Paintball Wizard by Doug Egan
Playtime: 1 hour, 47 minutes
TLDR: Heartfelt game about building emotional intimacy within a fraternity. Partially via puzzles. (Also, they’re all wizards, Harry.)
Gamemechanical notes: Choice based. No undo. You can save, and it autosaves frequently. (It’s pretty kind though, saving not super necessary.) I would recommend playing the tutorial, the interface is unique.
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Slightly contrary to my expectations, this is lovely story about TRUST and EMOTIONAL VULNERABILITY among friends. Which I am very much here for. I was worried it was going to be stereotypically fratty given the premise but actually it’s not that vibe at all. The main plot arc is the player character, Romeo, building connections with his fraternity brothers, learning more about their pasts, and becoming more willing to open up to them in turn. This stuff is like catnip for me!
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I had a lot of fun with the spellcasting mechanic and just casting spells at everything to learn what they do. Definitely captured one of the best aspects of “wizard school”-adjacent concepts.
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Loved the structure with a different minigame for each fraternity brother where you explore their backstory. Also the minigames themselves were a lot of fun.
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The writing was consistently funny:
“SPLACKing myself would be dangerous. What if I traveled back in time and learned something about myself that I didn’t already know? A person could go insane that way.”
" I’ve no reason to open the tape deck unless I wanted to change the eight track casette, but the chapter only owns one casette. "
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I appreciate @kastel and @joshgrams flagging the consent issue in their reviews. It didn’t jump out at me after my playthrough (I think because the response from the other characters is SO chill that I was sort of mentally retconning “well what if the fraternity talked about this spell earlier or something”). But after thinking about it, I think it would be better if the characters talked about it on-screen before the spell was used. And I think that would work fine, maybe even better, with the themes in the game–the fraternity brothers could offer using the spell as a way of helping Romeo with his spellcasting,which would fit with them being very supportive and trusting of him
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Despite the fact that I was really into it, I almost ditched this game at about the 80% mark. I got stuck at the necromancy puzzle, banged my head for a while, thought “OK, let’s just open the walkthrough”–but unfortunately, the walkthrough is formatted as hints, not the actual commands you have to give, and I STILL couldn’t finish the puzzle. At that point I was pretty frustrated. Reader, in several nearby universes I bailed. But, in this universe, I took a break, decided to try it once more, and did manage to finish it. Additional hints below in case anyone else has the same problem. (Credit where credit is due, I thought the solution to the time travel puzzle was really well clued through progressive in-text hints if you messed it up.)
spoilery hints for that one puzzle
Fair warning—I may actually be wrong that this is necessary and I may have been doing something ELSE wrong the first few times I tried it, but, to my best guess:
As stated in the walkthrough, you need to make a “bridge” for each element in the cazuela. What I think my problem was–you must use the “clear items out of the center” button in between items! As in: CLEAR CENTER, move tetrahedron (b/c metal) to center, close lid, press FER (b/c metal), open lid, CLEAR CENTER, then move the next object to the center. If you do it right for all 5 polyhedra, then clear the center, then put the brain in the center, when you next close the lid it will take you to a different screen with the option to put the face on top of the cazuela.
- OK, I also had a few ruminations about the overall plot arc that got a bit out of hand
discussion of the overall plot, including spoilers through the end
So, during most of the game we learn that wizards are an oppressed minority group, and we get glimpses of some of the other fraternity brothers’ lives, including some v. sad wizard-oppression-related backstories.
We also see that Romeo is reticent about his past and reluctant to confide in his brothers. Towards the end of the game, they’ve grown closer, and Romeo reveals that he was “faking” being a wizard. (i.e., he learned stage magic and used mirrors, etc.). Romeo feels ashamed to admit this to the rest of the fraternity. (Although the fraternity was explicitly stated to be open to both wizard and non-wizard members.)
So, on the one hand, this made me think, hmm, ok, we’re going to explore a sort of trans allegory (coming out, feeling like you don’t belong in a group that other people view you as part of, fearing others will criticize you for “taking on their identity for clout” etc etc.). On the other hand, I’m just very confused because on the in-game level we see Romeo do magic. In fact we just spent 90 minutes doing magic via Romeo, which sure seems like it would constitute being a wizard? But maybe I’m missing something in the worldbuilding around wizard-hood. (And, if the events of the game were a huge breakthrough for Romeo in which he finally achieves a cherished dream of doing magic for real I would also have expected to see that land emotionally in the moment, instead of sort of being mentioned by him in conversation much later?) And anyhow, other than this one conversation nothing is done with that revelation.
So, overall, this works at about the same kind level that say, witches/wizards in Harry Potter or mutants in the X-Men movies are working as an allegory but I didn’t feel like it was adding that much to the work. And I would have loved to see it more explored!
