199X starts off with a trigger warning. Yeah, it’s going to be that kind of game: a homebrew RPG Maker affair with stock graphics and a preachy message that aims to make the player feel like an awful human being.
Not even fifteen minutes in, you find yourself trapped in a hospital that an invisible narrator won't let you leave until you’ve explored five nearby hot spots. Which is fine; this is a thing that happens. Only 199X demands more of you. If you want to do something as monumental as go outside, you need to advance every dialogue option for every hot spot, revisiting and exhausting every conversation bracket available because it’s very important you take the time to digest every little thing the game has to say. Only then are you permitted to leave. I’ve been in these kinds of situations before, so I settled down and prepared myself for a couple of hours of being arrogantly lectured by a clumsily constructed video game. Only, that never happened.
There’s a saving grace to 199X: it builds around a reasonably clever setup, and and it is brilliantly written. You control 20-something Clara. And that, as the game’s byline goes, is the problem. You’re not actually playing as Clara, but rather as yourself, exerting an external force that guides her every move like an ethereal puppeteer.
For her part, Clara wakes up in a hospital room without the ability to move by her own power and, after an understandable bit of panic, seems to take to her situation quite well. Though you interact with each other through the game’s limited conversation branches, the exchanges are lively and full or personality. An early test of your newly-hijacked body asks you to wander over and examine a fire extinguisher. Should you continue to enforce a keen interest in fire safety equipment, that moment develops into an in-joke between the two of you.
It’s a real compliment to the writing that Clara is nothing more than a linear set of scripts, but still develops enough artificial personality for something as socially structured as an in-joke to organically build itself. Maybe you’ll never even find this particular abnormality if you either don’t go out of your way to try and troll your on-screen partner, or show disdain at constantly poking fire extinguishers. But that’s fine. Once you get out of the stumbling intro within the hospital, you’re no longer forced to digest every scrap of script in order to advance. Instead, you’re free to abuse your control as you desire. Eventually making it back to Clara’s apartment prompts a meeting with a band that occupies the same building she does. She’s not especially keen on them, and you can follow her prompts to make their conversation as short as possible. Or, you can be a dick and force her to sing a few bars of “Video Killed the Radio Star,” so they redouble their efforts to recruit her as a singer.
Despite its short run time of between one or two hours, little touches like this help you quickly build a relationship with Clara. She asks you to close your eyes while she changes her clothes and suggests you're a bit of a creeper if you try to get her to interact with a toilet. Of course, it’s all just a trap for when the game slowly starts to sour and things begin to fall apart.
There are plenty of signs there’s something wrong with Clara (a voice in her head forces her to sing or to fondle fire extinguishers, after all), but she lives in a once prosperous town now nearing complete abandonment. The hospital in which she wakes is barren, aside from a lone doctor you may or may not murder, consisting largely of rows and rows of empty beds and unanswered questions. 199X takes place over the course of seven days, with each day seeing the town grow a little emptier.
Personal relationships sour, and new world views are explored, accepted and despised. 199X’s short tale is clever, but not particularly unpredictable. It has noticeable shortcomings that are often saved by a sense of self awareness and confident writing. It has a snarky edge it really needed because, no matter how well words are spun, it still retains all the usual RPG Maker faults and then some. Did anyone ever truly think no one would notice the game’s houses are made out of ceiling tiles? It’s a bizarre place to live. Which is fitting in a way, because Clara’s predicament is anything but ordinary -- hers is an odd tale that’s not really even her own. She shares the focus with you, making you just as big a part of things falling to pieces around you as she is. It’s her world you’re visiting, but there are consequences attached to your stay.
