The 25th Ward - The Silver Case review
I wish I liked this more...
The 25th Ward should be credited for its incredibly strong sense of style -- monochrome, thick shadows and intense, sketched illustrations highlight a deeply polarized and sterile world. However, past the style: the Twin Peaks homage and flair, the unique soundtrack, and the same UI style the original Silver Case is known for, a frustratingly sloppy experience is laid bare. It is an exhausting, self-indulgent mess that mistakes incoherence for depth.
25W outright doubles down on the egregious nature of Silver Case's storytelling. Terse musings on identity and information-age criminality feel questionable, half-baked. One of the overarching ideas is pretty obvious throughout the three routes -- 25th Ward aims to be social commentary on the conformity of modern Japan and argues its low crime rates and outward conflicts hide a festering miasma of corruption and insecurity. I get that, but I feel the original game was able to hit this beat pretty consistently in spite of its questionable moment-to-moment plotting. The 25th Ward is inscrutable at points. It throws around so many plot points but presents them in such a fashion that doesn't push me to look deeper but instead look past them with disinterest. It is overwrought and exhausting, and any apparent thematic depth or sincerity is drowned out by the level of tedium between navigating its gameplay elements and getting brickwalled by Kill The Past Lore.
What angers me is how much I wish I loved this. It is right up my alley and smack-dab in the middle of a series with games I’m really fond of (Killer7, FSR). But the dry, meandering style of storytelling from the original is replaced with the stark opposite: constant information slammed into my brain without much coherence. I’m not a stubborn modernist that needs straightforward narrative either. Some of my favorite visual novels are denpa stories like Sayonara o Oshiete, Tsui no Sora, and Subahibi. Narrative coherence finds itself sacrificed for mental breakdowns and psychological horror. I guess to the less experienced a good parallel is something like Serial Experiments Lain or a Satoshi Kon work. I love the organized chaos in these narratives, but that is partly because of how ephemeral their larger plotting is. Subahibi is not a narrative with detailed plotting and three or four games’ worth of lore built up, it eschews this entirely to drive a character-centric narrative home. The incoherence and confusion doesn’t come from cryptic plot points I didn’t quite catch, it’s coming from troubled minds and conflicting emotions: traumatic responses, dreamlike depictions of experiences one cannot describe usually. The 25th Ward prattles on and on about political dynamics and mechanics established throughout the Kill the Past series devoid of pathos. It wants you to see the level of lore density and pedestrian social commentary: it insists you look past how dry, unseasoned and emotionless it is.
I love the intrigue that David Lynch and similar filmmakers create in their products. Twin Peaks makes me deliberate over so much and I can’t quite put to words the emotions it makes me feel. It is a very warm, human experience that has idiosyncrasies but binds them to emotionally evocative sequences and deliberate unnerving atmosphere. But what Lynch does so well is paint these mosaics of chaotic train of thought. The 25th Ward feels like an imitation devoid of the aggressively powerful emotions carried through its inspirations. I don’t like having to work my brain and comb through something I feel is impenetrable. I don’t want to invest time into an experience that does not have the willingness to let me in as a reader. I don’t like having to redo segments in a story to have a coherent understanding of what it’s trying to do. I love mystique, confusion, and the unknown, but when it is in the form of Correctness I have to clock out.
I respect the goal here of having a dense text with a lot of high-concept ideas -- visual novels are notorious for spelling themselves out and treating audiences like idiots. But it provides the player with awful puzzles and navigation, blatantly rejecting the player and “kicking them out” in a ludonarrative sense. You have to give me reasons to continue to plod along and power through. Suda and friends fail to capture the spirituality and mysticism that make cryptic storytelling at its best work.