this racism, but I prefer to compare this to the way Japan treated those who were irradiated from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And there lies our central confict--the game is not just about our duo's quest to clear the slime den, but also about their mutual hatred.

The game consists of going through the dungeon, and taking out slimes along the way.

Now for the combat. Julius is packing serious heat--he brought three different guns with him into the dungeon, and can switch between them at any time during battle. In the meantime, the healer has healing magic, of course, as well as a couple of attack and status skills.

The game encourages you to kill every last slime you encounter. That is Julius' mission, after all. When you kill all the slimes on any given floor, you are given a document about the backstory of some character. There's particular focus placed on a group of researchers who entered the dungeon before your party did and never returned.

As you go deeper into the dungeon, you find it slowly transforming from manmade brick wall tunnels, to a cave...to something else entirely, and the slimes, initially seeming to be mindless beasts, start to attempt to speak to the party, showing that there's more to the slime den than meets the eye...

I don't want to spoil the game past this point, but I will tell you that when I reached the finale, I thought "Yeah, I saw this coming since the very first minute."

Oh, plus, if you purchase the Steam version, or pay about $7 on itch.io, you get a tie-in e-booklet explaining various aspects of the game.

Lastly, there's Decay, which was released in 2022. Unlike previous games, this was made with RPG Maker MV, which, among other things, provides mouse control and Javascript support.

While thematically similar to I Hate You, Please Suffer, they differ in that the former was about someone trying to pay rent while struggling with unemployement, while this game is about our heroine continuing to work her 9-to-5 in the midst of a plague sweeping the nation. Now tell me, does this not ring familiar in this day and age?

In this game, you're not just struggling to pay rent, but also trying to avoid starving to death or breaking down from stress. On the way to and from work, you're bound to get attacked by MS Paint birds and, later on, glitchy MS Paint crystal monsters that spread Covid.

As the days pass, things just get worse and worse, as the reporters giving the daily news, and even your own coworkers, start to get sick and die.

As you're in an underserved part of the country, the government initally turns a blind eye to your city's plight, but eventually, they decide to send adventurers to deal with the growing monster threat. This is barely even an allegory anymore, it's just what the pandemic was like!

Eventually, the end of the month comes, and you're confronted by your landlord, who asks for exactly $1000 in rent. There's not a lot to spend money on in this game, and what little you can buy is relatively cheap, so I have no trouble coming up with the amount.

The game as a whole is less aggravating than I Hate You, Please Suffer, but feels a lot more dull to play by comparison. But that's the whole point: despite the disaster that's facing the world, you still have to go to work like nothing happened.

And those were all the games in the Scityverse (or whatever you want to call it). They're just heavy-handed allegories for various facets of millenial malaise: the Fishing Minigame duology is about putting too much of your life in your job, Slimes is about the bigotry that seems to be growing more and more prevalent across the globe, and Decay is the Covid-19 pandemic, but with random encounters.

While societal allegories are nothing new to gaming, especially indie gaming, these games in particular speak to a deep, deep frustration on the part of the creator. In case you haven't figured that out on your own while playing, the bonus e-book that came with Slimes spells it out in detail.

I will tell you this: they're a bit more subtle with their messaging than, say, We Become What We Behold, for whatever that's worth.