Platonica Space

Looking at my old posts, it’s been over a year since I played GIRLS MADE PUDDING, and I finally got around to playing the developers newest game, PLATONICA SPACE! If you’re asking why I put it in all caps, that’s just how it is in my Steam Library.

Now this was a game that I had been looking forward to since I enjoyed the developer’s other two games. The premise seemed interesting, and the gameplay seemed… like gameplay alright. It in fact reminded me of Blue Prince, and while I wasn’t the biggest fan of Blue Prince (not the style of puzzles I typically enjoy but I respect the game and think it’s a very cool concept), I thought maybe a simpler version of it would be something up my alley.

Unfortunately, this game had quite a few issues from a gameplay perspective. It’s kind of what I expected since its not like the other two games were exactly amazing gameplay wise either. But in the case of Moonless Moon, there wasn’t really “gameplay”, and in GIRLS MADE PUDDING, I think the gameplay mechanics while jank, the driving around added a lot to the story in its own way.

In PLATONICA SPACE, I can see the elements that they were trying to go for. Exploring a maze of rooms with disconnected memories, it definitely adds to the feeling of disorientation and aimless wandering. However, there were two major issues I had with it.

First, the vigor/room system I felt wasn’t exactly… tuned correctly. There was a stamina system similar to Blue Prince where if you ran out, you “reset”. Which didn’t matter too too much, outside a few situations where you were expected to be on a specific “floor” (successful memory playback iterations). This I’m a bit iffy on, but what I really didn’t like was how many actions costed vigor. Picking up an item, playing a memory, “interactions” with the rooms, opening doors (which also sometimes costed a significant amount of vigor). Now to “balance” this, your vigor would reset/you would advance when you played three memories, which is where my issues really began. Three memories and then being kicked out of the exploration got rather… annoying especially near the end of the game when I was trying to get all the memory fragments. But during the main story, it wasn’t enough of a factor where it felt like the system added any value other than serve as a “oh I have to remember to spend my vigor to get the memories”.

And the problem with that spending especially when it came to play back memories is that at the bare minimum you would have to spend 2 vigor to play a memory. One to pick up the item, another to actually try the memory. If you got it wrong, you would need to spend another 2, one to pick up another item, one to play the memory again. I think that was a bit harsh, and even if it wasn’t necessarily an issue in me finishing the game, it still was annoying to have to track/be mindful of it.

The other issue I had was the figment system, which felt very randomly tacked on. You would get these bonuses from watching memories, but sometimes the bonuses were useless or didn’t help at all. A good example of this is one where it would reveal the item you would need to play the memory in the room. That sounds great! Except if it was used on a room where there was no memory, it didn’t do anything. And you can’t control what room the bonus is applied to. There were also a lot that felt like they didn’t really do anything useful, keys rarely ever came up for me, and having inventory space was… honestly not that important in the grand scheme of things.

I think like GIRLS MADE PUDDING they tried to make sure that you wouldn’t ever get too too unlucky with items/rooms, which was nice, but yeah it also made having a large inventory rather pointless for me.

Anyways, its not like I played this game for the gameplay anyways. Like I mentioned before, I do think there’s a bit of a cool aspect of roaming around these disjointed rooms with memories that add to the atmosphere, I just think there could’ve been a biiiit more fine tuning.

As for the writing itself, overall I liked it. Obligatory mandatory yada yada spoilers ahead.

The writing style definitely matches what I remembered from their other two games. There’s a lot of disjointed memories that get pieced together through the course of the game, gradually revealing more and more information about both the characters and the setting. I think this was done mostly well, with again the primary issue being more on the gameplay side.

Setting wise I think it’s an interesting idea to set a story so far in the future with humanity split across the stars, but not in a way like other sci-fi where communication/travel is easy. Instead humanity is very fractured and it’s a very integral part of the game’s themes and story.

A lot of the memories explore these very different individuals who come from very different backgrounds and how they end up on the ship with their own traumas and baggage. Whether it’s Zoe who abandoned her family and grew up in a horrible environment, Walter who was a spy that got an innocent child killed, Katrina who let a war break out and her lover presumably died, or Elara who quite literally made Earth uninhabitable, they all come from different walks of life.

A big central theme in the game and part of Elara’s motivation is how humanity when fractured cannot come unite so easily. It’s a byproduct of both the time it takes to travel to other planets, but also the fact that after leaving, why would you come back? Instead of being confined to a planet where you either disagree with the people there or some other problem has arised, you can just… leave! Leave to an entirely new planet with COOL people and COOL ideas!

Of course though, this isn’t without its share of problems. A prime example is Zoe’s planet, where their ideologies created a planet that is hostile towards the people living there. But for the people who grow up there, they don’t know that there’s anything different (until someone else comes along). After all, how could they? Humanity is so spread apart.

Yet part of the more heartwarming message of the story is that these five individuals, despite being from completely different backgrounds and by all means unable to completely understand each other’s situation since they lived such different lives, they’re still able to come together. While there’s hiccups between the five of them, they ultimately (mostly) end up having faith in each other.

I think it’s a nice way to look at how human connections can be formed. There’s so many people in the world that walk different walks in life, but it shouldn’t stop us from being able to talk to each other, even if we may not necessarily understand each other. Of course, this is a nice optimistic view, and yes this is based on the assumption there is a willingness to try and not try to hate/kill the other party as extremists may opt to do.

There are some parts of the story that I didn’t agree with, but in some ways that’s part of the game itself! I may not agree with the messages presented, but I can still interact with the game.

Now as for the individual characters and backstory, I ended up liking Walter the most and this is a definite personal bias, I liked his story with Chesca even if it ended tragically. Overall I thought the character writing was pretty strong, outside the main character Liam at least. Though that is also partially deliberate.

Some critiques I have writing wise also tie in gameplay wise. The biggest one I have to offer is that while I like the way memories are supposed to be “random” with some checkpoints that you have to read certain memories before continuing, there were certain instances that I felt like that didn’t happen with. For example, near the end of the game when Elara gives the helmet to Liam, I don’t think I ended up using the helmet before I finished the game and there’s a convo about how Elara explains she knew that helmet would be what “gave her away” though that could’ve been done in other ways.

There’s also the “mystery” of having the sixth person. I think this mystery element could’ve been done better IF the memories were more properly interspersed. One problem I had was the reveal that Liam’s memories were faked was actually revealed/leaked earlier than it was in the main story, because I had found the memory fragment beforehand. I think delaying that memory fragment more and interspersing more of either Liam’s real memories (without the ones that gave away his memory was faked) would’ve added to that suspense more.

It was also generally very easy to determine whose memory was whose, and while I don’t think the game tries to make it out like a big deal, it was rather frustrating near the end to not be able to identify memories without actively seeking one of the characters out and talking to them about memories, and only being able to identify one memory at a time

One other slight disappointment I wanted to bring up with the game is that I felt the OST was weaker than the other two games. The atmospheric songs were nice even though I did prefer the other games, but one aspect I wasn’t a fan of was it felt like the vocal song played too early and too frequently. I wish it played at more opportune moments, maybe between episodes with some sort of cutscene/video. Otherwise it kinda felt like it lose its impact to me. The ending song/music video I thought was pretty nice though.

Well, I ended up rambling for longer than I expected. I felt like there was probably more I could talk about but not in a way that would make sense even to me lol. This long post was all to say that while I liked the game, I liked their other two games more. I respect the more ambitious themes, and find it amusing that a lot of their games carry central themes revolving around humanity and the connections we make.

oh, one last thing actually. I never managed to open the door that said it couldn’t be opened. I got every memory fragment, identified them all, and was still unable to do so! If you’re reading this and you know how, let me know how!