Manna for our Malices
Jun. 8th, 2021 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Status: Complete
Site: https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices
Pairing: Mildly F/F
Description: Figure out why you keep getting murdered

This is a murder mystery VN where you're both the victim and the person tasked with solving the case. The main character is an expletive spitting Japanese school girl named Akagi Ai. After an unremarkable day at school she's stabbed in the back on her way home, and wakes up again at the top of the day. From then on she repeats her day over and over again, trying to figure out why she keeps dying, and why she keeps coming back to life.
Let's get the bad parts about the game covered first. The art direction on this game is pretty bad. It's got to be some of the worst I've seen in a VN and that's a low bar. I assumed this was because the writer was forced to create their own assets for budget reasons, and I'm partially correct. According to his postmortem, he actually paid a whopping 1000 bucks to get the background images from one artist(which are roughly serviceable), and a some preliminary character sketches from another artist who later ghosted him for the finished products. The preliminary sketches appear as the character icons in the dialog, but they haven't been touched up at all. They look like rough pencil anime sketches that were shot with a camera in low light. The dev was then forced to draw most of character sprites himself, and it appears he wasn't up to the task. I feel for the guy, because he got screwed over by an unscrupulous artist who's sketches show he wasn't good enough to be taking the job in the first place and then just took the money and ran anyway.
There are also a couple of issues of mechanical weirdness that caused some frustration in my play. Specifically the game asks you constantly if you want to save, even though there are very few times where it seems actually necessary to preserve a branch or something like that. It prompts you to save at the end of every day, but sometimes multiple times at the end of every day, even though nothing has happened, sometimes within a few lines of each other. The constant interruption annoyed the hell out of me once I realized that it wasn't actually indicating an important point of no return or anything like that.
With those big things out of the way we can get to the bulk of the game, which was fun, despite being ugly and having a few technical issues. The story relies heavily on you trying out new things in each repeat day, and then modifying your behavior based on the information that day gives you. There are lots of weird secrets, including aliens, psychics, ritual bloodletting, and so on and so forth, though I wouldn't put this game in the horror genre, possibly because the art undercuts the mood. Leaning into the meta aspects of VNs is not new, but the mystery is interesting, and with only the occasional exception figuring out what I needed to do was not hard. Often times you just need to run into a problem or new info, and then spend the next day talking to someone who might know something about it.
The puzzle design isn't air tight though. There is a way that you can trap yourself in an infinite time loop, and there's no way out of it besides save scumming. This is by design and in retrospect makes sense, but when it happened to me I wasn't sure if I actually was in an infinite loop, because the game is about loops, and I had to go looking around for a walkthrough to confirm. Another issue that recalls some of the more brutal IF of days gone by is that you can miss important scenes in the early game, and if you do you cannot get the good end in the late game. I thought I had basically figured things out, but at the end got murdered with finality, throwing me to the menu instead of waking me up for a retry. After poking around I found out that I needed to restart from the beginning because I had missed an entire branch of plot that started on the second or third day.
I'm not sure I would call either of these things bad. They were just moments of opaqueness in a game that is otherwise forgiving in how the player puts the pieces of the mystery together.
The writing in the game is hyper otaku. It's set firmly in Japan with a strong American sense of humor and mindset, but it goes so hard on it I came to appreciate the dedication to the aesthetic. There are maybe a couple of moments, particularly in the end, where the transitions between scenes are not quite solid, but otherwise I found this to be a fun, relatively short little puzzle with a bunch of fun over the top supernatural themes.. It's a shame Malices doesn't have more polish, because mechanically it was fun to figure out. At a mere 1 dollar, I actually think this game is worth a buy, regardless of how it looks.