The Coma: Recut

I am severely hoping this was part of some kind of game sale bundle, as I cannot see a reason this would have made it onto my wish list. Bizarre Anime-style games that centre around awkward teenage boys with crushes on their teachers with exceptionally large breasts isn’t exactly my idea of a cracking Saturday night in. But somehow, the Coma: Recut ended up in my game collection and even more bizarrely, on the next to play list.

The Coma is… well, I suppose the best genre fit is survival horror. You play as Youngho – an awkward teenage boy – not a clever naming convention for an underage prostitute – as he turns up at his school for exams to find that one of his colleagues has jumped off the roof to commit suicide. Instead of suspending the exams like any normal school, everyone just carries on and Youngwhore appears to fall asleep during his exam.

 

Upon waking, he finds himself in a twisted alternate universe of his school and it’s up to you, the player, to guide him through the mess before him and back to the real world.

 

This is made difficult to fulfil by the fact that it’s a video game and shitty physics, poor controls and bizarre design decisions will constantly work against you to prevent Youngslut from achieving his goal of escape.

 

The story is told through written text dialogue in the game and while I appreciate the game is based in Korea, some of this is really bad. There are a few hammed-in swear words which seem to be an attempt to appeal to Western audiences but this means a lot of the dialogue just feels wrong. They also through a random swear into an achievement description for some arbitrary reason – maybe thinking it’s cool?

 

So let’s move on to how it actually works. The school is a 2D environment where you need to roam the halls avoiding a load of stuff that randomly appears on the floor to hurt you and the biggest pain in the ass, a demonic form of your ‘hot’ teacher who will cut you into ribbons if you run into her.

 

Your tools of defence are running and dodge rolling. Both activities use up stamina, of which you have relatively little and to top it off, 90% of encounters you have with demon-teacher-lady are random so you can’t plan for them.

 

While this does create an element of suspense, after you’ve walked through a door, only to be immediately stabbed and killed for the fifth time in a row, the suspense is gone and replaced with rage-induced frustration. This is probably a good time to talk about the totally redundant health system. You have five hearts, which is enough to survive two stabbings. If that’s the case, what’s the point? Just give me two hearts and be done with it. The other elements that can hurt you can inflict bleeding and poison and there are items to heal these status effects, but it feels a bit weak and just tacked on, like the game couldn’t decide what it wants to do.

 

The killer-lady-tits is also ridiculously annoying. There is background music when she chases you and when you successfully hide from her, it fades out meaning it’s safe to continue the story. But on several occasions when I emerged from my hiding hole, she was standing right there waiting for me and I had to start the sequence over again. This happened in one spot five times in a row and while yes, it’s realistic, the video game logic was clearly suspended here in an infuriating way that prevented me from progressing the story.

 

Another annoyance is that a large portion of the game is exploratory based where it will benefit you to be able to remember the hide spots, which doors are locked and where everything is. However, if you had put any work into this, the third act throws this out of the window by rearranging the entire school. I think this was done just to make the big finale even more harrowing, but not when it turns your potential victory into a game of guesswork, trial and error that isn’t based on skill.

 

Turning to the environment, I found the controls when interacting with objects to be sticky at times. This is made all the more noticeable when you press A to open a door to escape weird-anime-chick only to instead, do nothing and be stabbed to death. Helpful.

 

The music is used to create an eerie, survival horror feel which it does to great effect, but it’s the only decent part of the game which makes it all the more pretentious.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 24 Achievements

 

There are lot of guaranteed achievements at the beginning of the game just for progressing the story but I actually missed one of these, which was for trying to go into the girl’s bathroom before the horror portion starts – not strictly guaranteed but still pretty hard to miss. And right up there with the undercurrent theme of the game.

 

There are several issues with the achievement list and it commits that cardinal sin of having non-stackable ending achievements. Essentially, Youngslag has spent too much time on street corners and failed three of his classes and there are certain things that occur during the game, which will allow him to rectify his grades. Two of these can be completely missed – it may be possible to miss all three but I wasn’t going to suffer through another playthrough to find out.

 

There are four ways you can end the game – getting the good ending  by doing everything the way it was supposed to be done and being a really nice guy at most opportunities, and then there are another three for completing three, two or one of the grade amendments. Guess what? The bad ending is the same regardless of if you get one, two or three grades changed so there is literally no reason for the game to make you play out this scenario three sodding times to see the same shit.

 

Aside from these, there are loads of other missable stuff for looking at things when you walk around the school and taking the various multiple choice roots through the game. The worst part of the whole thing is avoiding stabby-killer-boobies though. This mechanic is arguably worse than the entire achievement list.

 

Downloadable Content –N/A

 

The Coma: Recut is a painful yet short completion which I’m glad to see the back of and wouldn’t revisit for fun, because it’s not. I’m actually contemplating what’s worse – having to play The Coma for another seven hours, or actually being stabbed for real.