Contact Review

The stats screen.

Indeed it's so clever you'll probably need to look up words like 'intertextual', 'postmodern' and 'semiotics' over on Wikipedia just to understand how clever it is. Even if you don't, you'll surely get the reference to the Genji meme when you're told to hit a boss's weak point for massive damage, and surely you'll spot the sly digs at the Microsoft Windows autoupdate feature. Heck, there's even a whole island of electronic games and the nerds who play them called Habara (almost Akihabara, see?). There's not been a game this entertainingly knowing since Bangai-O, which is almost what you'd expect a game developed by the same whacked out developer as Killer 7.

"Oh, but what's the game about, and is it any good?" I hear you ask (there goes that fourth wall again). Well there's the rub. Because in many ways it's actually pretty disappointing. You play as, well, you, and your job is to help The Professor and his space dog Mochi recover some missing power cells by directing his assistant, a young boy named Terry. During the game The Professor stays on board his space ship, depicted on the top screen in a beautifully pared down isometric style. Meanwhile, Terry engages in typical action RPG behaviour down on the bottom screen, rendered in a more conventional, realistic style. And over the course of the game it becomes increasingly clear that The Professor's got a secret he's not sharing.

One early location in the game grants you access to a chef suit.

There's a whole load of neat mechanics in the game. Terry can discover different costumes that grant him various abilities, like lockpicking, fishing, or cooking, and he can pick up various different types of weapon. His 30 different statistics level up continuously, simply through use, the same way as in the Elder Scrolls series. And there are interesting concepts, like the fact that it takes time for Terry to digest food and healing items, or the way you can play around with Mochi while the game is saving, to make him more powerful when he occasionally helps out Terry during battle. And there are other power-ups called decals, which you peel off, Panini-like, using the stylus, before sticking them on Terry or his enemies to produce various effects, from transforming enemies into cows to granting Terry a stat bonus.

But the mainstay of the game is simple combat and exploration. And that's where it falls down. Combat is totally basic: you just hit a button to enter a combat stance and wait for Terry and his enemy to trade blows. Exploration is just frustrating: wander through dungeons, fight a few enemies, find a boss, discover he's too hard to handle, backtrack, grind out battles against enemies to power up stats and obtain umpteen healing items, backtrack, beat the boss, find the cell, and start the process again. Or backtrack some more.