LISA: The Painful

Wow. It's hard to stay spoiler-free, but I'll try. This was such a rollercoaster. I'm disturbed, coming from a power trip, laughing about stupid jokes. Lisa The Painful Definitive Edition doesn't take itself serious, but then it switches to very serious, and back, and fourth, but at it's core it's an emotional story. Bradley, a kid, raised by his dad who always drank. There was no love, no hugs. He stands tall for his friends, but was never strong enough to really matter. Then, years later, there was the Flash-Event. Some mysterious thing that changed the world for the worse. In this world Brad already was doing Joy, a drug, that made him forget about the pain and suffering. He was happy, but also his friends noticed the bad sides of the drug. From here the game starts and lets you discover the wonkiness of the world, the idiocracy of some people living in there, the rough way of handling problems or the simple neglect of problems overall. First impressions of the art style is that it might be lackluster, but it's effective at what it wants to be. Deformed minimalistic, cute-ugly, somber-depressing. Symbolism for things to discover can be seen early, yet hard to grasp what it might go for, without progressing the story first. The music goes even crazier, some tracks just scream pain and depression, others are bangers, then there are the "weird" songs. They just fit into the environment, even if some are hard to listen to. But that's what I love about it. At its very core, it is a basic RPG, as you would expect from an RPG-Maker era game. You got your rooster of characters, attacks and skills, simple equipment, status effects and items to use. It works, it can be tedious at times, but has its highlights which stand tall against everything else. In the end, it is used as a device to tell a story. And it works, but is a bit stiff due to the nature of old school RPGs. The gameplay can be a bit frustrating, dying sends you back to the last save. You would assume to die, when going into a big boss battle. But accidentally going of a cliff is instant game-over. I lost some progress here and there, which was really annoying. But yet this is important, because just as Bradley would accept loss, and always keep going, so do you. You will take sacrifices, you will suffer, you might be angered, but ultimately be disturbed. Occasionally the game will give you a break by throwing nonsense and jokes at you, which for the most part were funny, funny-weird or just weird - it was great. [h3]TLDR [/h3] It's weird, funny, painful, emotional. It will take you of a journy which is hard to grasp and gets more nightmarish with every step. If you like a amazing story in which your brain goes "WAT?", then just buy it right now! I'd rate this game: Story 10/10 Music/Sound: 9/10 Gameplay 7/10 Now I need the DLC to see whats coming next.