MICHIGAN: REPORT FROM HELL
on concept alone it's hard for me to dislike this. rather than being the protagonist, you're a creepy little satellite that hovers around, leers at, and accompanies a series of disposable Hot Babe Reporters while they do the usual point&click bits in your stead. you thump around with your big camera & your audio guy who's even more of a weirdo than you are, and you investigate a virus outbreak that's got people spitting up slugs and turning into vagina dentata monsters in order to capture a True&Real Document of Events (but also get Sick Footage)
it's b-horror schlock thru&thru; there's no taste here that isn't bad taste, and most of it veers toward bad bad rather than good bad. oftentimes it feels like grasshopper found a way to launder their recurring misogyny thru a lens sleazy enough to provide reasonable doubt, and even accounting for the direct-to-VHSness of it all, it's hard to get past how grimy it can be. when you're capturing web 1.0 pornsites on a laptop for Erotic Points, that's fine and good. when you're capturing a woman's distressed reactions to your co-worker sexually harassing her while she's involuntarily bound to a pool table for Erotic Points, that's.. not so good
i had expected your choices (save/shoot) and the types of footage you capture (immoral, suspense, erotic) to play a more pivotal role in the multiple endings, but not really. all they alter is some aesthetic and tonal flavour in final 30 seconds of the game. there's no real consequence to anything you do, and even while accidentally killing off most of the characters, i still got the best(?) ending with the most handsomest depiction of the protagonist and was referred to as a divine being who considers themselves a journalist and has a strong belief in rationalism. a very good joke!!!
how this ended up coming around for me in spite of itself is twofold:
I) really love the mundane environments and how much of the game focuses on this voyeuristic out-of-body quality as you watch other characters rummage thru everyday places they really don't belong; the feeling of being tethered to the True Protagonist is fascinating, even when the interactions themselves generally aren't. it's not scary whatsoever, often thanks to one of the goofiest, shittiest english dubs ever recorded, but there's something unnerving about being this silent, lurching force expressing yourself almost exclusively thru pans and zooms that really, really works for me
II) i eventually started to view the horror derived from monsters as being secondary to the horror derived from the protagonist's (in)actions. while it could be argued you can be somewhat of an Upstanding Guy when making the most ethical choices, your role as silent deuteragonist forces you into being a passive observer in ways that're hard to reconcile with someone having any amount moral compass. everything's much more consonant if you assume the disconnected, lecherous, and opportunistic role the game repeatedly goads you into playing, and it makes the queasy peeping tom aspect of your presence far more potent
main complaint, aside from the obvious shit, is that it doesn't have much to say about the subject matter or its framing. maybe that's obvious too, and maybe you'd have to be a total idiot to expect some sort of deep dive into the subjectivity or ethics of disaster photography like its some kinda susan sontag thing, but whatever. feels like a missed opportunity to have set all this groundwork just to have the player stare at some tits or film a guy blowing his brains out in a bathtub (or not!!! doesn't really matter!!! who cares!!!)
on the other hand, maybe it wouldn't have worked without that enormous vacancy in the first place. not gonna think too hard on it, god knows suda & ueda didn't