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| Title | Resette’s Prescription ~Book of memory, Swaying scale~ |
| Developer | Liz-Arts |
| Publisher | Sekai Project |
| Release Date | May 30, 2016 |
| Genre | Point and Click Adventure |
| Platform | PC Steam |
| Age Rating | General Audiences |
| Official Website | |
Long gone are the glory days of the point and click adventure. They used to be the king genre in gaming, especially on the PC, but then they largely went away. There was, however, a minor resurgence with the emergence of in-browser flash games. And this title, Resette’s Prescription ~Book of memory, Swaying scale~ is definitely of that ilk. It is much more of the Flash genre than the Monkey Island genre. That’s not to say that it’s simply a throwaway game that shouldn’t be purchased for money, but it is a much more simple story with much more simple mechanics than the old ones we used to get.
There is really not any buildup to the opening of this tale. You play a young girl, named Resette, who thinks that she’s an adult but tends to act like a kid, and you are starving and lost in the woods for some mysterious reason. You also have a talking cat that is not really a cat and is more like a familiar. You also carry around a power glove in your suitcase for some reason. None of this is made clear through the entire story, but apparently she mainly uses that glove to heal people, and that might be where the name Resette’s Prescription comes from. While wandering lost in the woods she comes upon a young boy who is asleep and won’t wake up. She promptly steals his bread and then decides to try to help him wake up.
By using her healing glove she is able to enter into the sleeping boy’s mind, and that is where almost the entirety of the game takes place. While in there, some kind of magic parasite will be trying to block your progress and try to make him not remember something from his past. Apparently it is not physical trauma that has rendered him unconscious; it is mental anguish. From there it is a fairly simplistic tale of justice and regret that you work your way through by picking up objects in the environment and trying to find out where they fit elsewhere. An important mechanic is the ability to combine two items together within the toolbar at the top. This is all done with point and click though. There are no real menus. This is a Flash game through and through.
The game may be very short, only about 2-3 hours, but there is a decent amount of variety in the puzzles. They can be brain teasers like the above board game, with very esoteric instructions, or they can just be a case of finding the right object to click on. Really I preferred the brain teaser type by quite a bit. A lot of the objects you need to click on blend in very well with the surroundings, especially a certain book, and the switch over from regular mouse cursor to the inspect icon is very finicky. A fact that also reared its ugly head is when you know what you need to do, but getting the cursor to click on the exact right spot can be an exercise in frustration. If they tightened up the controls and gave better indications of where you needed to click, this would have been a much more enjoyable experience. The puzzles themselves weren’t all that difficult, even the brain teasers.
And the background styles don’t only cause issues with obscuring objectives. The other issue with the backgrounds is they just feel tonally off. The character artwork is simplistic but has a nice style to it. The backgrounds look totally out of place against the character art. I would find it difficult to believe that the same person or even the same team designed both. But one area that was pretty consistently good was in the music design. The sound may not be anything to write home about, but the music was pretty good for a simple indie title like this. And in a couple places it was noticeable for its quality.
Sadly, that is about the only quality thing I can say for this game. The opening movie was good and the music was pretty good. The story was pretty bad. It was very simplistic, highly manipulative, and had very little nuance. There is also the fact of the subject matter which is something that offended me personally, especially to so casually throw in the state execution of a young girl. That may be the story they want to tell, but it is not the story I want to read. But even beyond that, you were also trying to save a kid that I had a very tough time wanting to save at all. He was not a very sympathetic character. Not that everyone should have to be a choir boy, but when you combine a story that I didn’t like with gameplay that is pretty shoddy, it’s hard to find a good reason to recommend a playthrough. At an MSRP of $12.99, it is not a very expensive purchase. But for a 3 hour story that is this rough, and a game that feels like it should be free in a browser, or at least free-to-play, I just don’t see the value proposition. I do hope that they keep some of the elements of the character design and opening movie design and music design, and come back with a game that I would enjoy more next time.
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Review Copy Provided By The Publisher
