"Three Volts" is the third game developed by Shiying Studios, and the first two works, "Hesse-cho Chitan" and "Fireworks", have achieved "rave reviews" on Steam. Among them, "Fireworks" is praised for its moving story and localized theme. Therefore, I have played the first two masterpieces, and my expectations for "Three Volts" are quite large.
"Rave Reviews" of the previous work "Fireworks"
Layer upon layer of suspenseful plot
In terms of the volume of a demo of less than 1G, the plot of "Three Volts" has reached a considerable degree of richness. Like the previous high-quality game "Fireworks" produced by producer Moonlight Cockroach, "Three Volts" is also a work that pays great attention to plot presentation. What is different between the two works is that the previous work pays more attention to the style expression of "Chinese horror", and "Three Volts" pays more attention to the creation of suspense, and in my opinion, the creation of this sense of suspense is successful and extremely outstanding.
The story is triggered by a sensational "signal hijacking incident" in the city: when Yamashiro's TELEVISION station was broadcasting a program one day, an advertisement for "Three-Eyed Child" was suddenly inserted, and the strange thing is that this Three-Eyed Child died two years ago, and the video hall where the advertising disc was made was closed the year before.
"Three-eyed prodigy" disc peach secret
The protagonist Xu Qingyuan has a more bizarre situation when watching the "Three-Eyed Child" disc, there are only two windows in the room, and there are actually three on the screen reflection of the TV set! It turned out that this situation happened more than once, and every time the disc was played, it strangely made the reflection of an object on the scene become three, and it was also because of this problem that could not be explained by physics that Lao Shen found Xu Qingyuan, a former investigator and a current Taoist priest, to find out the truth.
There are three windows in the reflection of the TV
There are actually only two
Finding the roots and solving the puzzles is what players need to do in the game, which is also the fun of suspense story games. At the beginning of the investigation, something was wrong, Xu Qingyuan gradually approached the video hall, but the assistant sent by Shen was still missing, and he had to go alone to investigate. However, with the deepening of the investigation, there are more and more suspicious places, the video hall that collapsed the year before tomorrow, and now there are mysterious people operating, but it is a dilapidated look inside... Most unexpectedly, Xu Qingyuan found Qiu Wu, an assistant who was supposed to act with him— it was actually in the TV. At the same time, Qiu Wu also found him. Together, the two found that Qiu Wu was actually in the time and space of 1995...
What force brought him back to 1995? Who is the mysterious man who runs the video hall? At this point, the plot direction has become very confusing. After that, the design of the game is more ingenious, and players need to constantly switch perspectives between Qiu Wu in 1995 and Xu Qingyuan in 2000, so that the two characters can cooperate "across time and space" and find the mystery of the event little by little. The transformation of time and space perspective also makes the game experience very interesting, Xu Qingyuan got the chalk produced in 1995 and could write in Qiu Wu's time and space, and the "expired Dafu Coke" was sent back to 1995 and became brand new...
In this process, some interspersed plots also make the atmosphere of suspense even stronger. For example, in the process of returning the wallet, Qiu Wu saw the conductor being killed by Boss Yang in the video hall from the lost and found office, which also indirectly gave us questions and conjectures, that the dead three-eyed child was also victimized by this person?
At the end of the plot, Boss Yang behind the three-eyed child and Boss Ma of technology have surfaced, but a bigger question follows, what does Boss Yang want with all his efforts? He induces Boss Ma to touch the wall behind the screening hall, and Xu Qingyuan in 2000 also put his hand to the wall full of cracks, and finally, the wall collapsed, revealing two strange corpses with their hands together. Who are these two corpses?
At this point, the plot of the first chapter came to an abrupt end. I spent about half an hour to clear the demo of "Three Volts" in one go, and the layers of plot were very substitutionary, so that when I wrote the manuscript, I was still a little unfinished. In terms of plot, the demo version released by "Three Volts" may be even better than the previous masterpiece "Fireworks".
An expression of feelings that complement each other
Similar to "Perfect Day", which has caused a lot of discussion a few days ago, the story of "Three Volts" also happened in a very special year around 2000, the former focusing more on campus life and family, and "Three Volts" more on the streets and alleys of that era.
Small advertisements on street corners, long strips of tiles on the walls, and small triangular bunting flags fluttering in the wind, these tiny but age-sensitive details can easily pull us back to our old memories. At that time, small noodles were still one dollar and one bowl, and bean flower rice was only two pieces. I remember if I could have a dollar or two, it would have been enough to support me for two or three weeks of snacking (laughs).
A bowl of small noodles, a large rice bowl with red flowers on a yellow background
The picture style of "Three Volts" is also very suitable for that era. One exception is that the producer Moonlight Cockroach said that the strokes in TV commercials were actually not quite in line with the style of the year (this kind of strokes were more used in the 80s and 90s), but in fact, this font is still very common in small local TV stations (such as the local stations I watched when I was a child), so there is no sense of violation. This small problem actually shows on the side that "Three Volts" is still very careful about the details.
Very old font
With the development of the times, more and more old things disappear in time, the video hall is one of them, how many people's good childhood memories are in this small hall of less than a dozen square meters. But the people in the video hall in the game have lost their hearts under the tide of the times, made absurd farces such as "three-eyed children", and even embarked on the road of crime, which has to be regretted.
A good game is never just fun, just like "Fireworks" tells a story about tradition and feelings under the surface of a horror game, which is directly gripping. I think that "Three Volts" should also be able to tell a story about the times and feelings.
There are still insufficient demos
Having said that, let's talk about the problems I had when I was playing demos. First of all, it is a pity that the system of "Three Volts" has almost nothing new, whether it is the familiar game start interface, the interactive design of the dialogue in the game, or the operating system, you can see that the mold is almost the same as "Fireworks". This is obviously the producer directly took the underlying code of "Fireworks" and used it.
In fact, in game companies, this kind of "lazy" practice of low-level code reuse is not uncommon, for example, the V Society has a lighting code that has been passed down for 23 years... But the problem is that the system inherited from "Fireworks" is not excellent, "Three Volts" as a game on the PC side can not be operated with the mouse but can only use the keyboard, bringing some very awkward operation experience, such as when the game to explore clues, the mobile cursor that appears on the screen is actually controlled by the arrow keys...
To say that the producer of "Three Volts" is only one person who is very hard, too busy to pick up the previous system and use it, I can also understand the pain of not changing the code or adding mouse operation. But the game also eliminated the shift acceleration function in Fireworks, especially when we needed to walk back and forth in a long room during the puzzle solving process in the video hall, and the question of why the character could not go faster kept on my mind.
Don't understand why this was canceled
In addition to the slightly outdated system, there is also a problem that some of the level plot design in the game is oversimplified, and it is more obvious that Xu Qingyuan wants to investigate the video hall located on the 3rd floor, and the elevator button must be obtained through the fortune teller machine on the first floor. Click on the fortune telling machine, which shows a lot of permutations and combinations of surnames and first names, but these are meaningless, because no matter whether you enter "Chen Langkun" or "Zheng Yuan", it does not respond, only entering "Xu Qingyuan" has the result of fortune telling.
Losing Zheng Yuan does not trigger any plot (at least give feedback on an input error)
This makes people feel very unreal. According to the game plot, the button is open to all the audiences who come to the video hall, then naturally whether it is "Zheng Yuan" or "Xu Qingyuan" can get it, take a step back, even if the video hall knows the name of the protagonist in advance (this possibility is very small), set the name "Xu Qingyuan" as a password, then Xu Qingyuan, who has been meticulous and careful along the way, found that only his own name is available, and should be suspicious of "Why do you know my name?" Instead of seeing the fortune-telling results, He said lightly, "The calculation is quite accurate"...
So "Three Volts" is still a little imperfect in my eyes. However, for the production team called "Shiying Studio", which actually has only one employee, Moonlight Cockroach, the production level of "Three Volts" is enough to have a good evaluation, and it is also worth our expectations. I hope that "Three Volts" can go to Wu Cunjing and move on.