Meteoric
I was interested upon seeing this game, as I had heard of the author a lot before due to his frequent participation in discussions on the CoG forums and for the name of one of his WIPs (Mass Mother Murderer) and his saga of going to another company at one point.
So I really wondered what to expect here.
What I got was a tale that at its core is about belonging. You play as a young person in a crappy dead-end job with no money and no future. Following a fallen meteor, you stumble upon a demonic-looking microphone that promises you riches and fame in exchange for an unknown price.
Following the microphone’s prophetic urgings, you audition for a death metal band, winning the lead spot over a serial-killer obsessed would-be singer named Larry, who instantly becomes your nemesis.
The word that came to mind the most as I played the game was ‘alienated’, and later when Larry was explicitly described as alienated, I felt validated. I also thought of ‘disaffected’. Our main character suffers from many fallacies that I learned as part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Their biggest fallacy is ‘the fallacy of control’, where either they have a complete lack of control in their own life and suffer the whims of others, or they have total control and everything is their fault.
We see this in the way our character mentally divides people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. ‘Bad’ people are like the cop and the manager or Larry. They inflict bad things onto our protagonist which we are unable to resist. All bad things in our lives are the fault of ‘bad people’, who have no redeeming features.
In contrast, our band members are ‘good people’, the kind of people we always dreamed would find us. ‘Good people’ never get mad at you for anything, are completely understanding, nurture you, find you strong but also help out at all times. If we can only find ‘good people’ and keep them from finding out how bad we are, we will be happy; but in this fantasy, even if they find out our problems, they won’t care. (Wayhaven has similar fantasies)
Our character really reminded me of an alienated youth I worked with once. He was handsome but thought himself ugly, and had good male friends but said that women hated him. I had quietly asked some of the girls his age what they thought of him and they said positive things, so I decided to observe him. He came into a class and the first thing he did was tell a joke about how much he hates women! I couldn’t believe it. Step 1 of getting people to like you is ‘don’t say you hate them’. That reminds me of this character; both don’t think that they have control over their lives, so if people don’t like them, it’s not because of their own actions, but because they’re ‘bad people’, and all you can do is wait for a ‘good person’ to come along.
Anyway, I think a lot of people will find this character relatable. The story has an actual really positive overall arc, almost wholesome. Our character finds community and fulfillment.
The writing is intensely physical and sensory-based. Dripping blood, cold mists, trembling knees. The prose isn’t purple, as it uses simple sentences, but is focused on these physical feelings to the extreme. That made it more compelling to me; I liked the writing quite a bit.
The choice-structure is unusual. I was annoyed at first that I found it hard to tell what choices had what effect, but I slowly realized that the first option always increases Toughness, the second one always increases Charisma, third Intelligence, and fourth something I don’t remember. This makes replays a lot easier. It’s not completely trivial, though, as each action also has an effect on which band member likes you, and that’s not always fixed in the pattern.
Stats could use some tuning. Relationships start at 50 and end at 60, so the numbers 61-100 are essentially useless. That could be fixed by just adjusting all the numbers to be bigger (both for boosts and checks) or switching to additive stats the way that the main stats are.
I did encounter a few minor bugs, which I’ll pass on to the author.
I think this game was less popular for a few reasons, the main being the low wordcount size (I’ve seen that in my own games of the same size!) and the way that the blurb and art don’t quite match the game itself (I didn’t know it was a rockstar game until I started, I thought at first it was a superhero game). I could recommend it to several people though, especially on reddit where people often ask for games with found family, or where you have imposter syndrome, or where you can be a jerk or have someone be a jerk to you.
