Too Long; Didn't Play: Blackbay Asylum

Committed by: Aaron D, aka DJ Dostoyevsky

Time served: 84 Minutes

Short Review

Welcome to Blackbay Asylum! Our inmates don’t suffer from insanity.

They enjoy every minute of it!

Long Review

When I received the green envelope containing Blackbay Asylum, I was presented a warning.

Aaron D wrote:

Just leave your P.C. sensibilities at the door. :p

The game also warns against those of tender constitutions to stay away. Every time I load the game I’m presented with a content warning.

At four score and four minutes in, I’m in that place where I can intellectually understand that a person must find this content objectionable, though my emotional response tends more toward “Boy, they sure do make a lot of jokes about masturbating. I wonder when the offensive stuff kicks in.”

Of course, I did beat Duke Nukem Forever twice, so maybe I’m not exactly who they had in mind when they wrote those warnings.

So, what is Blackbay Asylum? It’s an adventure game with inventory-based puzzles featuring an unlikely protagonist in a mental institution. It’s also absolutely fascinating. I've never played a game that was simultaneously so flawed and so compelling. An easy metaphor would be to call it a train wreck, but it's not morbid curiosity keeping me interested. Heaven help me, this game is good.

It shouldn't be this good.

The graphics are terrible, for example. The game was released two years ago and it looks like it came from around the turn of the century – right down to the low-resolution cutscene videos. I will give it full marks for maintaining a steady framerate, though I will also have to dock those points right back out for having animation that doesn’t fully deserve the number of frames it gets. When he’s on screen, the main character walks exactly like an old Masters of the Universe action figure, pivoting at the waist to swing his back-leg forward so he can plant his tiny foot and take another step, which seems to happen independently of how the floor is moving underneath him.

The writing is another place that doesn’t so much shine as glisten. A telling example of the humor is the loading screen that features a big metal sign that says “Loading! So sit down and shut up!”

When I first saw that I thought “Oh, so it’s going to be that kind of humor, eh?”

And the voice acting! Oh. My. Someday people will appreciate that being a voice actor requires more than the ability to read. Indeed, someday people will acknowledge that a voice actor at least needs the ability to read. But it is not this day.

The story is exactly what you’d expect from an adventure game set in a mental institution. The people in charge have been very naughty, and their dastardly work has caught up with them in a grisly way. Naturally, it’s up to an escaped patient to put things right, because of course his mental state renders him immune to the occult craziness that’s going on around him.

In spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, the game retains a lot of charm. The main character is a criminally insane inmate at Blackbay Asylum, and his happy-go-lucky madness is endearing in a bizarre way, to the point where I imagine him to be a distant relation of Gomez Addams. Nearly everything you encounter in the game is interactive to some degree, even if most of it doesn’t do much more than show the player snippets of the main character’s internal dialog. The writing isn’t great, but it is effective at what it’s trying to do, which is to convey the inner workings of a dangerously unbalanced mind that is nonetheless cheerfully self aware. Dark humor is often a tricky line to walk, and making a homicidal maniac your comic relief is generally on the wrong side of that line. Damned if it doesn’t work, though. You want to like the guy, even though you know everyone’s better off with him locked away and medicated.

The gameplay is, likewise, surprisingly compelling. Sometimes you’re playing the game from a top-down, third-person perspective, and other times you’re playing from a first-person perspective. The game throws you into first-person mode when it wants to limit your vision enough for jump scares to be effective, so: Brace yourself for that whenever the camera changes. Mixing the perspective up like that kept me on my toes and prevented anything from getting dull.

Usually in an adventure game like this, particularly a budget-looking game like Blackbay Asylum, the puzzles tend toward the nonsensical. Somehow, the nature of the setting and the protagonist make that work. The game’s logic is defined by the tenuous grip on reality that the main character has.

Are you noticing a theme here? Nothing about the game is good by itself, but everything about the game works well together. The result is a textbook example of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. Like Three Stooges Syndrome, all of the bad things are trying to get through the door at the same time, thus preventing any one of them from crossing the threshold.

Blackbay Asylum is indestructible!

Will I Keep Playing?

I don’t see how I’ll be able to help myself. The game has me hooked, and I want to see what happens to that wacky psychopath and his asylum of doom.

Is it the Devil Daggers of … whatever this is?

I can’t say the puzzles are particularly difficult. Even the puzzles with ridiculous solutions make some amount of sense in context; the trick is recognizing the context. Of course, there’s always the old adventure-game trick of trying every item on every interactable item.

Or, better yet, I could use the new adventure-game trick of consulting a walkthrough. Hooray for the internet!

Four out of banana Devil Daggers chits.

Comments

You know, I kept seeing that character's creepy face and reading the game title as "Backbay Asylum." I kept thinking that can't be right, the game can't possibly be about that.

Then I read the article and realized it might just be about that...

Oh man, I'm so glad you had a chance to check out Blackbay. It's a tough sell on paper, but winds up having an offbeat charm that totally carries it through.

I love unpolished gems in the gaming space!

Aaron D. wrote:

Oh man, I'm so glad you had a chance to check out Blackbay. It's a tough sell on paper, but winds up having an offbeat charm that totally carries it through.

I love unpolished gems in the gaming space!

You know me: I love the rough in the diamonds.

Mantid wrote:

You know, I kept seeing that character's creepy face and reading the game title as "Backbay Asylum." I kept thinking that can't be right, the game can't possibly be about that.

Then I read the article and realized it might just be about that...

I can say for certain that this game has nothing to do with any Boston neighborhoods or public transit stations.