BAD END THEATER: an indie game
Let’s get the technical details out of the way so that we can get to the juicier bits: BAD END THEATER is a visual novel developed by NomnomNami. The indie game, available on Steam and itch.io, has over forty endings, one ‘true’ ending (which I am yet to reach), and four characters you can play as. The playtime can range between one to three hours for all the endings. It features over six hundred stunning illustrations, and the game bundle that you purchase comes with a game art collection PDF file.
The Gameplay
All the endings are bad. If not bad, they’re sad. Something goes wrong, does not work out, is left hanging. The four characters that you can choose between are: the Hero, the Maiden, the Underling, and the Overlord. They all belong to the same story line.
The story line is simple at the beginning. To ‘finish’ the game, you will have to play the story again and again because only as you play, you unlock characteristics of each of the characters. And when you have multiple characteristics unlocked for the four players, you can pick and choose between the characteristics to progress, and find newer endings. And this is my favorite thing about the video game — to progress, you need to learn more about each character.
For example, here in the screenshot two characteristics are unlocked for each of the characters. I can pick and choose what my characters want to display in next play of the story. The story will change accordingly, and say if I am playing as the Overlord, I might unlock another characteristic of theirs according to my selections.
If you think it can get confusing:
The game provides you with a flowchart of your choices for each character which makes it easy to see the choices that have potential to unlock another ending. It doesn’t make the game ‘easier’ in any way, but it gives you a sort of a navigation map.
The more you learn about the four characters, the more you progress and newer paths unlock. However, each route (that is, each playthrough with a new setting) is pretty short. It can range from about a minute to seven minutes depending on your speed. Thus, it is rather fast paced. Although it features over sixteen thousand words of script, each distinct dialogue is only a line or two, so you go by them pretty fast. The sixteen thousand words is then a good reflection of the several branches of the story, however it does not do enough to fully and thoroughly rope you into each character’s life.
The Game
It is gory, unsettling, and surprising.
This PC Gamer Review describes the game saying:
Recent release Bad End Theater plays with the idea that Bad Ends are to be avoided, or that they’re bad at all. It does that by embracing the puzzle-like metagame of the visual novel, where players like to map out and tweak the world for precisely the ending they’d like.
Oh, and fair warning: The art is cute. The story, however, is pretty violent. It’s definitely for adults.
I have not been able to describe the actual storyline because I do not know how to without specifying my choices for the characters and their characteristics, but I will give a go: There is the demon Overlord who lives in their castle right beside a town where lives the Hero. The rather unbothered Overlord has an Underling. The town has a Maiden who was always told that they are ‘destined’ to be taken away by the Overlord.
The story is simple enough. But I would say it is one of my complaints as well: the story is simple. As a storyteller myself, at various points in the visual novel I thought to myself ‘writing it this way would have made so much more sense/have added depth to the story’, which isn’t always a good feeling if it happens more than a couple of times.
I would say that the artwork, the aesthetic, and the mechanics were the best parts of the visual novel/video game for me.
The game, still, is GREAT
I had to write down the flaws I saw with it. Because, well, this is sort of a review and I wanted to document my feelings as I am playing it. The facts that the storyline is simple, that I still could not explain it, and that it has mechanics that I had personally not encountered anywhere else in a visual novel developed in RenPy mean that it is worth playing and is also a treat.
It is cute, horror-y, indie, sad, and great looking. If like me you also have attention span issues when consuming media, it is great for that as well. Since each play ends in under five minutes. Have I mentioned it has great art?
Find my About Page here.