MOTHER

There are 15 nights in the game, and up until night 10 it was almost perfect for me—well-paced, with superb atmosphere. Starting from night 10, however, things get chaotic. In particular, night 10 and 14 (if I remember correctly) are the classic "survive x minutes" segments where the gameplay essentially reduces to a loop: 1. the monster spawns 2. it grabs one of your kids 3. you find the monster and drive it off 4. back to step 1. The repetition sets in quickly, and it becomes annoying because the monster snatches your kids far too often—sometimes just seconds after you've chased it away. To make matters worse, the monster is buggy (at least from my experience). It can hit you through walls or trap you inside furniture, among other odd things. These glitches kill any tension or fear, and I'd say this is the weakest part of the game. The final night deserves a mention too. It features a kind of "boss fight" that sounds cool in theory (you have to kill one monster while navigating around another), but in practice it feels underwhelming due to all the glitches. The monsters don't do anything particularly new or interesting either. If you can't beat it on the first try, your enjo…

The most corrupted thing that i saw in my entire life. Shtty graphics, corrupted textures, great story that you can't understand, locked to 30 fps, menu doesn't work, sounds are blasting as hell. At the end of the game two things happen, your eyes bleed and you cannot hear anymore. Overall... AWESOME GAME! 9/10

(Played it back at launch but I didn't leave a review) Interesting concept, one of the more memorable micro-indie titles of the horror wave at the time. Just know what to expect.

This was genuinly creepy. Went on a little too long maybe, but ended before it got annoying. Loved the style, too.

kewl game! had a really interesting story and i like the artstyle!! also like how keeping both your kids alive is actually important and determines which game ending you get. i will admit, this did took me a little while to finish and i had to stretch it across a good few days because ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 15 nights was just wayyyy too long! there was *just* enough gameplay variation to keep me interested. but at times it really felt like a struggle.

I've been thinking of writing an essay about gameplay as a narrative tool and MOTHER has a lot to this -- you have to manually do a lot of things, like carrying each and every box from the apartment to the corridor one of the many nights you're going to spend during the game, to express the mundaneness of the task at hand and how exhausted is the protagonist about everything. In fact, everything is a chore -- taking your kids to bed separately while they're playing too late at night or being downright annoying express the hardships of being a mother during the worst time of grief; giving them cookies that you find in plates on the floor depicts how she's barely able to take care of them; and even the screen shake (that I know it's not gameplay per se but juice, that adds to the game feel overall too) when you receive a notification on your phone shows how stressed is the mother about everything. There's more things, like having to manually board the windows instead of having it made automatically helps to build tension, making you balance the time to make the house safe at the same time that you leave the kids exposed to the monster; the fact that every night the game shows you t…