The New Classics #47: Marchen Forest – Mylne and the Forest Gift

 

The Backstory: Marchen Forest is a port of a phone game, and the last one of that batch of Asian games I snatched from Play-Asia. Internet wisdom describes it as an adventure game mixing alchemy and roguelite-ish dungeon crawling, a mix that sounded pretty nifty to me. Surely nothing could go wrong with such a sound gameplay premise, right? 

 

 

The Game: A lot of thing actually went wrong — and very quickly at that. First, MF is slow as all heck, and not just when it comes to loading times: everything drags on, from the transitions between scenes to the scenes themselves — to the point where I thought the game had glitched and frozen a couple of times.

 

 

As annoying as it is, that slowness pales in comparison with MF’s utter and unmissable weirdness. What exactly is weird in that game, you may ask? Well, everything. The camera angles are completely bonkers and switch constantly, going from side views to aerial ones with no rhyme or reason. The gameplay logic is outlandish: you’re sent on a mission to collect ingredients in the great outdoors — only to be stopped by an NPC blocking the way out of your garden, and forced to collect stuff in said garden. Why not simply instruct me to, well, collect stuff in the garden, instead of using a random roadblock? Later, you have to get rid of that obstructing NPC by feeding it a donut you find lying in that same garden: no challenge, no fun, just fake longevity at its best.  

 

 

And since I’m mentioning NPCs, the whole crew of characters looks and feels queer as well. Mylne herself could be cute if not for her puke-green hair — yet she’s honestly the best-looking of the bunch. Everybody else looks disturbing, from Mylne’s eyeless grandfather to that useless penguin delivering tutorials at random. Maybe it’s just a matter of taste, and maybe that posse feels like the pinnacle of character design to some eyes; but my own retinas just cannot bear the sight of them any longer. 

 

 

The Verdict: I very seldom dislike a game; but I genuinely dislike Marchen Forest. It’s supposed to get better during late stages, as dungeon crawling kicks in; however, I cannot wait, nor play, until it happen. I’d rather play something that lets me roam dungeons right away — and makes me feel good while we’re at it.