Hour of Demonic Calamity Review
Hour of Demonic Calamity is a standalone game developed by Kanashimi Hocchikisu. It is the first game since Light Magic 2 that is not connected to the rest of the series. However, many of its characters and concepts have appeared in later Towelket games.
The story begins with Okappa, a young girl who wakes up to find that her town has been taken over by beings who call themselves "gods." As she tries to survive this sudden nightmare, she befriends a white rabbit named Shinshi, who helps her on her journey.
At first glance, the story and environment give the impression that this is the developer's attempt at a more traditional RPGMaker horror game. While Towelket has had games with disturbing themes and horror-esque imagery, it has never delved into full horror before. Coming into this game, I was eager to see if it would truly go down that route. Needless to say, I found myself feeling underwhelmed and confused by the game's direction.
The story of Hour of Demonic Calamity isn't told in a straightforward manner. Instead of a constantly moving narrative, you're placed in large maps that you must explore to progress. There aren't many cutscenes, so you'll spend most of your time talking to NPCs and reading notes spread throughout buildings.
The idea of slowly understanding the story through exploration and interaction with the environment is not bad at all. In fact, it's something that should have appealed to me. Unfortunately, the exploration in this game—despite being its main focus—is just kind of boring?
Once the initial shock of the game's brand new, non-Towelket-like style wears off, the environments presented are rather uninspired. All the areas basically consist of the same type of building, copied and pasted throughout the map. The NPCs say some interesting dialogue, but a lot of it is not. The various notes you can come across are about the same. Whether you find anything that's actually relevant to the story is a complete gamble.
I hardly ever felt rewarded for going out of my way to explore and interact with everything in the environment. There were times when progressing felt more like a chore, especially when I got lost. Fortunately, there isn't much you need to get through each area, (In fact, it's possible to skip entire sections) which made the experience slightly less frustrating than it could have been.
Believe it or not, this game actually has combat. Though it's probably as barebones as you could get with RPGmaker combat. There is no EXP system. The only way to improve your health and attack power is by collecting protein bottles that appear throughout the map. You can then train in your room or at a designated spot outside to raise your stats. There are some skills in this game, mostly obtained by interacting with random things, but they're not useful since all enemies die in one to three hits. The only time I've ever died in combat was during a boss fight that didn’t give you any chance to heal before the last one. For this kind of game, I suppose it's alright. Mainly because I'm really not sure how I would feel if I had to spend extra time actually trying to play this game like a more typical RPG.
There's also a chaser enemy that will show up every now and then. They're pretty fast, so it's best to avoid getting close to them if you see one before it sees you. Otherwise, it's instant game over.
Unlike usual Towelket games, Accessing your menu and saving cannot be done at any time. There are designated spots for them. Saving can be done on any telephone present in the map and you can open your menu from the dresser in your room. I didn't have a problem with any of these personally. Since each section is basically one big map, you won't have to do any crazy amounts of backtracking just to open your menu. There's also plenty of save points to spare.
As for the story of this game, it's just...meh. Whether or not you try to piece it together, the method of storytelling is too dull for me to want to put in the effort to deeply analyze it. It just gets to a point that- whether the story is completely nonsensical with billions of inconsistencies or if it's actually the greatest story to grace this Earth, it would not change the fact that it's presented in the most boring way possible.
Though we're initially presented with an unsettling atmosphere and premise, it steadily melts away as you progress through the game. Though there are some NPCs that will trigger combat encounters or insta-kill you upon interacting, the majority of them seem completely indifferent to your character, which makes the situation feel a lot less threatening as a result.
The game slowly becomes a bit more humorous as it goes on and there are some pretty funny moments here and there. Usually I would complain about this kind of tonal shift, but it's not like the more horror-esque atmosphere of the earlier sections were particularly strong enough for me to feel any sort of great loss when the game opts to become slightly sillier. If anything, it's better than being bored. However, this does make it painfully clear that the game doesn't quite know what it wants to be.
We have a pretty small cast of characters and they're not terribly interesting either. Okappa is a silent protagonist and she has her amusing moments, but I feel like I would have enjoyed said moments more in a completely different game. The rest, I just don't have much of an opinion about.
Overall, Hour of Demonic Calamity felt more like an experimental prototype than a completed work. There's a lot to criticize, but I don't have strong feelings either way. It's short enough that I didn't feel like I wasted my time.
There are some interesting ideas, but none of them were developed enough to amount to anything more than just ideas. The experience itself was monotonous and repetitive.
I would usually suggest maybe checking out this game if you're interested in the creator's work outside of Towelket, but this game is a whole whooping 300 yen (less than three dollars), and I don't know if I can justify spending money on something like this. So in this case, I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to play it unless you're really, really curious about it.
I didn't hate it, I didn't like it. It was sort of a game I guess.
I rate this game 1.5/5 Towels
