LISA review

by Piyoz on Jan 9th, 2017

This one came as a personal recommendation. So screw you, Pat.

LISA is an indie role-playing game released in the December of 2014 that spawned from the darkest depths of Kickstarter. It is the progeny of Dingaling Productions and the brain child of one Austin Jergensen. Advertised as a post-apocalyptic tale of redemption, a better way to describe this title would be as wacky and abusive.

LISA’s retro aesthetic is clearly inspired by Nintendo’s cult classic Earthbound for the SNES. Basically, take the journey of Ness and company to vanquish Giygas and the army of Starmen, subtract the color and vibrancy, keep the wit, and replace all sense of happiness and civility with sadness, gore and dark humor that borders on emotionally sadistic. That’s LISA.

Our premise is that in the land of Olathe, for reasons never truly explained, all women have disappeared from the world. With only men left, society has crumbled. During this horrifying descent of the species, one man named Brad Armstrong, a long time drug addict and product of a violent household, finds a child in the desert. To his surprise, the infant is a girl, the first ever seen in a long time. Brad takes the girl home to raise her in secret. He names her Buddy. Years later, she is kidnapped by a Mad Max-style group of bandits lead by the enigmatic Rando. Brad, eager to prove himself as a good person and save his sole loved one, begins a quest to find Buddy from the evil likes of the sexually-deprived men of this hopeless wasteland.

The player controls Brad as he navigates the desert landscapes. The world of Olathe is comprised of caves, mountains, oceans, swamps, grasslands and the occasional derelict town. These environments are drained of color and animation in a way that really communicates the decaying nature of this place. The background music echoes softly along Brad’s trek, which adds a certain loneliness and wayward apathy to the mix. The character sprites are small and placed at the bottom of the screen, appearing insignificant against an enormous, uncaring world.

The battle system is turn-based with stats, equipment, consumable items, status effects, damage counters, critical hits and the works. The player sets the moves for Brad and up to three companions against one or more enemies that you encounter non-randomly in the field. Characters like Brad can input up to five attacks at once to perform special attacks that use up the SP meter. Other characters similar to Brad are Joy addicts. Occasionally they will suffer from drug withdrawals, which reduces their normal attacks to zero and decreases many character stats. Choosing to consume one pill of Joy (a highly addictive and destructive drug of which there is a limited number in the game) will guarantee critical hits for several turns. Consequently, consuming more and more Joy will worsen one’s addiction even more.

Much in Earthbound fashion, the status effects in LISA’s combat take on unusual forms. Combatants can suffer poison, fall sleep, get stunned, cry, be afraid, feel wary, become confused, get drunk, feel hung over, fall over, look cool, look super cool, enter Party Mode, or stink. The backgrounds in battle are trippy, abstract images. Action text goes by fast but it was always entertaining to read the different ways that fighters interacted mid-brawl.
The battle themes for the bosses are totally catchy.

While it’s certainly enjoyable to battle hordes of drug-induced maniacs with their variety of flagrant, silly names, the battles themselves I came to find very predictable toward the end. Brad and his companions are given access to a huge number of unique moves with many different damage types, status effects and so on. However, I find myself typically not in need of most of the abilities at my disposal. I can blind enemies. I can inflict Animal damage. I can shower them in oil. I can scare them with ghost stories. I can make them feel weird. Why do I need to bother with any of that when I can more easily pummel them with my normal physical attacks? Why give me so many options when I can beat this game with standard melees punches and swords? I found this combat system fun to use overall. I was simply disappointed at the lack of depth in dealing with foes. On the normal difficulty, I had no trouble with anybody. Nor did I really have to put much thought in how I dealt with any baddie. Perhaps the game is much more challenging on higher difficulties.

Luckily, Brad doesn’t traverse the barren plains alone. In his journey, he meets a wide assortment of companions. These men come with all their own strengths, weaknesses and abilities. Some are Joy addicts. A few suffer from the permanent status effect of Depression. They all have unique stats, attack names and wild animations in combat. We see little of them, but your companions make their presence very stark and very funny. This game expects you to lose companions. Permanently. When you rest at the campfires, there is a random chance that you will 1) get robbed of some consumable items 2) get robbed of currency (porn mags) 3) get robbed of one of your partners. You have to go and find the gang hideout and pay them a crap ton of money to see the stolen comrade again. Some story events give you the moral choice of sacrificing a few companions or decreasing Brad’s battle stats. Some enemies have perma-death attacks that put allies out of commission for good. Other times, Brad’s pals may choose to leave you themselves. It’s an interesting system. Your party is always in flux. The game gives you a steady stream of fresh friends as you continue. I found myself attached to a few of these guys after a while. I felt heartbroken when I chose to let them die. The moral choices in LISA have slight consequences. That doesn’t stop them from melting my heart.

While Brad must progress on a linear path, the direction of the game is very branched out. There are always many different tunnels and alternate exits to take to find all the items needed to progress. This layout presents LISA’s largest problem. So much of this game’s world looks identical with little indication as to where you are going and where you need to go. This makes establishing a trajectory through the world difficult and aggravating. For example, Brad may be standing in front of a rugged mountain with seven doorways leading inside. I want to find the Car Keys collectible. There is no information either physical or textual telling me where my desired item is, where these doorways will lead or where I need to go to advance to the next hub zone. I blew so much time in this game meandering between doorways until I finally found the enemy, NPC, object or pathway. Even after bumbling around for hours I still passed over the whole fishman village segment. Navigating LISA’s maps was a serious pain.

A much more satisfactory feature of LISA is its writing. Much like Earthbound, there is a definite zaniness and irreverence in the air. This time around, instead of light-hearted, family-friendly plays-on-words, the player is faced with brutal violence, sickening deaths of children and innocents, deformed drug addicts, depressing outlooks on life and the general decline of human civilization. Between instances of the hilariously depressing you can find wonderfully well-written exchanges packed with cleverness and imagination the likes of which would make Shigesato Itoi proud. The writing of this game’s in-battle text, NPC interactions and cut scene dialogue is highly memorable.

LISA is the second installment of a trilogy of RPGs about the Armstrong family and the world of Olathe. While details are sparse and exposition lacking, the experience given here is more one of humor, cleverness and suffering. I very much enjoyed the presentation of LISA’s environments, music and, most of all, writing. It’s a gorgeously miserable place to be in. I just had trouble finding the correct path among the identical brown cliffs and caves. I was accompanied by a wild and crazy pack of diverse survivors. Even though they each had their own special flavor and skills, I seldom found myself in need of these skills. The main course, though, is a series of smart, emotionally-exhausting story pieces than tore me to shreds and delighted me simultaneously.

4 / 5

Painful

Categories: Reviews