[quote][i]This is a spoiler free review. It's accompanied by a spoiler-free video review that can be found [b][url=https://youtu.be/5xJyDXMamU0]here[/url][/b].[/i][/quote]
[b]In summary, I don’t recommend Failure Drill, and as a numerical score I’d give it a 3/10.[/b] This visual novel has some well-made visual styling, but it lacks in copy / proofing, no sound direction, some clunky puzzle interactions, and storytelling that felt both rushed and shallow.
[h2]Introduction[/h2]
I picked up Failure Drill because the art looked interesting and I’m a sucker for psychological horrors. Found on the [i]All New Releases[/i] page.
Failure Drill is a 2D adventure game that largely plays as a visual novel. You spend most of your time reading text with only an occasional need to interact with stuff, typically for puzzle-purposes. Otherwise, it’s clicking on an element to advance the story.
In this game, you play as Claire, a young woman who gets brought into a military academy. It’s not too clear as to why, but what I’ve inferred is that it’s because she lacks empathy, I suppose. She comes from a relatively stressful environment, with familial problems in combination with her not doing well in school. She seems apprehensive about the idea, but after a loving conversation with her brother and a small speaking-to with a fabled hero, Claire decides to join the academy. For some reason we learn that Claire is both an “interesting candidate” while being absolutely terrible at basketball, while one of her classmates appears to be the next Lebron James. Their first training assignment is to watch over this outpost for any enemy stragglers, as this population is at war with [i]something[/i].
The game has a runtime of about 30 minutes if you’re a slow reader and get caught up on any one of the puzzles. I ended up completing the game twice just to try and grasp a better understanding of the story, so my playtime’s a little off.
An excellent premise, clearly one that can be built off of. Let’s talk about what I liked.
[h2]The Good[/h2]
The art, one of the two things that originally drew me in does deliver. All the scenes are well done, and there’s a scene in particular that showcases some shining light visuals on a panning camera in a game that overall does not offer any animation. For character animations, characters move by ‘teleporting’ and fading in/out instead of traditionally animated movement.
That’s about all that I could take pleasure from, so let’s talk about what I liked a little less.
[h2]The Questionable[/h2]
It didn’t take long for me to run into some grammatical / spelling errors, which for one reason or another were mostly centered around the beginning of the game. For a visual novel this is [i]kind of[/i] a tough pill to swallow since your focus is mostly on the text, second to the art that comes behind the text. It’s possible that English may not be the developer’s first language, as the shorthand for “December (DEC)” is spelled w/ an I instead of an E, which is usually found in Spanish or Italian languages.
Next up, the game was awfully devoid of sound, especially in the beginning sequences in the game. Up until Claire’s assignment, there’s very few sound effects, almost no music, and absolutely no voice acting. This felt [i]really[/i] disconnecting in a crucial time for players to try and emotionally connect or sympathize with the cast, and that opportunity was challenging without sound cues or audio pieces to use as a vehicle. Sounds and effects were more prominent later, but still much less than I would have hoped for.
To swallow another big pill, the gameplay was a bit clunky. There’s only two puzzles to solve, both involving knobs or levers in some way. Something that's pretty annoying with these two puzzles is that the mouse cursor [b]must[/b] stay on the knob or lever to turn, which, again, is a bit of a nuisance. For the levers, they could be simplified to being a clickable on/off switch, because 99% of the lever’s position is [b]off[/b] while 1% of it is [b]on[/b]. The lever puzzle (which is a temperature-related puzzle) is also really ambiguous in its goal — essentially, Claire wants water that’s not too hot, not too cold, and you have a rather large thermometer to work with. It’s mostly trial and error on what she wants, but I also forgot that the water valve needed to be turned [i]on[/i] the knob and not clicked, so I spent more time than I needed to there because I didn’t realize I wasn’t using it as intended.
Lastly, which is considered the biggest of offenders, is the storytelling. It feels [b]really[/b] rushed. If you look at the [i]About This Game[/i], the advertisement leads you to believe you’re going to wrangle with belonging, identity, and purpose. That’s kind of hard when a game only has 30 minutes of playtime, and maybe no more than 200 dialogue boxes. There were plenty of times where the scenes transitioned and there was no establishment on how much time passed at almost every point in the game, which makes it hard to connect with characters when you can’t figure out how long you’ve been by their side. There are some parts of the game where time is easier to tell, but once again the introduction is lacking in this aspect specifically.
Another thing to tack onto the previous point is the lack of worldbuilding or character development. Like I mentioned, we’re supposed to be wrangling with identity, purpose, and belonging. Well, if Claire’s the focus, there’s clearly no benefit in following up with either of the two people I mentioned in the Introduction… which, the game must believe in, because we don’t. We don’t know their fate, there are no hints, they’re never even mentioned again. The enemy or the threat at large is also a bit mysterious. They’re definitely interesting — but we’ll never really be introduced to them or their threat, so don’t worry about having to think about ‘em, so we’ll leave worldbuilding to the birds. So, with all the focus on Claire… certainly we’ll get plenty of monologues, internal strife, how she deals with emotions, compromise, conviction, or etcetera. …
… or maybe not. We’ll just give Claire some conviction with the most minimal amount of thought, wrap up the game with a very literal ending, and we as an audience will never see the impact of her actions. I can’t consider this a story-rich drama, and as far as psychological horrors go, the most applicable to that descriptor is the game’s conveyance of the heavy topics it wanted to talk about.
[h2]The End[/h2]
This game could’ve been better as an episodic web-comic because the art [i]is[/i] really nice, but fighting for space in the $6 USD range is kind of a [i]tough[/i] fight since for what you get out of it.
[quote][i]If you’re into curator groups, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41665876/]we have one of those[/url]. Did you like this written review? Check out the spoiler-free video review for visual and audio compliments to the review:[/i][/quote] https://youtu.be/5xJyDXMamU0
