Four Horsemen

[got_quiet]

Name: Four Horsemen
Status: Complete
Site: https://nuclearfishinsoftware.itch.io/four-horsemen
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Suggested M/F but largely gen
Description: Being a refugee sucks, the game

This is a game focused on a very particular sort of refugee experience. It starts off with a group of four friends co-opting an abandoned war bunker for their club house, and as the days go by event after event causes them to engage with racism in a multitude of forms, from the locals, from their own people, from themselves and each other, etc... but mostly from the locals.

 

 

The mechanics of this game were at first a little hard for me to figure out. You have a set of options for what to do in the afternoon, and another set for the evening. Some of these things get you resources, some of them advance a character path. Saving is locked. It auto saves at the end of every day and doesn't allow for any save scumming, as  you're given only one slot per run. I'm not a huge fan of long games preventing you from being allowed to save scum, as all it does is make it harder for a player to interact with your game.  If you don't continue a plot it seems like you can play forever just gathering resources, which means it seems to punish going for the story option.

The narrative pathing for this game is complicated, seems to rely somewhat on stats, and is overall difficult to navigate due to a large number of choices that don't always tell you what they're for. I found myself discombobulated, and kind of lost about was needed for what, or how to get what parts to build what thing and why I was building that thing. It's easy to be distracted by a lot of options, or to do something that results in you feeling like you wasted your time. The complicated list of parts you need to make different contraptions for the club house was my bane, because you have to kind of memorize what exactly it is you need, remember how much it cost to get that part so you don't waste your time going to the hardware store without any money, and then buy the right parts. And some of those parts seem to rely on RNG to appear. If you are like me and easily get distracted or struggle to stick to one single goal when a game keeps throwing you alternatives, then you may get as frustrated as I did about it all. It got easier on later runs as I learned to just focus on one thing or another, though.

Below are spoilers, so skip to the conclusion if you would like to dodge them.

Plot wise things were also a little hard for me to get a grasp on. There is something about each of the paths that I took that didn't entirely make sense to me, in terms of basic human behavior. For example, in one plot a character has some sort of anxiety/depressive attack and there is an insinuation that she may hurt herself, but then maybe it was all not that bad at all, but then it turns out she's being emotionally attacked by an AI version of a childhood stuffed animal she built, but if you fight it in a sort of rhetoric battle you will get the good end, but picking the right argument felt mostly like guess work, and the whole sequence of events feels surreal. When I was done with that path my primary emotion was "what just happened?" While the conclusion of the route is a good speech summarizing the pressure the character is under as the "hope for the people," the progression of the plot was not as concrete.


 

In another route you decide to start some sort of protest movement and immediately have national attention, but then get betrayed by one of the characters with no foreshadowing that they were a double agent of some sort, and then that character tries to get you to murder him because he claims this will somehow free the immigrant population from something. It was completely nonsensical. Who thinks that a minority doing violence on one of their own is going to make the majority think better of them? And while some of the things the betrayer was saying was pointing to the real sort of internalized hatred and alienation that some marginalized people experience, that point was undercut by the weirdness of the character's behavior. In that same route the kids end up turning their bunker into a barricade and stay there for weeks. It sounds like a terrible situation, but where are the parents? How are they feeding themselves? Why did they even think that this was the right move? Part of the problem is that the story wants to talk about a "movement" but also is only about 4 kids, so the perspective is skewed weirdly and the stakes just never made sense.

It felt like I was being asked to suspend my disbelief in ways that was difficult to do when the game was also very earnestly telling you that it was trying to be about a serious statement on the immigrant experience. While there were many moments in the game that I thought were good, the A to B moments between character plot often made me stop and go wait, what is going on? This made it hard for me to invest myself in the characters. They just didn't feel real.

While there are four major routes, one for each of the main characters, the game starts by making you select one of 12 different groups of people, all of them a vague mishmash of real life populations. While the game page on itch.io suggests that doing so changes the game substantially, my experience was that it is an entirely superficial option. The 4 major plots are very likely the same, from what I can tell. What changes is names of the characters, the sort of second language that is peppered in, some of the details of backstory, and if the devs can be believed, sometimes the "right" option in encounters is switched around based on what would work for the host culture of that particular scenario. This is just added complication to me. Especially if you add on the mechanical prevention of save scumming and an already maze like system of options that are often ambiguous, doing this adds guesswork to an already guesswork heavy game.


 

The routes are asymmetrical, as in it is a lot easier to trigger certain routes over others. I got the first without really trying, got the second in about twice as much time, and then just straight up couldn't figure out how to get the third. Possibly it was locked behind having to build something with an item that RNG was preventing me from finding when dumpster diving. After about an hour of trying I gave up and that was where I stopped playing.

The game runs on a new game plus system, where by completing certain endings you are given new things you can build in subsequent games, and you get a little picture added to a wall in the game that appears to be the only thing that helps you track completion. There isn't any gallery or anything like that, which is a minor frustration in a game that emphasizes replaying. At the end of a run you're often told that there is a true end out there, but I don't think I will ever see it.

 

 

While the writing is generally okay and the game does face down some heavy stuff regarding displaced communities, it felt like the mechanics were getting in the way of the story it was trying to tell and it trips over its feet a little by overcomplicating things. But this may also be because crafting is possibly my least favorite RPG mechanic of all time and this game is all about it. So maybe if someone really enjoys crafting they will like the way this game seems to manage progression.