Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraumSo before anything else, I do want to say that this game
traumatized me the first time I played it. I'll get more into it later. I'll also try to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.
In
Pocket Mirror, you follow G, a young amnesiac girl who can't remember more than the first letter of her name as she searches for her identity and answers in a Victorian-inspired fantastical and nightmarish world.
GoldenerTraum is the remake of of the 2016 original. Said version can be found on Astralshift's Itch.io page.
I'll also make some references to
Little Goody Two Shoes, the prequel game published last year, which tells the story of the protagonist's mother, Elise, for some additional context.
The GoodThe Art
This game is f-ing beautiful. Absolutely breathtaking. I was in awe of the beauty of some scenes. I love pixel art and this is some of the best I've seen in a game, or ever. Am I sounding enough like Trump yet?
The beauty doesn't stop there, the game employs a variety styles and mediums to tell its story.
Pocket Mirror uses your typical CGs for character art, but look neither flat nor overdesigned as some anime-inspired art tend to be. The game includes some well-crafted animations, of which I'll include screenshots as I don't have the vocabulary to describe the style.
Furthermore, the game starts off with an
anime opening sequence, complete with squeaky singing in Japanese. Wow!
The Music
The soundtrack is amazing. I'm not sure how to comment on the soundtrack besides "it's amazing" and "I listen to it everyday", but, um... Well, the soundtrack really solidifies the whole experience. Yeah, that sounds good.
The music doesn't sound generic either. I can think of a couple of games where upon entering an area the music choice sounds jarring or is just forgettable. I didn't feel that at all. The music meshes seamlessly with the mood of the scene in ways that I often did not pick up the music changing.
Some of the tracks that really manage a certain mood are:
Kleine Beere for something childish and playful;
chimerical presence evokes tension and unease;
Sun Seeps Through gives you glimpse of hope and respite.
The overall aesthetic in the choice of instruments (piano, harpsicord, violin, etc) is consistent with the Victorian vibe throughout most of the game.
Some of my favorites are: the titular
Pocket Mirror, which contains the main leitmotif;
Reiner Weiss, with its ethereal quality and
Girl's Midnight Secret with its mystery and somewhat lingering melancholy.
The Symbolism
Pocket Mirror heavily uses symbolism in a way that is shockingly not pretentious. While sometimes it is more obtuse, it doesn't come across as forced, dumb or jarring overall. It does get a bit heavy-handed during Lisette's chapter but otherwise strikes a good balance. Having played the game a couple of times, I feel that most of the images and symbols are appropriately employed. They make sense if you think about it a bit. I didn't get an "it's random and/or nonsense" feeling from it.
As to remain as spoiler-free as possible, I'll give you a banal example that's right at the beginning. The first puzzle involves gathering colored marbles from different rooms. Each room is tied to one of the major characters (G, Fleta, Harpae, Lisette and Enjel) in its theme, each marble is of the eye color of said corresponding character. The way you uncover the marbles also relates to the characters' personalities or story. You're not given a random puzzle because "it's part of the game" or even as an excuse to set the mood; it's a subtle hint as to what the story is about.
Adjacent to this is intentionality. Most things put into the game has some thought behind it, a purpose. A good example is, again, in the prologue and throughout the game, you find many paintings on walls you can interact with. Each painting is given a proper description and each of them has to do with an aspect of the story or the characters. They're not random nor are they given some default text.
Overall I'd say that team as AstralShift was pushing to make more than a game, they were making art.
The BadUnfortunately, the good stops here. While the artistic of the game is excellent, both the storytelling and gameplay mechanics are frustrating.
The StorytellingI'd say the storytelling is almost brilliant. Almost. Although, when I finished my first playthrough of the game, I almost immediately went to the wiki because I just could not make sense of anything that happened.
I was reminded of this:
Admittedly, it's not that bad, but it's not far off either. If the reader is confused about your story as a whole one they've finished it, have you, the author, really succeeded in telling it?
So what are the problems I encountered, story-wise, in my
Pocket Mirror experience?
Nothing Straightforward
Nothing in the story is explicitly stated. Well, sometimes. The game will throw some concrete info at you only in circumstances you can't really make sense of it, like when you get one of the character's bad end. Everything else, though, is inferred through all kinds of symbolism and imagery. From time to time it seems our other characters do know what's going on, but speak as if we do too, which makes for confusing conversations.
At no point does our unnamed maiden really reiterate her understanding for us, the player, in a way that lets us get what's going if we haven't caught on already.
Another thing is that while the game gives you pieces to understand the plot, it'll also throw some counter-evidence to make you doubt. An example of that is Harpae's character. She has a certain, erm, trait that's hinted at throughout her arc, but there's one event that happens that'll make you doubt she has that characteristic. (Sorry for being vague. I do want to spare people from spoilers.)
Missing Pieces
The story is like a puzzle. It gives you pieces here and there and it's your job to put it together. That itself is fine; I'd say some measure of it is good to make your story interesting. Info-dumping doesn't make for great storytelling. I believe the game builds itself up to a gigantic "Aha" moment. There's just something much more hard-hitting when you figure it out yourself than when you're being told, right? The unfortunate problem is in this case, your understanding of the entire plot resides on it. If you can't connect the dots, well, too bad.
Going back to the puzzle analogy, another aspect is that even if you manage to assemble all the pieces the story gives you, you realize it's incomplete. Pieces are missing, and it's on purpose. You still have to infer and try to fill in the blanks and it's just so annoying. With a story-driven game I want to be able to enjoy the story, not guess at what it is.
That said, I think there's something interesting and legitimate to that approach. I don't believe it's lazy nor poor writing either. When you get some info that's only available via playing
Little Goody Two Shoes, you realize that AstralShift had their story all figured out from the beginning. They decided not to disclose everything. It's... well, I feel it sits on the opposite spectrum of these games and books where they just can't help themselves from showering you with exposition. Problem is, while I think all the techniques employed are valid and create interest for the story in the player/reader, the compounding effect makes the experience so f-ing annoying. Just goddamn frustrating. Geez.
Here's a stellar example of what I'm talking about: there's a letter from Elise scattered in three parts throughout the game. Even after gathering all the parts, the letter manages to dance around the issue while raising more questions. It's a touching letter, but that's mostly it. It gives you maybe one new piece of information you hadn't previously access to.
Lastly, for an additional layer of complexity, the game tells two stories in parallel. There's the adventure you're going through with G and the backstory which led to the current events. The backstory with Elise is really what gives the main story some needed context.
The MechanicsThis review is long enough as it is, and I don't want to particularly go into this. It's essentially a puzzle game with some chase sequences, the occasional "Z" button mashing and two "who dunnit"/murder mystery puzzles. The chase sequences are fine... if you have good reflexes. The "Z" button mashing is not overused. Many of the word puzzles are what I'd call "purple prose puzzles" and the two murder mystery puzzles are by far the hardest to figure out. I believe the one in Harpea's manor is legitimately impossible to get it right the first time; there's just no way. If somebody who played the game manage to figure it out on the first shot, please tell me how.
The game also features a number of death traps/game overs. About half are predictable; the other half feel kind of unfair.
My first run of the game took me about 7.5 hours according to Steam. I clocked a total of about 5 hours in the in-game timer. So about 2.5 of those 7.5 hours were from me dying in trying to beat the chase scenes, dead ends or puzzles you can die from.
My Personal ExperienceFirst, I'd like to give credit to the devs. To me, they achieved the ultimate goal of storytelling; playing this game changed something in me. It managed to gouge a place for itself in me. Bravo. Unfortunately, it wasn't a positive experience and instead of being uplifting, it left me scarred. I know I'm sounding dramatic, but it was dramatic to me.
I'm usually pretty careful about maintaining an emotional distance with games and stories, especially the darker and somber ones. Hell, I don't even like horror; I can barely stand it if it's in any way scary. Alas, most of the good RPG Maker titles are some type of horror game.
Everything you open yourself to affects you and the darkness of those kind of stories is not something I want to carry. The problem with letting something enter your heart is that it almost never leaves.
So yeah, in this section I will explore the following: how did this horror game manage to drop my guard so low it managed to deeply affect me and is there anything we can learn from it from a storytelling perspective?
Wrong ExpectationsI thought the game was going to be funny. I'm serious.
In the first area of the prologue (the marble puzzle), the horror is borderline comical. Like, really. Dreary atmosphere, objects that move on their own, cryptic pictures and messages. It's almost too cliched. There's a "shock value" moment near the end of the puzzle that felt silly (and predictable because the lighting changed).
Humor
is a great tool. It makes people relax and take things less seriously. Humor can make heavy topics more digestible without necessarily taking away from the impact of them. It makes you lower your guard, and when that happens your heart becomes more open to the story. I don't think they meant for the first area to be funny but that is definitely how I experienced it.
Soon after that, you do get some horror here and there. A bit of gore, a bit of blood, some strange oozing liquids, etc. Stuff you'd expect from horror, but still on the light side.
The game gets quite dark later on, what with imagery of mutilation, killing, self-harm, suicide, the sudden deaths, and that one horrific nightmare vision in one of the cutscenes. I... was
not properly prepared to deal with that.
The juxtaposition of "cute and cuddly" with "blood and gore" makes the horror that much more jarring, especially since the tone
usually shifts on a dime.
I do blame the creators a bit for not making the real tone of the game more explicit at first. Well, I think they did try, but I didn't find that moment at the end of the marble puzzle very convincing. It could also be that doing so would have made the game ultimately less impactful. Anyway, whatever.
After being unprepared to take this game seriously, what next?
MysteryThinking back on games I played, stories or movies that got me hooked the most, there was always an element of mystery at the beginning, something needed to be uncovered. The desire that people have to understand is a really good tool to exploit when crafting a story. This game does both in an overt and subtle way. Right from the start, you're in a strange place solving strange puzzles to go God-knows-where and you're trying to make sense of what's going on. That's the obvious part of the mystery. The more subtle part is that despite all that surface fairy tale fantasy and horror, there's something deeper that's off about the world. For example, you meet many NPCs in the prologue, but no human characters. There's something more concerning than just trying to find your way out.
So, after the initial impression that this game wasn't going to be seriously scary, I let myself get invested in trying to figure out what the game was about. The real clincher was what came next.
WonderI think this is what ultimately did me in. I'm not sure how to properly formulate it. The whole game has this dream-like quality that drags you in. There's something about it that's just a bit beyond the real that captures you? I don't know, I really don't. There's only two things I can say for sure: I don't often feel this while reading fiction and that sense of wonder was the final element that bloomed my obsession with this game.
Alas, all of this was just a preamble. Now that I was a captive of its beauty and starved for understanding, the real mistreatment commenced.
Hope, Fear and ConfusionOne of the themes the game plays on is hope and fear. Well, fear, but it's more like this growing feeling of unease and desperation. As I mentioned earlier, this game is quite dark, in many ways, but doesn't present itself as such in the beginning. The prologue and first chapter strike a nice balance by alternating bright and lively rooms with the dark and scary ones. Even then, our nameless maiden is under the threat of death on many occasions. Both the darkness and danger of death ramp up as you advance. What was about a fifty-fifty percent balance in the contrasting theme radically shifts to the somber end of the scale right at the end of said first chapter.
All the while, you don't know where you are, who you are nor what you're progressing towards to. You're trying to make it out of wherever it is you are and you're trying to make sense of what the game is presenting to you, but it doesn't make it easy for you.
You will be chased. You will be threatened. You will witness death. You will be put into situations that seem impossible to escape and wonder if the game isn't broken. In the midst of confusion, the game will grace you with a glimmer of hope for escape and understanding only to snuff it out. Each time, the oppressive darkness increases and the light becomes sparser and fainter. It
will give you hope, light, to tease you, to be sure you still believe and then try to crush it.
In my first playthrough, I didn't make all the right choices and ending up messing up each character's arc which end up, um, to be disturbing. At the end I got the ULTIMATE BAD ENDING which, err, I don't even want to get into.
So yeah, that was a legitimately scarring experience.
I dropped the game completely the day after I finished it the first time, but unfortunately, I couldn't forget it. When I was playing
Omori, Sweetheart's palace gave me strong
Pocket Mirror vibes that brought up some tears. If a day passed that I wasn't thinking about it, I was thinking about
Little Goody Two Shoes and its implications on it. Sigh.
After staying away from it for three months, I caved in and concluded that forgetting about it wasn't happening. Listening to the soundtrack after it being stuck in my head for so long gave me cold sweat and palpitations, lol.
So here I am now. I finally beat the game properly, got all the endings, understood what the hell it was all about and as I'm writing the review I feel like I'm pouring out the remaining attachments I still have to it.
ConclusionThis will sound overly dramatic but I feel my life is worst off for having played both this and the prequel, lol. Both
Pocket Mirror and
Little Goody Two Shoes made a significant impact on myself but I can't say it's mostly positive. I was on the fence about writing this review for quite a while because I know that talking about it will ultimately lead some people to check it out nonetheless, perhaps more than if I had never mentioned it, but I feel I need some outlet to get some closure.
One of the good the good things it brought me to purchase a copy of
Grimms' Fairy Tales. I wanted to see where this whole thing about fairy tale and horror came from.
Verdict
Not recommended.