Digimon Survive Review – Digital Devolution
Digimon has never been shy to delve into storylines and topics that society too often wishes to ignore–the first episode of the 1999 anime literally begins with the main character monologuing about climate change and how it’s destroying the planet. Most of the stories in the series explore these topics within the scope of being trapped within a fantasy world inhabited by cute monsters. It’s here where the characters must come to terms with the irresponsibility of finding solace in the black-and-white morality of their new reality–an alluring alternative to the nuanced wants and needs of the real world. Pushing on this notion a bit further to dip its toes into the horrifying realities of physical and verbal abuse, terminal illness, psychotic breaks, and weaponizing relationships, Digimon Survive tells one of the darkest tales that the franchise has ever covered. All told, it amounts to a deeply compelling visual novel that’s driven by likable characters and an intriguing mystery but that aspect of it is too often interrupted by boring tactical combat.
In Digimon Survive, you play as middle-schooler Takuma, who is attending a camp over spring break alongside friends Minoru and Aoi and acquaintances Saki, Ryo, and Shuuji. Upon learning that the camp is close to a temple famous for its legend about a festival in which human children were sacrificed to beast gods, the six investigate, and they’re soon joined by local brother and sister duo Kaito and Mio. The misadventure ultimately results in the kids becoming lost in a world inhabited by the so-called beast gods known as Digimon.
It’s a familiar setup for a Digimon story (or any isekai story, really), and Digimon Survive spends way too long laying the groundwork with meandering dialogue and unnecessary character backstory. The game dangles the foreshadowing that these kids are about to be trapped in another world, but then spends hours getting there, and then leaves the group confused as to what’s happened to them for a while after. It’s frustrating to see three separate people theorizing that maybe the group is now no longer on Earth when you as the player arrived at that conclusion hours prior and just want the actual adventure to kick off.
But once that adventure does begin, it really gets going. There’s an unsettling sensation that hangs over the ongoing dynamics of the teenage heroes in their quest to find a way home, which evolves depending on how the characters react to one another. You guide Takuma through conversations with his peers, developing into a leader that the group looks up to and aspires to emulate. Your dialogue choices can influence Takuma’s karma to lean more towards morality, wrath, or harmony and also have an impact on his standing with the others in the group.
The effects of these choices slink into the background, only coming to the forefront during climactic moments in the story, oftentimes informing who has Takuma’s back in high-stakes situations. They also affect who ultimately makes it to the end of Digimon Survive, as your choices may inspire some to give their lives for the betterment of the group or condemn others to fall so far into despair that the only way out for them is death. Some characters can only be saved if another character is alive and thus around to help them through whatever they’re dealing with, so losing certain characters will doom others down the line. It’s a daunting web of possibilities and consequences, some of which can have a substantial impact on the final outcome of Digimon Survive–there’s some decent replay value here for those who are interested.
The fear of death looms over Digimon Survive, and the mounting sense of dread that one mistake could potentially cascade into a character’s demise several chapters later leaves an eerie feeling over even the most mundane of interactions throughout the campaign. It adds a nerve-wracking but narratively compelling weight to your role as the leader–your choices matter here, not just in terms of whether you beat the bad guys, but whether each of the good guys can overcome their own personal demons.
Though there are moments of light-hearted humor and slice-of-life shenanigans, Digimon Survive’s story is dark–it never shies away from depicting some truly horrific acts, like a person being literally eaten alive by the physical embodiment of their emotional trauma. The game never lets up on the notion that real-world issues can’t be fixed or put on hold just because you’re now stuck in a fantasy. Wilfully ignoring physical abuse will not suddenly make it magically go away, nor will a breaking psyche suddenly rectify itself if you allow it to escape into a happy delusion.
Your failures will oftentimes be met with stellar work from the game’s voice actors, sound design team, and composer Tomoki Miyoshi, as chilling screams ring out against creepy piano melodies accompanied by the soft crunching of bones or slow evisceration of flesh. The eyes of each character are designed to be especially expressive as well–it really sells the horror of the situation when you’re trying to talk some sense into your friend and suddenly their eyes widen with feverish hysteria, teasing that you may already be too late.
The creepy tone helps sell the unsettling mystery at the core of Digimon Survive. The cast of characters is striving to uncover the truth about this fantasy world and its history of human sacrifices, the nature of the Digimon themselves, and the identity of a strange adult man known only as “Professor” and how he may connect with two ghost-like children. There’s a lot here, with plenty of surprising twists that deliver on satisfying turns over the course of a 30+ hour campaign. Even when you can correctly guess what’s about to happen, the journey to that reveal is written well enough to be an enjoyable ride.
It’s a great story, too often interrupted by dull combat encounters. A few hours into Digimon Survive, each human character befriends a Digimon partner who aids them in battle. Every fight plays out on a grid, with each Digimon in play taking turns to move, attack, defend, or use an item. Digimon Survive reduces the wonderful complexity seen in so many good examples of tactical combat to a tedious level of simplicity. Each Digimon only has two attacks, and though there is a system of type advantages, it’s so unimportant that you can outright ignore it and still land an easy win. Nothing about it encourages you to fight with any semblance of strategy, you simply send out your strongest fighters to mop the floor with your opponents. After just a few fights, combat becomes a repetitive slog. Digimon Survive does feature difficulty options, but even after cranking up the difficulty, combat is too simple to be challenging–battles will only, unfortunately, last longer given enemies’ larger health pools.
The weakness of the combat drags down Digimon Survive’s exploration element as well. At certain points in the story, Takuma will have limited time to explore an environment, giving him a small window to talk with allies, look for items, or battle wild Digimon. Though talking with allies will oftentimes allow you to glean additional insight into your friends’ troubling pasts and ongoing traumas, the other two activities feel superfluous in the face of straightforward and easy combat. The act of scanning the environment with your phone feels pointless, given the reward are items you’ll never need in battle, and you don’t have to grind for levels to increase the strength of your weaker Digimon if you’re already using the same ones over and over and overpowering your party.
Admittedly, battling wild Digimon is an important step for growing your team if that’s your aim. While in battle with wild Digimon, you can pause combat to converse with your foe. Answering their questions in a way they find satisfactory will open up the possibility of having them join your side, and you’ll likely then have to face more wild Digimon to level your new teammate to a point where they become useful. However, the Digimon you recruit rarely, if ever, prove to be stronger than each human’s original Digimon partner. I’d try to befriend a Digimon whenever I saw one that I had nostalgia for, but only ever used them once or twice in battle. The eight Digimon that you more or less start the game with are more than capable of carrying you to the end.
If anything, wild Digimon seem to be weaker stand-ins for anyone who finds themselves with a heavy mortality rate by the end of the game, as a Digimon dies when their human partner does, and so losing a number of your friends can cut your fighting force down by quite a bit. I might have relied on recruiting Digimon more often had I needed to, but I only saw two of my friends brutally killed in front of me on account of my poor leadership.
Takuma and his friends’ emotions influence how their Digimon partners evolve over time (a process called digivolution), creating what could have been a symbiotic connection between the visual novel side of Digimon Survive and the tactical combat. However, the connection only serves the story in how it keys you into each human character’s subconscious desires. Seeing Takuma’s adorable, dinosaur-like Agumon achieve the strength to digivolve into his Mega evolution can lead to different results–a Takuma driven by his moral responsibility to support the group will see Agumon become the dinosaur knight Wargreymon, for example, while a Takuma who only cares about his own survival will witness Agumon transform into the power-hungry cyborg Machinedramon. This insight is reflected across the cast, with each Digimon evolving to mirror their human partner’s desires. But in terms of gameplay, it matters little. The names and animations of the attacks that Agumon’s evolutions can use may change form to form, but their function–that of an all-rounder heavy-hitter–doesn’t vary in any meaningful way based on Takuma’s choices.
Digimon Survive is a misshapen DNA digivolution. Most of the game is this great visual novel, which starts slow but eventually tackles some intriguing themes that are interwoven into one of the most mature Digimon stories ever told. Sometimes the characters can be a little one-note, but each manages to carry aspects of the story in compelling ways, and I wanted to keep pushing through Digimon Survive to unravel each person’s history and ultimately learn why and how they had been transported to another world. But, at the same time, Digimon Survive is regularly dragged down by tedious tactical combat, and it negatively affects other sections of the game too, like exploration and Digimon evolutions. It’s not enough to ruin an otherwise great visual novel, but it does put quite a damper on the whole experience.
Indika Review – The Devil Makes Three
Indika is a hard game to define. It looks like a horror game, but it’s not scary–at least not in the conventional sense. It plays like a third-person puzzle game, but most of the puzzles don’t require much thought. What Indika definitely is, however, is a fascinating psychological examination of faith and doubt that’s supported by remarkable visuals and mature writing. Occasionally, its ambitions get a little unwieldy, but developer Odd Meter’s decision to take on these heady themes and confidently explore nearly all of them is an impressive feat.
You play as Indika, a nun tormented by a demonic voice in her head, as she travels across a nightmarish interpretation of 19th-century Russia to deliver a letter. Most of the game consists of traveling from point A to B, solving a few puzzles, and watching cutscenes, but within these tasks are moments of introspection and self-discovery. Along the way, she meets an escaped convict named Ilya who claims God speaks to him. What ensues is a nuanced exploration of faith and doubt, love and hate, and pleasure and suffering. Both characters believe in the same God; rather than pitting a believer against a nonbeliever, Indika explores the space that exists between two interpretations of the same faith. This specificity allows Odd Meter to delve into different shades of Christianity and examine how the same texts, rituals, and prayers can be bent to ascertain different meanings.
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These frequent philosophical exchanges could have easily come off as overwrought or self-indulgent, but all these musings are in service of the characters and their development over the course of the story. For example, Indika tells Ilya she joined the convent of her own volition, but because her decision was fueled by emotions and experiences that were out of her control, can she really say she became a nun through her own free will? Ilya challenges this notion, and declares that free will is how we rise above our biological dispositions. Reflective conversations like these are key to Indika’s character as she grapples with her faith and attempts to make sense of her life.
It helps that Indika is portrayed by the fantastic Isabella Inchbald, and Louis Boyer embodies Ilya with equal confidence. There’s a raw authenticity and conviction to their performances that bring both characters to life. You can hear the fear and doubt in Indika’s voice and the desperation and hope in Ilya’s. Meanwhile, Silas Carson’s portrayal of the devil is humorous, sadistic, and cordial in his demeanor as he deftly narrates the action. While the writing and acting are great, they are occasionally undermined by awkward animations. Sometimes the action will look a bit too robotic, or dialogue won’t quite sync up with a character’s mouth. These are minor issues overall, but sometimes it was just enough to take me out of a scene.
Nevertheless, Indika is one of the most visually arresting games I’ve ever played. Developer Odd Meter uses framing, color, and lighting to achieve a look and feel that is rarely seen in games. Wide-angle shots often distort Indika’s facial features and warp the background to give the experience a voyeuristic feel. The framing, meanwhile, consistently impresses as it accentuates the action and world. In one section, after being chased by a wolf the size of a truck, the beast takes a tumble and wedges itself in a water wheel. What follows is a subdued conversation between Indika, Ilya, and the devil in her head about whether or not a beast can be sinful, as the camera tracks the dead wolf being dragged underwater by the water wheel. It’s a macabre scene given the context alone, but the stylistic choices allow the tone to meet the moment more effectively than a standard shot/reverse shot conversation would.
Rather than pitting a believer against a nonbeliever, Indika explores the space that exists between two interpretations of the same faith.
These choices aren’t just for show, either. They are bold and sometimes jarring creative decisions that reflect Indika’s inner turmoil as she travels across Russia. There are sections where the world–at least from Indika’s perspective–is split in two. When this happens, an oppressive and discordant synth kicks in as hellish red light soaks the scene. Through prayer, Indika can reforge the world around her and suppress the chaos. To progress, you–and by extension, Indika–must rip apart and merge her world by alternating between Indika’s cacophonous hell and her quiet reality. Although rare, these moments give weight and meaning to Indika’s gameplay as they leverage Indika’s themes of faith and doubt.
The same can’t always be said for the game’s puzzles, though. Most are simple and mundane: Move some boxes around, manipulate a crane, and strategically align lifts and elevators. Puzzles like these make sense in the early hours, as the game familiarizes you with Indika and her menial life. But as her world expands, these bland puzzles start to feel tonally and narratively incongruous as Indika struggles with her faith, especially when some puzzles literally let you tear the world apart, while others have you shove a box around.
With these criticisms in mind, it may seem like this story would be better told as a film or book. What’s fascinating, though, is that Indika clearly understands the medium it inhabits. It brazenly leverages video game tropes to elevate its themes. You’ll earn points for acts of faith, such as performing the sign of the cross at crucial moments, lighting altars, and collecting religious texts. You can then use these points to unlock skills that increase the amount of points Indika can earn. The thing is, these points do nothing. The loading screens even tell you they are useless. They have no discernible value and are simply a shallow way to measure Indika’s faith.
Yet, I didn’t want to miss any of it. I lit every altar, collected every text, and mashed the sign-of-the-cross button (yes, there’s a button) at every opportunity. It’s almost silly to gamify this stuff, but putting Indika through the motions as she builds up an arbitrary “faith” score while she’s actively questioning her faith is brilliant. I grew up religious. I went to church every Sunday and attended Catholic school. There was a distinct period in my life when I was questioning my beliefs, yet I still held on to some of those ingrained rituals. There was a quiet guilt that I couldn’t expunge: a feeling that could only be alleviated by going through the motions. In a way, it feels like Indika is using the language of video games and my understanding of them to reinforce her feelings of faith and doubt. Indika is about the internal struggle of a nun who isn’t entirely sure what she believes anymore, but seeing her cling to tradition–through my actions–is powerful.
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Although Indika does an excellent job exploring its themes of faith and doubt, there’s one subject the game doesn’t handle with the care it requires. In one particular scene near the end of the game, it touches on some uncomfortable territory that–depending on your interpretation of the story and its themes–might feel unnecessary. Up until that point, the evil that exists in the world feels intangible and theoretical. Indika and Ilya talk of hell and demons, but it always feels distant, almost as if God is protecting Indika on her journey. That is, until the final moments of the game, which allude to a sexual assault. The reasoning behind this scene is to test Indika’s faith, but as it stands, the scene in question feels like a means to an end rather than something Odd Meter wanted to properly explore.
Given the Catholic Church’s long and pockmarked history of sexual abuse, it makes sense that it plays such a critical role in Indika, but it’s not examined with the care that is necessary. The scene and what follows are clearly intended to elicit a lot of different emotions and speculation, but when those knee-jerk reactions stem from something so traumatic, it feels unearned. It’s almost as if the game wants you to move on as quickly as it does, which stands out as unusual in a game that is otherwise very thorough in its interrogation of sensitive subject matter. To be clear, Odd Meter doesn’t botch this scene entirely. Atrocity is often the most difficult test of faith, and they had the good sense not to show the assault itself. However, once the scene ends, it feels like Indika is barrelling towards its conclusion, while I was still trying to make sense of what just happened.
I’m often frustrated when developers lean on religious iconography but fail to explore faith in a meaningful way. Some of the greatest works of art exist because of religion, either as an exploration of it, a testament to it, or a denouncement of it. Human history is inextricably tied to religious faith. Yet, outside of a few exceptions, games tend to avoid commenting on religion without obfuscating it behind fake dogmas and fantastical gods. Indika’s direct examination of Christianity allows it to better explore the gray areas of religion and faith that are often lost when the recognizable specifics are swapped with allegorical fiction. And while the execution occasionally falters, its willingness to grapple with these difficult themes, and the conclusions it draws, make Indika a fascinating journey.
Endless Ocean: Luminous Review – Hope You Really Like Fish
Between the advent of cozy games, farm sims, rhythm games, narrative adventures, and more, we’re in something of a golden age of non-violent games. If you want to take a break from shooting and punching and instead just relax with some chill vibes, you have myriad options available to you. Endless Ocean: Luminous is an aquatic take, letting you freely explore the ocean with no danger or violence to speak of whatsoever. It sometimes straddles the line between game and edutainment in ways that could be engaging, but achingly slow progression and a lack of realism leave it feeling washed up.
Scientists say only 5% of the ocean has been explored. The name Endless Ocean, and the unexplored nature of the ocean itself, suggests an incredible degree of possibility and adventure. In practice, though, there actually isn’t all that much to do in Endless Ocean: Luminous. You can take part in a Solo Dive, in which you explore a seemingly randomized map; a Shared Dive, which is just a Solo Dive with friends exploring the same map together online using Nintendo’s Switch Online service (complete with its usual shortcomings); and Story Mode, which gives you short missions consisting of objectives accompanied by a little dialogue.
With this dearth of options, its approach to progression gating further compounds the lack of variety. After the first handful of story missions, the others are locked behind scanning ocean creatures in Shared or Solo dives. To scan you just hold the L button in the direction of sea life until the meter fills, which then gives a detailed look at the creatures in your scan. But the progress gates are set so absurdly high that the novelty wears off quickly. One of the earliest gates is set at 500 scans, which felt high but reasonable. The next was at 1,000, so I had to get another 500. That rubbed me the wrong way. By the time I reached the next gate, set at 2,000–meaning I needed another 1,000 scans–the chill vibes were gone. I was just annoyed. It’s hard to overstate how frustrating it is to spend almost an hour roaming around a randomized map scanning fish, only to exit the map and find I’ve only gained another 200 pips toward my next story goal. Plus, judging by the creature log, there are just under 600 species of sea life total in the game. Why would you need to scan 2,000 times to see a mid-game story mission?
Not that there’s much story to tell. You’re a new diver accompanied by an AI companion, exploring phenomena of glowing fish, and sometimes you’re accompanied by a brash (but actually cowardly) fellow diver named Daniel. The story missions are short and largely uneventful. Sometimes they end so quickly that I was genuinely surprised. Other times, they feel like a glorified tutorial, which makes it that much stranger to gate it behind so much free-roaming playtime. At least one of them is just a cutscene with no actual diving gameplay whatsoever. Occasionally, the story mode will deliver something unexpected and fun, like a massive or fantastical species of fish, but those moments are few and far between. There is a meta-story involving an ancient relic with 99 slots, which you fill in by discovering certain artifacts scattered randomly throughout dives or by fulfilling achievement objectives, but it feels more like a busywork checklist than a real story-driver.
And because the scanning requirements are so excessive, small inconveniences feel more impactful than they should. It’s easy to pick up a fish you’ve already scanned while trying to register a new one. Every time you scan any fish, it zooms in on them for a moment, forcing you to hit B to back out of the detailed view. If you scan multiple species at once, they’re grouped in a listing together, which is meant to be a convenience feature–but new species aren’t prioritized in the list, so you need to scroll down to find any with a “???” designation to mark them as discovered. If you don’t, the unidentified fish remains unidentified. If you scan a large school of the same fish, they’ll all be listed separately. In Solo Dives, the map is slowly charted in segments as you explore, but keeping an eye on the map to make sure I was filling in the little squares meant I could fail to notice a fish swimming by, or I could miss a depth change that may reward me for diving deeper.
Your dives get you experience points to level up, which increases your dive capacity, which you can use to tag sea creatures to swim alongside you. At first, these only include the smallest of sea creatures, but as you build capacity, you can swim with larger ones that are used to solve riddles. A stone tablet might challenge you to come back with a particular type of turtle or a fish that “sails as it swims.” Even then, though, the solutions are too rigid. When I returned to the tablet with a “Sailfish,” nothing happened, presumably because it was not the specific solution the riddle had in mind.
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In addition to story progress and dive capacity, leveling up also opens new but severely limited tiers of customization options. Those include palette swaps for your diver or individual SCUBA suit parts, different stickers to apply to your profile, and emotes. There isn’t even a different helmet or mouthpiece, just the default in different colors.
It feels as if the goal was to create a virtual, interactive aquatic museum, and the variety of sea life does support this nicely. It actually is exciting the first time you see a new species of sea turtle or an extinct megalodon shark, even if you know that it can’t hurt you. But the mechanical underpinnings get in the way of its potential as a museum too. For example, every species of fish has a blurb with some interesting marine facts, complete with a reading of it from your AI companion. This could be a cool and educational feature, but when you’re pressed to perform thousands of scans, it’s hard to bother listening to every blurb. There also isn’t an indicator for when you’ve already heard a blurb, and since you’ll see species repeated a lot, it’s nearly impossible to remember which ones you have or haven’t heard–even if you can tell dozens of roughly similar-looking fish apart, which I can’t.
In part due to its non-violent nature, Endless Ocean does not present the depths very realistically, even to my layman’s eyes. Your oxygen is unlimited, and you don’t need to worry about temperature or depth. You’ll never freeze or get decompression sickness or drown. More aggressive species will never attack you. Species of fish seem to be scattered more or less randomly around the map, which leads to oddities like finding large-scale creatures in shallow waters, or discovering deep-sea dwellers in middle-depths instead of the deepest, almost pitch-black parts of the ocean where they actually reside. And while this is likely a limitation of the Switch hardware, the fish, coral, and ocean floor themselves aren’t rendered photorealistically enough to instill a sense of awe and majesty.
It seems Endless Ocean wants you to spend most of your time diving with friends to pass the time. The Shared Dives option is the first one on the menu, after all, and it is easier to fulfill the simple procedural objectives when you’re paired with other divers. But like most Switch games, you join friendly games using a digital code, and there isn’t built-in voice chat, so you can’t really treat it like an underwater virtual lobby. Even if you could, though, scanning fish with your friends would not sustain the group fun for anyone but the most devoted of sea-life enthusiasts.
Endless Ocean: Luminous could have been a realistic SCUBA sim with all the treacherous hazards that real underwater divers need to consider, a relaxing chill-vibes game that’s mostly about finding fish with your friends, or a story-driven game centered around discovering awesome and even extinct underwater beasts. It has pieces of all of those, but it doesn’t commit to any of them. Instead, it takes the enormity and glory of earth’s largest and most mysterious region and turns exploring it into a dull, repetitive chore.
