Reviews of Smile For Me

Smile For Me

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radradradish

Completed

Windows PC

Smile For Me is a first-person 3D adventure game where you play as an unnamed florist visiting The Habitat, a weird group home with the mission statement of making you Happy again. However, the owner, a dentist named Dr. Habit, has done a remarkably poor job at actually helping the residents so far, so it falls to you to explore the Habitat, interact with its myriad residents, solve puzzles, and one-by-one, make all the residents smile again.

First off: I’m really into this game’s artstyle. It blends together a bunch of different things: a 3D environment, 2D sprites, analog stock footage cutscenes, and even utilizing Jim Henson-esque puppets, and yet it all feels like a consistent whole — with no area in particular bringing the rest down. And as for what does feel simple as far as gameplay loops go, I think it’s fun! I like how most of the traditional item-collecting and puzzle solving is mostly focused on interacting with the people around you — doing things for them, helping with their problems, which results in them providing you with items or giving you access to new areas as a reward for helping them out. It’s… not something I haven’t seen before in a more modern adventure game, but it’s a nice twist on the traditional formula (where often most of your puzzles/interaction dealt with the environment rather than the people in it) and a nice way of placing focus on what matters most here: the characters and the writing.

You meet a total of 20-25 people during your visit to the Habitat, all distinct and fun in their own unique way, and part of what I enjoyed most was finding out which weird and kooky character I’d meet next, or find out just what happened if I did something or showed them a particular item. Particular favourites, off the top of my head, were the guy who desperately wanted to smell like pickles (and whose puzzle you solve by just smashing him over the head with the jar of pickles he gives you) and the child who up and asked me to punch twenty people. The cast as a whole are fairly strong, and I like the way they’re balanced and kept relevant throughout the whole game — a lot of the earlier people you meet, for example, either can’t be made happy until later in the game, or are in some way involved in somebody else’s quest. There’s a couple people who are less memorable, and there’s a non-zero amount of them who slip through the cracks, but given that it’s a cast of 20+ people I’d still like to say that’s pretty impressive.

I’m also into what this game is doing under the surface with its writing. There’s a notable undercurrent of horror bubbling throughout, and the game does well at handling the balance without going too over the top with it. While there are hints from the beginning that not everything is as it seems, from all the little messages and videos that appear when you dream and just how suddenly foreboding it gets when night starts falling, the game never falls further into that territory until the final act, keeping a sign of what’s to come while never feeling like, say, a creepypasta game, or something that’s explicitly meant to be horror. I’m also interested in some of the stuff it has to say about happiness, and how that gets communicated through gameplay: how there’s no one way every single person can be made ‘happy’, how oftentimes you need to get to know a person before you can get to the heart of what they want, and how sometimes happiness can be fickle — making certain people happy via causing distress to others. It’s subtle, and you have to intuit it through playing the game, but it’s a cool thing to think about, and a neat example of communicating thematic messages through gameplay.

There are… a good amount of double-edged swords in this game, though. While it’s certainly cool to access more parts of the Habitat as you progress through the game — as a reward for and reminder of your progress — I do feel there’s a little bit of a problem with scope, with you receiving items and having no idea what to do with them because there’s so many items and so many places to use them and it’s tricky to figure out the one place you’re meant to use it. There’s a weird, fun logic to puzzles that can make the player feel clever for getting on the game’s wavelength, but it can just as easily kinda leave the player with no clue on what to do or what to interact with — something compounded with the above issue of scope. in addition, the game kinda felt… clunky, at points? Accessing the inventory and using items never felt particularly comfortable, especially as it started to grow and grow, and even by the end of the game I’d often just hold an item in my hands rather than use it like I wanted to. Sometimes I’d do things the game prompted me to do and it just wouldn’t register. In general items and puzzles felt a little finicky to play around, and oftentimes I'd just kind of stumble around without really knowing what it was I could do, and that was something… I pretty consistently felt, throughout the whole game.

But aside from those issues, I had fun with this! I don’t think it particularly breaks the mold of like, adventure games like this, nor do I think this as something I truly haven’t seen before, but I liked it! It’s a short-ish, cute game with some really good art and some pretty good writing and I’d say it’s totally worth your time to check it out yourself. 7/10.