Update Three Hundred and Thirty-Nine: 20 October 2019

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Just a step or two away from greatness, Rumu has you play as a little vaccuum cleaner tidying up a house in its owners’ absence, accompanied only by the house’s AI, Sabrina, who (naturally) isn’t telling you everything. The game’s biggest flaw and drawback is that you can probably guess most of the plot by that simple, one sentence description, which is a shame. If the story had been a bit different, had gone a slightly different way, or just explored slightly different themes, it’d be a real standout. As it stands instead it’s an interesting, well-made, well-acted, all right game.

I could just have too high standards for ‘robots maintaining houses while their owners are away’ stories—once I read There Will Come Soft Rains in high school, there was nowhere to go in the genre but down. I kept wanting the game to be more metaphorical, to explore deeper, more complex emotions in the ways only games can, and while it did touch on them, and have some sequences that landed, most of it was very garden variety ‘a pipe is just a pipe’ stuff. Rumu is the best part of Rumu, which is nice, and the game’s focus on ‘this machine loves’ is adorable and heartwarming. If the game was more laser-focused on the theme of ‘what is it to love?’, perhaps, and got a little bit more metaphorical with it, I’d’ve been overjoyed.

The actual playing of the game is fine - controlling Rumu is nice and responsive, although she IS a little vaccuum cleaner so not the most nimble. There’s some clunk here and there, but still nice to go through. There are things throughout the house to examine, most of which are books that include short passages from famous, relevant books, which began to wear on me pretty heavily because, yes, groundbreaking, a game about robots references Philip K. Dick, wow.

I don’t mean for this to be so negative - I wanted so much for it to be a BIT better than it was, and the gulf between what it is and what I had hoped for is FCKN with me. It’s still very much worth a play, though, and I thought it was a cute way to spend a weekend.

Next up: You know what’s crazy? Ever since I finished, I’ve been itching to buy and play Trails of Cold Steel 2. What the hell is wrong with me, right? I should be all JRPG’d out, and ESPECIALLY Cold Steel RPG’d out. But it haunts me. I want more. Should I jump right in so I don’t forget everything that happened? Should I play another RPG to get my fix? Give me some advice while I take a detour with -

See you soon!