This series Mei have potential.
Indie Games, especially those made by a very small team, are usually passion projects rather than being designed around huge commercial appeal. They can often fly under the radar, and unless they break out on a platform like Twitch, their reach can be incredibly minimal; buried in digital storefronts that are not well designed. I had heard about Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story about a year ago. I was pulled into it with its art design and found the premise of an adventure game taking place in a cyberpunk future to be rather enticing. While the game does feel decently constructed at times, its reliance on too much backtracking and its convoluted item puzzle system holds the game back and can often make the experience feel a bit too much like a chore instead of being consistently entertaining.
Developed to pay homage to adventure games of the past, and a slew of inspirations from survival horror games such as Fatal Frame and Clock Tower, Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story (which I’ll simply refer to as Sense from now on), certainly wears a lot of those inspirations on its cyberpunk sleeves. Taking place in 2083 Neo Hong Kong, you play as Mei, a young girl who starts her evening out at a bar, waiting for a date she’s destined to be late for. After her cybernetic eyes start to glitch out, she is then transported into an old apartment complex, one that has been chained up and left abandoned for a century. You’ll solve a series of puzzles as you collect items, track down clues to many of the ghosts that still inhabit the building, and learn about Mei’s true destiny, something that is more fully shown to you during the game’s additional ending, a brief scene that takes quite a few playthroughs to unlock, and one that sets up a hopeful future for this potential franchise.
On paper, I can certainly see the appeal and drive of what this handful of developers were aiming to create. An adventure-horror game taking place in a cyberpunk setting sounds incredible until you realize that this futuristic playground is largely only there for the backgrounds that are piercing through the windows of this decrepit apartment complex. The game starts with you walking down its futuristic and neon flavored streets, and you’ll visit this setting again during the game’s final moments. And, apart from a cross-bridge between rooms, the rest of this game takes place inside a dark and gloomy apartment, making for a small amount of disappointment from me wanting this futuristic era to shine a bit more throughout the game. The environments are still expertly detailed and the game is often visually pleasing, but the premise of it being a cyberpunk ghost story doesn’t quite hold water. Mei has a set of cybernetic eyes, but they don’t really tend to contribute to anything from a gameplay perspective. If she had the ability to use them to maybe scan rooms or see things we couldn’t, then maybe I’d have a different opinion on the use of cyberpunk here.
Now, coming into a game made by an incredibly small team of largely just 3 people, there are always going to be expectations to set and keep in mind when critiquing a finished product. However; when you have such a small pool of opinions and choices going into the overall design work, you can often single out a lot of flaws or issues that the team may have been unintentionally blind to. The game suffers from a bit of poor pacing, and despite being a horror game, there isn’t much here that is fear-inducing and while you’ll encounter a few monsters or ghosts that follow you around, they are so few and far between that they lack in any real terror to make you afraid of what is around the corner. There have been countless other 2.5D or 2D sidescrolling horror games that can be incredibly terrifying, such as The Coma 2, a game I thoroughly enjoyed and found to be perfect in its level of horror. While the game has a combat system to deal with these threats, it’s simply too clunky and lacking that it simply fails to resemble anything even remotely fun. I can certainly see what they were trying to do, but the execution is where it suffers the most and feels like something added in at the last minute instead of an intentionally planned mechanic.
The core gameplay to Sense is Mei investigating the apartment complex, floor by floor, attempting to put the souls of these ghosts to rest, making offerings of rice and a personal object that has sentimental significance to the departed. Some of these stories are well done but are limited to diving into the menu to read notes that you’ll uncover. Many of these notes are also used to hide solutions to puzzles, such as trying to decipher a floor safe’s code by implementing the birthdate of the referenced character. Mei will eventually meet a spirit that details a lot of what is going on, offering you a few items that you can use to combat the more hostile ghosts that haunt a few rooms. Most battles have you walking up to a boss, selecting it, performing an action, then swiping the sword as it’s defenseless, backing away, and repeating the process again. The final boss, for example, took to this method a bit too well and I was able to defeat it in about 10-15 seconds without getting hit. Again, I see what they were trying to do, but the execution of it just disappoints. Mei will also have to watch out for how she interacts with the world as there are countless traps and hazards that end in her swift and gruesome death. From reaching into a sink before you turn off the garbage disposal to not using a bouncy ball to disarming an out of reach trigger, there are several areas you’ll want to save before you attempt to push ahead.
Despite the few combat encounters you’ll have, Mei has health that is determined by the number of jade bangles you have on your person. While these are largely only significant to Mei, they are littered around the apartment for some apparent reason. If an enemy swipes at you, it will shatter the bangle and crumble to the floor. You can only hold 2 at a time, and I’ve had enemies swipe nearly half a room away and shatter one, or directly in front of me and fail to make contact, making it rather random if you’re going to see one shatter or not. There is a spirit you battle in a two-story room that fires off a blast of blue flame. If you take a hit a certain way, it can actually destroy both of your bangles in one shot, an attack that feels more like a glitch than any sort of fair hit. Now, this was before I realized I could simply run-up, interact with them, throw ash, and have them drop to the ground for an easy swipe. Once I reloaded with that information, he was defeated, much like the final boss, in around 10-15 seconds, all without taking a hit.
Saving your progress comes in two methods, either using video cassettes at the few spaced out TV/VCR units you’ll find, or a quick save system you can use anywhere. The quicksave system is a bonus here as simply using the television once you’ve died can result in you having to repeat a ton of item collecting and backtracking and of course, gathering your bearings on what you were doing, as it can be a bit confusing on what you’ve collected, used, or what you were attempting to do since you’ve last saved. You can also use the television to playback certain cassettes you’ll find, but these are fairly rare from what I was able to track down. You also can take pictures of special spots you’ll encounter and these are not really indicated other than rapidly pressing the action button as you walk around and unintentionally discover them.
The item collecting is probably my only big complaint with the game as there are several items that can only be collected when you have performed certain actions, but then there will be some items that Mei will consider to be useful later on and just pick them up, despite not having a need for it at the time. This method of ‘order’ causes situations like this one; There is a moment where you need to make a key out of melted metal. It’s not made terribly clear, but thankfully, I recalled there being a small metal statue in the downstairs office. I pushed through the several floors between where I was to where I had last seen it and could not collect it. She just talked about it. So, I thought maybe it had to be another one. After about an hour of searching, I exhausted every option I could think of, but then stumbled upon the Wok that I couldn’t pick up before. So then I went back to the statue to collect it, maybe making my discovery of the Wok as a trigger. Nope. She still didn’t want any part of it. I took the Wok to the apartment with the working stove, and she set it there. I then went back to the statue and she was finally able to grab it. This type of situation happens constantly. It’s like knowing the answer to a math question but then your teacher demands you to write out the work you took to discovering the answer. I don’t mind puzzle hunting, and while this was an issue I also had with The Coma 2, it’s not anywhere as bad there as it is here as you’ll find yourself backtracking all over the hotel almost constantly just to pick up something Mei could have easily snatched in the first place. If it was a question of inventory room, then ok, but Mei literally shoves an entire door in her pockets for a brief puzzle midway through the game.
Another shared aspect towards the Coma series is how Sense uses cultural folklore to tell vastly interesting stories. And, what was the case with the Coma series as well, having an education into those legends does make a lot more of them stand out. Some are explained through various notes and environmental storytelling, but since I don’t have a deep understanding of Cantonese folklore, some of it was, unfortunately, lost on me. This isn’t to downplay anything the game tries to do from a narrative level, as the story and narrative elements the game presents are still enjoyable, it’s just clear that those more familiar with that culture are going to get more out of this game than your typical player. It’s also nice to see more cultures represented in games, causing those interested in what they are playing to research it, whether out of sheer curiosity or to have a better understanding of the story.
I mentioned it before, but the visuals of the game were a big draw for me. The character designs can be a bit over-sexualized for some, especially the chest size of its leading protagonist Mei, but it’s never taken to any sort of extreme. While there has been some controversy surrounding the “near-pornographic” tone of the game, it’s nowhere near anything that makes that criticism valid, even with the few revealing outfits you’ll unlock later on. Even despite Mei’s larger assets, they are wildly tame in comparison to other games, and never feel out of place with the design work that has gone into the game, or feel distracting in any way. I read a review for the PC version before I requested a code for the Switch release about how Mei’s breasts would constantly jiggle when she ran, often distracting the reviewer. Frankly, they don’t move more than a pixel or two at most and I had to actually stare intently at them to even see the slightest jiggle. Regardless of Mei’s proportions, the game looks great, with highly detailed environments, a moody atmosphere with its use of a flashlight, and its monsters, which are vastly too few and far between, all look interesting and unique. I still wish that the game showed more of the cyberpunk world that exists outside of the apartment as it’s so brilliantly designed that I just wanted to explore more of it.
While a single playthrough should take you around 5 hours with about another hour or so if you plan on tracking down all the secret photo locations. The game is designed around multiple playthroughs to unlock the true ending, and there is also a short secondary story as well, utilizing a whole new character that is fun while it lasts, something I didn’t know was even unlocked until I went into the new game menu after beating it. As for other issues I had with the game, I had the game lock up and freeze twice, and some rooms are packed with so much detail that the game would drop frames to where the game would shutter. Now, most of these slowdowns were while playing the game portably. I also found it a bit annoying that doors and items share the same button, as I would constantly trigger a door or stairwell when I was simply trying to interact with an item that is in the same range as exits to a room. Had the game had swift load times to get me back into that room, then ok, but some load times are just far too long for simply going into the next room.
Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story is more or less ok, without anything being downright bad. I still found enjoyment out of the game, but the backtracking, item puzzle order, and combat being the issues that did everything they could to prevent that. If the order of items were restructured in a way to limit the backtracking and the combat altered in a way to make it more engaging, then I’d have a very different outlook on the game that is here. The concept of a cyberpunk adventure-horror game is certainly an engaging idea, and if the next entry is more focused on the cyberpunk aesthetic, then I am certainly interested in returning to this world, seeing what adventure awaits Mei.
Developer - Suzaku Publisher - Top Hat Studios Released - January 7th, 2021 (Switch) / August 25th, 2020 (PC) Available On - Nintendo Switch, PC Rated - (M) Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.