Mad Father Written by: LiteralFall308 (9.25/10 Pandas)

      I have been honored by my good friend, BrawlingCupid, to be the first guest writer and to balance her book review, she asked me to kick off the gaming portion of this blog. I recently played and fell in love with Mad Father. So, let’s begin.

       Mad Father is a free-ware horror/puzzle game created by Sen (of Miscreant’s Room) using Wolf RPG Editor. An English translation of the game was made by vgboy (or, alternatively, vgperson), the translator of such great games as Ib and The Witch’s House.

        In Mad Father, you play as a young German girl named Aya Drevis. The game takes place a year after her mother’s death in her mansion of a home, where she lives with her pet rabbit named Snowball, her father, known only as the Doctor, and his assistant, Maria. After a bit of intro to the characters’ history and a brief chance to get acquainted with the controls, the gameplay begins in Aya’s bedroom where she has is awoken by her father’s scream. Upon leaving her bedroom to help her father, she stumbles upon two corpses that try to, you guessed it, kill her. She runs back to her bedroom and finds a “red-eyed stranger” who tells her to call him Ogre. Ogre tries persuading her to leave but Aya is adamant to save her father. In her quest to save her father, she comes across several unearthly creatures, many evil, some... well… polite enough to get the job done.  During her search for her father, Aya is confronted by the victims of her father’s work and is forced to face the reality of what she has chosen to ignore throughout her short lifetime.

       The game is played by keyboard controls only. (I was a little disappointed when I attempted using the mouse on a few tasks, but that’s just me being a dork! Hahaha!) You move Aya about with the arrow keys and, once acquired, you can equip and un-equip the chainsaw using C or shift. Enter or space interacts with objects and people and insert or 0 opens the inventory. All in all, pretty simple and straight forward.

       The soundtrack throughout the game is beautifully composed and each composition evokes just the right emotion to go with the scene it’s used in conjunction with. For instance, the music played while learning about Maria’s past is sad and slow, evoking the right emotions to connect to Maria as a deeper character than just a home wrecker. Also, the music for his conversations with Aya is slow and provides an even more mysterious tone to Ogre’s already bizarre appearance and unexplainable knowledge of what is occurring in the Dresden’s home. However, I found the individual sound effects, the squishing of the dead bodies and moans of the corpses for example, to begin getting a little repetitive about halfway through the game.

        Always my favorite to discuss: the graphics. Now, personally I prefer either modern, highly detailed graphics, like in Assassin’s Creed III, or extremely unique or artistic graphics, as in Okami or Limbo. However, even I can appreciate the good old-fashioned appearance of this game, especially with the character portraits, which I found amazing given it was made with an RPG maker.

        The game is pretty straightforward, literally, with only one path to travel through most of the game and only variances coming into play near the very end. For the most part, it’s easy enough, however, there were a few challenges, one of which being the attacking corpse in the Guest Rooms, which took me a few tries to figure out and then a few more to complete successfully. XD

I’ve got to say, the only downside that seriously affected my rating of this game was the dialogue between characters. I felt it was a little slow and drawn out, and, sometimes, the transition between lines or different characters took longer than necessary. I felt this slowed the gameplay and began to take the focus away from the plot itself.

         All-in-all, though, Mad Father is an amazingly well made game and I highly recommend it to anyone that can appreciate a few jump scares. With a good plot line, amazing music, and the right balance of challenge and surprise, Mad Father get a whopping 9.25 pandas! (Would that be 9 pandas and a leg? Oh no! Poor Panda!!! D: haha Just kidding!)