Have you played...? BAD END THEATER
I bought this some months ago captivated by its premise: a weird game where you decide characters’ fates as if in a theater play, with cute, 8-bit aesthetic? Sign me in! Steam reviews were also overwhelmingly positive and it was not expensive. It stayed dormant in my library until my 10-year old nephew ⤴ urged me to play it some weeks ago. I’m glad he did, because I found a small little gem.
In BAD END THEATER, we take the role of the director of a play. There are four protagonists: the hero, the maiden, the demoness overlord and one of the overlord’s underlings. You can see the story unfold from the perspective of any one of them, and, at pre-determined points, you choose what action the character will take. Each decision will lead to different interactions with the other characters and, ultimately, to a different (bad) ending. Then you can repeat the play from the point of view of the other protagonists but keeping the previous choices that the others made. This is essentially a visual novel with a small puzzle element, as the four character’s choices intertwine with each other and lead to different outcomes.
The story, or, rather, the play’s story, is barebones and cliché, but on purpose. In a fantasy Dragon Quest-esque land, there’s a demoness overlord living in a castle near a human village. The village’s hero goes out to save a maiden that was captured by the overlord. That’s it.
It’s all very cliché. However, the characters, in their internal thoughts and dialogs, question these established, arbitrary and many times nonsensical tropes. Here’s where BAD END THEATER shines: its bold, sometimes funny, and always witty writing isn’t afraid to criticize and poke fun at tropes and clichés of the fantasy and visual novel genres, and, ultimately, at the clichés and prejudices of our own society and life.
For example, what actually happens is that the overlord just wants to live in peace, away from the violent humans that kill her kin for no reason; the maiden feels empty inside because she was taught that her role was to be captured by demons and saved by the hero, so she goes to meet the overlord by her own volition; the underling just wants to chill instead of standing guard at the castle’s gates.
Each storyline is filled with dozens of cute (and sometimes unexpectedly gory) cutscenes which help bring characters and their personalities to life. They’re all really well done in a low-resolution, limited color cute manga style.
The soundtrack, also done in an 8-bit chiptune style reminiscent of the NES or Gameboy, is always pleasant and enhances the emotion of each scene. There’s heavy usage of leitmotis, adding even more personality to each character. Huge props for author NomnomNami who did all the writing, drawing and composing for this game by herself.
From a gameplay perspective, it follows the same conventions as every visual novel - you make choices and different things happen. It can be a little tedious going through the same storylines again and again to find the branch you missed. Because of that, I really appreciate how the game has a built-in story graph - it shows which choices you’ve already made and which endings are still undiscovered. That is immensely helpful and saves so much time when you’re trying to uncover all the possible endings.
And speaking of endings, it seems no matter how many different choices you make, everything always ends up badly. That’s the name of the theater, after all! But it can’t end like that… right? I won’t spoil the true ending, but it was very heart warming and well written. I could feel the influence of other very interesting games like Undertale and Doki Doki Literature Club.
If BAD END THEATER sounded interesting to you, give it a shot! It takes about only 3 hours to see everything and it’s definitely worth your time.
Details card:
- Name: BAD END THEATER
- Genre: Visual novel puzzle
- Developer: NomnomNami ⤴
- Year: 2021
- Site: https://badendtheater.carrd.co/
- Available on Steam ⤴, Itch.io ⤴, GOG ⤴, Humble Bundle ⤴ and Google Play ⤴