I’m sure you found your way to this game on www.backloggd.com, just like I did, due to LordDarias’s review. Of course you did, it’s the only other one on here so far. After reading it for myself it became irresistible for me to try out, but a cursory look at the switch store indicated that this game was $20. Fortunate for me, I have a very large and wrinkly brain, so rather than pony up that Andrew Jackson I found a YouTube playthrough charging a significantly less amount (not, of course, to suggest that Darias’s brain is small or smooth. He showed it to me once, it was wonderful). His main complaint, having purchased and played Ou for himself, was that the gameplay was repetitive and the requirement to play the game more than once for a proper ending tedious. That was never my problem, having watched a stream instead, but what if I told you that in spite of that even I did not enjoy the game?
Let’s get the good stuff out of the way, it looks and sounds great. There is a nice “scary children’s book” aesthetic and you could do a lot worse than minimize the window of a let’s play video and just listen to the nice guitar music. It’s good!
Unfortunately, there is not just that aesthetic and music in Ou, there is also writing to be had, and it mostly sucks. A lot of it has very little to do with the story and is instead one of my pet peeves: statements of fake profundity, “kinda makes you think” writing. One of the first things you see in the game is an old tree, and the Virgil-figure opossum who leads you through the magical world says something like “you want to know what the tree is like, but did you ever consider if the tree wants to know about you?” Every other line is like that. “Snow can melt, and then it leads to tears.” “How do you bring someone and something together? With a bridge, of course, that’s what they’re for.” I’m reminded of the movie Nymphomaniac, where after the main character goes into detail of her depraved life of sexuality and violence the old man she’s with says precious shit to her like “do you ever think about which hand you trim the nails first?” “Have you ever eaten a rugelach with a fork?” At best, it shows an author not sure you’re going to get the profundity they’re going for without them telling you, and it worst, it’s often just not done in the middle.
For example, one of the major motifs is pools of water. You gotta jump into water to get to the next level. It doesn’t need to be explained, or there could be a cool in-game lore reason for it. But instead, the possum turns to you and says “did you ever wonder why it works that way? Jumping into water is the perfect transition to the next scene. Think about it, you jump in, next scene. Happens all the time.” And I’m like… it does? The possum has a tail that lights on fire, and he loses the fire every time he jumps in, only for it to dry off a few moments later. Okay, but why? There’s no gameplay incident where you need his tail on fire, despite a few dark levels where he tells you he needs it even though the environment is clearly visible to the player. Something is presented as symbolically important, then dropped, and I get frustrated that I care more about it than the game ever does.
Which brings me to my favorite example, and one that directly pertains to the repeat walkthroughs. Your character is barefoot to start, and when you complete a playthrough, you win a shoe. When you receive two shoes, it’s time for the game to end. So it’s not “try again, dummy,” it’s “now you know you got something to do, get to it,” and there is a difference (on a side note, one of my favorite games I played last year was Astro Boy: Omega Factor, which has a similar repeat-playthrough mechanism that works very well, so I’m not automatically opposed to it). It might have been smart on the game's part to have OU wearing each shoe he finds as the game progresses, a little visual reminder of your own progress, becoming fully shod of course by the end. Except he never does. So what does being barefoot mean symbologically, and what does having shoes mean, symbolistically speaking? The game doesn’t care to answer those questions. Well, it sort of does, except it’s very stupid. Being barefoot, I guess, means the character has to stay in the magic world cause he has shit to do, and the shoes means he’s ready to walk away. But does he put them on? No, because… ah, because the shoes are actually books.
And I quote: “Did you notice? There’s a spot on the shelf big enough to fit two books. And you have a pair of shoes with you. Do you know what that means, OU? Shoes are a tool to go back to the place you call home. And those shoes want to go back to the bookshelf.”
…
W…what?
What on earth are you talking about? On what planet do shoes go on the bookshelf? And then the shoes turn into books on the shelf, which turn into puddles of water to jump in to reach the last world to get your ending info dump. So many story beats and potential symbols are like this, just either not used well or straight up incoherent, so many strange conclusions that just do not follow from underdeveloped premises.
And guess what? The ending is a letdown too. As far as I can understand it, because to be very honest I’m still not sure I do: someone somewhere is reading a story about a boy who is mourning their sister, and the magic world is some anonymous reader’s impression of that story, and OU is, I think, that reader’s self-insert as him imagining himself as that protagonist, who is yet interacting in the world and reincarnating in it due to a desire to be independent of the world and having a story of their own. Kind of neat, I guess. I just wish the narrative reflected that in any way at all! OU is a silent protagonist, he has nothing to say, nothing to fight for, there is nothing to him. Except for one, maybe two moments (when possum accidentally calls him stupid and he does that like aw-shucks toe-pivot with hands-behind-back motion, and an admittedly very cute hug between OU and possum), he is a blank cipher meant to be given exposition to by possum. It was three hours long, my guys, how about one or two more to spare so you can maybe put in, you know, dialogue? Something that makes me give a shit about this kid? Honestly, the after-credits montage that reveals the erm, “real story,” of the boy and his sick sister, has more emotional teeth than anything in the three hour game that just passed by.
I’ve seen writing like this a million times back in college and I know exactly what it is: someone who wants to major in animation and create superficially pretty and quirky artwork so they can get an internship with Pixar. Someone who likes the idea of telling a story, and has admittedly interesting building blocks to do so, but never bothered to learn how. That the story is coherent, let alone deep or moving, is an afterthought. It’s infinitely more frustrating to experience something like this, something that could be great but the creator couldn’t be bothered to try, rather than something that just sucks outright. Well, I guess that’s one of the advantages of independent game developers, there’s no one to tell you eh, maybe you wanna workshop that a little bit more.
And this was $20 on the switch store!
Let’s get the good stuff out of the way, it looks and sounds great. There is a nice “scary children’s book” aesthetic and you could do a lot worse than minimize the window of a let’s play video and just listen to the nice guitar music. It’s good!
Unfortunately, there is not just that aesthetic and music in Ou, there is also writing to be had, and it mostly sucks. A lot of it has very little to do with the story and is instead one of my pet peeves: statements of fake profundity, “kinda makes you think” writing. One of the first things you see in the game is an old tree, and the Virgil-figure opossum who leads you through the magical world says something like “you want to know what the tree is like, but did you ever consider if the tree wants to know about you?” Every other line is like that. “Snow can melt, and then it leads to tears.” “How do you bring someone and something together? With a bridge, of course, that’s what they’re for.” I’m reminded of the movie Nymphomaniac, where after the main character goes into detail of her depraved life of sexuality and violence the old man she’s with says precious shit to her like “do you ever think about which hand you trim the nails first?” “Have you ever eaten a rugelach with a fork?” At best, it shows an author not sure you’re going to get the profundity they’re going for without them telling you, and it worst, it’s often just not done in the middle.
For example, one of the major motifs is pools of water. You gotta jump into water to get to the next level. It doesn’t need to be explained, or there could be a cool in-game lore reason for it. But instead, the possum turns to you and says “did you ever wonder why it works that way? Jumping into water is the perfect transition to the next scene. Think about it, you jump in, next scene. Happens all the time.” And I’m like… it does? The possum has a tail that lights on fire, and he loses the fire every time he jumps in, only for it to dry off a few moments later. Okay, but why? There’s no gameplay incident where you need his tail on fire, despite a few dark levels where he tells you he needs it even though the environment is clearly visible to the player. Something is presented as symbolically important, then dropped, and I get frustrated that I care more about it than the game ever does.
Which brings me to my favorite example, and one that directly pertains to the repeat walkthroughs. Your character is barefoot to start, and when you complete a playthrough, you win a shoe. When you receive two shoes, it’s time for the game to end. So it’s not “try again, dummy,” it’s “now you know you got something to do, get to it,” and there is a difference (on a side note, one of my favorite games I played last year was Astro Boy: Omega Factor, which has a similar repeat-playthrough mechanism that works very well, so I’m not automatically opposed to it). It might have been smart on the game's part to have OU wearing each shoe he finds as the game progresses, a little visual reminder of your own progress, becoming fully shod of course by the end. Except he never does. So what does being barefoot mean symbologically, and what does having shoes mean, symbolistically speaking? The game doesn’t care to answer those questions. Well, it sort of does, except it’s very stupid. Being barefoot, I guess, means the character has to stay in the magic world cause he has shit to do, and the shoes means he’s ready to walk away. But does he put them on? No, because… ah, because the shoes are actually books.
And I quote: “Did you notice? There’s a spot on the shelf big enough to fit two books. And you have a pair of shoes with you. Do you know what that means, OU? Shoes are a tool to go back to the place you call home. And those shoes want to go back to the bookshelf.”
…
W…what?
What on earth are you talking about? On what planet do shoes go on the bookshelf? And then the shoes turn into books on the shelf, which turn into puddles of water to jump in to reach the last world to get your ending info dump. So many story beats and potential symbols are like this, just either not used well or straight up incoherent, so many strange conclusions that just do not follow from underdeveloped premises.
And guess what? The ending is a letdown too. As far as I can understand it, because to be very honest I’m still not sure I do: someone somewhere is reading a story about a boy who is mourning their sister, and the magic world is some anonymous reader’s impression of that story, and OU is, I think, that reader’s self-insert as him imagining himself as that protagonist, who is yet interacting in the world and reincarnating in it due to a desire to be independent of the world and having a story of their own. Kind of neat, I guess. I just wish the narrative reflected that in any way at all! OU is a silent protagonist, he has nothing to say, nothing to fight for, there is nothing to him. Except for one, maybe two moments (when possum accidentally calls him stupid and he does that like aw-shucks toe-pivot with hands-behind-back motion, and an admittedly very cute hug between OU and possum), he is a blank cipher meant to be given exposition to by possum. It was three hours long, my guys, how about one or two more to spare so you can maybe put in, you know, dialogue? Something that makes me give a shit about this kid? Honestly, the after-credits montage that reveals the erm, “real story,” of the boy and his sick sister, has more emotional teeth than anything in the three hour game that just passed by.
I’ve seen writing like this a million times back in college and I know exactly what it is: someone who wants to major in animation and create superficially pretty and quirky artwork so they can get an internship with Pixar. Someone who likes the idea of telling a story, and has admittedly interesting building blocks to do so, but never bothered to learn how. That the story is coherent, let alone deep or moving, is an afterthought. It’s infinitely more frustrating to experience something like this, something that could be great but the creator couldn’t be bothered to try, rather than something that just sucks outright. Well, I guess that’s one of the advantages of independent game developers, there’s no one to tell you eh, maybe you wanna workshop that a little bit more.
And this was $20 on the switch store!