The spooky school.
A boy wakes up at school. It’s dark outside, and he’s almost alone. But he meets a girl who wakes up sitting in a chair. What’s going on? Where is everyone, and why didn’t they wake them up so they could go home? Will they ever have the chance to return home? They have so many questions that need to be answered.
Before I played the game, I watched the movie from 2019, which I have reviewed. That was an excellent movie, and after playing the game, I have to say it’s one of the best game-to-movie adaptations ever made. To be honest, I found the movie to be more engaging than the game because of the better storytelling in the movie. The movie offers a more emotional ride that explains the story in a better way than the game did.
But the game is great, but I wish it had more story to tell. It feels a little half-complete compared to the movie adaptation. The movie has more depth, and I got a feeling that you should know your Taiwanese history when you sit down to play this short game. The movie has more fleshed-out characters and information about the white terror years.
The game will take you around four hours to complete. I wish it would have taken 7-8 hours so they could have given the characters more depth, and that we learned more about the white terror years. There is so much history in this game. If you aren’t Taiwanese, you will feel that the game should have spoonfed the players more with history lessons. Like Iron Maiden does when they make history songs that last for 14 minutes.
The atmosphere is great. The first two hours offer a creepy experience with the sound effects and the visual style of the game. This is mostly an easy point-and-click game that had one puzzle with two clocks that drove me almost insane. But other than that, this is an easy game to complete. It tries to tell you the hardships the citizens had to live through when the Taiwanese government was hunting communists. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you that!
In the first half of the game, some enemies pose a threat, but suddenly they just disappear, and the game focuses on the protagonist. We understand she has been a bad girl, and she needs to be punished. So I need to find my whip to punish her! Oh, sorry, I was thinking of a movie!
The protagonist takes us back in time, and we get hints of things that happened in her past, which leads up to the situation the protagonist is in. Her parents argued a lot, and she was in love with someone older than her. She’s a confused girl who needs to feel some real love in her life, but she lives in a dangerous time, and she will discover what happened to her and the other people she had contact with. Will she like the answer to what’s going on? Well, I doubt it!
If you have played the game, I would recommend you to watch the movie. I haven’t watched the TV series, because I don’t think it would add anything special that the movie didn’t tell. But if you feel like me that the game lacks better character depth and information about the white terror years, then I recommend you to watch the movie. The movie is great!