26.8 hours played
Written 5 days ago
[i]Originally posted on [url=https://www.dragon-quill.net/rainbow-billy-curse-of-the-leviathan/]Dragon Quill.[/url] Comments are enabled there.[/i]
This is a cute kids' game of the "experimenting with nonviolent gameplay" genre. It reminds me a lot of both [i]UnderTale[/i] and my own [i]Flawed Crystals[/i]. The overall structure is essentially, "What if when you spared enemies in [i]UnderTale[/i] they joined your party?" A set of recruited enemies are drawn randomly from a deck in each round, and you can summon a certain number per turn. Outside of battle, you can level up your friendship through the standard video game relationship strategy of bribing them with gifts and food.
The plot is a standard Saturday-morning-cartoon-esque premise: An evil monster has drained all color from the world because he wants to remove the hero's "rainbow heart" and make everything conform to normalcy. If that sounds like very queer subtext, you may be surprised to learn it is actually queer [i]text[/i]; the protagonist is textually nonbinary, and many of the recruitable characters are gay or nonbinary and explicitly struggle with queerphobia. I'm pleased we have gotten to a point where kids' media can discuss this stuff outright instead of needing to obfuscate everything behind metaphor and allegory.
Your goal is therefore to "recolor" the world's inhabitants. This is represented by enemies' health bars being various types of colors, and every ally you summon can "attack" with one type of color to gradually fill it out. However, enemies' colors are initially hidden, and this is where things get interesting. Every round before summoning your creatures, you have to play therapist by talking to the enemy about their psychological problems; favorable responses will reveal some of their hidden colors, while unfavorable responses will give them a free attack.
However, I felt this was the weakest part of the game. It is almost always obvious which options are correct (the choices are almost always "be nice" vs. "blatantly antagonize them"), and to make things worse, your slate of options appears to be semi-random with a lot of canned lines that repeat across encounters, making a lot of them feel like non-sequitors. It overall felt more like I was just telling them whatever they wanted to hear rather than genuinely connecting with them. This wasn't helped by even the shallowest platitudes being ludicrously effective; I lost count of the number of times enemies responded to the most basic advice with "No one ever told me that before!" in complete seriousness. (The real fantasy of this game is people listening to your arguments instead of digging in their heels, I guess.) You then drag them to your Therapy Boat (which is literally called Friend-Ship) and force them to be BFFs with everyone else, and if you feel like it you can bribe them with gifts to learn their tragic backstory that explains their neuroses.
This writing is all incredibly basic Therapy 101 stuff; every single enemy's story is "I have (textbook psychological issue) because I'm (poor/bullied/insecure/PTSD)," which does get tiring after a while. (I also did have to roll my eyes at how many of their insecurities were solved with, "It's okay, everyone here is a perfect friend who loves you unconditionally!") It doesn't help that there are a [i]ton[/i] of creatures (60), many of whom are extremely similar. I'd have preferred if we had half as many with twice the depth. [i]However[/i], given the game is targeted at kids, I don't think this is necessarily a problem. Everyone has to learn Therapy 101 before they can graduate to 102, and I think the writing works for providing someone's first exposure to these concepts.
...Though I do think this gets a little weird with the sheer breadth of the creatures' ages. While the ones in the starting area are all grade schoolers dealing with kid problems, as the game progresses you will encounter college grads, adults going through midlife crises, and old dudes struggling with ego integrity. I suspect this was done to give the game broader appeal (and several of them were uncomfortably relatable to me), but it makes the narrative framing very confusing. The creatures are all just products of Billy's imagination, so how is this kid so keyed-into adult issues???
And on a performance front, I do have to say that the platforming is very janky. Hitboxes and collision get very wonky if you stray off the beaten path, and I encountered a few weird bugs (though nothing that softlocked me, thankfully). This made it more frustrating to explore for secrets than I would have liked. I also would have liked some way to manipulate your deck, since enemies tend to use the same set of colors in a given area, which can make large swaths of your deck useless.
But overall, despite my quibbles, it was a fun and cute game that forwarded good ideas, and I liked that [spoiler]Billy doesn't forgive their dad[/spoiler] in the end, which showed a surprising amount of realism and maturity in an otherwise saccharine "Everyone can be friends!" narrative. I also enjoyed how many gimmicks the battles employed; nearly every battle has some twist based on the enemy's personality, which was a great way of keeping things fresh. My favorite was probably Dippy banning perfect attacks -- that's a really clever twist that forces you to turn your playstyle on its head.
