Day 363 - Disillusion ST Redux
Dungeon Crawler, Horror, Nightmare Fuel ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Well, here we are. We are tiptoes away from the finish line of this project. Exactly a year ago, we played Disillusion ST. Before we go too much further, I wanted to direct you to Sam’s “Replay Percentage Chance” from the first time we reviewed Disillusion ST:

Boy, was he spot on! We nearly ran out of time to re-review Disillusion ST, so I’ll count the 80% chance. Plus, it did take us months to replay the game - 12 months to be exact - and there do appear to have been some updates, along with a Steam/Full Release back in October!

Very cool to see. Congrats and glhf! We will be playing the Steam release for this review, and I love that we get to review a game once on itch.io and again on Steam. It’s also a great achievement and I hope checks notes “Disillusion Dev” previously known as “Disillusion ST” are proud!
I’m not going to rehash what I’ve already said about Disillusion ST - I’ll link the review here if you need a refresher (Boy howdy, did I need one!). I do need to say that somewhere halfway through this project I deleted my games folder because it was taking up entirely too much storage for a bunch of itch.io games. With that, my save data for Disillusion ST was also lost, so I will be starting fresh. I believe Sam is in the same situation, so he will also be starting fresh. We’ve decided to flip the Pacifist and Combat playthroughs. I’ll be playing Pacifist and Sam will be playing Combat.
I skipped through the starting area pretty quickly as it was mostly the same. Some familiar faces:


And the thing that made me feel the most at home…


We are so back, baby!
After going through a few doors, and exploring a few pretty places…

I’m met by some anime doll thing promising to warp me to magical places.

After dancing around, she has some speech options. I accidentally click into the one that brings up the warp menu, giving me a list of zones to choose from. Remembering from the control menu that “Tab” is “Back”. I hit Tab and immediately make a selection on one of the zones from the list. I couldn’t tell you which one, but I sure as hell warped.
When my eyes adjusted, I realized I must have selected “Silent Hill”.

I wander around Silent Hill talking to the strange characters. That’s right! It’s another round of Weirdo Appreciation!




Eventually, I ran into this little stone face man who said he knew a guy that wanted to meet me. Well, who am I to shun an adoring fan?
I pass out and wake up in front of a beautiful building. If you look really closely, you can see a squiggly metal man.

This reflective man does the craziest worm-groovy dance I’ve ever seen as the camera zooms in on him. A further testament to the art direction of this game.


I guess we came here for a piece of his body - seems only fair if we give him one of ours. He only wants a left hand. I step aside to discuss with my colleague who is emphatically not down.


My companion wants to take it by force. If this was the Combat run, sure, I might have indulged her. However, this is the PACIFIST run and we won’t have any of that weenie violence here!


The metal worm reveals why he needs parts to a body:

He’s building a friend! That’s sweet! Unfortunately, he’s also realized that if he just kills me, he can skip the steps of finding the rest of the body for the left hand.

At least he will pay tribute by stealing my previous life’s appearance! I mean, he’s not a complete monster, in fact he seems extremely reasonable!
I’ll be honest, I was distracted by real life stuff for a moment and missed how we got out of this whole mess (I’ve only been doing this for a year), but I do know something very important.
We got a mirror! My companion said mirrors are very powerful artifacts in this world! So, that’s really rad!
Hold on, if I may direct you to the first review we did of Disillusion ST one more time…

Remember this guy? This poor fella would have people visit, but they would always leave. He couldn’t really make a friend. He begged us to find him a mirror so he could see his own reflection and finally understand why those people kept leaving.
And we just found a mirror!
This is pretty much where I stopped playing (more on that later) as it felt like a good bookend. I ended the first review searching for the mirror, and on a separate save, a year later, I found the mirror. I think that’s pretty neat.
One thing I want to touch on: there is a pattern of loneliness between the two monsters that links them in a way. Both want to find a friend, one is looking for a mirror to look inwards and better understand themselves and why people don’t like them, while the other one is reflecting the world back on itself and resorting to violence to try to force-create a friend. I’m not sure how intentional it all is, but that’s the neat thing about surreal experiences like this - you get to bring a lot of yourself and interpretations into the art.
Disillusion ST was always a game we planned on coming back around to play. I’m glad we found the time. There was something about this game that just stuck with me. It’s got such a distinct feel and vision that it doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve played. It’s a unique experience and so clearly a passion project. It feels like a game that someone made for themselves. It really feels to me like the dev wanted to play a game that doesn’t exist, or rather, could not exist without them. I really hope I find a time to give this game proper time outside of the 95 minutes I spent with it in a year.
I did play a bit more after the encounter and if this doesn’t convince you that this game is a Mario Party 2 Hootenanny, I’m not sure what will.
Recommend: Oh yeah, baby
Replay Percentage Chance: Next year, when we do this project again. That’s right! We are doing this project again next year! We are trying a new format of only Sam, but we hope you enjoy the coming year’s content!
Time Played: 53 minutes

Sam’s Take:
Last time we reviewed Disillusion ST, it was in version 0.16. Almost a year later, we’re up to a full release and a half - version 1.5. In that time it’s hard to tell what was added other than the ability to look up and down, but I can say that I felt much closer to figuring things out this time around.

On our last playthrough I spent 30 minutes wandering around trying to find a save point and making no progress. On this playthrough I was able to actually obtain a key item and got many more conversations that seemed to hint at how characters could help me in the future.

Last time I played pacifist, and this time I tried combat. Honestly they are kind of the same. In combat mode there are enemies that can kill you, but all dying seems to do is teleport you at random, which is the same thing that happens when you exit a level or talk to someone so it’s not punishing. Maybe later in the game I’d understand the route to an item and not want to be teleported, but at the start there is functionally no penalty for dying.

The combat is a whacky turn based affair with the only strategies being a light attack vs a heavy attack (miss chance vs damage) or calling in aid from a friend you made along the way. I like that the talking bits have combat relevance, but the combat itself feels very tacked on, and I think the dev agress since they included a pacifist mode that is billed as equal (not as a special “story mode” like Witcher 3 has).

The art and writing are still top notch. They have an ability to make me like and understand characters despite me not understanding the world they live in at all. For a freak weirdo game, there is a shocking amount of pathos which to me served as a reward for making my way through the labyrinths.

I’m glad the dev put in the work to clean this up. You should buy it, you should try it. You’re always talking about supporting independent art, put your damn money where your mouth is. I find it exhausting but rewarding to play. My guess is that I’ll be booting this up for an hour or so before I go to bed. You know, the weirdo shit hour.

Also this game has Fallout New Vegas in it:


Recommend: Absolutely
Replay Percentage Chance: 0% Cuz we ALMOST DONE
Time Played: 45 min
Random Review