Rakuen

I went in expecting a pleasant indie curio, and came out the other side needing to sit quietly for a while. Rakuen is the solo debut of composer Laura Shigihara, built in RPG Maker XP of all things, and the engine choice will immediately scare off the wrong people and virtually no one else. There are no battles, no experience points, no stat screens. What you get instead is a combat-free, puzzle-driven adventure that shuttles you between a washed-out hospital ward and a vividly coloured fantasy forest called Morizora's Forest, the two worlds linked by the stories of the patients living on the Boy's floor. The structure is essentially an anthology stitched together by a central mystery. Each chapter introduces a hospital patient whose alter-ego exists in the fantasy world, and the Boy must resolve their unfinished emotional business through a set of light environmental puzzles. These range from item-fetch quests and switch-flipping to more inventive set-pieces like staffing a tea party or stepping through flashback sequences. None of it is mechanically demanding. The puzzles are gentle by design, and a dedicated "Talk to Mom" button gives you a nudge whenever you lose the thread. What that gentleness does is keep your attention exactly where Shigihara wants it: on the characters and on what they are quietly going through. The people you meet carry real weight. The themes the game handles, dementia, grief, loneliness, guilt, and the particular terror of a child facing something too large to name, are not softened into irrelevance. They are just handled with unusual restraint and care. Shigihara's background as a composer (she scored Plants vs. Zombies and contributed to To the Moon's soundtrack) is the engine this game actually runs on. The score shifts between Celtic-inflected village themes, spare piano pieces, and original vocal songs, each sung by a character as a kind of emotional thesis statement for their arc. The visual contrast between the grey hospital corridors and the saturated purples and greens of Morizora's Forest is doing quiet storytelling work the whole time. The sprite work punches above the engine's limits, and characters like a D and D-playing onion or a flower with a fondness for powdered wigs keep the tone from collapsing under its own sadness. The game knows when to be funny, and that timing matters. The legitimate criticisms are real but small. The resolution is locked at 640x480, meaning you will have black bars on either side for the entire run. The walking speed is slow, and there are stretches of backtracking that drag in a game where momentum is everything. Some reviewers have noted that the anthology format, hopping between multiple patients' stories, occasionally dilutes the depth any single arc might have reached if given more room. Those are fair points. But the final hours pull the threads together in a way that recontextualises everything before it, and the payoff is proportional to how much you let the earlier sections land. Rakuen sits in a very specific category: games that are not primarily about playing, but about being present for a story that has something genuine to say. If you bounced off To the Moon because you wanted more interactivity, this will not convert you. If you found To the Moon affecting but wanted a broader cast and a world that feels more lived-in and explorable, Rakuen is the stronger choice. It earned an Honorable Mention for Excellence in Narrative at the 2018 Independent Games Festival, a 9.5 from Polygon, an 84 on Metacritic, and an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam from nearly three thousand reviews. Those numbers reflect something real. It is a small game made by one person who clearly needed to make it, and that shows in every scene.

Alex · Scout Team

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