Forsaken Denizen

“Well, this is quite pleasant” is perhaps an odd reaction to a decidedly idiosyncratic game: Forsaken Denizen is written in Dialog, has gameplay structured around survival-horror resource management tropes, and is set in a High Weird sci-fantasy world that puts me in mind of the Metabarons or the less-fascist parts of Warhammer 40k – oh, and the narrative voice belongs to the protagonist’s space-princess girlfriend, who won’t condescend to her or drool over her when she can do both at the same time. But while there’s a version of this game that’s a spiky, off-putting blast of weirdness, instead there’s a smoothness of design and of implementation that makes playing it just feel very nice indeed.

There are any number of places to dig in, but let’s start with that last one, the narrator, since she’s got to be my single favorite element of the game. Princess Cathabel X starts the game locked in her floating palace, victim of her own machinations after the extradimensional finance-monsters she cut a deal with decide to collateralize the debt by turning the citizens of her space-colony into cybernetic zombies. When you put it like this, she’s possibly the villain of the piece, though as a clone of the galaxy’s sovereign assigned to a periphery world to operate the infrastructure that allows for space travel (I think – the worldbuilding here, to its credit, is portentous and a bit confusing), and raised as part of a failed experiment to perform a royal marriage to space-bees, perhaps she was just acting out. By far her most redeeming feature is that she’s head-over-heels in love with the game’s actual main character, Dor, who’s a working-class (and possibly trans? Again, I confess I’m not really sure how all of this is meant to work) alien crammed into the skin of a human-looking bureaucrat; she’ll need to use every scrap of her ingenuity to save the day, and Cath will be squeeing over her, while pretending to remain archly unimpressed, the whole time. They’re a heck of a pair – I mean, here’s their meet-cute:

"Thirteen years ago. She was twenty-two and I was nineteen. When my automated guardians dropped from orbit, all they saw was someone threatening the Second Princess of the Empire of the Final Sun.

"But I saw someone gaunt with hunger and exhaustion, with a weapon that didn’t look like it would even fire. I saw someone with a burning flame behind her black eyes. And it suddenly felt like I’d been waiting all my life for a pretty woman to jam a gun into my sternum."

There’s not much of a plot beyond Dor making her way through the city to find Cath, then deciding she’s not leaving and it’s time to take the fight to the mastermind behind the attack on her home. But there’s plenty of incident along the way. Traversing from one side of the map to the other requires going through Dor’s workplace, her home, and an industrial district, with gonzo lore dribbled out in compelling nuggets along the way – there are clever details by the wazoo, from the aforementioned demonic capitalism to weird shadow-based technology to small-scale human stories that are there to remind you that there are actual stakes here. It’s all done by allusion and is maybe hard to take too seriously, but they’re well-written enough that I was excited to track down every errant fax (seriously, they still use faxes) and document I could find. Beyond the environmental storytelling, there are metroidvania elements that make exploration a key part of the game; mostly this reduces to finding new flavors of keys to unlock new flavors of doors, but the rewards you find, from unique conversational partners to one-off rewards that create new gameplay opportunities, were enough to keep me engaged through the game’s running time.

Speaking of the gameplay, as I mentioned it’s going for a survival-horror vibe, with a limited-parser interface mostly channeling your options to shooting or running from the baddies. Of course your ammo is limited and replenished only by scavenging (killing monsters doesn’t result in bodies to loot, sad to say), UNDO is disabled and you can only save in specific map rooms, and there’s an inventory limit keeping you from having all your tools on you at once; that sits alongside a light equipment system that allows you to wear different outfits for bespoke benefits like more frequent critical hits. Beyond the specific mechanics, there are also a few nods to past examples of the genre, like a roving super-zombie who recalls Resident Evil 3’s Nemesis and an unlockable opera-dress outfit that sets enemies on fire, which is surely a Parasite Eve callback. It’s typically possible to evade monsters by just going to a different location, but many of the game’s puzzles require juggling inventory items or waiting for processes to finish, which is often tricky when cyborgs are trying to burst you like a pinata. Fortunately fighting is straightforward, too: at its most basic, you just need to land two regular hits on a monster to kill it. The feelies spell out the math – 1/6 of the time you crit, 1/6 of the time you miss, and 4/6 of the time you land your blow – which is generally forgiving unless you get ganged up on, and of course there’s limited healing as well as several special attacks available.

It’s all very cleanly designed; despite this adding up to a fair number of systems, everything is explained quite well and works straightforwardly in practice, so it only took me a few minutes before I was skulking through the alleys and splattering techzombies like a pro. And though it’s churlish to say this, that leads to my only major critique of Forsaken Denizen: there’s perhaps a mismatch between the desperate struggle for survival that Cath narrates and the frictionless, laid-back set of combat puzzles I actually played through. I always knew where I was going, I never felt in danger unless I was intentionally pushing my luck (and even then I knew I had close checkpoints to fall back to), and I wrapped up my first playthrough with substantial reserves of bullets and healing items left. Generously, the game does encourage challenge-run replays, since you’re given a score when you win which unlocks new outfits with exciting bonus powers, like the aforementioned opera dress and a jacket that allows you to opt into fun alternate endings; a series of achievement-like goals or restrictions that will win you extra points are also listed.

This was all fun enough that I did a quick second play-through that won me all but one unlock, but the lack of randomization and the ease with which I’d identified what felt like an optimal strategy meant I didn’t feel too compelled to play a final time to get the last outfit – not having systems that are robust enough to support full roguelike replayability is a pretty faint criticism to levy at a piece of IF, though. Again, it’s all very fun, and very winsome, but part of me wonders if I would have enjoyed Forsaken Denizen more if the experience of playing it was more like the experience Dor is diegetically having: marshaling my strategies to the utmost, wincing at every run of bad luck, moments of sanctuary hard-won and few and far between, might have been less fun but more memorable. But, well, probably not – I don’t actually like survival horror games that much, and there are far worse things to be than pleasant.