Anna: Miles of What the Fuckery
24 Dec 2015
This is only the second review I’ve made, so I can’t really claim to be breaking any sort of pattern by reviewing an old game with mixed reception that I can only say I personally enjoyed, but damn it all that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Take that, hypothetical pattern. So lets pick apart Anna - a single player point and click-ish atmospheric horror game. Actually, let’s pick it apart twice. In a move I wouldn’t really expect from a small studio like Dream Painters, the game was redone to improve some of the worse problems such as slow clunky movement, frustrating menus, unfathomable story logic, and no way to lose. So why even review the old version? Well while the story may be as loopy as the product of a spirograph machine operated by Michael J Fox, it had an odd sort of charm for being a type of horror that just put the player in a state of constant unease, worsened by the insane actions needed to advance the storyline and giving the impression more of an ominous dream than direct fear.
Before we get any farther, let’s get the one consistent problem out of the way. Anna starts off by demanding a user name and password. This type of DRM sucks. It sucks worse when it’s a login to an account you’ll never use for anything other than a single game. It sucks bad enough I have to verbally truncheon a game I like with the metaphorical disembodied horse cock of DRM. With that done, it’s time for the review within a review. A witty literary device within plays, and an annoyance game reviewers get to inflict on their audiences without any sort of legal repercussion.
The game starts off loud, and the only part of that you can change is the music volume which doesn’t help when it’s the ambiance that killed my ears. Once you’ve got the sound levels in check, the music does have a decent charm to it, and pleasant enough to listen to on its own. I’m not terribly picky about high resolution anything so long as the art style works, and it certainly does. Unfortunately, the movement has a very strange flaw to it in that your walk speed is reduced whenever your camera is not pointed forward relative to its angle. Put more simply, looking at your feet means you forget how to walk. Next, while the menu works alright, the way the player interacts with everything feels a bit clunky. As one would guess by a point at click style of game, the will be many clicks. When each of those clicks to interact pulls up more options, even when all you want to do is pick up the obviously take able object, it can get annoying. Maybe being able to hit keys for everything has made me lazy, but having to move my mouse two times for an action? Unthinkable. Lastly without going into specific story or puzzles, the overarching logic behind your actions is nearly nonexistant. I took it as plus, but in reality it just means more wandering around with no clue what to do until you completely throw reason out the window and just start intentionally trying the things that by all rights should not work. By the end, you have bits of story narrated by a voice in your head, a few memories, some delusions, and the revelations of the dress god you smeared with baby blood. If that isn’t clear enough to explain exactly what the story meant, you know what I felt like the first time around.
Pretty soon after I had finished with Anna and I had finally pieced enough scraps together to come up with what I thought the plot might have been, the updated Anna Extended was released as a free update to the game. Yep, what was pretty much an entire overhaul of a $10 game with some success came out for free shortly after it launched and directly addressed a large chunk of problems players had with the game. So what in particular changed? If you want a technical answer, the controls, how the plot is presented, puzzle logic, game length, and added a failure state. Technical is boring though, so we’ll go through things as they’re experienced. On loading the game, it looks the same, is the same volume, and has the same menu but opens with a pile of dialog. Next, the observant player will notice controls don’t suck anymore. Left click picks up, hold left click drags, and right click inspects. Next up, the opening puzzle isn’t the result of a fevered dream’s logic. Things happen in logical enough order to at least get engaged with the story. Last bit from the intro is an intuition section adding plot puzzles to game puzzles. Combine plot points the player learns and stores to get the next step just in case they missed something by not having the same breed of crazy the developers had while writing the story. I should also mention two important non technical changes - adding some decent horror events and the failure state. In original Anna, there were periodic and random horror events bearing some or no relevance to the plot. In the remake, those events were ramped up and can be pretty damn unnerving to the unexpecting player. Not really a scientific measure, but what more can be said about horror? It got to me, and it’ll probably get to you too. Now this last point was an odd one, and a bit semantic in nature, but the change is welcome. Certain events will make you lose your sanity which acts as health. Lose your mind and get the lost your mind ending. Sounds like a lose state, and it is. Just one more layer of pressure while trying to figure out puzzles that may be more sane, but only puts them barely within the limits of what the most fevered human brain might come up with rather than the toenail scratchings of a paranoid schizophrenic being contacted by river satan.
I’ve gone over the bones of the game, the flaws, and a bit of where it shines so far, but not really why I liked it enough to write about it. This game is a rare sort of horror. The jump scares, the tense moment to moment gameplay - this isn’t what makes it memorable. It’s atmospheric, but the sort of atmosphere that just doesn’t really sit right. It’s like an itch you can’t find, and it makes you crazier and crazier as you try to pin it down. It’s a sense of something being wrong, prolonged and slowly intensified until you’re jumping at every breeze. Even the plot just fucks your mind more and more as you try to understand it. Sure in the full version, you might have enough of an answer to satisfy yourself, but in the back of your mind there will still be that doubt that it’s not really enough. The things that shocked you might be just the tip of something much worse. That’s enough gushing for now. Just play it if you have $10 to spend on games. Play it, and go “Huh.” In the end, isn’t that what we really want out of life? More metaphorical dark corners to be suspicious of.
Buy Anna Extended Edition on Steam.