Lached Up Games serves a very specific niche with its quirky and colourful visual novels. Is there much of an audience for fanservicey visual novels filled with Australian humour about genderswapping (and now, with Help! I’m Turning Into A Mermaid!, species swapping)? Probably not. But for the people who do appreciate something that takes “oddball” to a truly surreal place, it’s great that they’re around.
Help! I’m Turning Into A Mermaid (hereafter HITIAM because I really don’t want to keep typing that out) is a full-length visual novel, with more than 350,000 words. But it’s also Lached Up Games’ most ambitious effort in terms of how it plays, too. The minigames, for example, are really quite detailed. There’s a management minigame where you need to recruit and assign staff to a restaurant business. There’s also a time management cooking minigame, which is every bit as enjoyable as the likes of Cooking Fever. In the main game itself, you’re often given puzzles to solve that might not be as mind-bending as, say, Virtue’s Last Reward or AI: The Somnium files, but will appeal to fans of those kinds of games.
There’s also a romance system in place, and a “Cute/Sexy” “alignment” system that results in your character getting different dialogue trees and unlockable costumes. It’s genuinely impressive just how much work went into making this a visual novel that pushes beyond simply reading words and laughing at the humour.
That humour is what will ultimately make or break your interest in the game, however, (as has been the case with previous titles). It really is very Australian, and Australians have a unique sense of humour that doesn’t always export well. It’s a sense of humour that doesn’t have a great deal of decorum about it, and heavily uses both sarcasm and droll, deadpan beats. There are also a lot of cultural references in the game that may or may not resonate with other players without having an understanding of Australia as context.
For example. A recurring beat that the script returns to is the cost of living. Lachlan clearly has things to say about that, and to Australians, it’s one of those things that we’re all keenly aware of (and living through). People in different countries living through different issues might not fully appreciate the foundations of the jokes.
That being said, there’s also more than enough universality to the humour that just about everyone will be able to laugh along with most of it. The very funny dialogue and storytelling is backed up with some outrageous, ridiculous, and funny character designs, and as much visual humour as the developer was able to pack into the limited budget (visuals are so expensive for visual novels).
In places, HITIAM really shows the way it was taped together. Lachlan has reused assets from previous titles, which both makes sense because the game is set in the same universe as Max’s Big Bust & co, and it saves on the need to recommission new assets each time. However, the downside to this approach is a lack of cohesion. Different characters have slightly different scales, meaning that they look odd at times when standing next to one another on the screen. Backgrounds aren’t always consistent, with a series of different artistic techniques, meaning that they do look like they’re collected from different games from time to time. To be clear, I don’t blame the developer for this – graphics are really, really expensive, and a game of this ambition is not easy to do on a one-man-band indie game development budget. There’s also a lot of self-aware humour that helps to paper over these cracks. However, the art direction is noticeably inconsistent at times.
Once you move past the humour, there’s some surprising sharpness to HITIAM’s story. I mentioned the cost of living jokes above, but underlying that is some real criticism of various issues in society, power structures and cultural battlegrounds. Because it’s always played off with humour, I don’t think people will mind how “political” the game is at heart, even if they have a different position on it, but it’s always nice to see games that are designed to be maximally entertaining still be willing to take a point of view.
Lached Up Games gets more confident and ambitious with every title. The 15-20 hours that Help! I’m Turning Into A Mermaid! takes to run through make you wish that the developer had a bigger budget to work with, but you’ll be glad that games like this somehow get made in the first place.
