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Cuddly and dark., December 19, 2023Snuggling under the covers together. An unsettling dream. Waking up to a changed room. She’s bleeding! You have to save her.
KABOOM is about some very heavy subject matter. It’s filtered through the viewpoint of a girl’s cuddle toy, a stuffed hare. This means that the PC is innocent and clueless about the circumstances happening around it, and it produced some fuzzy cuteness feelings in me (“Aw! I like games with stuffed animal protagonists. Is this going to be like A Bear’s Night Out?”).
Soon however, reality pierces the cuddly feelings. Wriggling free from under the girl’s arm requires some determined action, a grim image immediately underlining the desperate urgency of the situation.
Considered this way, the cuddly stuffed hare protagonist has opposite effects. Its cluelessness about what’s happening initially dampens the impact of the horrible events, but the player’s realisation of the true nature of the game’s subject hits harder because of it.
Saving your girl requires some quite standard object manipulation. In both puzzles (after getting out of the girl’s embrace), there was a single step I overlooked at first which made them a tad more challenging.
The entire game (puzzle solving, narrative tempo, player engagement, clarity of the surroundings) suffers from poor design. The interface forces the player to do a confusing amount of clicking to get her bearings and to manipulate the intended object. Imagine having a parser without an implied LOOK when entering a room, for example. Sometimes the player has to explicitly (and for no discernable reason) refer to the PCs limbs, which are separately implemented under an “Inventory”-link. This necessitates spreading your awareness over more buttons than is needed. It frustrated me when I thought my intended action was not in the list of choices, and then found out that it was several more clicks away, buried in this “Inventory”.
Taking my distance from the technical issues and letting the story come to the forefront, I must say I’m very moved by this piece. The helplessness of the little girl in her collapsed room, the powerlessness of the hare to rescue her by itself… (This is captured in a touching image when the hare looks at the ruined house and concludes a scary giant must have caused this.)
Technically lacking, emotionally moving.