MetaWare High School (demo)

[got_quiet]

Name: MetaWare High School
Status: Complete (yes really)
Site: https://not-fun-games.itch.io/metaware-high-school
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Description: It's meta, it's in a highschool, but it's about a demo.



As the title suggests, this is another game that demolishes the fourth wall and then sets the wall on fire once it's been ground to dust. In the first scene three of the characters notice you, the player, have arrived, and welcome you with excitement. They were waiting for you to show up, you see so they can show you the demo. There are five of them, looking kind of like complete characters except they have no eyes. I'm not a fan of the no eyes thing, but it actually figures into the plot.

 

Very quickly you realize that the characters are all very concerned with what it means for the Player to have arrived. Some are a more concerned about it than others.

The game draws heavily from a lot of the meta elements of stuff like Undertale and I'm told Doki Doki Literature Club, though I haven't played that. It calls itself a demo in the title, and it appears that there was a larger project in the works at some point, but this is actually a fully realized game, where the game being a demo is just a conceit as part of the plot, and some characters are eager to move quickly because they don't think they have much time, or other characters have angst about being incomplete. A single run is pretty short, maybe 10 to fifteen minutes, but there are ten unique endings, and some variations in a number of routes, so that it took me about 2 and a half hours to complete, including the final "true" end.

The game will give you some hints about how to get to paths you've missed after you've gone a certain distance. And there are a couple of Easter eggs, including one sitting in the game files that has no effect on the game if you find it or not but adds to the story a little. The writing is good and the characters are snappy and interesting, there's a lot of humor, and there is a ton of choice, so finding all the routes was fun, even though you kind of have to be a jerk once or twice to get full completion.


 

My biggest gripe is with the narrative, which sort of kinda maybe leans into existential horror because the characters are concerned with "dying" every time a route is complete or being deleted by the player once the game is over. I think this may have been a more interesting concept when it was novel, and maybe if it was used more sparingly. The problem was that the game reminds you constantly that these characters are just hard coded scripts with some minor branching. Like it literally has them say this to you. It tries to cultivate compassion for their inevitable demise (and the game erases your save files on initiating the final "true" route just to hammer the point home) but since it's constantly putting into my head that this is just a script I was like... well you're not real... soo... To make matters worse each round starts with some sort of philosophical quote about being and existence and feeling alive and all that, from such minds as David Foster Wallace etc. And the final route goes for an eerie horror vibe, but I wasn't really feeling it, and got annoyed cause it's tedious and took very long to complete even though very little happens.

Mechanically the choice branching is pretty good. Even though the routes are short there is a lot of interaction and outside of the dragging final route things are brisk. The biggest issue is that the game makes ample use of forced pauses, which are way too long. Like it makes you wait what feels like 20 seconds before going to the next text, and at times I couldn't tell if the game was frozen or I just had to wait longer. This trained me to just sit there staring at an unchanging screen, so at the end of certain paths where there is no indication that the path is over and you're stuck at a black screen.... I just sat there and waited for the fucking game to move on for minutes, alt tabed and then came back to see if I could progress, alt tabed again, and finally gave up and restarted because it looked like I had actually reached the end (and I had). Besides that technically everything works well, and there are even parts of the game that point directly to the more demo-like nature of the play in a tongue-in-cheek manner, with unfinished joke art or sprite manipulation.

 

I'm not a huge fan of games that are almost nothing but a wink wink meta deconstruction. I play mostly for escapism so a game that insists on telling you you are playing a game over and over is an annoyance more than anything. However, if you're going to take pure distilled meta narrative and try to make it entertaining, this does as good a job of it as I've found.