In the indiest of the indie gaming scene, the RPG Maker community, there are many amazing hidden gems. "Imaginary Friends" is not one of them.
Story 1/5
Your old imaginary friend is jealous, so you go into a warped world that reflects your childhood.
I did not find the story engaging whatsoever. A game about imaginary friends can be really interesting, but this story did nothing with it I couldn’t see coming. It felt neither original nor imaginative; After maybe the first thirty minutes I already knew how it was going to go down.
The story becomes a dead horse so beaten it no longer even resembles an animal by the end. The main character, Hailey, is lonely, she had trouble making friends, so she made an imaginary friend, yadda yadda, (it’s hammered in so hard I just wanted to skip any of the little story clips because I already knew what was happening.) It especially bothered me when a little play in a gymnasium was just word-for-word of something I had previously read. There couldn’t have been anything more interesting there?
The writing wasn’t bad, but I felt zero investment in the characters. Possibly because of the lifelessness of Hailey. I know she’s supposed to be a sort of dry, sarcastic hermit, but she’s not even humorous to counteract the blandness.
She does change to be a better person, I guess, but that is at the very end. There’s no witnessing her development, her thought process, or any sort of emotion. It’s just, boom, suddenly she gets home and is nicer to her mom and wants to make more friends or something. At least that’s the ending I got. I did not care enough about the game to play it again for more endings.
Graphics 3/5
Just like the writing, the graphics aren’t… bad. However, they are underwhelming. I won’t go into specific critiques on the style, I'm sure plenty of people find the art style appealing, however, I personally find it amateur. Also in my opinion, I think mixing smooth graphics with pixels just feels out of place, (and shouldn't be done unless it's meant to feel that way).
The biggest problem I had with the graphics was the facial expressions—there is simply not much variety. Most of the time I was just left with Hailey’s Resting Bitch Face, even in times where it was not appropriate, such as immediately after her friend was kidnapped. I did really like the facial expressions of the character Oliver, but I would have expected more from the lead rather than the support.
The face of an invested hero.
Audio 4/5
The music was good, and so were the sound effects. Not really anything to critique, except that some tracks seemed either very short or too repetitive. I muted it a few times because the repetition was driving me insane, but perhaps if there was less needless backtracking it wouldn't have droned on for so long.
Gameplay 2/5
The game is really just fetch quests and scavenger hunts. Sometimes a game will do them well, but this one does not. How many times do I have to walk back and forth across the whole map till I can get the story to progress? I never really felt fulfilled when I finished a puzzle or a fetch quest—I just felt like my time was wasted. Making it so that the player has to check every single bookcase in a library to find vague clues and one of the pieces of the puzzle, is not “exploration.” Having to check every single patch of flowers that all look the same to find whatever one looks the prettiest to a "lovestruck scarecrow" is not engaging gameplay—it's just tedium.
There were also plenty of unfair deaths. Here are a few examples: You walk into a kitchen to find a bowl of candy on the table. Enticing, yes? Well how about you take some, could be useful!
Guess not! You try to walk to a different room and immediately die.
Another involves an unearthed dog skeleton. There's nothing else to do in that area, but there's an open grave. Again, enticing, yes? Well how about you look inside, could find something useful!
But nope! You find a rusty key inside, then the dog immediately attacks you with a one-hit death. I find out eventually after some backtracking through a couple maps that I had to find a bone underneath a bed. Bed, bone... Those two have nothing to do with one another. Exploration is key in many RPG games, but this game punishes you with immediate death if you don't explore in the right order.There's also gameplay elements that appear to not exist for challenge or fun, but just to prolong the running time. A naked doll will ask you to get her an outfit as a fetch quest, and you eventually find a closet filled with three dresses. You can only carry one at a time, so you take one out and show it to her, only for her to tell you that you didn't pick the correct colour. She'll just ask you to get another one, but she never tells you which colour she wants. So you just go back and forth till she decides the one you picked was pretty enough. That's not fun. It's boring and annoying.
Granted, I did really like the gymnasium, where you have to place items to match their corresponding shadows. It was an interesting idea that I felt was original, and I could quickly pick it up.
Worlds 4/5
I’m a little confused by the choices made for the different areas you visit. There’s a crayon-drawn barn and forest, dollhouse, some fantasy cloud world, and an elementary school.
Hailey is brought there in the first place because of the imaginary friend, but it's never explained how or why. What was his plan? I suppose you could say it’s “left to interpretation” but that feels like too lazy of an answer. All we know is that he's angry that Hailey forgot about him. That's not even a spoiler, because it's beyond obvious.
Oh, another point that I will mention that I did like was the side scroller movement on the dollhouse. Nice touch.
Technicals 4/5
I’m only adding this bit here because I have a couple of grievances. There was a proof reader in the credits, yet seeing the word “scarp” just takes me out of the immersion (at least what little there was of it). There are also doors or transfer tiles that don’t work right. Such as, exiting the door of the hangman room transfers you a tile below the door on the outside. And in the south west part of the cloud world, you can be walking in the middle of a path, and end up on the left on the next map. The game had a good amount of testers, and no one found those issues? Making transfer tiles work correctly is one of the absolute essentials, and it's easy to test and fix in RPG Maker. I know it’s small and nitpicking, but details like that I think are inexcusable for an officially released game.
Atmosphere & Themes 1/5
This game simply tries too hard. After the first hour I couldn’t stop saying to myself, “This is like 'Ib', but not scary.” I think I had a teensy bit of a scare once or twice, such as when monsters from inside of a TV chase you. It's frightening because they actually follow you through doors, and it gives a real sense of tension and urgency, but besides that all I remember the parts that I felt were so damn forced. Such as, the bloody heart room, or the doll being killed. When I saw those I just thought, “Welp, that’s unfortunate. Moving on.”
In the beginning, you’re in a large busy place with your family then things get a little creepy and suddenly everyone’s gone—just like the beginning of "Ib," where you are with your family in an art gallery.
Then there’s the scribbly drawings becoming the environment—just like the ending of "Ib" where you traverse several maps entirely drawn in crayon. Creepy doll head in a room filled with boxes? Wonder where I’ve seen that before. And blonde-haired, blue-eyed, innocent-looking kid coming up to you, saying that they’re also alone and have been trying to find people, but turn out to be not what they seem? I mean come on. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.
Final Score 2/5
What makes a good psychological horror game is subtlety. And this game is anything but subtle. It throws its story in your face when it really doesn’t need to; it has such a contrived and predictable plot if I had skipped through half of the dialogue I wouldn’t have missed anything; the characters were never engaging enough for me to care about them, and they didn’t have any real development either.
I know a lot of people love this game, but I just can’t see why.
