1535: El Psy Kongroo

I’ve already written on the subject at some length over on USgamer, but on the offchance you haven’t paid us a visit recently, I thought I’d wax lyrical about my initial experiences with Steins;Gate here, too.

Steins;Gate, for the unfamiliar, is a visual novel from popular developer Nitroplus, whose name you may remember from the excellent “giant robots fight Cthulhu” visual novel Deus Machina Demonbane that I played a while back. Unlike Demonbane, it’s not an eroge — though Demonbane’s sex scenes were, for the most part, more horrifying and uncomfortable than anything else — but it’s still an unabashedly adult affair, just one without any graphic uglies-bumping. It’s an enormously well-respected title, known better to most people in the West through its apparently excellent anime adaptation, and an official English localisation has been a long time coming. But come it finally has, thanks to localisation and visual novel specialists JAST USA — one of my favourite publishers in the world for the last few years — and finally everyone can get in on the action.

Steins;Gate is a science fiction tale that, for the few hours I’ve played so far, centres largely around the concept of time travel and parallel worlds. The main character is a gloriously chaotic individual afflicted with chuunibyou (“middle school second-grade syndrome”) — he’s utterly convinced that he’s a mad scientist and that he’s being pursued by a shadowy group called The Organization. Whether or not his delusions turn out to be true or not remains to be seen, but it’s certainly an interesting setup; much like Demonbane put the player in the shoes of a protagonist that was a character in their own right rather than an obvious blank-slate cipher, so too does Steins;Gate.

This time around, the narrative influences aren’t drawn from Lovecraft, but instead from popular science and science fiction, both Eastern and Western. The game makes frequent references to real-life concepts, particularly with regard to topics like time travel and parallel world theories as well as the real-life modern-day myth of time traveller John Titor. The game makes unsubtle changes to things it mentions throughout (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure becomes Juju’s Bizarre Adventure, for example, while the IBM 5100 computer Titor supposedly travelled back in time to retrieve becomes an IBN 5100), presumably to avoid breaching about a bajillion copyrights, but it’s always clear what it really means. There’s a constantly updated glossary you can refer to as you play, too, that gradually fills up with a wealth of information ranging from Japanese cultural tidbits to scientific and technology history.

It’s clearly a setting that has had a lot of thought poured into it. In many ways, although the premise, style and genre are completely different, Steins;Gate reminds me of Aselia the Eternal in the sense that the writers obviously had a very clear vision of how their version of the world worked and how the various characters fit into it all. This was very true in the case of Aselia the Eternal, which I maintain has one of the most well-realised, well-depicted fantasy worlds of any game I’ve ever played, despite the inherent restrictiveness of the visual novel genre, and is already shaping up to be very true in the case of Steins;Gate. Nitroplus’ title goes a step further with all the supplementary information you can refer to as you play — not to mention the fact that clicking the “Internet” option on your in-game phone opens an actual website for the main character’s “Future Gadget Lab”.

And speaking of the phone, the means through which you interact with Steins;Gate is bizarre and intriguing. Rather than making the usual binary choices that visual novels tend to present you with, Steins;Gate instead makes use of the protagonist’s phone as its main means of interaction. As you progress, you’ll receive email messages from characters and have the option to respond to them or not; you’ll also receive phone calls and have the option of answering them or not answering them, and various other things will happen in and around your phone. The choices you make as to whether or not you engage with these various distractions determine the paths down which the plot proceeds, giving the flow of the story a much more “natural” feel than some visual novels with extremely obvious decision points. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

Anyway. I’m but a short way into the overall plot as a whole as I type this and thus there’s not a lot more I can say thus far save for the fact that I’m really enjoying it and looking forward to seeing where it goes. It’s an immediately intriguing, compelling tale with some fascinating, unconventional characters and an utterly gorgeous art style, so if you’re looking for a new interactive story to delve into, I’d encourage you to check it out and grab a copy as soon as you can.