Root Double: Before Crime * After Days (PS Vita)
Categories:
[blog]
Tags:
[video games],
[review],
[psvita]
- Released: June 2012
- Time to complete: ~35 hrs
Your team of emergency rescue agents are sent into a possible meltdown event at a nuclear reactor and are tasked with assessing the situation and rescuing any survivors. Even with such an unfathomable situation as that, it still doesn't work out as could be expected, and clearly some of the workers are not simply doing their jobs, and civilians trapped in the building are not there by chance.
The story is presented from two viewpoints, depending on the route chosen: that of the rescue team, and that of some of the survivors. Piece by piece, the backstory leading up to the present-time events is revealed, both to the player but also the various characters in the situation.
As a visual novel, most of this is presented through textual means, however as is usual with the medium there is a 'gameplay element' - and in this case, rather than controlling dialogue options directly, you instead control the 'mood' of the characters relative to each other. Having stronger/more positive emotions towards another character means more likelihood of cooperation, or general favour. Using this mechanism, you can steer groups of characters towards or away from each other, which is vital in progressing through the story (literally - characters dying is not rare or avoidable at all, and there are many endings, most of them 'bad'). Unfortunately this gameplay style is not always obvious - as you are at best 'guiding' the characters in how to act towards each other, sometimes you can misunderstand how the settings will affect them). Fortunately the quicksave options are extremely convenient to use, so make lots of save points.
The scenario is very plot-twisty, with lots of strange elements encorporated, and I generally greatly enjoyed it - saying too much would be absolutely spoiling things - but overall it comes across as a bit of a cut-rate 999/Virtues Last Reward, very good but not mind-blowingly good. Worth playing if you like the more important entries in the genre (such as Steins;Gate and the aforementioned Zero Escape series).