Based on the real life suicide game, Blue Whale is a weird horror game that I don't know how to fully cover.
Story:
You play as Midori, a 12 year old girl. One day when returning home, she sits down next to her computer and opens up her social media, as she receives a message from the Blue Whale game, she is plunged deep into the game and you have one chance to save her.
As I said before, the game is heavily inspired by the real life Blue Whale game, where in some instances people did actually commit suicide afterwards. It's a sensitive topic to cover, but my morbid curiosity got really interested in checking it out and I'll say right now the plot in the game is really bland. The story is very hard to follow considering a lot of the times the translation is very poor. The notes you read seem to be written in a way to set up a very bleak tone and it works, cause the game is very depressing from start to finish, but it's all very cliche to say the least.
Graphics:
The art style is really decent, however I do have some minor gripes with it. Midori is a very cartoony looking character, she is very small and sort of resembles a character sprite out of a JRPG, but once you're plunged into the dark world, you run into other humans that look much more like real humans. I guess it's to set up a very surreal tone which works, cause even the environments seem to wildly different from one another.
You can enter a house and see a giant eye looking at you instead of walls and not to mention how many locations you visit, like shopping districts, beaches, bridge crossings and other stuff. It's a very moody looking game and I did really like most of it.
Audio:
For the most part, the audio is decent enough. Every little audio cue does play up the atmosphere and when you're going down dark alleyways and start hearing rumbling and wind howling it is pretty creepy. However most sound effects are very likely to be royalty free cause I've heard them before, in some other horror games. They are used effectively so I won't nag on it too much.
Gameplay:
Blue Whale is more or less an adventure game where you explore your environments and solving very light puzzles, however as soon as the game begins, you're left on your own devices on figuring out how to actually do anything. Your main goal is to save Midori and you mainly do this doing moral choices, which are actually really cryptic in a way.
When you die you are sent back to the start of the game and have to play from the start, as there's no checkpoints or a save system. This is one of the biggest negatives of the game, at least for me. It's not that bad since the game is bite size a single playthrough takes roughly 30 minutes, but it's still really annoying when you die because of something you didn't know can kill you and forced to start from the beginning.
The puzzles themselves mostly consist of trying to get to certain locations, which is both simple and fairly complex and tend to be really annoying to figure out, not to mention most of these endings are just really not that good and not worth playing the game multiple times.
Verdict:
Blue Whale is a really mediocre horror game. It has some decent scares and a really nice atmosphere, but everything else is just bland. The story is really hard to follow and just boring and the gameplay is just walking around trying to figure stuff out that is not made clear to the player. For some it might be worth checking out on a heavy discount, but other than that, just skip it.
Final Rating:
5/10
Pros:
+ Great atmosphere
+ Some decent scares
Cons:
- Story is not great
- Some endings are way too cryptic
- Gameplay is really boring
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