Norman’s Great Illusion by developer Civil Savages and publishers Civil Savages and Sometimes You, is a new game for the Nintendo Switch, previously released on Steam. Norman’s Great Illusion gets its namesake from Sir Norman Angell’s famous book The Great Illusion, published in 1910 that argued against war creating large economic gains for nations.
Self-described “pixel art visual novel” for “quite intelligent, conscious users,” Norman’s Great Illusion tries to teach you a lesson on exploitation, Marxism, and capitalism during a time of rising social turmoil. However, while I would say that it is indeed a visual novel, the intelligence requirement is not necessary. The lessons in this game are made quite explicit, and understanding them and their consequences does not take much critical thinking.
In Norman’s Great Illusion, you play as a man in charge of a factory. Every day, you wake up to have breakfast with your wife and daughter, engage in one of the two minigames to drive to work, then play the second minigame at work, and return home via the first minigame to come home, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Each night that passes it actually a month, and the goal of the game is to survive a year during this routine.
However, the game makes it clear that doing so is close to impossible. Every day, almost more than 90% of the time, your work earnings do not overset your spending, creating a net decrease of your savings. This deliberately creates a stressful and desperate aspect of your gaming, knowing that whatever you do is meaningless.
The minigames themselves are not to elaborate. In fact, they are boring. The first is driving to and from work: you must simply click a button when a slider is on the size-changing bar. Failing to do so makes you crash your car, depleting family funds much faster. The second is a math game, alluding to the fact you are a factory engineer. Performance on the math questions can either result in a normal day, getting sent home early with no earnings, or even a bonus that eventually can turn into a promotion. Although, even with bonuses, your earnings are never enough. You always end up with less money than you started the day (unless you never make a mistake, and at the end start making money. But that’s extremely difficult to do, and requires making certain decisions. (More on that later).
However, I struggle with saying this is bad design, because from what I can tell, Norman’s Great Illusion is designed to make you feel irritated and stressed, and be extremely monotonous. The atmosphere of constantly losing, never being able to make a profit, and not having a way out of the whole society makes you dig for yourself is part of the experience. Not a pleasant one, but it’s the whole idea of Norman’s Great Illusion.
Now, every morning, you are greeted with some well-known quote pulled from Marxist ideas or even from WW2-era writing. These are supposed to reinforce the idea of exploitation and how certain economic platforms are oppressive and never actually for the people.
Now, Norman’s Great Illusion advertises seven different endings. Spoiler alert (without saying what the spoiler is), at least from what I found, while they are different endings, they result in the same story conclusion. In between minigames, sometimes you get a prompt for a scenario that you need to react to. It does indeed present different endings in the short term, be it arriving late to work with a reprimand or a 100-dollar reward, but to quote Linkin Park, in the end, it doesn’t even matter. I’m unsure if this is another storytelling mechanic, or a failure on the developer’s part to make the choices in Norman’s Great Illusion matter.
Overall, it is hard for me to make a decisive claim on the quality of Norman’s Great Illusion. Game-wise, I would say I did not enjoy it. The background music is ominous and stress-inducing, the mini games are stale (or awful if you detest math), the story line is bleak, and the closure never changes (even if you achieve a promotion, which I did once). Yet I realize you are not supposed to enjoy it, therefore, Norman’s Great Illusion did achieve its desired goal, and quite eloquently at that.
It’s not meant to be fun, but there is certainly a lesson to be learned. Because of this, I will just give Norman’s Great Illusion a middle-ground score.
End score: 5/10
Check Out the Norman’s Great Illusion Nintendo Switch Trailer:
For more information, please visit Norman’s Great Illusion on the Nintendo eShop.
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Nintendo Switch Review
I'm Zepora, a junior at UC Berkeley studying Economics. I grew up attached to my Game Boy playing the Pokémon games, but now I turn to my consoles as break from school work when I'm not busy with lacrosse. I prefer RPG's with a some action, such as Elder Scrolls and Assassin's Creed (which is my favorite franchise) but am also known to play Super Smash Bros until 3am with my friends.
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