It goes a little like this: you and your sister are hanging out in the 3 FPS Meadow and see a mysterious butterfly. Your sister wants to take chase and see where it leads you, but you're a bit of a weenie and protest the idea, saying you'll get in trouble and besides, that's awfully close to where grandma said ghosts turn people into butterflies. Even more excited by the thought, she follows the butterfly anyway and lo and behold gets sucked into the titular Mansion. And so into the mansion you must go in hope of saving her humanity.
Inside the mansion you find its inhabitants—butterflies with unconvincing accents and the rooms that represent the interests they had as humans. In the game's best moment, a butterfly tells the player how in her days as a musician she longed to shed herself of her human body. Now, as a butterfly, she just wishes she were able to play the piano again, to be able to do the things that filled her soul. It brings to mind the scene in Wings of Desire where Peter Falk explains to the main character, an angel contemplating giving up his high standing for a permanent return to the corporeal world, his decision to do this very same thing. Being unable to interact with and therefore truly experience the world is an unfulfilling way to exist (to crudely paraphrase one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema). But here in Mansion of Hidden Souls, the words are spoken from someone for whom it's too late. She already made her decision, perhaps hastily in a time of pain, and now she's left in eternal regret of the things she can never experience again. It's a beautiful scene despite the voice actor doing maybe the most insane attempt at a Southern accent I've ever heard.
Unfortunately, that's the first and last time the game succeeds in doing anything emotionally resonant whatsoever. There are other butterflies we meet: an Australian butterfly specimen collector repulsed by the human form but who we never learn enough about to be interesting; an artist who we know is an artist on account of his room having a couple easels in it; a lady whose entire thing is that she's kind of mean and hangs out in bars; and finally a girl who, like, I don't know, is just kinda there.
It's this hasty characterization that makes Mansion of Hidden Souls a mere sliver of its potential. I want to poke around into the lives and minds of complex individuals and find out what made them get entangled in—if not outright seek out—the loss of their human form. What insecurities and sadnesses and ennuis and stubbornnesses brought them here? What brings so many people into wishing they were no longer human? Is there, maybe, a richness to Experiencing and Feeling we often overlook in our misery, like the butterfly who just wishes she could play music again?
Sadly, Mansion of Hidden Souls is largely uninterested in those questions: after all we have a sister to save and only one disc in which to do it.
Inside the mansion you find its inhabitants—butterflies with unconvincing accents and the rooms that represent the interests they had as humans. In the game's best moment, a butterfly tells the player how in her days as a musician she longed to shed herself of her human body. Now, as a butterfly, she just wishes she were able to play the piano again, to be able to do the things that filled her soul. It brings to mind the scene in Wings of Desire where Peter Falk explains to the main character, an angel contemplating giving up his high standing for a permanent return to the corporeal world, his decision to do this very same thing. Being unable to interact with and therefore truly experience the world is an unfulfilling way to exist (to crudely paraphrase one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema). But here in Mansion of Hidden Souls, the words are spoken from someone for whom it's too late. She already made her decision, perhaps hastily in a time of pain, and now she's left in eternal regret of the things she can never experience again. It's a beautiful scene despite the voice actor doing maybe the most insane attempt at a Southern accent I've ever heard.
Unfortunately, that's the first and last time the game succeeds in doing anything emotionally resonant whatsoever. There are other butterflies we meet: an Australian butterfly specimen collector repulsed by the human form but who we never learn enough about to be interesting; an artist who we know is an artist on account of his room having a couple easels in it; a lady whose entire thing is that she's kind of mean and hangs out in bars; and finally a girl who, like, I don't know, is just kinda there.
It's this hasty characterization that makes Mansion of Hidden Souls a mere sliver of its potential. I want to poke around into the lives and minds of complex individuals and find out what made them get entangled in—if not outright seek out—the loss of their human form. What insecurities and sadnesses and ennuis and stubbornnesses brought them here? What brings so many people into wishing they were no longer human? Is there, maybe, a richness to Experiencing and Feeling we often overlook in our misery, like the butterfly who just wishes she could play music again?
Sadly, Mansion of Hidden Souls is largely uninterested in those questions: after all we have a sister to save and only one disc in which to do it.