MY BEAUTIFUL PAPER SMILE Preview for Steam

Two Star Games’ first Steam release, My Beautiful Paper Smile, grazes the surface of what a good game is, but needs an extra push to become what it has the capacity to be.

The game’s first chapter starts with a slideshow about the world’s backstory. A tyrannical king imprisons children for the sake of experimenting with his pursuit of perfection. His idea of perfect stems from smiles and happiness, casting away those who happen to break that expectation.

At first glance, I was unimpressed with the story. It felt like it pulled from ideas that had been done too many times. Young heroes in a dystopian society was a motif that died out after the mainstream success of books like Divergent or The Hunger Games. But the presentation and execution of that motif in My Beautiful Paper Smile is fundamentally different. The ideas are presented more abstractly. There is a unique focus on religion as the main character connects with the god he and his peers create in their torturous environment. And while I would’ve liked a practical explanation of the practices in this world, I find the mysteries presented keep me entertained.

My Beautiful Paper Smile does a great job of keeping the player guessing. Throughout this first chapter, I enjoyed creating theories on the questions the game presented. Being a horror game, these questions helped add a layer of tension and excitement as the world is explored.

And as a horror game, My Beautiful Paper Smile doesn’t disappoint. There are surprises waiting for you where you least expect it. Camera angles are placed strategically to make your heart beat as you press forward. The art direction is designed to make your skin crawl. In presentation, the game is a major success, but it’s everywhere else that I find it falls short.

Two Star Games (and Vicarious Publishing) does its very best to live up to its name. It becomes very obvious that My Beautiful Paper Smile is their first Steam release. When I first loaded up the game, I was immediately greeted with a massive drop in framerate. Upon passing the menu screen, the problem slightly alleviated, but still lagged to an unfortunate extent. An extent that should be unacceptable for a game as dimensional as Paper Mario. But it wasn’t just the optimization that tainted my experience.

There were many aspects of the game that just seemed unprofessional. For instance, I initially thought there was zero sound design to the main bulk of the gameplay. I couldn’t hear doors opening, or footsteps. There was no ambient music. I thought there could be no way. I checked the settings and the sound was turned to the max volume. It wasn’t until I turned my computer’s volume all the way up to the max possible setting that I could start to hear the game.

Text boxes were excruciatingly slow. In part, I attributed this to the story and style of the game. The main characters are purposefully kept unintelligent and talk slowly. But the dialogue slowly fades into view in the text bubble, and with a large portion of the game being the reading of dialogue, I was forced to wait for the text to fill my screen. I couldn’t even skip the fade animation to show the entire text. If I did click, entire paragraphs of dialogue were skipped, and I risked missing out on some of the story.

But the arduous reading wasn’t the only part of the dialogue I banged my head about. Often times the game would make a blatant suggestion through its text, completely disrespecting the problem solving capability of the player. A line like “I may find something useful in this room” was often used, while there only being a single object to click on.

In the final confrontation of the first chapter, I was excited. But I quickly realized that it was much easier to solve than I initially thought. The player has to place masks on an evil entity that wishes to kill the player. You have to race between mannequins to the location of the entity. But after a couple tries, I realized you didn’t even need to be near the enemy to place the mask. You only needed to move your cursor across the screen. And what was supposed to be an intense finale, quickly transformed My Beautiful Paper Smile into the latest iteration of Freddi Fish, a 1994 point and click adventure game.

My Beautiful Paper Smile has so much potential, but the inexperience of the developers is plain to see. There are so many aspects of the game I consider positive, but they are often times overshadowed by the rough edged technical aspects of its game design. However, I know that, overall, I enjoyed the game and patiently await Chapter 2 along with all its improvements.