Forsaken Denizen

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

Did I miss a Forsaken Denizen thread? If so, I sincerely apologize for this overage, I am a little giddy with enthusiasm.

This is a lot of fun! FD captures the thrill of old-school survival horror games like Resident Evil where exploration and resource management form the primary gameplay pillars. The setting and characters are hardly derivative, though, as Fallen Denizen takes place in a sci-fi later-than-late-stage capitalistic setting that capably held my interest.

It boasts several interesting craft features, too, like an in-game character that narrates the game’s events while alternating between third and first person.

There is a scoring system that encourages replay. High scores unlock bonus outfits (this is a staple of the survival horror genre) that grant bonus abilities. Most (or perhaps all of them) allude to classic games, including Resident Evil 2, Parasite Eve, and Fatal Frame III.

Despite several playthroughs, I was unable to unlock the last outfit, which requires 3,500 points. I’ll sleep on it, but right now I’m not sure how to get there. I could save a little more ammo, but my 3,350 score feels pretty far away. I don’t think conserving resources would be enough (I didn’t heal once!). Perhaps there is another source of points. I wondered if there might be an unadvertised bonus for minimizing turns passed or for never saving the game, but I’m feeling a bit saturated to try for those without knowing if it matters. Maybe later. Anyway, here’s my score info. How did you do?

CALCULATING SCORE…

Defeated Dowager King: +1000
Defeated Archduke: +500
Defeated Viscount: +250
Kill all junkers: +500
Never changed outfit: +500
Remaining ammo bonus: +200
Remaining health items: +400

FINAL SCORE: 3350

This is a VERY polished, well-written, well-designed experience that realizes one of my favorite video game genres in text form. Good stuff!

E: and excellent feelies, too.

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

Thanks for making a thread! I’ll post my review in this:

Mathbrush's 2024 IFComp Review Thread

Forsaken Denizen by C.E.J. Pacian This is a long exploration game involving picking up and using various tools and ammunition in a surreal technomagical future. Many Pacian games are in such an environment; Gun Mute and Weird City Interloper come to mind. This game, though, seems to be directly set in the same universe as the game he released last year, Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince. Both involve solar royalty (the Third Prince in the previous game and the Second Princess in this one) and…

You’ve gotten really far; I only tried out one or two basic outfits. I hope you figure out. I could try looking at the string dump to hunt for clues but it’s probably more fun trying to explore in game!

[jwalrus (Adam Biltcliffe)]

@kamineko

I wondered if there might be an unadvertised bonus for minimizing turns passed or for never saving the game, but I’m feeling a bit saturated to try for those without knowing if it matters.

You’re not missing any sources of points, but it’s possible to score a lot more than the 3500 you need to unlock the final outfit with what you’ve discovered so far.

The +500 points for never changing outfit is a trap. Some of the later unlockables have wildly game-changing effects that are worth a lot more than 500 points.

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

Ah, yes, I misunderstood/underestimated the effectiveness of the opera dress. Thanks!

Post/NG+ score stuff, don’t look if you want to find the unlocks yourself

NG+ strategy

It was a bit painstaking, but I cleared the map with the Eve costume, found all hidden items (I actually think I may have missed some) with the photographer outfit, then gathered all bullets with the nurse outfit. So a no-heal, use no bullets (except silver) run.

CALCULATING SCORE…

Defeated Dowager King: +1000
Defeated Archduke: +500
Defeated Viscount: +250
Kill all junkers: +500
Never changed outfit: N/A
Remaining ammo bonus: +1700
Remaining health items: +450

FINAL SCORE: 4400

I feel like I probably missed some items, because 4400 doesn’t feel like the number. But a good score!

Final outfit was a Dino Crisis ref. What a classic

e: I may take one last crack at it after some disaster shopping (looks like we may get a hurricane this week)

[JoshGrams]

Does this game start being horror or survival at some point? I’ve played just shy of an hour with my attention half on other things most of the time. I’ve just gone up the elevator to the king and gotten sucked into the shadows and… so far it has been completely rote? The game keeps going “ooh, look at how scary this thing is!” and then you can just… walk away and it’s a complete disappointment and not actually scary at all?

So the main choice has been whether I want to spend bullets (which haven’t been too scarce so far, but who knows if they will be later?) in order to avoid the tedium of walking back and forth until the monsters randomly move out of your way? Which doesn’t seem like an interesting choice at all.

The map is pretty simple and unlocks gradually: I haven’t even bothered drawing it out: I feel like I’m just walking around doing the obvious thing that the game is shoving in front of me next. I’ve been saving constantly, expecting it to get difficult, but so far the only time I’ve used it was to experiment with doing something that I knew was a bad idea, and even then… I think there’s enough health scattered around that I didn’t even need to do that?

How much longer is this game? Because right now I’m just about bored enough to call it here. I really don’t think I’m interested in another more-than-an-hour of this…

[severedhand]

@JoshGrams

The game keeps going “ooh, look at how scary this thing is!” and then you can just… walk away and it’s a complete disappointment and not actually scary at all?

To be fair, you can walk away from a lot of stuff in console survival horror games! You just tend not to be able to advance if you don’t take some hairier actions. Or do important stuff like puzzles. Being prose, this game doesn’t have that real-time pressure.

I can’t say much else except, I do find it fun, and reviews like mathbrush’s show that it has induced stress. But it’s not stressful like playing Forbidden Siren or something…

-Wade

[EJoyce (Emery Joyce)]

At this point I think you’ve seen what the game has to offer and if you’re not enjoying it now, that’s unlikely to change.

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

@JoshGrams

The game keeps going “ooh, look at how scary this thing is!” and then you can just… walk away and it’s a complete disappointment and not actually scary at all?

I do think this is intentional. Looking at Superluminal Vagrant Twin and Weird City Interloper and even Walker & Silhouette, I think a lot of C.E.J. Pacian’s modus operandi is “Take well-known mechanics and add flavor that contrasts strongly with it.” Like in Walker and Silhouette, I remember one character having a happy go lucky attitude even while a squid was grabbing everything, and the whole thing is a classic buddy cop adventure that happens to have bizarre world building. In Superluminal Vagrant Twin, achieving the main goals in the game is very anticlimactic: Your brother is just like, ‘hey dude!’ , and the princess is like, 'Okay, I’m going to rule this people and end this war.

That doesn’t have to mean it’s effective for everyone, but I do think it’s an intentional choice to have (sorry for using an overused and kind of bad word) ludonarrative dissonance.

[jwalrus (Adam Biltcliffe)]

@EJoyce

At this point I think you’ve seen what the game has to offer and if you’re not enjoying it now, that’s unlikely to change.

I think this is probably true, but it’s also worth pointing out that you’re like ten minutes tops from the end of the game so it’s not a big further commitment if you do want to see it through.

[JoshGrams]

Oh. I was literally six minutes from the end of the game. Heh.

OK. Review.

I think this game has great cyberpunk-inflected horror writing. And fun action-hero mechanics (with light resource management to make you be thoughtful instead of indiscriminantly blazing away at everything). …and when you put them together they seriously undermine each other (at least for me they do).

For instance, outside of the tutorial hit that the game makes you take to demonstrate your health bar, and two (?) other places where you have a good chance of guessing wrong when experimenting, the enemies literally can’t hurt you unless you decide to let them. They seem to move around randomly: they don’t even follow you. They telegraph all their attacks, so when you see “Junker Cordelia raises the sword over her head, preparing to strike. Junker Daluka draws back the mace, ready to bring it down on Dor" you simply walk out of the room. Not exactly the stuff of nightmares.

And there is resource management, and you don’t know how many resources you’re going to need, or how many you’re going to find, or how long the game is going to go on for. But if you’re searching everything the way the game strongly suggests you do… I thought I was being pretty conservative, keeping a good reserve of ammo and I ended the game having killed two-thirds of the enemies.

And I had seven bullets left. Three more would have been plenty to kill all the remaining enemies, and I’m sure I wasted at least five or six sloppily blazing away in reckless experiments. “Sure, go ahead, kill most of the enemies” doesn’t exactly say horror game to me either.

“A gyro gun.”

“Do you really know how to use it?” I ask.

“When I was a kid,” Dor says, “my no-good friends stole one of these from a partisan dead drop. We used it to shoot bottles and shadow-corrupted rats.”

So, uh… yeah. As a horror-story protagonist, Dor is a ringer. She’s a dead shot, has a wardrobe full of reaction-enhancing clothes… I’m sorry, but she’s basically an action-hero working a dead-end office job to get along in this capitalist hell-scape.

So if you’re playing remotely strategically the experience is the game telling you something is all scary and then–oh wait, never mind, it’s not remotely dangerous at all. The mechanics are all about making you feel as safe as possible in a dangerous world. I don’t quite understand that juxtaposition.

There’s a fun, solidly-implemented game here, with a fair bit of replay value to unlock all the different clothes (which I’ve done) and the different endings (which I haven’t)? There’s also some good writing. I’m just not convinced they go together.

So, fun parser action-hero game, but if you want action-horror go play I Am Prey or something.

spoiling almost everything

Outfits

1. Overalls (pockets - one extra item)
2. Jogging (more likely to dodge)
3. Laserball (never miss)
4. Dance (more critical hits)
5. Biker Jacket (unlock alternate endings - code FINALLY OVER)
6. Onesie (almost all attacks are lethal - DRAMMEN)
7. Alchemist (HIDE command - AZOTH)
8. Kimono (STAB command - unreliable weak attack - COCOON)
9. Gestalt Shift (6 extra items - PROMISE)
10. Photographer (reveal hidden items - RITUAL)
11. Nurse “costume” (find twice as many bullets - except in the collapsed hab cube, for some reason - AGLAOPHOTIS)
12. Opera Dress (auto-burn junkers - MITOCHONDRIA)
13. Time Traveller Costume (UNDO command - BIG ASS LIZARD)

Health Fruit - 10 Total

• Start with 3.
• Space Port - hangar
• Cube 96 - common
• Apartment 186 - cubicle
• Core Bay 1 - shadow core
• Holo Bar - stage
• Shady Office - boxes
• Old Shipbreaking Yard - starships (lure countess to near other end).

Bullets

• Alizarine Road - car x5
• Alley - garbage x3
• Robot Leg Joint - partisan x5
• Warped Close - partisan x5
• Shady Office - containers x3
• Library - desk x3
• Core Bay 2 - machinery x3
• Streamlining - cubicles x3
• Conference Room 3 - cabinet x3
• Collabsed Hab Cube - rubble x3 (nurse costume doesn’t double, but since this gives an even 80 bullets/2000 score I’m almost positive this is intentional)
• Upper Illume (later) - bandolier x4

Silver Bullets

• Apartment 186 - Nel
• Pawnbrokers - Lis
• Holo Bar - Saint
• Break Room - Samuel

Score - Unlocks Auto-Tailor Codes

• 1000 - Defeated Dowager King
• 500 - Defeated Archduke
• 250 - Defeated Viscount
• 500 - Kill all 15 junkers
• 500 - Never changed outfit (conflicts with some of the others)
• 2000 - Remaining ammo bonus (80 ammo x 25 - use nurse costume)
• 500 - Remaining health items (10 fruit x 50 - DON’T heal ever!)

So I think the highest possible score is 4750 - all bonuses except the never-changed-outfit one? But I don’t know what’s up with the hologram projector and I haven’t even tried the outfit that unlocks alternate endings, so there might well be other stuff there.

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

Yeah, I think that’s a fair assessment re: horror. It’s definitely more like Resident Evil 4 than Resident Evil (RE is a series that has titled increasingly toward action over the years).

[JoshGrams]

Has anybody played the alternate endings? Do they extend or recontextualize any of the story?

My impression is that Dor is a tough-kid street-rat who grew up, mugged a black-sheep princess who was out slumming, they fell in love, Dor (superficially) cleaned up her act and got a government office job. I’m pretty sure they broke up? Then when politics and commerce go against Cath (the princess), she’s going broke, there’s the usual corrupting magical shadow eating away at society by turning people to the dark side (literally), and the last straw is that some kind of cyber-plant-presenting something (an agent/avatar of her dad the emperor?) is moving in and zombifying all the people, so she breaks Dor out of the plant’s clutches hoping she’ll go do violence and save Cath for the sake of their former relationship?

Something like that? I didn’t really try to piece together the galactic politics driving the whole thing.

[EJoyce (Emery Joyce)]

I also found that the conversion of standard survival horror gameplay to the parser format sucked a lot of the tension out of it, but:

@JoshGrams

As a horror-story protagonist, Dor is a ringer. She’s a dead shot, has a wardrobe full of reaction-enhancing clothes… I’m sorry, but she’s basically an action-hero

This is pretty genre-typical, no? I mean, it’s maybe 50/50 between that and normal people who are in over their heads, and some of that is Resident Evil skewing the count, but there are a lot of survival horror protagonists who are law enforcement or soldiers, which at least diegetically makes them even bigger ringers than a woman with an office job who used to take potshots at rats.

Re: your understanding of the story, I don’t think Cath and Dor are estranged at the start of the game, Dor just has an initial burst of anger over Cath being insulated from the effects of the catastrophe in her palace while commoners are dying left and right. The incident in which Cath lost her signet ring in Dor’s apartment seems to have been quite recent, so I think their relationship was doing fine before this happened, though clearly Dor has been suppressing some dissatisfaction about the power imbalance and Cath’s blithe complicity in the whole hypercapitalist absolute monarchy thing.

Also, I don’t think the zombifying force (an intergalactic investment group) was created by or directly controlled by the king—I think the reveal is supposed to be more that he’s also in on it, presumably because he’s also profiting from it somehow, than that he’s 100% behind it.

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

The game is definitely aware of the conventions and history of its genre, and, while it doesn’t recreate all of its thrills, I enjoyed it in this context. Its references, its gameplay emphasis on efficiency, its dramatization of getting to know a map and what is needed to fully traverse it, and even its criticism of unchecked capitalism all felt familiar to me as a fan, but not stale.

I think the outfits are a convention of the genre, too, and whether that works narratively in isolation is a question worth asking, but I’m unable to experience it that way. The multiple endings jacket, unless I’m mistaken, is a pretty direct reference to Claire Redfield, one of the deuteragonists of Resident Evil 2. If I recall, she’s just a college student that turns up and just starts killing monsters without a strong rationale for how or why. She’s just a hero, that’s it. When it comes to Doris, I see her as a pretty conventional–though interestingly imagined and written–survival horror protagonist.

I found three or four alternative endings. A weakness of Inform 7 is that there’s no ready-made way (I’m not saying it can’t be done!) to track found endings across games. Which would be very useful.

In fact, if I had a mechanically-centered criticism, it would be that resources remaining is ultimately not my favorite measurement of success. I would have been interested in a more conventional ranking system based on saves/restores and total turns (by conventional I guess I mean Resident Evil), but some of that is hard to manage. Or a “professional” mode where enemies don’t flinch as much.

I generally liked the secret endings; it was nice that you could wear the jacket over an outfit.

[severedhand]

@EJoyce

This is pretty genre-typical, no? I mean, it’s maybe 50/50 between that and normal people who are in over their heads, and some of that is Resident Evil skewing the count, but there are a lot of survival horror protagonists who are law enforcement or soldiers, which at least diegetically makes them even bigger ringers than a woman with an office job who used to take potshots at rats.

I thought I’d have a look into the numbers, as I keep a spreadsheet of survival horror games I own or have played.

I counted 18 games with combat-trained protagonists out of 48 games, and fourteen of those are Resident Evil games up to and including Village. The other four games were Chaos Break, Cold Fear, Dino Crisis and Vampire Hunter D.

I keep this list pretty strict with the Survival Horror qualification, so for instance, Dino Crisis 2 isn’t on it. I always felt Fear Effect was s/h, but few agree with me, so that’s not on there either, and none of the Resident Evil rail shooters are on it.

Thus in total games it’s about 60/40 normal folks to combat-trained, but take out the Resident Evil games and it’s 90% not combat-trained. High school students of both sexes make up the majority of that 90%.

(edit - whoops, I had the 60 and 40 around the wrong way previously)

-Wade

[EJoyce (Emery Joyce)]

Hah, I knew RE was skewing it but that’s even more dramatic than I thought it would be, so I guess for someone whose horror game experience involves little to no RE, it’s understandable that Dor would seem jarringly competent. Though it’s worth noting that Parasite Eve, while not survival horror gameplay-wise, is also one of this game’s direct inspirations and also has a combat-trained protagonist.

[severedhand]

Right. I never played the first PE and I forgot she was combat-trained. I mentally flicked past her with, “wearing a denim jacket, probably wasn’t trained.” Cue Jill Valentine’s nightclubbing look in RE3.

-Wade

[JoshGrams]

Yeah, I guess I have no idea what survival horror is usually like: I basically never waste my time with triple-A games, and the solo or small-team indie horror I’ve played doesn’t pull its punches like this. I mean, even with big-budget “indie” studios like Klei don’t usually: in Don’t Starve there’s never a question of if you’ll die, only when and how.

[severedhand]

Well, the fundamental survival horror period already ended around Resident Evil 4. That’s in 2005. As codified prior to that, it pretty much no longer exists. Most of those games would now be regarded as wildly punitive by current console gamers. Plenty were boutique and weird. e.g. Clock Tower! Others changed everything in the world; Silent Hill influenced all of horror, gaming, music and sound design.

Indie teams occasionally try to bring back some of the elements that have been gone for twenty years (e.g. fixed camera angles - my favourite) with mixed results.

Even in the day, in sales, there were the Resident Evil games, and then everything else, by a factor of roughly ten. I tried to find this particular graph again today for an earlier post, but couldn’t. If memory is right, some Silent Hills came a far down second.

-Wade