Chaos;Child Review

Chaos;Child was published by PQUBE and is available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.

The story starts 6th November, 2009. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake has devastated Tokyo. Downtown Tokyo was demolished as a result of this catastrophic event, the city was in flames, buildings fell, people were terrified of another disaster happening. The final death toll was 3,851, with another 30,927 people injured. This event was known as the Shibuya earthquake.

The story centers around Takuru, who is a high-schooler in Shibuya that helps out at his school newspaper club. This is the only place that Takuru belongs: He isn't very popular in his school however he believes in his mind that he has a normal life. While investigating two murders for his newspaper, he discovers that the case is in fact a copycat from the previous game in the franchise, titled Chaos;Head. This new game shares the same universe so it makes sense story wise for them to reference the previous entry. However, you don't need to know anything about Chaos;Head as this is a whole new cast of characters with only minor details being revisited. You and your best friend Serica explore the murder mystery together.

This title isn't so much a game as it is a movie, as you don't really have any opportunities to control your character. That is, apart from choosing how you feel in certain situations via the Delusion trigger system, which is okay with me considering the story is the best part of the experience. I would compare this game more to the Telltale series of games than any other type of games.

With that said, the Delusion trigger system is one of the most stupid game mechanics I have ever experienced, especially since the narrative is a murder mystery. Basically, this system triggers at a certain point in the story and allows the player to choose between a positive or negative outlook. This is all well and good, except you can skip these parts, making the whole system stupid and irrelevant in the first place. Sure, they change the endings and branch your story out down different paths, but being able to skip the choices is a poor decision, as only a minority of players will experience all the different options. To me, this system is not a good change for this genre of games and I would rather have the options of choosing dialogue lines or making the protagonist do something.

The art style is very plain anime, however they did a surprisingly good job with environments, characters and even deaths. Considering this is a murder mystery, I had first assumed that the art direction was wrong for the dark theme. Boy, was I wrong! In fact, the art style makes the game even better, by making the death scenes stand out. I had never imagined how gruesome and terrifying an anime character could be... That is, when they're lying there, covered in their own blood with their throat slit. Due to this, I just couldn't wait to experience the next death scene... For review purposes, of course. I was mostly impressed by how different these moments looked from other anime style games and novels.

Even the audio impressed me, from small details like creaking floorboards to the score that plays throughout the game. It was all incredible and really drew me in, whether it was the creepy music with the drums to the light and cheery sounds of a piano, it was was all pretty unique from scene to scene and I can't praise the audio enough.