Platonica Space calls itself an exploration adventure, but it’s really an almost completely linear visual novel. It consists of a bunch of loops of waking up in a maze of repeating rooms and looking at memories from unknown people. Memories appear as wisps of smoke in some rooms and require you to place a related object on them to play out in full. You do get to move around in 3D, but there are no interaction points besides the memories and mandatory NPC conversations.
Platonica Space is divided into days, and each day follows a very similar pattern. You’ll wake up in a somewhat liminal room. There are at least two doors leading out of the room, and the rooms past those doors most likely have a memory you can attempt to play. You need to guess which item goes with the memory based on its title, and then you can play the first part of it to see if you’re right. The titles are usually not helpful, so you probably won’t be right, but the part of the memory you get to see will give hints about the correct item. You can’t try again immediately, however, so you have to go through another door and repeat this process until you see the memory again. Once you successfully play five memories, the day ends. Sometimes there will also be NPCs you can talk to after completing particular memories. They will often ask you who you think a memory belongs to, but since you’re not allowed to get these questions wrong, they’re also just guess-and-check.
The gameplay in Platonica Space is weak, but thankfully the other elements are initially stronger. I really like the way the memories are presented with just enough detail to let you start to tie them together, but not enough to make you confident about the connections until about halfway through the game. The cycle of waking up in strange spaces with limited memories reminded me of some Uchikoshi/Zero Escape games, and others have compared the setting to Gnosia. If you played this studio’s previous game, Moonless Moon, it also has a lot in common with the “outside of time” experiences that game presented. All that said, the gameplay is so repetitive that I think this is best experienced by treating the game’s days almost like real days. It lends itself to playing for 15-20 minutes every now and then instead of trying to sit down and binge it for hours.
Unfortunately, while Platonica Space is great about setting up mysteries in its first half, it largely fails to deliver on them. The game’s big twist is almost offensively obvious several hours before the game ends. Those final hours also start spending more time in cutscenes with the NPCs. These characters have incredibly erratic personalities and create a lot of conflicts out of nothing. It feels like everyone has just agreed to play musical chairs with who is going to be the bad guy today, and it doesn’t really even amount to anything. The game’s ultimate message is basically “it can be hard to understand other people”, and that is certainly true when they make no effort to explain anything and behave nonsensically like they do here.
There is apparently some extra gameplay post-credits that I didn’t see. It wouldn’t let me skip the credits and I didn’t have time to wait around for them, so I quit out of the game without a recent save. Other reviews don’t mention whatever it is much, so I assume I didn’t miss anything important. It’s also worth noting that patch 1.1.0 removed a bunch of gameplay systems, so reviews from around launch may mention extra gameplay that is no longer present. The dev apparently felt that these were just getting in the way.
As an aside, the game makes a big deal on its Steam page about there being dark and serious story themes. I wouldn’t say that’s exactly wrong, but it’s all basically what you’d expect from a scifi visual novel. There was a vaguely described apocalypse and some people die without too much detail. It’d all be fine in a T-rated game.
Conclusion
Platonica Space is not a bad game. It’s actually a pretty engaging one for the first half. However, the NPCs are its weakest part and it just drags itself down the longer it spends with them. I think it would have been a better game if the player was just left alone with the memories and asked to piece together the story. It wouldn’t have worked with the “people are hard to understand message”, but that’s delivered hamfistedly anyway. As it is, there is half of a good game here. It would have been an 80-85% for the first 2.5 hours and then spent the remaining 2 hours dragging that down as much as it could. By the end, I was telling the game to shut up and end already as it wasted my time with repeated minor variations of the same shallow dialogue.
Rating: 60%
Time to beat: 4.5 hours
Price: $10
For a similar game, see: The Sekimeiya Review – Caught in its Own Web
Feel free to leave a question or comment below!
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
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