O Livro da Verdade

The first thing I noticed about this game was that the description was written in a foreign language that I thought might be Spanish, but I wasn't sure without checking. So I pasted the description into Google Translate, and in addition to discovering that it was actually written in Portuguese, I found the machine translation surprisingly lucid, if still a bit Babelfish-y:

"Based on the philosophy Mokiti Okada enter the adventure of the Book of Truth which will enable learning how to get the balance of the human being, to create for yourself and everyone around you a better world to live."

I figured if I could understand the description enough to get the gist, I could probably play at least a good ways into the game. And sure enough, about twenty minutes later I had won the game. Quest's keyword based interface was a big help, of course; without it, I would have never been able to figure out the verbs. With it the game was so easy I could beat it without actually understanding the language it was written in.

The game is based on the teachings of Mokichi Okada, the founder of the Church of World Messianity. Or at least, so it claims; I'm not familiar with World Messianity so I couldn't tell you how much of the game is accurate to the source, but apart from a scarily large infodump at the end, I couldn't detect much philosophy that wasn't generic New Age "materialism bad, spiritual truth good". (And I mean that "scarily large" about the end; it feels rather paranoid!) You come across a creek (or possibly a river) of gemstones, and if you pick any up you get dinged for your focus on material wealth. Later you come across three doors, one of which promises wealth and prosperity, and if you go through it you get an instant game over. This would seem very unfair were the general point not drummed into your head over and over. And though it's impossible for me to say for certain, the writing feels a little slapdash. There are a couple typos scattered across the game that I had to fix in Google Translate, and examining the titular book gets you the response I used for the title of my review.

Even so, I found this game charming almost in spite of myself. There's an earnestness about the game that helped me ride it through the preachy bits. For example, each gemstone in the creek has a description that details their spiritual use and general history. Some care was put into the presentation of the game as well; nearly every room has an accompanying photo, and there's even a pretty background as well. It's still a pretty bad game, mind, but it verges into self parody so often I can't help but love it. If you like bad games, can speak reasonably good Portuguese or enjoy fiddling with machine translations, and don't mind being preached at, you might want to give this game a try.