Seven years ago, the weirdest anime visual novel graced our PCs. In Doki Doki Literature Club, you got to read poetry with cute girls, but the real draw was the mind-melting narrative where increasingly horrific things befell the characters until even your computer itself was under threat. Millions of people ate this game up, and Doki Doki Literature Club is still considered a a genre-bending classic.
The publisher of Doki Doki Literature Club, Serenity Forge, is now back with a new game called Roman Sands RE:Build that is somehow just just as weird and cerebral as its predecessor. Roman Sands is slated to arrive sometime this year on PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox, but we had a chance to check out the latest demo in San Francisco ahead of the Game Developers Conference and experience this bizarre new indie that can be best described as part service industry simulator, part apocalyptic psychedelic adventure, and part philosophical puzzler.
It’s part service industry simulator, part apocalyptic psychedelic adventure, and part philosophical puzzler.
You wake up on a mysterious, idyllic beach resort with White Lotus vibes where you must wait on a series of baby boomers who demand things like massages, margaritas, and figurative hand-holding in a Groundhog Day-like time loop. Each night once you complete tasks, you’re able to walk towards a light on the beach as your character hazily fades in and out in a weird and unsettling sequence.
As you start to figure out what’s happening and you manage to solve a major puzzle, the game shifts to Act 2. Your cow has mysteriously died. (Wait, you had a cow?) Then, you’re suddenly pulled into yet another landscape; feeling unsettled is part of the experience.
While Serenity Forge showed off a similar demo last November, the one it brought to San Francisco has more visual polish and performance improvements. Now, when you complete tasks for boomers, you’re rewarded by ranking up, and can use the points you earn to buy boosts and rewards from a gacha-like vending machine. Players are welcomed into the game with a cute-looking tutorial that’s also new to this demo in which a small anime character barks instructions at you so you can learn the job more quickly.
Now, when you complete tasks for boomers, you’re rewarded by ranking up, and can use the points you earn to buy boosts and rewards from a gacha-like vending machine.
Roman Sands RE:Build is set to really great electronic music, that brings to mind Machine Girl’s soundtrack for on Neon White. Like Neon White, Roman Sands also has a lot of capacity for speed-runners to run wild. Part of the fun will be seeing how gamers react and respond to an art project that’s clearly open to interpretation.
Roman Sands isn’t for everyone. It doesn’t quite have the hot anime women of Doki Doki, and its name is a bit hard to parse. But the weird ideas behind it and the overall strangeness of jumping from environment to environment makes at least the first few hours a compelling play. Of the dozens of games showcased this week in San Francisco, it’s one that lingers in the mind, hauntingly, for days on end.
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