[h2]The Ultimate Death Clock is a visual novel that is in its entirety a dialogue between the player character, a reader self-insert, and a personification of death. It emulates webpages of the early internet with the promise of providing you with the date of your passing on the basis of ambiguous questions about your personal life, but fails to meaningfully develop any sort of narrative on top of this premise.[/h2]
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[th]🟩 Pros[/th]
[th]🟥 Cons[/th]
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[td] ✔️ Death’s character artwork is nicely detailed and expressive.[/td]
[td] ❌ The game’s narrative is not entirely consistent and suffers specifically from its nonsensical characterization of the characters.[/td]
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[td] ✔️ Given the inspiration of old internet web games, the short length and focus on ambience can evoke a sense of nostalgia and support approaching the VN as a parody rather than a narrative.[/td]
[td] ❌ The writing seems antithetical to this idea, and while it retains the questionnaire formatting, it frequently alludes to taking itself more seriously than the arbitrary pages it tries to emulate.[/td]
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[th]🟨 Miscellaneous Thoughts[/th]
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[td]TUDC is rather lackluster in its presentation. While the reading time of approximately thirty minutes doesn’t invite a lot of variety to begin with, it also lacks any CG to further support the character artwork.[/td]
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[h3]Technical Issues and Performance[/h3]
As a visual novel, TUDC ran fine. There were no lags or other hiccups; graphics changed as they were supposed to, and the sound was well balanced. With the game’s engine, your ability to customize your experience is somewhat limited, but given the short length and purpose of the game, none of this was really an issue for me.
[h3]Story and Setting[/h3]
The setting of the VN is rather simple; for no immediate reason, you, the reader, are encountering the personification of death in a realm that is largely kept ambiguous. From there, the around thirty-minute-long story is played out entirely as a conversation with Death about your life, habits, goals, and philosophical ideals that aims to mimic the Death Clock webpages of the early Internet, though it seems to take itself a little more seriously.
TUDC is somewhat weird. It is written on a largely diegetic level, treating the player as an actual entity but frequently breaking that dynamic by reassuring you, as the player, of what your choices may entail. The best way to describe this is as a conflict in the formatting of its text; so, for example, Death may ask you about your relationship status: "Are you married?" as regular dialogue, offering you a variety of answers that are likewise written as if they were natural speech. Your character may um and er sometimes, but not entirely so, and likewise, occasionally the game thinks it necessary to put specifications in columns: "Are you married? (Pick the answer that fits you best)". The same applies to your answers, and while it’s aimed to get a more precise measurement of what exact answer you may want to give, for example, your smoking habits and the parenthesis specifying just how many cigarettes you may smoke, it also breaks the dynamic between the narration and the character you are supposed to relate to a bit, even if that character is also meant to be a self-insertion.
The game does succeed in making the dialogue feel largely natural, although given that your conversation is with a character that is very much representative of just a concept, some formulations feel odd. Death may relate to parts of the human experience—whether life is fair or not—talking about emotions and regrets like you normally would, but then also completely breaks out of this for what seems like an attempt at making Death more charismatic or the story more comedic, like Death’s somewhat cliché description of intercourse just being that of rubbing wet and messy body parts against another.
Your conversation with Death never really gets much deeper either, which is to be expected given the premise of the game; any philosophical musings are kept on a basic level, and while Death may toss around terminology like Freud’s psychoanalytic theory or Descartes first principle, it doesn’t really escape the confines of superficial questions about how you feel about these terms in the broadest sense.
[h3]Graphics and Sound[/h3]
TUDC doesn’t feature a lot in terms of graphics; in fact, there are only two backgrounds and a single character with a small selection of different expressions. While these are perfectly reasonable, I wouldn’t quite agree with the description of psychedelic visuals that is being advertised on the store page; it’s not atmospheric but rather provides ambiance for what is a more flavorful questionnaire. This is not necessarily a criticism either; arguably, the appeal of both TUDC and the webpages it’s based on is toying with this sort of inherent silliness and trying to play with your suspension of disbelief a little bit.
The sound is much the same; it’s ambiance and nothing special elsewise. Death is not voice-acted, although there is some garbled speech that occasionally plays when The Cosmos is being addressed. The transition towards the end of the game, when your promised death date is revealed, can be a little bit jarring, but other than that, this is perfectly reasonable and what would be expected from a game with this premise.
[h3]Formatting[/h3]
I have already mentioned some issues with TUDC’s prose, largely relating to Death feeling somewhat inconsistently written and the boundary between reader and character not being respected, but TUDC also has some quirks within its text’s formatting. I have encountered sparse punctuation and capitalization errors, which may stem from a disturbing tendency to use ellipsis and parenthesis. The former becomes an issue with one text box flowing into the next, as it is frequently not clear whether they are meant to represent a break in speech or whether they are meant to serve as proper punctuation, whereas the latter leads to structures like this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2990134949
[h3]Final Thoughts[/h3]
The Ultimate Death Clock isn’t anything special. It is a short, thirty-minute novel that is essentially a death predictor webgame with some more immersive writing to try and get you a little invested, but suffers from spotty writing in both formatting and actual characterization of both you and Death. It seems to take itself a lot more seriously than this emulation, which in itself could be quite a fun concept to write around but just ends up feeling somewhat dissatisfying.
As a visual novel, TUDC feels stale; your choices may matter only insofar as to what exact tone the next question is going to take and what ultimately arbitrary number the game is going to toss at you at the end, much like its inspirations. It didn’t make me think about death or my mortality any more than a casual conversation would. It didn’t offer insight into any of the philosophical topics it asked you about. It didn’t succeed in immersing me in either the game of predicting my date of death or the dialogue between the characters.
Replaying the game and skipping through unseen text yielded an experience that was essentially identical. The same questions. Largely the same dialogue. And apparently, living the life of an Asian man born in 1930, chain smoking, alcoholic, depressed, and with a penchant for risk-taking behavior is still a more healthy lifestyle than mine, as the game predicted that alter ego will outlive me by one year.
[b]Acknowledgement[/b]
[quote]This game was provided for review purposes by the developers. Thank you![/quote]
[quote]Follow our Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/] Summit Reviews [/url], to see more high-quality reviews regularly.[/quote]
