In The Novelist you take on the role of Casper the Friendly Ghost, haunting a lovely summer home while playing voyeur cam on a family named the Kaplan’s renting the house for three months and suffering a severe case of first world problems. Your role is to listen in on the family’s thoughts, find clues to their problem of the week, then gently suggest to the family’s head Patriarch the solution to whichever problem plagues the family that week.
The gameplay is simple enough, as a ghost you mostly hang out in the seaside home’s light fixtures, able to zip around the house by jumping from one light to the next. You can leave a light fixture at any time to explore the house and examine things a little bit closer, though if you’re playing the game in stealth mode you run the slight risk of alerting a member of the Kaplan family to your presence and “spooking” them. Your mission is to read the minds of the Kaplan’s, possess their memories to review past events, and read notes on photos left around the house to figure out which each Kaplan desires. At the end of each exploration you the select one “object” that will fulfill one Kaplan’s desire, and if you didn’t startle the bejeezus out of them, you’re allowed to select an additional object to “compromise” on another family member’s wants.
Honestly, the mechanics and investigations grow fairly repetitive fairly fast, and as I proceeded further in the game everything became mechanical and mindnumbing as opposed to engaging and entertaining. Even the “stealth” mechanic never adds a real element of challenge, as the family is really easy to trick since you can quickly hide in or flicker lights to distract them. The game attempts to ramp up the difficulty later on by turning off lights around the house and thus removing stealth travel and hiding spots, but even then the game remains easy and the amount of lights on around the house never dwindles enough to impede or challenge progress.
The environment doesn’t help either, since the entire game takes place in the one house there’s never anything new to see, and what is there remains a little bland. There are a few nicely painted backgrounds beyond the picture windows, causing me to look outside with kitty eyes and lament that my poor unfortunate ghost butt was trapped in that home.The graphics aren’t incredibly stellar, they’re serviceable, even good in a few places, though the blandness of the environments and the lack of detail in characters tends to make it all a little boring. The music is grating, with piano compositions that sound like they were meant for PBS programming, I eventually had to turn off the music and throw on some slightly more moody and enlivening soundtracks in the background. The voice acting is also bizarre, while Dan is acted pretty well, Linda sounds bored and lacks any depth, and Tommy embodies the typical mistake of little kid characters written as what we think little kids sound like and not a proper human being. The different levels in talent, especially with only three characters, is really noticeable and off putting.
Really it seems like the story is just meant to “unfold” for the player, with a few gameplay elements tossed in. The Kaplan’s are a family of three that are somewhat struggling. Unfortunately the stakes just never seem that high, with the same exact emotional beats constantly repeated. Linda complains one week she and Dan never hang out, the next that the family doesn’t eat dinner together, that she and Dan can’t go on a date, that Dan and her son don’t hang out. Different things happen but it’s all the same emotional beat, the core message of “My family needs to hang out” regurgitated over and over and it gets a bit tired. This is only one example as this kind of writing repetition is constant, and in some cases such as young Tommy, the same exact memories are repeated, with me counting Tommy’s reused drawing of him wanting to spend time with his dad four times, despite the fact I made sure Tommy and Dan hung out plenty. Choices in the game ultimately felt inconsequential, and while occasionally a character would comment on something that happened in the previous chapter, the game remained on an obvious set path and week to week there was a lack of any serious cause and effect.
It’s a game that really pulls its punches as well, making sure every emotional hit lands with a soft glove. Dan isn’t an alcoholic, he just develops a slight drinking habit that culminates in the horrific accident of him hitting his shin on a coffee table. Tommy is a bright intelligent boy who will excel well in school, he just has slight difficulty with reading comprehension. Linda seems to have the most at stake, though even then throughout the narrative she ended up a bit stale and I felt like making her happy was a lost cause and she wanted to be miserable no matter what I did… Which could probably be a poignant commentary on life and relationships, but the fact she was written so dryly made me believe this wasn’t intentional.
The only time the story got slightly interesting was in some of the ghost’s own memories of the house. Other diaries from other summer home occupants, with these diary entries implying the ghost has an unsettling, even sinister presence, though none of these storylines panned out either and they all ultimately felt deflated. I’m not asking for gore or survival horror, evil things don’t have to happen, but I do expect high stakes I can invest myself in. Not all games I’ve played and reviewed have had a real choice system, such as Walking Dead which is arguably the illusion of choice, a few have had no violence at all, such as Gone Home, but what they did have was a level of emotional engagement where things that happened felt like they mattered.
I can appreciate the artist attempt here, and it should be applauded as a one man effort by industry vet Kent Hudson, showing a real slice of life in this middle income family with a father figure who has to balance work, love and family, but slice of life isn’t necessarily engaging or entertaining, and so the mundane even if it’s meant to feel mundane remains mundane. More fleshed out characters, varied emotional beats and higher stakes would have served this title a great deal, even more so than a more difficult and varied gameplay system. Aside from the repetition and the music the game doesn’t make any tragic mistakes, it’s just overall boring. Ultimately it didn’t work for me and if you’re super into the “lens of a somewhat well off American family” this is the game for you, but your day to day life is probably more exciting than this title.
