A while back, I played the demo of this. Although short, it looked like it the full game was going to be a viewed from above puzzle adventure game with Twin Peaks overtones. And, when it came to playing the full game, for a while that was the case. Your basic zombie-lookin aubergine FBI agent’s car breaks down outside a mysterious town that only appears once every 25 years, and he needs to find a phone and get on his way.
Only that premise is discarded very early on as the plot veers all over the place. Characters you know are somehow also in the town. Nobody mentions the 25 year thing. You have to play hide and seek with beavers in a first person section for… some reason. A guy in a cinema gives you a ticket so you can get into the cinema in order to get a ticket to give to the guy so he can get in the cinema. What? Sometimes you turn into a guy who is a tiny moon for a bit, but it’s not explained why. Frankly, nothing makes sense.
I’m all for weird for the sake of weird, but at least string it together. BME1ODEF is missing what fellow weird games Weird Dreams on the Amiga and Switch on the MegaCD had – a coherence to the random madness. Perhaps some of the cause of this was the translation to English from what I assume is the dev’s native Spanish, and some explanation was lost.
I don’t think I enjoyed playing it and I think that’s because I wasn’t sure why I was playing it. There’s no mechanical or gameplay reason why it’s bad, and it isn’t bad really, it’s just too strange. That said, I’m going to play the sequel as I’ve already bought it.
