"The Kindeman Remedy" - Review ["Torture Simulator"/Management Game]
Hello again everybody.
As my hunt began for a game like This War of Mine, i came across two games in a Reddit post that were "like This War of Mine". Someone in the thread suggested this game; The Kindeman Remedy. A few replies later Ravenous Devils was also suggested, being "better than The Kindeman Remedy".
I played Ravenous Devils and enjoyed it and you can read the blog post i made about it, here.
After finishing Ravenous Devils i decided i'd give The Kindeman Remedy a try, as well - lately i've been on a roll to play these management games.
Having spent about 8 hours playing it, here's what i have to say about The Kindeman Remedy.
Brilliant But Twisted Doctor
The Kindeman Remedy is about Dr. Kindeman, a brilliant yet unhinged scientist who's been relegated to work as a mere prison doctor, due to his use of unethical scientific methods in the past.
While at the prison, he decides to analyze a few corpses of inmates that have been sentenced to death, via the electric chair. In doing so, he discovers that a mix of substances is produced by the human body when "stimulated" under extreme circumstances, i.e. being subjected to the intense shock of the chair.
This mix, according to Dr. Kindeman, has the potential to become a "cure-all" remedy. But, in order to synthesize and perfect it, he needs to continue his research.
Unhappy with his new position as a mere prison medic, he decides to begin his research into this remedy. To do so he extracts this mix from corpses of sentenced inmates, and then injects the mix into live subjects. Once injected, the live subjects are then tortured by the good doctor, until dead, under increasingly extreme circumstances.
All this, to try to find the cure-all; the "Kindeman Remedy".
Gameplay
We spend our days working as a prison doctor, creating remedies and performing surgeries, helping the (unusually unhealthy!) prison population. Occasionally, with help from Sister Anna - another twisted soul - we poison some of the remedies, in order to "set aside" a few inmates - alive and dead - for our nightly "experiments" and research towards the cure-all remedy.
We need to maintain a balance between the number of inmates we heal and the number of inmates we set aside for our experiments, by poisoning them. Healing inmates gives us reputation which we use to upgrade the prison's medical facilities (both honorable and otherwise). Poisoning them, on the other hand, reduces our reputation but allows us to advance our research.
The goal of the game is to do enough research in order to discover the Kindeman Remedy, before our time runs out.
Multiple Endings
You can fail at this game. You're not guaranteed to find the Kindeman Remedy if you don't hurry with your research.
Dr. Kindeman does not have a free reign; there are several critical eyes pointed at him which know of his experiments - critical eyes which he must outsmart.
Plus, you can miss opportunities that are presented to you only once.
This all sums up, resulting in different endings.
Which is cool.
Bugs
There are a few easily encountered bugs. Some visual, some mechanics related.
I found a few mechanics-related bugs that, luckily, were easily fixed by simply restarting the game. Others required me to outsmart the game and try to restore the correct state of the characters. Luckily, as well, nothing game-breaking - so far.
To be fair, the developers are working and releasing patches. Some of which might fix some of these issues. When writing this review, i was playing the patchless version of the game!
Nothing Great
While the backstory is thought out (and there even is one), the story during the game is not all that interesting. It's mainly got to do with the warden and how he needs help from the doctor, while at the same time wanting to keep the doctor under his thumb.
The other narrative is about an old colleague and ex-friend of the doctor who knows what he's been doing in the prison. This colleague of Dr. Kindeman's is set out to catch the doctor red-handed in his experiments and turn him in to the authorities.
The writing is also nothing great.
Piled up on top of that, the daily chores (the gameplay per say) is very slow paced, extremely repetitive and it takes a long time to finish the game (i took about maybe 8 hours).
There's a very simple upgrading system that doesn't require that much attention to the order in which you upgrade things, and doesn't really change things up that much - you end up doing mostly the same things, during your time playing, with the story being intermixed, to counter-balance the tedious gameplay.
There might be a tweaked version of the order in which we upgrade the facility, in order to be able to reach the "good ending", but seeing the game is long and tedious, having to repeat the game multiple times to figure it out is just unfathomable to me.
Torture
And then there's the torturing. The main part of the game that moves the main story's objective forward lacks a real sense of the pain we are causing to the inmates, most of the times.
Not that i played this game for that specific part of it and sure, you can cringe a bit when thinking about what it would feel like to receive each different torture, but the lack of impact of some of the torture animations makes you just play that part of the game to gain research, without much thought or regret about what you're doing.
At least that's my experience.
Deal or No Deal?
Would i recommend this game?
No.
Torturing people is not exactly what i think of when i want to play a game, and this game does not deliver anything that is enticing enough that i would want to play it, to the point were i'd have no other choice but to have to endure the torture parts. Especially if these were more impactful.
Perhaps the tortures bits are supposed to not to be that impactful, exactly because without an enticing story, they'd just make people stop playing the game.
The story being a bit lacking and not very enticing, and because the game is quite long, without these two being good (and upon failing to achieve the "good" ending), starting the game all over again is a real chore to go through!
I feel like, for a game like this to work, the story should be really gripping and make us think really hard about the morality of what we're doing.
And another thing; during the boredom of the daily chores, i kept finding myself staring at Dr. Kindeman and unable to disconnect the character's design with Conan O'Brien or TinTin.
Very weird choice of character design!
Playthrough
If you're interested in being completely informed about this game without playing it, i might make a summarized playthrough post of the game, where you'd be able to get a sense of the story and make up a decision about it on your own.
I might do this if i can get myself to play the game again and try to get "the good ending".
This War Of Mine
One thing i came to realize playing these two games in a a row (Ravenous Devils and The Kindeman Remedy) is what makes This War of Mine so good and work so well.
First of all, the story is super impactfull and something many people can relate to. Even if people haven't gone through literal war, i think everybody can relate to the struggles that game puts us through, on one level or another.
These other two games...not so much!
But the theme of the game is not a fair comparison point, so i'll be fair and speak about it's mechanics. Unlike these last two games i played, This War of Mine doesn't keep us "locked" in the same place. Sure, we spend some time fixing our house, preparing food, taking care of each other - all in the same location. But then, at night, it allows us to travel to several different locations and explore, minimizing the management aspect of the game.
At that point, we're not just playing a sim management game, set in the same location, doing the same things. We're actively exploring different locations and dealing with several different dilemmas that appear in each of these locations.
And i think that this is what sets This War of Mine aside, and why both these other games feel like less.
Tha-Tha-That's all Folks!
That's it.
The Kindeman's Remedy is nothing great - the mechanics are there as a management game, but the story lacks interest, and for some reason, the daily loop cycle is boring and slow paced.
Please do drop a comment if you can think of, or know of any game that comes close to This War of Mine, in the same genre and as impactful. A tall order, i know, just by simply google searching for one.
But still, i'd love to hear your recommendations!
Thanks for reading, everyone!