I recently discovered, through means I have now forgotten, that Traysia had been added to Steam. When I was writing about Final Fantasy II, I was at one point going to call it the worst RPG I'd played, but then I remembered Traysia. The gameplay is an atrocious waste of the game's Christina's World-inspired cover, one of the best and most beautiful covers ever created. I do not know why it was chosen for a Steam release. Psycho Dream, also from Renovation and in no need of being introduced to future generations, has also gotten the Steam treatment. I imagine this is part of a misbegotten Pico Interactive-type initiative to attempt to milk income out of moribund properties that weren't popular even in their day.
Of course, I bought Traysia.
Anyhow: I wanted to see what other oddities the publisher had put on Steam, and I ran across a few original titles the publisher had put out. Of these, one by Pixel Noire Games caught my eye immediately, for reasons I'm sure you'll understand once you view the store page banner:
It was six bucks, and How Long to Beat clocked it at two-and-a-half hours. How could I say no to the entertainment proposition offered by It Could Happen to You?
I report from the other end of the experience - an experience, I will note, curiously devoid of resolution controls, Steam's F12 screencap function, or even saving - and I can tell you there are many threads. Let's unravel them one-by-one. FULL SPOILERS, so proceed only if you can handle THE TRUTH!
PLOT THREAD ONE: Cows are being exsanguinated in your aunt and uncle's Spanish rural village. They mention the problem at a family wedding, for which they are appropriately dressed:
While most of the game's visuals are digitized from stock photos, the expressions seem guided by the artistic approach behind the Ecce Homo restoration.
You investigate to find locals are being kidnapped and experimented on by men in black. Instead of teleporting victims to their spaceship, though, they're stuck with driving them in a used sedan to an abandoned factory. (Budget cuts? OSP mission?) When a couple MiBs shanghai a neighbor couple, you tail their sedan for about what the game specifies is about an hour down a lonely, otherwise-deserted and evidently largely flat rural road in broad daylight. The MiBs never twig. Guess those big black eyes the greys have are great for night vision but not so great on the peripheral.
PLOT THREAD TWO: After rescuing the couple, you learn that the MiBs are ticked and have followed you back to the city to your apartment. You get a call on the phone:
I might point out at this juncture that the translation on this is not where it should be. I might also point out that, based on the color version of this portrait on the store page, it seems Photoshopped from an image of Grandpa Munster:
Grandpa Munster instructs you in escaping the MiBs, then sends a taxi to bring you to another small town with more cattle mutilations, which won't have any further relevance to the narrative. Grandpa has set you up for a long stay at the local hotel and exhorts you to investigate a different set of strange events in the town. You do not hear from Grandpa again.
(I will note that during the MiB escape, you'll receive a phone call from a friend claiming a convenient life-threatening medical emergency. Instead of running to his apartment into a very obvious trap or doing nothing, I opted to call an ambulance for him. The game will execute your intentions by having your character interrupt his desperate, death-defying escape to sit tight in his apartment for an hour to charge his phone before making a.by-then very timely emergency services call. Your phone doesn't take an hour to charge fully—just to recover from a dead battery to the point of functionality. Evidently, Spain uses the USB 0.0000001 standard.)
PLOT THREAD THREE: A teenager who disappeared after a car wreck five years ago has reapparated in the town, not having aged a day. He tells you a winged chupacabra-like creature wrecked his car and that he has no memory of anything that happened since then. At the exhortation of his former girlfriend, now in college, you steal a USB containing his examination results from the local doctor - who, it is noted, is operating out of a makeshift garage -
- to reveal that DUH DUH DUHHHH, according to an autopsy report, the teenager actually died five years ago, and the doctor's exam of whoever is presenting himself as him confirms they aren't human. What is he? Who is he? We don't know. The girlfriend goes to say goodbye, and he, like Grandpa Munster, doesn't appear in the narrative again.
PLOT THREAD FOUR: The chupacabra is back! You join forces with a reporter who's been chasing it since it attacked his sister to the fashionable small-town spot for horror games to culminate:
DOOM 66%
Only during the day, though! The chupacabra attacks at night, but you turn the lighthouse's devastating beam on it to shrivel it up. The monster shorts out the light, but oh, well; you and the reporter leave the lighthouse, satisfied and with absolutely no loose ends left untied.
Oops. Guess someone else needed the lighthouse more. You end up causing a cruise ship crash with over 50 fatalities. The tales of chupacabra sightings before disasters turn out to be causative instead of correlative, and everything in the narrative, from the MiB sedans to Grandpa Munster to a teen dying in a car crash five years ago and being impersonated by who-knows-what to the chupacabras, was in service of getting you to connect faulty wiring in the lighthouse and short out its lamp, thereby causing the ship to crash.
There's a germ of a good idea in the horror being caused not directly by a monster but by a human intentionally frightened into doing something beneficial in the moment but calamitous in the longer run. Frankly, though, 50 deaths seems a low RoI on the investments of interstellar travel, cloning, and teaching Greys how to drive stick. Any given Final Destination movie manages more with just Tony Todd and household appliances. Then again, this did all start with MiBs, and bureaucratic officials were never known for their efficiency.
In conclusion:
