A short RPGMaker narrative adventure game more focused on 4th wall breaking story telling.

Pros
+ Interesting

Cons
- Minimal gameplay

199X is a short RPGMaker narrative adventure game with minimal gameplay that is more about the story and heavily plays with the idea of social norms, emotional manipulation, and mental illness, featuring a ton of 4th wall breaking that is basically the premise of the game. For its time it would have been one of those unconventional experimental indie games but it does have an interesting spin to it, where there are also a lot of gaming tropes thrown in that it kind of makes fun of.

Story
The game centers on Clara who is suspected to be suffering from schizophrenia, though in reality or maybe even not, you the player are in control of Clara and her decisions and even speak directly into her mind. Although the whole idea is that you are in control of Clara being given multiple dialogue options and decisions you could make along side certain moments where they make a point that you are able to force her to do things. In reality the game is linear and even when you want her to do certain things you simply can't or she will outright refuse forcing you to do the other thing, this is weird as it goes against the premise of the game and for me kind of reinforces that she might just be schizophrenic.

Gameplay
Gameplay is quite barebones where you will mostly be interacting with objects and annoyingly sometimes multiple times or have a lot of dialogue, having to go back and do almost every option to talk about before being able to move on so exploring every possible interactable is often required. I find some of the things being talked about also a tad bit pretentious and I guess a little cringe.
There are the moments where it does get amusing when they throw some RPG aspects in but they don't happen enough. Though that is not the point of the game so just remember that most of the game is spent interacting with objects, reading through lengthy dialogues, and a lot of walking.

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