The Dead Tree of Ranchiuna

If you play through the new game The Dead Tree of Ranchiuna, you'll learn a lot of life lessons about pranks, bullying and young love. You'll also learn that the toilet is a metaphor for life. I don't know if I can agree with that, but I do know that what goes in the toilet is a metaphor for this game, because The Dead Tree of Ranchiuna is crap. Here's my review.

This is the story of a young man named Andrei who comes back to the mountain village he grew up in after attending university in the big city. He's understandably excited to hangout with his childhood friends and, most importantly, rekindling a romance with his teenage love, Daniela. But not everything is as it appears, and over the course of around two hours, we learn the dark secrets of the village and why Andrei was probably better off staying in the big city.

This is one of those exploration games where the goal is to walk on a linear path and be reminded of important moments from the past. These come in the form of ghostly smoke figures who reveal tiny bits of the backstory in one slow drip after another. We discover that maybe Andrei's mates aren't quite as friendly as they let on, and that girlfriend he came back to is prone to fly off the handle for the dumbest reasons possible. What starts as pranks quickly escalates into violent encounters that will forever scar the tiny mountain village.

When you're not reminiscing about the past, you'll be slowly hiking through the wilderness in an effort to visit all of the scenic locations Andrei remembers from his youth. It's a stunning nature walk that is occasionally interrupted by story beats and some very light puzzle solving. We'll also run into a few platforming challenges, but they are so few and far between that they are barely worth mentioning at all.

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Look, I know that not everybody loves these narrative adventure games, but I like getting caught up in their dark stories. This is something I need to say now, because this review is about to turn negative. The best things I can say about The Dead Tree of Ranchiuna is that the nature walk is gorgeous and the set-up is certainly intriguing. This is a game that starts off incredibly strong, with a solid mystery and a unique setting. So, what could possibly go wrong?

Let's start with the writing, which can best be described as clunky. The story being told here is so frustratingly dumb that I had a hard time believing any part of it. The whole thing is a setup for the narrator to make a moral point that literally everybody in the audience will agree with. This is not somebody making a bold statement against something controversial, but rather a game developer grandstanding about something that nobody is disputing. This is basically the video game equivalent of somebody tweeting: "I don't know who needs to hear this, but bullying is bad."

This is a game filled with the narrator lecturing us with the most generic platitudes you've ever heard. It's always written to be deep and profound, yet it comes off as hallow and banal. It's the kind of stuff you see in bad television commercials trying to sell you soap. It could be that it sounds better in its original language, but the English translation left me laughing at its attempts to be overly serious and important.

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Unfortunately, the same holds true for the dialog. Nobody talks like a real person and the voice acting is abysmal. There are a few voice actors who understand what kind of game they are in, but Andrei is terrible from beginning to end. The story never bothers to explain why his buddies and girlfriend would turn on him so quickly, so I was left to assume that they too hated the way he delivered his lines and couldn't stand to be around him. Trust me, that's far better justification than what actually happens in the final act, which will leave you shaking your head in disbelief. It's so unrealistic and dumb.

There are other problems, of course, like how easy it is to get turned around and lost in the wilderness. However, it's the constant crashing that annoyed me the most. I had the game crash on me three times, always at the very end of the level. I bring that up because the save points are few and far between. Crashing at the end of a level meant that I had to slowly jog through the linear path all over again, something that takes fifteen or twenty minutes. It's even worse when you have to replay a section with one or two of the flashbacks, which is this game's version of a speedbump. I probably wasted the better part of an hour replaying stuff I had seen before, all because the game kept crashing. Not cool.

At its best, this is a gorgeous world with nothing interesting in it. The developer has done a good job building a path full of scenic locations and stunning vistas. There are a few truly breath-taking moments. This is clearly what the developer is good at, and I truly hope that he is able to share that talent with somebody who knows what to do with the cool world that has been constructed. If you can ignore the terrible story, awful writing, headache-inducing voice acting and constant technical problems, you'll find a relaxing nature hike through the mountains. Sadly, I could not ignore any of that, making it hard for me to recommend The Dead Tree of Ranchiuna.