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Mad Father, Part Two
Jul. 23rd, 2021 07:56 amI got sucked into Mad Father yesterday.
The difficulty I experienced when I started playing arose from the game being relatively open toward the beginning, with a large map and a lot of moving parts that don’t fit neatly together. Thankfully, the game becomes more linear, and the way you’re supposed to interact with objects becomes more intuitive.
At the same time, the jump scares become less effective, and the horror elements become very silly. The generic off-brand anime art style doesn’t help.
For example, at one point there’s an eyeless girl locked inside a basement cell scratching at the door and being all like, “I can’t see!!” Meanwhile, I’m just shaking my head like “that’s what happens when you watch too much anime” and making a mental note to pick up a jar of eyeballs or something. By the time the dad starts chasing you with a chainsaw, I’m like FUCK YES LET’S GO.
There is one genuinely creepy “statutory is an awfully big word for a twelve-year-old” moment, and I think it’s creepy because the game knows it’s upsetting but treats it as perfectly natural. The killer dolls and unquiet ghosts haunting the basement aren’t all that scary, but the “kind” behavior of the father during the sepia-tinted nostalgia flashbacks is super disturbing.
The basement of this family’s house is epic, by the way. It makes me wonder what I would do if I had a sprawling dungeon under my house. Like, I barely have enough furniture to fill a three-room apartment. The other day I was reading that a lot of families who live in large McMansions don’t actually have anything in most of the rooms, and that makes sense to me. If you’re not imprisoning people to use as subjects for occult medical experiments, what are you going to do with all that space?
The difficulty I experienced when I started playing arose from the game being relatively open toward the beginning, with a large map and a lot of moving parts that don’t fit neatly together. Thankfully, the game becomes more linear, and the way you’re supposed to interact with objects becomes more intuitive.
At the same time, the jump scares become less effective, and the horror elements become very silly. The generic off-brand anime art style doesn’t help.
For example, at one point there’s an eyeless girl locked inside a basement cell scratching at the door and being all like, “I can’t see!!” Meanwhile, I’m just shaking my head like “that’s what happens when you watch too much anime” and making a mental note to pick up a jar of eyeballs or something. By the time the dad starts chasing you with a chainsaw, I’m like FUCK YES LET’S GO.
There is one genuinely creepy “statutory is an awfully big word for a twelve-year-old” moment, and I think it’s creepy because the game knows it’s upsetting but treats it as perfectly natural. The killer dolls and unquiet ghosts haunting the basement aren’t all that scary, but the “kind” behavior of the father during the sepia-tinted nostalgia flashbacks is super disturbing.
The basement of this family’s house is epic, by the way. It makes me wonder what I would do if I had a sprawling dungeon under my house. Like, I barely have enough furniture to fill a three-room apartment. The other day I was reading that a lot of families who live in large McMansions don’t actually have anything in most of the rooms, and that makes sense to me. If you’re not imprisoning people to use as subjects for occult medical experiments, what are you going to do with all that space?
