* This article is originally written by IGN China, the original author Kamui Ye, unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.
The interactive video adventure game "Flying Over Room 13" produced by ALT Lab launched the first half (prologue to chapter 5) in early January, and updated the story after chapter 6 in the form of DLC on February 2, and the two parts were disassembled and sold for 32 RMB each, which together is a complete game.
There must be some difficulties for developers to use this form, but the game itself adopts a chapter system, and like many other works of the same type, there are many different endings, so in terms of story experience alone, this form of separate development and sales does not have as much impact on the game architecture itself as expected. However, many players expressed their dissatisfaction with this in the first half of the Steam interface released in early January, and it is understandable.
The plot of the game itself is based on one of the social hot spots in China in previous years - Yang Yongxin and his Internet addiction treatment center related events, but the developer moved the story to a country in Southeast Asia (the main characters are still Chinese backgrounds), the hero was sent here by his parents to quit Internet addiction, so he tried his best to resist, and in the middle of a lot of interaction with the surrounding classmates, instructors, and Principal Yang (named "Yang Yongen" in the game), according to the player's choice will produce some completely different endings, This is the biggest play point of the entire game.
The theme itself is the biggest attraction
Since you decided to focus on this theme, the biggest attraction of the game, or the most attractive, is, of course, the worldview setting itself. Players want to see what angle and form the production team interprets this series of events that have brought great pain to countless parties, but on the other hand, present mixed reviews and disadvantages at the level of broader public opinion.
The difference from traditional film and television dramas is that the expression form of interactive images can borrow the multi-branching and multi-ending characteristics of text adventure games, allowing players to experience multiple lives in one play, which means that the whole thing can be repeated from multiple angles.
Although as the main single-player player, in the face of such an audio-visual interactive "game", it is natural to presuppose in his heart which are "good endings" and which are "bad endings", and his views on this event are basically fixed.
From the standpoint of the production team, it is obviously impossible to simply show events from an objective perspective that only exists in theory like the news media in reality, and the overly clear position prematurely makes the ideas, characters, and players' ideas clear and fixed and face-painted, resulting in the lack of suspense in the general direction of the entire game as a work with storytelling as the core content.
Any player who sees such a game appear in front of them, knows or hopes that the final ending will develop into what it looks like, but is just curious about what tricks the production team can play in the specific implementation process, which is the inherent disadvantage of choosing this theme to make a game.
The level of film and television is online
It is gratifying that although the cost visible to the naked eye is not high, the development team of "Flying Over Room 13" has shown a high level of film and television production in the process of specific implementation, and has undoubtedly reached the level of domestic first-class online movies from the perspective of casting, costumes, performances, mirror movement, on-site scheduling, etc., which has played a great positive role in helping players integrate into the plot and empathize with the characters in the play, and is also the biggest highlight in the entire game.
Several young leading actors are not famous, and their acting skills are relatively immature, but it can be seen that everyone is still dutifully showing the joys, sorrows and sorrows of the characters in the play, and the excellent appearance conditions should also attract the attention of some light players who are usually not interested in the game.
Especially need to be praised is the performance of the villain No. 1 "Principal Yang", relatively speaking, the most outstanding, aside from the Facebook setting, the performer Zhang Xinhua teacher fully shows the character's madness and ignorance and fearless psychological characteristics. It is not difficult for a villain to be scared in the story, as long as there is a plot to cooperate, the difficult thing is to make the audience unconsciously begin to dislike the appearance of TA when playing the game in reality, and "Principal Yang" has obviously achieved such an effect.
Although due to objective conditions and production costs and other restrictions, players are still easy to encounter some more natural bridges in the process of the game, and there are also some detailed bugs, including the escape process of the male protagonist, the logical derivation of several search + puzzle solving, the combination between items, etc. Many links are worth further scrutiny and refinement, and from my personal feelings, it does have a certain negative impact on substituting their emotions into the plot.
In addition, from the overall environment, the atmosphere in the "school" is generally relaxed, plus several leading actors are handsome men and beautiful women, and the faint emotional line makes the story atmosphere show a little taste of campus idol dramas, which has attracted criticism from some players, which is also difficult to avoid as a commercial product.
But on the whole, the flaws are not hidden, in the face of such a work must not be scored by the standards of first-line blockbusters, it is not strong to be serious and rough within an acceptable range, which is enough, and the film and television part of "One Flew Over Room 13" is obviously a plus for the entire work.
As an adventure game, the architecture is too simple, and the branch exploration is slightly cumbersome
Under the premise that the general direction of the plot is determined and the cost is limited, from the perspective of adventure games, the space left for the production team to play should not be too large, and in fact it is.
The entire process of "One Flew Over Room 13" is basically linear, and the narrative will be paused at the plot point to show the player options to decide the later story development, and different choices will bring different dialogue, plot, character relationship changes, and these elements will then make some subtle or fundamental changes to the future story, which is the normal flow of AVG games.
However, specific to this work, the first biggest impression is that the player's choice space is actually not large, and in most cases, which one should be chosen to develop the plot (the game continues) is clear at a glance, and the suspense atmosphere is very light.
When you retrace previous nodes through the "storyline" function with curiosity, you often only face two outcomes - either simply seeing one or two sentences of dialogue that is different from just now, which has no impact on the development of the story, or simply restarting the game over because of too obvious intentions, and the only fun left is to constantly eliminate the padlock icon on the story line and constantly improve the completion of chapters.
There are NPC favorability and satisfaction settings in the game, and the choice of different dialogue and plot branches will affect this value, and then determine whether the player can continue to promote the plot. The more frustrating part is that there are several places in the game where players are stuck in the main line because of this setting, and they can only go back over and over again to sort out the different results that different options may cause, and guess the possible consequences of NPC favorability.
Of course, when stuck, the system will give a relatively clear hint, which link to go back to, who to find to solve the problem, etc., will not confuse the player, but in terms of actual experience, it will still give people a feeling of messy clues and always doing repetitive work.
The last problem of the game is the amount of content, even if you count some of the time to go back and sort out the clues, if you do not pursue the full unlocking of the chapters, the game time should be about 5 hours, the foreshadowing of the characters' emotions, the details of the story background, the rhythm of the plot development and other links inevitably present a sense of haste, as if the production team actually has a lot to say, but limited by objective conditions can not present too many details in the game, can only endure the pain of cutting love.
The text, pictures, and video introductions in the character file are a kind of compensation for the lack of content in the main part to a certain extent, but the strength is obviously too weak.
summary
In a doomed niche field, the development team of "Flying Over Room 13" has worked hard to hand over an overall satisfactory answer sheet for the propositional composition of "Yang Yongxin Incident", although there are many questions, some of which even affect the mood of the game, but the significance of the existence of this work is not only the performance of the game itself, but more importantly, it can evoke some players' memories of that event, so that many people can re-examine the absurdity and nonsense of the year from a more comprehensive and in-depth perspective.
Just like the protagonist in the game, it is not enough to criticize "Principal Yang"'s personal evil deeds or expose the shady scene of the school, the more important thing is to reverse more people's understanding of the so-called rebellious behavior, game behavior, and to dig more life truth to understand the logic behind the behavior, which is obviously too heavy for a niche interactive work, but I think this is at least a good start.