Update Two Hundred and Seventy-Six: 24 January 2019

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Long time no see! You know how it is at tsupertsundere Industries! A billion posts in one day or nothing for two weeks.

1931 is a real strange beast of a game, a stat-raising sim with as many bad qualities as there is good. In fact, within minutes of launching it and trying to muddle through the opening chapters, I reached out to BLAEO user and PA mod MouseWithBeer to inquire about just how long I had to actually play this game for it to pass Playing Appreciated standards - I honestly would’ve just dropped it then and there. With assurances that as long as I gave it the old college try it would be approved, I settled in to do my best!

Then I discovered two things: 1. I could cheat, and B. once I got into the swing of things, those things weren’t half bad.

Let me back up a bit: in 1931, you play the eponymous Scheherazade Keating (or Sadie to her pals), an 18 year old freshman archaeology student at NYU in, you guessed it, 1931. Her parents, long missing, were globe-trotting adventurers and archaeologists themselves, and Sadie wants to follow in their footsteps. Her story is one ripped right off of the silver screen and out of dimestore pulp paperbacks, as charming as it is old-fashioned. The gameplay involves raising a ton of stats and collecting inspirations to pass different obstacles in each ‘caper’, or adventure she can go on following different plot threads and relationships.

Overall, those plot threads are interesting. Sadie heads all over the world and spends some time in New York City in between. She has five love interests as well as her original family goal she can focus on, and all of the dudes are actually pretty cool (though two, Sterling and Roland, are a little too similar for my tastes). There’s clearly a lot of study that went on in this game - it’s dripping with detail, though how much of it is super factual I have no clue. The game isn’t really hip to the trends of, uh, hey, uh, colonialism is bad and the ‘priceless ancient artifacts belong in white museums, not in their countries of origin’ angle. While, okay, temporally accurate, it really reads like a moldy wet ham. Sadie does get confronted by different indigenous folks on that score, though, and she can come around to it a bit.

This fuckin game is LONG, and there’s a ton to do, and mostly the plot threads are kept intact and the adventures, for how many there are, are varied, interesting, and take advantage of the different locals Sadie heads to. It’s only near the end that things get jumbled up, though that might have been me rushing.

Unfortunately, for how much time and effort went into the writing, the rest of the game is woefully underpolished. The interface is bad, there’s little quality of life assistance, and everything feels so, SO cheap. There’s a lot of bugs and straight up broken or impossible to get achievements. There’s a ton of repetition, and to get what achievements you CAN get involves playing through the game multiple times - considering it’s length, I just couldn’t sit through it all again, even with skips on. The sprite art is also… really, really weak, and it’s not fun to have to look at that for hours and hours on end.

There’s a part of me that’s really fond of this game, but considering how it’s a fight to get through it all I can’t really recommend it. I’ll put this in my ‘to revisit’ pile, if only to come back to it in a few years and skip through some shit to maybe scrape a couple more achievements out of this thing.

For now, I can only say I did actually appreciate this one.

Next up: I’m making a new home in -

See you soon!