Day 184 - Dead Detention #4 (Rescribbled)
SPOOKY MONTH!, Visual Novel, Sam is just reviewing a different game ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Happy Halloween!
To be honest, this snuck up on me. I went to a Halloween party a few weeks back and as far as my brain was concerned Halloween had already happened. I was hoping to do something big today. I was thinking we could play Mouthwashing today or Under the Lighthouse since Sam gifted that to me with intent to review it here.
But Halloween jumpscared me. Here we are. It’s today. And guess what also happened to land on today?
That’s right! The final chapter of Dead Detention!
00:30 - Uh oh Big Steppa
01:05 - A combination lock Wario-Ware game. The most numbers I’ve personally seen on a padlock.
01:50 - man these must be some big locker or small high schoolers to fit two of them in the locker.
03:00 -I’m sure there’s zero chance of the big Zombie coming back as the final boss, right?
04:07 - It’s literally called Boss Zombie. We’re fucked.
05:00 - Fuck I just threw the food we came to collect at it. Nice one ABC.
6:00 - ABC tripped on the same hockey stick he did in chapter 1. This is dashing any hopes I had of him learning and growing.
9:05 - Based Sora:
11:08 - The screenshot of a funny ABC face is obligatory at this point
Mom on the line. She’s flying a helicopter. Badass. We have to be ready for pickup on the roof in two hours (it’s a slow helicopter).
12:53 - Wait, if Mom is arriving at 9:30pm and it’s a two hour ride. She will 100% miss her manager meeting at midnight. EZ.
16:00 - It’s so funny ABC set an alarm for 9:20pm, like they are planning on leaving the roof anytime soon.
Also that battery on the DS will run out any minute now.
18:00 - Sora venting her troubles and worries in a pretty sincere scene:
But the asshole in me had more control and ABC just stayed silent:
24:44 - ZOMBIES ON THE ROOF ZOMBIES ON THE ROOF
28:00 - Uhh, before the guitar hero mini-game, there was definitely a splash screen that said “Boss Battle”… Is this not the final game? Or is this the ol’ fake out before the actual boss comes out?
30:00 - The alarm went off. ABC told everyone to run. And then guess what happens?
It appears we haven’t met the end of Dead Detention (Rescribbled). This does appear to be the last of the (Rescribbled) variants, at least without purchasing the full game. There is JackAstral’s original Dead Detention Episode 5 which claims to be the final chapter of the series. It might be interesting to play this as the final episode and compare the two. It looks like this episode was posted 13 days ago, and the Steam game on the 10th, so maybe JackAstral is slowly porting the (Rescribbled) versions to Newgrounds? I’m not sure.
Well. I suppose that was a little anticlimactic. Maybe we can do an “Halloween Retrospective” where we pretend it’s Halloween at a later date, and ignore the fact we played the penultimate episode of a series that hasn’t finished being ported.
Recommend: HEYYYYYYYYY Macarena (AYYY)
Replay Percentage Chance: 😐
Time Played: 32:01
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! HAPPY HALLOWEEN! HIPPY HELLOWEEN! HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Sam’s Take:
Something happened in today’s game, and before I talk about it, I need to clear something up. Dead Detention is not secretly good. The scene I’m going to talk about is not secretly good. The writing is disjointed and immature. The art is above average for a Newgrounds game, but nothing that hasn’t been done before. The plot is eye-roll-inducing, characters have no depth, I do not recommend Dead Detention, unless you too feel the need to plunder the depths.
I wrote a few reviews early on about the nature of this project. Who we are writing for, what the purpose of this project is. I was lucky enough to play something that gave me a moment of clarity early on in Flash Forward Reviews. Since then I haven’t felt much of a need to write about writing. My purpose was clear, I was writing these for me. To find my voice again, build up a habit, and if any devs or readers got something out of it, hey that’s a neat bonus.
Recently my reviews have been shorter and sassier. This isn’t some surprise, Skeeter and I have done this before, and going through periods of not feeling it is normal. That’s part of the point, pushing through when you really don’t feel like it prepares you for the rare moments when you are. Pushing writing from a place of “a rare event” to “something I do all the time” is an important part of being ready when the inspiration does eventually hit.
In episode 4 of Dead Detention, Max has a conversation with Sora when she can’t sleep at night. They talk about their failings and insecurities. It’s not subtle, it won’t tug at your heartstrings. It is a real life high schooler writing a visual novel with no guidance. It includes the phrase “so that’s why I’m fucked up”. It’s actively embarrassing.
It’s also the most beautiful thing a game can be.
There’s a scene in the Face-Lift-Horror game Who’s Lila where two teenages walk and have a classic “deep teenager” conversation. It is one of my favorite moments in any game, plus it doesn’t even contain spoilers! So if you would please indulge me and watch the scene:
This scene needs to pull a lot of the emotional weight of Who’s Lila, and it fuckin nails it. That flow between trying to sound smart about a picture, to the fake “hehe’s” and “haha’s”, to finally getting into something real but not being able to articulate it. This game gives me painfully accurate flashbacks to conversations I had late at night as a socially awkward teen who didn’t know his way around a house party. The horrific and beautiful feeling that you understand each other, yet you’re both too stupid to be able to explain it. The one moment when you finally say something that does make sense, “I hope you won’t be offended, but, really, the world is not revolving around you, Tanya”.
I could write a whole essay about this scene, but what’s important for now is what this scene is. It is a writer, writing teenage characters, and trying to make it feel as real as possible within the confines of a two line text box. You need to feel their connection to understand the story. You have to understand how William’s forced facial expressions are a constant force to fight against in social situations. In a boring, literal sense, it is a scene made to explain and show a connection between characters.
At a glance, the Dead Detention scene serves a similar function. Two characters, having a late night conversation, trying to find the words to understand each other and themselves, but there is a notable difference. We’ve established before through his specific media references, phrases, and just geneal… Maxness of Max that he is an intensely obvious self insert character.
Every writer writes about themselves to some extent, but Who’s Lila is written stealthily. It masks its self insert indulgences behind real conversations, interesting mechanics, nuanced morality, etc. The writer of Dead Detention is not capable of this. There is not an ounce of successful artifice between the viewer and writer. We are not watching characters trying to work through themselves. We are watching a writer write his diary, then post it online.
We make fun of the things people make a lot of the time, and I think that’s fine. In fact I’m willing to bet that I’ll do it again very soon, but a lot goes unsaid in a daily review format. I genuinely love that anyone can make a game, post it online, and maybe two schmucks doing a review a day that no one reads can analyze like it was hanging in a museum. It’s easy to get lost in the mire of “this game is cringy”, “this music sounds like a co-worker band”, “what a film-school-ass movie”. Yes, great art can change your perspective, obviously Skeeter and I love it when we play something genuinely refreshing, but do you think we’d be doing this if we didn’t appreciate the bad art?
I can’t talk about my love of bad art in every review, it’d lose its meaning and frankly there’d be no point. I do truly love stuff like this though. Not so bad it’s funny art (though that certainly has a different place in my heart), but someone who put it all out there. The Who’s Lila scene works because the writers make it feel real, but guess what motherfuckers, the Dead Detention scene IS real. You are seeing honest art from a random teenager. It’s cringy terrible beautiful. Every now and again I think it’s good to step back from trying to label everything, discuss what’s good and bad, and just realize how ridiculous it all is. How far away is Dead Detention from Who’s Lila? None of the characters are real. They were all written by someone who thought they were the best words to write. Two fake characters had one fake conversation.
This isn’t anti-art criticism. After this exercise, I’m zooming right back in to explain to some random Discord user why Fire Emblem Engage is dogshit. It’s not a permanent thing. Just hang back for a moment, remember how small it is. How lucky we are that we have the time and power to partake in something so small. How we can choose to make it as big as we want in our own minds. I won’t be doing this again for this project. Maybe I’ll have a different existential crisis, but not this one. So let’s enjoy the irony of every conversation about “real art” that we’ve ever had; that this shitty conversation in Dead Detention is more “real” than anything in your, or my favorite game. Wallow in it. Learn from it.
Now we come back. Back to the material world, where Who’s Lila is obviously way better than Dead Detention… but maybe with a new tingling feeling that Dead Detention might be better than Skyrim.
Recommend: Fuck no
Replay Percentage Chance: I thought we were done with this Skeeter%
Time Played: 12 Minutes
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