Isekai (preview), by dott. Piergiorgio
Exactly at the midpoint of my combined ParserComp/Review-a-Thon list, Isekai loomed, both enticing and dreadful. I’ve already played and reviewed several games related to the author’s magnum opus, most notably The Portrait, which is the very opening sequence of this deep and broad fantasy parser game, and First Contact, which is a choice-based prequel providing some background on the game’s world and the married trio of elf, demon, and angel who appear to take center stage in Isekai. I think it’s fair to say that while there are elements of both games that I enjoyed, like the depth of implementation and the author’s enthusiasm for the world and the characters, there are also many that game me pause – the prose in both was often prolix, with some infelicities that are attributable to English not being the author’s first language, and some that are not, for one thing. For another, those earlier games often treated fairly ho-hum fantasy tropes, like devils and angels being people rather than supernatural incarnations of pure evil or pure good, as revelations, and fairly ho-hum plot developments like a man being mystically transported into a woman’s body, or the existence of queer throuples, as meriting repeated all-caps exclamations of incredulity. And the elephant in the room is their treatment of sexuality, which simultaneously attacls prudery, insisting that residents of this plane are too enlightened to find nudity or, er, breast-feeding inherently sexual, while spending a lot of word count drawing attention to the bounteous, barely-concealed bosoms of the super-hot main characters.
But both The Portrait and First Contact clearly presented themselves as subsidiary works. This slice of Isekai isn’t the complete package – per the author’s note, it’s only about the first fifth of the game – but it is nonetheless the main event, the prime reason for all the worldbuilding and character work foregrounded in the other games. So I was curious to see how this would all work in that intended complex, as well as to see what the gameplay undergirding all this looks like.
Well, Isekai both is and isn’t what I was expecting. Having played the Portrait, I wasn’t surprised to see the level of detail in the game’s implementation of an elvish wizard’s house; while there are some notes saying particular areas or items are works in progress or placeholders, every conceivable item of scenery can be examined or, where appropriate, interacted with, and there’s practically a fractal zoom available, as looking at any particular item often leads to two or three more sub-parts that can likewise be studied. There are plenty of books providing lore infodumps, about two dozen rooms and hallways that make up the mansion, and a solid view of the outside provides plenty of opportunity to learn about your environs in detail.
The flip side of this is that Isekai is also a game with a large number of words, and relatively slow pacing – I suppose I didn’t have to check out as many incidental details as I did, but since the gameplay in this section is purely explorative, it would have felt odd to cut it short. While the prose is still often a bit iffy, with plenty of typos and missing spaces, and does run on a bit, I did find this aspect worked better than in the Portrait or First Contact. Beyond the writing just being overall more polished, in the former, all you had to do was examine every single piece of an obsessively-detailed painting, and the latter had a lot of relatively clumsy infodumps of deep background. Here, you’re getting snippets of detail in response to moving around the house and trying to resolve discrete questions or handle minor inconveniences, and the additional agency – and the dialing-back of implementation depth after that initial, scarily-involved painting – makes it go down easier.
I felt similarly about the sexy bits. Isekai still risibly tries to have its cake and it eat too, emphasizing that the elf babe whose body you’re inhabiting is totally uninhibited and doesn’t find nudity sexual, but having practically the first bit of business that happens to you be a bit of burlesque farce that sees your bodice cut open and your skirts falling down (and for all that you’re not meant to be squeamish about your body, you’re awfully embarrassed by the sheets showing evidence of menstruation). Boobs are less of a focus than they were in the lactation-rama of First Contact or in the Portrait, where the gameplay entirely consists of ogling a picture of three well-endowed ladies, but the game still elicited more than a few eye rolls (like, one of the few books fully implemented in the library is a gynecology textbook).
All of the above is pretty much just a rehash of those earlier reviews, though, even if the particular valence of specific critiques shifts in this different context. I had two new reactions to Isekai proper, though. The first of these is that there is actual stuff for the player to do here, and I thought it was actually fairly mechanically engaging. I haven’t directly stated the premise, but the idea here, per the title, is that you’re a modern male human who has a bad dream and suddenly wakes up inside the body of the afore-discussed elf lady. And so this slice of the game is about trying to understand your new circumstances and surroundings, with regular prompts of italicized text pointing you towards the next revelation. Having played the author’s other games, I can’t say that the new information itself was all that interesting, since I’d already come across it before – though even then, it feels like the game makes a way bigger deal of elves having six fingers than that deserves – but the process of uncovering it feels pleasingly deliberate. You learn this new world’s numeric system by finding a ruler, noting the symbols marked on it, and counting its markings, and you similarly develop your literacy by working your way up from simple comic books to YA novels (the game acknowledges this is unrealistic, pitching it as your brain just catching up with a language your body already knows). My favorite moment in this vein was when the main character – who was a sailor in his previous life – was able to identify that this world was in another part of the Milky Way by finding the Magellenic Clouds. None of this is especially difficult, so I wouldn’t call them puzzles per se, but they’re satisfying to work through, and the emphasis on the way learning new things is helping develop your capabilities and understanding lends some purpose to the infodumping.
The second thing has to do with the isekai-ness of Isekai. I’m not super familiar with this genre, but it’s a version of portal-fantasy centering on the possession of the body of a native of the fantasy world. There’s a lot of dramatic potential in the mismatch between a character’s previous understanding of their identity and circumstances, and how those things have changed in their new reality, and the game is constantly drawing foregrounding the protagonist’s awareness of these mismatches, especially as it pertains to gender and sexuality. There are easily a dozen times – probably more – when the game harps on the protagonist recognizing their situation:
I realise that my thinking is more than mine, the thinking of Etuye of now. and I realise my being Etuye: Inside me, Inside my soul, I’m myself, I’M ETUYE.
The tone is almost invariably overwrought and incredulous:
After this realisation, you fight really hard to banish from your mind the surreal mental picture of three females, a demon, an angel and an elf sharing together the same bed… albeit that mental picture gives you an unexpected warmth inside your chest and tender feelings of… love ??
It can feel comedic, because again, has this guy never heard about trans people, or lesbians, or poly folks? It’d be one thing if what was going on was a conflict between the protagonist’s pre-existing personality and sense of himself, and the way they’re attempting to assimilate these changes. But the protagonist is almost completely uncharacterized; his previous gender is established, and we know his profession, but other than that he’s pretty much an AFGNCAAP.
Because there’s no real interiority to the characterization, no substantial engagement with the subjectivity that shapes the experiences and revelations the game depicts, some moments that are clearly meant to be profound land as comedy. “Can you imagine a man suddenly having a woman’s body??? Or an elf lady being married to a demon lady and an angel lady???” Well, yeah, of course I can imagine those things, repeating this stuff over and over just feels silly – I get it already. But imagining a particular character, who had a particular relationship to their previous, male, body, trying to figure out what that shift means for his understanding of himself – that’d be something different, and more interesting. The same is true on the relationship side: was he married? Happily or unhappily? Was he straight, or gay, or something else? How do those experiences shape his feelings about Etuye’s menage, as he realizes that he might soon be called about to inhabit it? In the absence of a characterized protagonist, there’s nothing for these questions to stick to, no central figure whose form is reshaped by these changes. And so they just float, abstract and insubstantial, with the game reliant on repetition and emphasis to try to sell their impact.
Maybe I’m wanting something from Isekai that the game isn’t interested in providing. But I don’t think so! In fact the whole structure seems to demand an actual character at its center. And that absence is a shame, because having played this substantial chunk of the full game, I do see its appeal – there’s definitely an idea here that could work, and a dedication to craft that could make for something truly unique (plus yes, the sexy stuff, which I repeat is kinda out there but I gotta admit is distinctive). But far more than tightening up the prose or speeding up the pacing, to be a success I think the final game really needs to figure out who the story is about. It could be that actually, it’s just about the elf lady and her adventures, which would be fine, if a bit conventional. If the game is going to emphasize the alienness of its premise, though, I think it needs to go a different direction, and create a protagonist who’s just as compelling as the natives of the fantasy world.
isekai mr.txt (234.8 KB)