Changeling

[got_quiet]

Name: Changeling
Status: Complete
Site: https://steamberry.itch.io/changeling
Pairing: F/M (Otome)
Description: A young girl with abysmal research skills dates magical boys.

I would warn for spoilers in this review but the spoiler is in the title, so I'm not going to bother.

Changeling is an otome game where the MCs is a changeling who doesn't know she's a changeling. She moves with her family back to her old hometown to be closer to an ailing grandfather, and on her second day back at school gets pushed into a magic clubhouse and told she's a "cryptic". It turns out that a large portion of the population in the little town where she grew up are also "cryptics," or supernatural beings of one sort of another. Most are either werewolves, vampires, fae or some sort of wizard/witch. Although the MC's friend immediately realizes that MC is a cryptic of some sort, exactly what sort of cryptic she is is uncertain to the characters through most of the game. The plot mostly revolves around the MC trying and failing to get a clue about herself, while also getting involved to various degrees with the story of the LI you've chosen to pursue.


 

 

This game is long. It's not the longest VN I've played, but it took me about 10 hours to complete a playthrough. However, this is a deceptive number because I kept losing interest in what was going on and wandering off to browse the internet as the program was running. While there is a lot of content here by word count, it felts like not a whole lot was going on in terms of character development or plot progress.

The paths splinter early on, and once you've made your choice about which guy to pursue the rest of them basically disappear unless they figure into your selected LI's plot in some significant way. Because the story goes very slow, is very long, and each LI path is so independent that there is no skipping on replay, I didn't end up playing every path. I just picked two guys, (the perfect gentleman varsity werewolf and the thornmallow headless biker guy) and played through their stories.  The plot on both was sort of the same. The MC spends a lot of time trying and failing to figure out what she is (the game sadistically teases you by constantly mentioning changelings and then having the MC go "couldn't be me"), and the LI tries to be supportive but his particular cryptic quirks get in the way some times. Both guys also tended to spend a lot of time not liking being a cryptic, and eventually made noise about how they feel bad that the MC got caught up in all this weird shit. I don't know if some of the other LI's are more positive about their own situation, but for my two runs there seemed to be a running theme of how being a cryptic sucks. I'm more of a "fuck yeah, magic" sort of person so I could not relate.


 

The slower pacing helped me buy the romance a little more than some of the more love at first sight plots that show up in VNs, but I felt like I was enduring the tedium of high school again where nothing really is happening day after day after day. It felt like there were a dozen scenes that were the exact same thing of Danny feeling bad because he's a scary werewolf, or Nora having a fight with her brother, who hates her but refuses to say why.

The main reason the story takes so long is because of a lack of communication between everyone. A relatively straightforward situation is made convoluted by the fact people keep secrets from each other that might clear things up. The game makes Watsonian excuses for why this is so -- the fae are just like that, people are suspicious of each other, everyone's distracted with Halloween, etc, but the end result is that after many hours when the truth does come out and one character or another admits that they had a missing piece of the puzzle the whole time, all I can think is, why didn't you say so ten days ago?! Throughout the whole game your twin brother hates your guts and makes it clear he suspects you of... something, but he refuses to articulate the problem, and then if you are on a path where you tell him the truth he doesn't believe you! This was definitely a game where I wanted to knock some people, mostly the MC, upside the head.


 

This sort of chronic lack of communication is an irritation to me, and it tends to make characters feel stupid. The worldbuilding is also a little bit shaky. Cryptics are thick in the water, but all the problems in the town seem to end up being dealt with by high school students, even though many of the teachers are supposed to be cryptics. There's a bit of a YA type approach here where you just have to accept that the adults are largely absent and that kids will be kids and make terrible, thoughtless decisions. But if you're okay with those sorts of genre conventions it's not too huge a distraction. The romances themselves are not terrible. The LIs are attractive and interesting enough, although both of the paths I went through felt pretty vanilla. The game is also very het and leans on those tropes. The author clearly has a thing for size difference because there are constant reminders that the MC is short and small and the LIs tower over her. There's also genre typical chivalry door opening, the MC getting picked up and carried, girls punching boys when they're annoyed and haha that's so cute sort of stuff. I'm less irritated by this when the MC is a well formed character in her own right and not a clear placeholder for the reader, which is the case in Changeling.

Gameplay wise there are a lot of choices to be made in this game. Between 6 LIs there appear to be dozens of endings and over 100 choices. There's no visible stat tracking, and because your main path is picked at the very beginning of the game, the choices are not all about what guy you are angling for, meaning that you can focus on RPing in a sense and picking choices that you think are best rather than what will clearly manipulate the game state to the right ending. I enjoyed having the freedom of just going with what I wanted to without thinking I was going to get a bad end every time, and the choices are not always clearly "be good, or be bad." The flip side of that is it's hard to tell how your choices are affecting the game when there are so many, and the choices sometimes don't feel consequential. There are moments where you are given significant choices, such as to help someone or to run away, and if you pick the wrong one the MC will briefly consider it before doing the other thing anyway. It always annoys me when a game so bluntly puts you on rails like that, but for the most part I didn't find that I was hitting those all too often, or at the very least when the game was putting me back on rails it did so gently and without my much noticing. It's also hard to tell how one might get the alternate endings. I got what I believe is the "good end" with both guys on the first try. I found one bad end during the climax when I guessed a riddle wrong, but that was it.  It's not particularly easy to get full completion without a guide or some detective work, because outside of some instant bad endings I think you need to simply hit an inadequate number of "right" choices to miss the good end, and that is math I'm not willing to do.

 

I'm not really sure what to think about Changeling in the end. I sort of didn't have all that much fun with it, but it's also not significantly flawed outside of the tedium. I think if you want a long play where you can date guys and kind of like the supernatural but more as sprinkles on an otherwise mundane story this could actually be a game that goes down pretty well.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

Ha, I was curious to know if the plot being dragged out by a lack of communication was an issue in all the plots and signs point to yes! I had similar reactions to all the other things that bugged you too. But yeah I'm sure there's people out there who enjoy it.

[got_quiet]

Yeah, I think between the two of us we went through half the LIs and they all had the same issues. I was honestly expecting to hate the game more when I read your review but the het tropes were somehow endearing in this lol.