Yesterday, the Meta-Universe Puxin Male Survival Guide was released.
Prior to this, the name of the game was called "Chinese Puxin Male Survival Guide". On December 29, 2021, the game's Steam page went live, and it was called "China Puxin Male Survival Guide". After the news appeared on Weibo, it triggered a rush. At that time, the development team announced that the game would be launched on January 2, 2022, but on January 1, it was announced that it would be postponed to January 31. And yesterday, the game suddenly changed its name and went on the shelves.
Presumably based on risk aversion considerations, the name of the game became "Meta-Universe Puxin Male Survival Guide", and also deleted the taboo and secondary words "use our sword to find land for our plow" in the previous game introduction. This got me to think of a scenario where the game's developers were also intimidated by the market's attention to the game (which is not uncommon in the game industry). Developers who only wanted to make a small amount of money suddenly found themselves staring — and then maybe they were frightened and started trying to pull back. Sure, that's my guess, but I'm confident in the accuracy of that guess. In addition to this, it is clear that the developers are also trying to avoid possible legal risks by claiming that the game takes place in an alternate world – all of which were too famous before the game. Developers do more than that, which we'll talk about below.
We noticed the game on December 29th. At the time, we had some discussions about whether or not to report on it. Some colleagues feel that we should keep a distance from this "just pay attention to it, it wins" work, while others feel that we should not shy away from its existence. On top of that, given that the game is using a rather bold and aggressive state of storming into the battlefield of gender issues — a topic that's a powder keg for the current online world — we've been arguing for a while about whether reviews of the game will drag us into the mire.
In the end we decided to write it anyway, or rather, we decided to face it. It's not so easy for us to make this decision, and if you don't want to stir up hot topics but find yourself being hyped up, it's not a happy thing. But all this hesitation and hesitation disappeared within 5 minutes of playing the game. Seriously, we thought about it a lot, and the quality of the game made all the attitudes and behaviors that try to take it seriously seem a bit like a joke.
Gamers seem to feel the same way. Right now, in the Steam community, the game has 21 player reviews, 17 of which are bad reviews, with a 19% positive rating. To put it bluntly, it is actually a mess.
Throw out the question, and that's it
I can explain the gameplay of this game in a single sentence or a short paragraph. If you've ever played Reigns, that's a good thing, the game's mechanics are a complete copy of Reign. In fact, the game mechanics of King's Power are not complicated, and the kung fu of that game is not spent on mechanics.
If you haven't played King's Power, it may have to be explained in one paragraph, but it is also simple. The game is played like this, the game will constantly throw questions at you, and you need to choose one or the other for each question. Different selection results can affect your 4 attributes to a certain extent - these 4 attribute icons appear at the top of the game interface without any text prompts, based on the content of the game, we speculate that they are the straight ball icon design of kindness, confidence, happiness and wealth. Players need to answer questions to avoid any of these 4 attributes from being full or zeroed out – any stat full or zero will cause the game to end. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the game does not have any explanation of the gameplay or functional modules at all, and it is played when it is played. At this point, the overall design level of the game is fairly consistent, full of shoddy feeling.
The picture on the left is "The Survival Guide of the Meta-Universe Puxin Male", and the picture on the right is "King's Power", which is obviously designed
I have to devote a little space to the opening animation of the game, which is probably the most difficult part of the game, no less than the game's promotional video on Steam, which is an aerial video of a city in the morning mist, which seems to want to create a sense of grandeur and epicness, giving yourself a sense of pride that "I built such a bustling city.". The music with the video also corresponds to this, making people feel that they are the kind of "honest, noble and hardworking people". After the software found that the soundtrack was called "My Heart Your Heart", I maliciously speculated that the game may not have been authorized for these materials.
"Say goodbye to yourself" is actually a button to exit the game
There's not much to say about the game itself, and our colleagues struggled to find the game's patterns, and after multiple attempts, we got a rough idea of how to evaluate the game. Simply put, if you keep trying to understand anyone or behavior instead of judging it, your kindness value will increase – which is not a good thing in the game, the game does not support you to be a good old man, but wants you to be... Who knows, anyway, if you always want to understand others (especially women), you'll end up being killed by your own kindness. When the kindness value reaches its peak, the system will tell the player that you have seen the courage to help the girl, and finally sacrificed yourself, and the game is over.
If you choose "hahahahahahaha" for all social events, your happiness value will increase – that is, you will become a qualified happy person. You can use this to fend off the drop in happiness caused by "your boss lets you go to work on the weekend." When the happiness value is full, the player will get the ending and the evaluation of "You have become a happy person like me, you are still alive, but you are actually dead".
The wealth value looks more like a trick to make up the numbers, the player originally has no money, and at present I have not played any event that can make the wealth value change significantly, so this value looks more like it is given casually to fit into the template of "Kingship".
At the end of the day, the game's system — to put it bluntly, there's a good chance that the game's system hasn't been designed in any way, and the game developer just throws out questions, asks you to answer, and that's it. On Steam, some players left confused comments, one of which read: "After 200 years, there is nothing new, and I have been repeatedly asking if I want to fall in love with my colleagues and fall in love, and repeatedly asking me to keep a cat and a cat." Falling in love is going to a restaurant to take pictures and give gifts, scarves, necklaces, bags, condoms, and after five or six rounds of repetition, I have no idea where I am, who I am, and I don't understand what values the author has. ”
Pu XinNan in the "Cat Garden"
If you think that cat ownership and falling in love appear in this game a bit abruptly, then the next content may be able to answer your doubts to some extent.
The Metaverse Puxin Male Survival Guide is not the first game developed by this development team. This development team, or at least the same developer embodied in Steam, had previously developed and launched a game called Welcome to the Cat Garden.
This game is a, uh... Place Simulator, I can't think of any other explanation. You might want to hear more about the game, according to the developer profile on Steam, "Cat Garden, just a dilapidated brothel in the Red Light District", the player for some fortuitous reason, became the boss here, managing the girls under his command. The developer is super lively in the text, and he finally tells the player that the goal of the game is to "spend quality time with the girls while working hard to make money."
This is our previous screenshot of the Welcome to the Cat Garden Steam page
At present, "the game has been removed at the request of the developer", which has been checked in the Steam store, but through Google search for the game name and Steam keywords, you can still find the game page with incomplete information. Promotional videos and screenshots of the game are preserved – the first image is a picture of a girl (probably an employee of the player in the game setting) at the bottom of the skirt.
When the "Meta-Universe Puxin Male Survival Guide" first released the news and caused a boom (at that time, its name was still called "China Puxin Male Survival Guide"), the developer column showed not the current "Vega game", but "general social animals". There is another game under the developer's entry, Welcome to the Cat Garden. But later, the entry was tweaked and the two games were changed to belong to different developers. For whatever reason, it seems that the developers of the Metaverse Puxin Male Survival Guide want to try to clear up the relationship with the previous game.
Given that this game has been taken down, we can only make limited judgments based on screenshots. But to be honest, this game is the type of game that can be understood at a glance. In addition, although the developers deleted the game's Steam page, they seemed to have forgotten about the cow level, which is a game community, and many people posted news about the game on it. The cows are closed and still have some information about this "cat garden". As far as the video and screenshots are concerned, a lot of the content of this game is both frightening and curious, you can also see that the game's technology is rudimentary, the interactive interface is chaotic, the text that is not good at typography is crowded together, except for the beautiful girl's standing painting, which seems to have worked hard, the other content seems to have nothing to say.
Screenshot of the game on Cow Off. Because of the different style of screenshots on the Steam page, it is likely to be from an earlier version of the game
I don't want to criticize this game. I certainly don't think the game has to have the responsibility of educating anyone, nor do I think it's a sin or original sin to develop a "cat garden." What I'm trying to say is that what these two games — whether it's "Cat Garden" or the Pershone in the Metaverse — may have in common is that the developers never wanted to express something sincerely, steadily, and sincerely. What developers do is find a certain group of people and then develop content that will please them — in addition to the content that pleases them, how rudimentary and rudimentary the other content is, this speculative behavior certainly says something.
The road to realism?
How do we rate this game? Or, first of all, I think we still have to admit that it's a game —although, seriously, I'm going to repeat, the game is tedious, the content is simple, and technically the game is no better than any of the test questionnaires on the web.
But we still have to admit that it is a game. Even the simplest game mechanics have the potential to generate thoughts and pleasures, and the simpler the game mechanics, the more the game actually depends on the inspiration and ideas of the makers. The essence of these kinds of games — and don't get me wrong, I'm talking about really serious games — is to constantly place the player under the moral dilemma of Kohlberg, where the player makes choices in moral dilemmas in order to think about certain issues or to know themselves during the game. Think about the choices you made in This Is My War, which touch you, make you meditate, evoke your emotions, and make you start to rethink yourself, the world, and the relationship between the two.
In some of the better works, games can depict, reflect, and even criticize the real society in which the player lives through narrative, and we usually call them "realistic works". For a variety of reasons, we rarely see games that reflect the world around us, and because of this, I even had a little bit of anticipation for the Metaverse Puxin Male Survival Guide – and now I feel like an idiot. At this point, I have to mention the classic work in the history of Chinese games," "Beijing Floating Story", if you have not played or even heard of this game that was born 21 years ago, I sincerely recommend that you play it - the game mechanics of "Beijing Floating Life" are not more complicated, and it is also based on the real environment, but its transmission of thinking and social observation is far higher than the game itself, so high that even compared to it, I feel that it is an insult to "Beijing Floating Life".
Uncomplicated game mechanics can also convey certain things, including satires of reality and observations of society. For example, "Beijing Floating Life"
The Metaverse Puxin Male Survival Guide could have been a realist work, but it's clear that it didn't. What's even more frustrating is that the developers never thought of putting even the slightest serious creative intent into the work. I think the game developers are afraid of reality and refuse to see reality, so the game tries to use "all blame female fists" to find answers to some questions, and when there is no strange "female fist" in an event, the game completely abandons the moral or value judgment effort, gives the option of "happy people", and no longer thinks that it is unlucky (and reduces a little self-confidence). This makes the game itself look more like a satire. In fact, in its act of changing the name from "China Puxin Male Survival Guide" to "Meta-universe Puxin Male Survival Guide", we can see that developers even lack the courage to face a little risk in reality, perhaps just thinking of using some gimmicks to make a sum of money - just make a sum of money, just like the previous game. At this point, the whole thing itself looks like a realist work.
The vast majority of the problems covered in the Metaverse Puxin Male Survival Guide are actually social issues. You're a college student, you can't find a good enough job, your superiors want to squeeze all your energy, you're forced to 996, have to work overtime on weekends, don't have your own life, and the owner of the apartment you rent runs away (obviously this is the counterpart to the "eggshell apartment" incident). As the development team wrote in the game's introduction, "You need to survive in the cracks just like me." Your future seems to be illusory – and the game skips all serious, complex, and thought-provoking questions with a "hahahaha" answer, while encouraging and implying that players throw all their anger and ridicule at the "female fist".
This is obviously an act of bullying the soft and fearing the hard. The game avoids all serious questions, willingly responds with "hahahahahaha" responses to most of the things that harm it, and even avoids exploring the reasons behind this sad laughter. It seems that its highest expectations of itself are nothing more than "making some players feel happy" – and it doesn't even live up to that. The game itself is a lame publicity, and in theory, if you praise it, call it out, or criticize it, it will eventually benefit it, after all, it may have nothing to lose in itself.
The game has a total of 44 achievements, which to some extent reflect the value orientation of the developer
I used to have some expectations for it. On some issues, I acknowledge that the world is complex and that everyone has the right to express themselves – even if I don't approve of them, but as long as they are serious expressions, they should be respected. Games, like many other literary works, are not responsible for solving problems, but can be seen and asked questions. Under this premise, I had argued that any idea had the right to be spoken—even if it was sometimes fierce, offensive, and even ridiculous—but while endorsing it or criticizing it, we should see them calmly and without presuppositions, and acknowledge that they have the right to be expressed. I also thought that games, as literary works, should also have the right and responsibility to pay attention to the real world, and at a minimum, it will also reflect or reflect some social phenomenon or social mood, but now it seems that this game does not deserve these expectations at all, because the developers of the game from the beginning to the end only think about using the emotions of some people to make a sum of money.
There is also a problem that is easy to overlook, most of the cases selected in the Metaverse Universe Puxin Male Survival Guide are events that have occurred in reality, and some events have clear victims, and re-mentioning certain events in the game (not to mention using this kind of unserious evaluation behavior) may cause secondary harm to the parties to certain events. This is not a responsible creative act from any point of view. The developers used a cunning approach to try to evade the legal risks it might face — including adding the word "metaverse" to the game prefix to achieve a kind of ear-covering effect. But it is clear that the harm that may be suffered by those involved will not be mitigated.
Against labels, it becomes labels
Personally, the biggest problem with the Metaverse Puxin Male Survival Guide is that it is not a qualified game at all. In my opinion, it is somewhat closer to a venting tool. It grabbed users' attention with controversial topics, sparked a small gender conflict, and made some people think that "the developer of this game may understand me" and buy. And finally? What do these people get? A shoddy stand-alone questionnaire system?
We may have a scene in our minds where a young man clicks viciously on a computer screen in a cramped rental house, occasionally showing a cheerful expression. But in fact, is such a scene real, and is this idea also labeled? Obviously, the game doesn't mind having people think of their players that way. In my opinion, at least 95% of players will not maintain interest in this game for more than 10 minutes.
From another point of view, this shoddy game costs 9.9 yuan – don't be funny, any college graduate can achieve 90% of the game's functionality in any free online questionnaire system in 3 days (excluding the opening video, of course). This creates a rather ironic situation. First of all, at least in this game, the so-called "Puxin Man" is labeled. The game's developers have been claiming to be speaking for a certain group, but in reality? What they're doing is taking advantage of the emotions of this group and making a profit with disproportionately crude products. At the same time, this behavior actually deepens the gender gap and actually stigmatizes the group.
Think about it, those who like it, those who feel it shouting for themselves, those who feel it and themselves are in the same team, those who buy it, are actually the ones who are hurt the most.