Late last year I played three remarkable old style Japanese adventures, on the trot: Retro Mystery Club volumes 1 (The Ise-Shima Case) and 2 (The Beppu Case) and The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case The Okhotsk Disappearance (~Memories in Ice, Tearful Figurine~) [posted in the 2024 retrospective]. What made them remarkable? Perhaps first, as someone who lived through the lean years of Japanese imports, the fact that these games are even coming out is amazing, let alone Okhotsk being remade 40 years after release. The other is how fresh they seem. Japanese-style adventures came up late. Earlier home microcomputers notoriously had difficulty in allowing the various “alphabets” used in the Japanese language. This made difficult the use of parsers. Not much later, the domination of the Famicom at home instituted a menu-based interface. This makes these games less of a chancer in terms of trying to guess what the parser will recognize but does tend to make them very straightforward. Thus what came to be called visual or sound novels were born. Still, the average visual or sound novel is either an erotic embarrassment or a teenage cutesy drama. So the freshness is how mature these games look and feel. The themes are grim and hard, and the tone is serious. A far cry from the usual light-hearted stuff.
Scar of the Doll was a small and unexpected indie/doujin hit when it came out in 1998. Its developer is sparsely credited, mainly known for the PS3 exclusive Folklore, which was critically claimed but flopped commercially. At this time there are two versions on Steam. A 2017 version that translated into English but kept almost everything the same, including music and art-style and a 2023 remake version that, unfortunately, redraws the original art to a generic modern anime-like (and costs over twice as much). I have only played the 2017 version.
Gameplay is very limited. It’s all menu-based which offers you some options to move between areas or decide whom to talk to. The challenge relies on making the right choices. A “wrong” choice invariably ends in a game over. Thus, it’s somewhat a game of attrition to constantly replay scenes until you figure out the right choice to move on. This makes it sound like an incredibly dull task but there are a few design options that ease this pain. The first is a small but useful hint at the end of each game over that tells you what you did wrong or didn’t do right. The other is the fact that you can save quite often, so a replay can only be a case of replaying one scene, and not the whole game from the start. The game over situation adds the necessary amount of tension to proceedings, in addition to the thriller-type storyline, and gives this the description of a game, rather than just a book, which you read passively. The game world is quite small in terms of locations but, as any interactive fiction player knows, this is a plus, as it makes the story and exploration more focused. The art-style is sparse but, for me, quite charming. It does look somewhat antiquated, and I have to assume it felt so already when it came out in 1998.
Finally, a game like this lives and dies by its story. Without spoiling it, this starts as a missing person investigation and later introduces some science fiction undertones but still grounded on the present day, planet Earth. By this I mean that thematically it explores the ethics of scientific advancement. Do not expect laser guns or spaceships or anything of that sort. The action is mostly set in a university lab and most of the characters are in that periphery. Being a short story (point to point, not taking in the need to replay scenes), characters are somewhat well developed.
Is this game worth it? Yes. I don’t think there’s anything quite like this, in an official English language version out there. At $4/€4/£3.40 full price for three hours of your time even if it’s too alien an experience for action gamers or someone who is just not into this, I’m sure no one will feel cheated out of their money either. At discount it’s an absolute steal, even if you treat it like an interactive book rather than a game. There just isn’t anything quite like this.
On a historical note this is quite a remarkable game for being a hit for computers in Japan in 1998. Remember this was the year when Metal Gear Solid came out for the PlayStation (another Japanese game that explored similar themes, although in a more militaristic way), inaugurating the modern cinematic game on consoles – right on the other end of the spectrum of Scar of the Doll.
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