
It’s not easy creating a game based on mental health. Many have tried, but a lot have felt rather cringeworthy and rely on stereotypes and cinematic tropes rather than reflecting reality. There are some games that do a good job of portraying it, however, and the ones that do usually feel special.
Which is why I went into Vlad Circus: Descend into Madness with more than a little trepidation. Fusing mental health issues with that of the circus could be a recipe for disaster. Or something brilliant.
Thankfully, the game handles the subject matter excellently for the most part. It’s such a shame that the rest of it isn’t quite as noteworthy.
Many thanks to the publisher for the review.
CLOWNING AROUND
After the owner’s brother burned down the Vlad Circus, things have not been easy for the clown Lazy Ollie and the other circus acts. Spending years in a mental institute to help deal with his trauma, Ollie is a deeply affected clown – one that has only just come to terms with wearing his costume again.
After receiving a letter from the owner inviting him and the others to his mansion with the hope of reforming the old gang, Ollie aims to catch up with his former friends and maybe even go back to his old job.
But things aren’t going to be easy. As well as battling his own inner demons, with the help of his psychiatrist who has helpfully brought along plenty of medicinal tonic to help overcome Ollie’s hallucinations, the others are also wrought with their own issues. Whether physically or mentally affected, these are clearly difficult times for the whole troupe.
The story is really well told using its colourful batch of characters, and the issues they face are dealt with seriously, making it quite a moving story. Being told from Ollie’s point of view also brings events into question due to his hallucinations. With him seeing things that aren’t there and having frequent blackouts, it’s quite clearly a case of an unreliable narrator thus bringing into question everything that happens.
The game plays out rather like a fusion between a point and click adventure and a survival horror game. During the course of the story, Ollie will need to do favours for his circus friends and also take care of some things that need doing. This could consist of nipping out to the train station to reclaim a purse or repairing a broken elevator. Of course, things aren’t quite that simple as that as most of the puzzles will require you to find certain items that will allow you to achieve what needs to be done.
The problem with the puzzles is that they fall into the common adventure game trap of being obnoxious to the point of stupidity. This is made clear very early on with a puzzle that requires you to get water for a cup of tea. The water isn’t functional, so you have to settle for rainwater. Easy in theory, as the constant rain outside and the jug in your inventory means that this should be a doddle, right? Nope. What you actually have to do is repair a broken gramophone using a horn found from behind a sign in a locked room. This will allow you to use an opera record to shatter the glass jug on the book shelf that contains a key to the backyard, where a broken tube will allow you to fill the jug. Ignoring the readily available rain, the inability to move the other working gramophone or just breaking the damn jug by yourself just makes the actual solution seem stupid.
They’re not the worst puzzles in the world, and there’s certainly no ‘rubber chicken on a pulley’ here, but the problem is that the game’s limited inventory space, stamina system, and backtracking (all of which ties into the survival horror elements makes the puzzles all the more frustrating than if it tried to be a normal point & click adventure title. And it probably should have been too, since the survival horror elements don’t really add much to the experience. Sure, the game is brimming with atmosphere, but the combat feels rather lacklustre with its simplicity and there’s little penalty for death as you’ll just wake up on the floor nearby with zero progress lost. To make the combat even more irrelevant, any stress (the game’s HP system) gained from fighting enemies can be restored easily by using your mother’s rosary beads to pray. Things get harder should you choose the game’s harder difficulty, but the combat is so bland that it’s not really worth the hassle.
It’s not all bad though, as the game does include some other mechanics to help get keep you engaged. Even though the stress system itself doesn’t feel like a threat in any way, the way it ties into Ollie’s sanity is really well done. As the title suggests, Ollie really isn’t mentally sound and will frequently see things that aren’t really there. These apparitions are gruesome and disturbing, and will cause a lot of mental duress for the clown. Luckily he does have some medication that can counteract these effects, and taking it will frequently cause these abominations to disappear.
Except when they don’t.
In those circumstances, the best way to stop them being a threat to your sanity is to put them down completely. Guns work as well as you’d expect, but ammunition is rare. The butcher’s knife you find early on is also great at chopping down a lot of creatures, but the blade wears down forcing you to return to a grindstone in order to sharpen things. That’s not the only resource you need to manage either, as your lantern will gradually fade over time as the kerosene runs down, so you’ll need to return to the back yard in order to top it back up again every so often. Even though these elements do seem rather like a waste of time (and truthfully, they are) it does help add some stakes to proceedings. The lantern in particular is very well done as it gives you a rather substantial amount of light when full, but barely lights your feet as it starts to run low. It’s a system I’m sure some people will hate, but given some of the game’s larger flaws I ended up appreciating it.
What really sells the game though is the overall presentation. Even when I found the gameplay rather tiresome, the unique setting, well-written dialogue, and beautiful visuals are what kept me going on. All of the troupe are really well fleshed out and I really felt sorry for most of them as you find out more and more about their tragic life, especially after the fire destroyed their livelihoods. This is all amplified by the excellent spritework and animation that really brings life to every single character – especially the lead protagonist. It’s let down by a predictable ending that the game heavily signposts from the very start (and follows one of the worst parts in the whole game), but I was still invested in Ollie’s journey up until that point.
VERDICT
Vlad Circus: Descend into Madness has a really well-told heartfelt narrative wrapped up in a gorgeous presentation brimming with atmosphere. It’s a shame that it’s let down by some lacklustre gameplay that takes the worst part of its two genres that can make the experience less pleasant than it really ought to have been.
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