You’re Not Special – Review (PC)
Let’s get ready to humble
Every once and a while, we as gamers need to be taken down a peg or two. We are so used to taking on the role of an all powerful protagonist with the ability to change the course of history and save the world from certain doom. Every once and a while a game comes around and sucks us back into reality and makes us realize that we’re not always going to be fortunate enough to be “the chosen one” but rather an insignificant cog in the world that really isn’t that different from anyone else. You’re Not Special, a retro style role playing game from the tiny team of three developers at Reky Studios, is one of those games.
In You’re Not Special you play as a meager recluse who has been locked up in his own house, drinking himself into a stupor and seemingly disconnected from society. You finally decide to venture out of your home and see what’s going on in the town. The village is abuzz with the sudden return of a man named Avdi, an important figure in both the town and the larger kingdom. Avdi mysteriously and abruptly left the town for several years. No one knows why Avdi left in the first place, nor why he has returned. By speaking to various characters around town, you discover that Avdi is not making any time to answer questions, but only has business with the King.
Your pursuit of answers leads you throughout the main town, into the kingdom, and into outlying areas. Early on the story is shrouded in mystery, much like Avdi’s unexpected reappearance. The player will need to canvas NPC’s throughout the game world in order to piece things together. Along the way, you’ll meet intriguing characters who will either serve to move the story along, provide fetch quests, or set up tough decisions with sometimes dire consequences. The curiosity and revelation of interacting with new characters was one of the high points of You’re Not Special. While the main story develops into something more derivative, the humans in the world give the game a nice sense of personality.
Actually playing the game is limited to puzzle solving, character interaction, and making conflicting choices. Dungeons in You’re Not Special use virtually no offensive strategies and rather employ a range of object movement puzzles. These utilize things like mine carts, rolling boulders, massive snowballs, and switches. Most of these puzzles require manipulating these objects to allow your player to move across gaps or pits.
The player will also need to dodge dangerous objects like rolling boulders, turrets and lava to avoid death. Puzzle solving is rarely fun in You’re Not Special. It’s not especially bad. Rather, it just involves a monotonous process of trial and error to figure out the solution. In most cases, a wrong move in a puzzle is permanent, which means the entire puzzle needs to be reset or a recent save game needs to be loaded. Furthermore, dungeons are usually book-ended by a boss battle. These confrontations are easily the most frustrating part of the game. In most cases, one or two hits in these encounters results in death, and this often happens so quickly that you’re not even really sure how you died. This means battles have to be repeated multiple times to figure out exactly what you need to do. Once you’ve understood what the game is asking of you, you’ll be so tired of the battle and thankful that it’s finally time to move on.
The remainder of the gameplay boils down to character interaction and decision making within the world. While this doesn’t do a lot for actually progressing the story forward, it is the most interesting and fluid part of the game. You’re Not Special seems to coax the player into making evil decisions along the way – whether it be stealing food or silver (which is extremely sparse) – there are a lot of temptations. You’ll always have a choice and it’s never obvious what the ramifications of your choices will be. I quickly became desperate for funds early in the game and decided to try to steal some silver from a character I could have sworn would not see me. Sure enough I was caught, and this particular citizen blacklisted me and refused to interact with me for the rest of the game. In another instance, I got away with my crimes and there was seemingly no consequence.
You’re Not Special also allows you to select between different dialogue options both within side quest activities and in points pivotal to the story. A cut-scene before a confrontation with a dungeon boss will allow you choose between staying completely silent or entice an ally into throwing the first punch. Another regrettable interaction I had was with a man who was willing to trade wood for silver. I was given the option to negotiate with this man on the price, but when I low balled (which I actually thought was a completely reasonable first offer), the man refused to do business with me at all and stonewalled me for the remainder of the game. The reactions for your dialogue choices are truly unpredictable. You’ll want to keep multiple save files in case your choices lead to a reality you don’t quite like. In any event, this was a very refreshing and interesting mechanic in the game.
The visual style of the game is best described as nostalgic. The influence here is clearly the top down 2D JRPG’s of the SNES era – cute 32 bit sprites with massive and exaggerated heads coupled with hand drawn anime style text based dialogue scenes. If you’ve been seeking a blast from the past and were an avid fan of the Final Fantasy games from the mid 90’s, then You’re Not Special will definitely scratch your itch from a visual standpoint. The variety in the environments is strong as you’ll move between the main town, market area, and the outskirts of the city holding diverse dungeons with countering themes. Some areas in the main town do however suffer from being over crowded. You’ll find entire areas that appear to be inaccessible because the alleys that lead to them or completely obstructed by buildings. In other cases, you can get stuck when your character is hidden from view behind a massive tree or building. These visual issues don’t break the experience completely but, like many of the puzzles, leads to a lot of trial and error poking around of environments to find a path forward.
Recommendation: All told, You’re Not Special is a good call to the past that employs decision making mechanics from the modern era of gaming. Utilizing gameplay that almost solely relies on puzzle solving was a gamble for an RPG that ultimately failed for the developers. Luckily You’re Not Special has enough charm, personality and replayability to somewhat save it from mundane and frustrating dungeon crawling. Much like the protagonist, this game is nothing special. However, at the very least, the title is worth checking out for some interesting characters and unpredictable player choice.
*You’re Not Special was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
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