Renowned youngsters’s TV presenter Mister Rogers as soon as stated, “when I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would tell me to look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” The red-cardigan-rocking ethical compass of a nation provided this small succour within the face of tragedy: that every time catastrophe struck you’d additionally discover the irrepressible compassion of humanity not far behind.
That beneficiant spirit is a bit of more durable to identify in Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories, a weird cleaning soap opera through which you careen a couple of disaster-struck metropolis pawning bento packing containers and first help kits, grifting injured strangers out of their final thousand yen and usually performing like a roving intercourse pest, combing the rubble for downed hotties. Had Mrs Rogers witnessed this sort of aberrant behaviour, she’d have guided her son in direction of a profitable profession within the jail sector.
You play a protagonist of indeterminate origin whose bus journey throughout the fictional metropolis of Hisui is minimize brief by an intense earthquake, decreasing a lot of town to rubble and precipitating what quantities to a long-winded check of the participant’s personal ethical fibre. Even earlier than the emergency begins, Disaster Report Four is repeatedly probing your ethics with a litany of benign inquisitions. Do you supply your seat to an aged girl on the bus? And when you do, is it provided begrudgingly, or just since you have been about to face up anyway?
Most of the game pans out this fashion, your meandering course by the ruined surroundings framed not by the massive skyscrapers continuously collapsing throughout you, however within the context of home human affairs. Disaster Report Four is about our small private reactions in a disaster. Encounter a high-school instructor in a fluster having misplaced her college students and also you’re provided a whole brochure of dialogue choices to select from, completely none of which make the slightest distinction to the result, however relatively exist to carry up a mirror to your personal attitudes and motivations. Disaster Report Four is much less a survival journey and extra like filling in a persona quiz subsequent to a pile of mangled rebar.
Consistently select essentially the most audacious, merciless, silly or diabolical responses – agree to assist the instructor since you wish to perv on her college students, or try to persuade a grieving girl that this pure catastrophe was by some means all her fault – and also you’ll merely rack up a foreign money referred to as “immoral points”. These accrue in some invisible compartment of your stock, like dangerous marbles to be tallied on the game’s conclusion lengthy after it really issues, like getting a invoice on your TV licence the day after you’ve moved out.
But removed from feeling restrictive, the predictable linearity of each dialog lends the game a form of nihilistic, liberating vitality. Insulated from any form of repercussion or potential divergent path, you’re in a position to absolutely embody the position of the inscrutable weirdo whose persona is described by the underside one or two dialogue choices, fortunately leaving subway passengers trapped and screaming for assist below chunks of concrete or refusing at hand over chilly drugs to a widow, secure within the data that the game goes to make you do these issues anyway. Disaster Report Four is all sowing and no reaping. I really feel karmically imbalanced for having performed it.
Once you faucet into this game’s wealthy vein of surreality it turns into much more endearing, the more and more foolish conditions much less a research of human psychology and extra reminiscent of a kid’s drawing of the aftermath of an earthquake. A number of of the pure survival programs from earlier games within the sequence – reminiscent of a life bar, a stress meter, and the necessity to eat, drink and use the bathroom – exist right here in a vestigial sense, however have zero bearing on what occurs. There are distributors who’ll promote you outfits and unusual objects (like tinned cat meals, which you’ll be able to feed to a stray cat seconds earlier than it’s obliterated by a collapsing bridge), collectible compasses, and an inexplicable fixation on job interviews that runs all through the plot.
Without having been in a single myself I can’t say with any authority that Disaster Report Four isn’t an correct illustration of the sorts of issues that occur after an actual earthquake, however I’m prepared to guess that it falls in need of a real simulation. It’s definitely about as ridiculous because the unfolding apocalypse occurring outdoors our personal home windows – the place society has seemingly ejected its collective thoughts to stockpile eggs and demand that the military open hearth on joggers – nevertheless it’s about as passive as our lockdown too. Disaster Report Four depicts a wierd and consequence-averse disaster, through which you’re normally little greater than a hapless observer.
