Long time no see, everyone! While this past summer was busy, I still managed to get dragged deep into my nostalgia per my summer tradition. For instance, I was brought way back to middle school around this time last year and it happened again with a different series.
For this article though, I’m blasting back to 2015 for a nostalgia shared by only a few people.
Today I’m talking about an RPG called “The Gray Garden” that was released in 2012 by Deep Sea Prisoner, though the creator is more commonly known as Mogeko.
It’s a long story-based game surrounding a world called, well, the Gray Garden where angels and demons reside in peace along with the world’s respective God and Devil.
The game stars a demon girl named Yosafire and a band of three other main girls named Froze, Macarona and Rawberry. For the first quarter of the game, everything is peaceful and it plays less like an RPG and more like a visual novel with interactive aspects to it.
Eventually, the plot kicks off with a different world known as the Flame World invading the one with our protagonists. From there, the girls go on an adventure to get back home after being kidnapped in order to help save their world.
Overall, this is my favorite game of Mogeko’s in spite of it being their oldest one out of three total. My opinions on this game hang on a heavy balance even if I adore it and still think fondly of it to this day.
For the good qualities, I want to start off with the style: it’s cute and pretty nicely polish art-wise. Sprites are pixelated and the environments perfectly display what they must. The music is also well done and it gets me pumped for fights while also managing to be atmospheric at the right times.
However, the real reason I adore this game is for the characters: many of them are wonderfully multi-faceted and get good development over the course of this eight hour adventure. Yosafire and specifically the devil (named Kcalb) strike a particular chord in me, though that may be in conjunction with the fact I have a friend who is a superfan of Kcalb that makes me love him more.
On the other side, there are a few negatives I can describe. One such issue is the pacing, which is excessively slow and I know has made a few of my friends quit playing before it got to the best part. While the character introduction and peace is important to make the impact of it all crumbling more emphasized, it doesn’t work as well as it could. Mogeko isn’t the best at telling stories and, honestly, their games could be shorter if they cut some of the extra unnecessary fluff out.
The more pressing matter though is the content included: the game is rated R-15, which is essentially an 18+ game due to sexual content. It’s part of the reason I wouldn’t actively buy something to support the creator: they create media that is incredibly inappropriate and horrifying at times that ruin the rest of what they’ve done by using their characters like that for no reason.
Overall, I do enjoy “The Gray Garden” in terms of watching more than playing. To ignore the bad content in it would be irresponsible as a player and fan of the game, so I can’t entirely recommend it to people without explaining it a little first.
Erika Brandenburg
Arts and Entertainment Editor