DISCLAIMERS:
Written by dne27, this is a review of Opus: Rocket of Whispers, available for the following platforms: Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch, Windows/Mac and Playstation 4. I am reviewing the Switch edition, bought with my own money, for £4.99 discounted using Gold Points (original price £6.99). Opus: Rocket of Whispers was developed by SIGONO and published by Flyhigh Works and had a intital release date of the 14th September 2017. It sits at a 9/10 on Steam and 72% on Metacritic.THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRETY OF OPUS: ROCKET OF WHISPERS, READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
I also want to include a potential trigger warning of discussions about death, the afterlife and other related topics. If you believe that you may be affected by this then perhaps this review may not be for you and even potentially the game itself. However if you feel comfortable enough then please, at your own leisure, continue.
I should also briefly mention the fact that there is a very short prologue 'audiovisual' game that serves as a mini backstory for the main character Fei Lin that is very good but is way too short and not really important to discuss in this review, but it's free and enjoyable so long as you like the original game. I will link it down below but knowledge of this, the main game or it's predecessors is not necessary to read this review.
Here's the tl;dr of the review: Opus delivers both a satisfying narrative and gameplay experience that may at first appear to be a sombre tale of death and despair but ultimately lands on a hopeful note, giving us a reason to cast our gaze once more to the cosmos and believe in ourselves and in love.
Well, with that out of the way, let's relax and revi - analyse?
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Opus: Rocket of Whispers.
Wow. I mean, seriously, wow. Where to even begin? Remember in my previous review where I talked about being affected by media - yeah, well in comes Opus: Rocket of Whispers (from now on I will refer to it as simply Opus) blasting me to pieces as if I was just hit by debris filled with powerful emotions. There's something special with games like Opus, seemingly quiet and shy indie games that will sock you right on your jaw if you dare to underestimate them. Often I lament about the Switchs' mediocre offerings, it's store-front littered with piss-poor shovelware titles aimed to sucker unassuming adults and prehistoric games bafflingly listed at the price of their initial launch (excuse you, Saints Row 3). Yet sometimes (and I stress sometimes) you may get lucky and find a small indie title sitting quietly between the cracks - like finding a ten pound note in a sea of one penny coins - and Opus is definitely one of these games.
A brief summary of Opus is as follows: a devastating plague hit a planet twenty-five years before the setting of the main plot, wiping out all human lifeforms as we know it. The plague meant that the ritual known as a Space Burial, in which witches - women with the ability to see the dead - send off the dearly departed in rockets made by rocket engineers, could not continue, thus leaving all dead trapped on earth. Unable to move on and find peace in the cosmos, the ghosts haunt the mind of our main protagonist John, who up until now believed himself to be the sole survivor of the plague. However, upon meeting the last remaining witch, Fei Lin (who had been placed into cryosleep) decides to, for both their sakes and the worlds, carry out the ritual and send the dead off to space.
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| (Credit: SIGONO) |
Opus is, at it's core, a story about the complex relationships we share with others and how the past and our ties to it often leave us at crossroads - unable to decide the best course of action for ourselves. Both our protagonists, without realising it, find themselves burdened with the past actions of others and themselves and struggle with the intensity of the weight they're carrying. Haunted by each of their pasts, Opus also explores one of the hardest themes not only to get right but also to - in my opinion - to even talk about: learning how to say goodbye. At first, it may not seem that way or even as deep as I'm portraying it. But that's how Opus gets you. Set in it's Fallout-but-snowy post-apocalyptic world, Opus plays as a top-down Long Dark filled with medium-sized open areas for you to explore and find small but not meaningless collectables and most importantly - parts for you rockets. You see Opus' gameplay revolves around going out every morning at eight am sharp to scrounge around the various locations covered in obstacles for you to overcome in order to explore further. The best way to describe it would be like imaging the Long Dark but from the perspective of the first couple of GTA titles - and for those who don't understand silly game references, then imagine the atmosphere of various zombie flicks such as the Walking Dead or I Am Legend but substitute zombies for really depressed ghosts.
Every morning you go out, with what small makeshift tools you have at your disposal, to ransack every location you come across in the hopes it'll have what you need. But don't get me wrong, this isn't a survival game - there's no tedious babysitting here. John doesn't have a cold or hunger/thirst meter, he's not gonna whinge that he's not taken a shit in the last five seconds nor complain that those beans he found are the reason for why he needs to go. Instead, the challenge lies in time management and simple obstacles. Each day starts at eight am, and is done in half hour periods ala Stardew Valley or it's contemporaries with the cap off at eight pm (you can push on from there you cannot complete any tasks and will most likely die of exhaustion or ghosts hounding you). The obstacles I've mentioned can be split into two categories; physical and context based. Physical means typically something you can overcome with the presences of something like a handsaw or torchlight, whilst context is slightly more complicated. These are more like context-based mini-events that only occur once and depend on where you are in the game. The most obvious example being when later on in the game you enter the city Hetmis, you are attacked by wolves and can either run away or shoot at them depending if you have the bolt-action rifle bullets necessary at that point (wow these survival games seem to really like them for some reason). There's the collecting of parts that, when you return to base and provided you have enough of what you need, will be taken by Fei to create the next part of the rocket which will take a couple of in-game days. Your home base plays out in a separate location to the over-world and can only be accessed by fast travelling there (even when standing right outside). Here, in John's father's old rocket assembly factory is a 2D frontal view set of buildings, the only ones you really go to are one for Fei and the assembly line, the launch pad and John's room, where you can create tools and polish up artefacts - this games equivalent of collectables except they actually do or mean something (unlike you Uncharted). There's not much you can do at homebase apart from the management of the rocketship or artefacts, both John and Fei will say the exact same line when pressed and there are a few bits of readables left around if you'd like to look at them. Most cutscenes will take place at homebase and will usually occur once a piece of the rocket has been assembled. Fei never travels out with you and apart from the odd brief dialogue moments that are mostly event based, John ambles alone. Well, not really - there's the ghosts of countless dead that pester him, but more on that later.
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| (Credit: SIGONO) |
The exploration gameplay is both a strength and weakness for Opus. On the one hand, I was surprised by my own pleasure of taking the long way round to the Hardware Store. I actually enjoyed John's slow movement and often revelled in the steady pacing as you make your way across the deserted landscapes. Exploring and discovering some place new actually felt like a big achievement - you got there because of your hard work and dedication - and when you did arrive somewhere new it was a joy to begin to plan optimal routes, search buildings for that resource you've been looking for or to simply take in the horror and beauty of a completely desolate city not unlike the one I reside in now. Often games have these huge sprawling worlds, filled with useless or repetitive content that is seemingly designed to bore you to death yet feel so empty and devoid of life to the point where I often take the game's offering of the fastest mode of transport or straight up fast travel because it feels unrewarding.
Here in Opus' moderately sized world (any bigger and I think it'd have lost it's charm) every location has something valuable to it, be it something physically valuable like for your rocket, some piece of worldbuilding or maybe it's an artefact for John to fix up. Opus' world slowly reveals itself to you the further you explore, drip-feeding you at an acceptable pace bits of information on just how devastating the plague has been on the world and it's remains. Trains lay side-lined, tracks covered in massive heaps of unpenetrable snow whilst the local chemical plant crumbles inward on itself, steel beams precariously balancing on the fingertips of gravity. The artstyle and point of view of the game does however, leave most of this up to the imagination of the player. You don't actually see the details like how a house might look like inside after it's been ransacked for supplies, but the hauntingly beautiful music (recognised for the IMGA Global - Excellence in Audio Runner Up award), intricate details and story titbits helps paint a picture much more powerful than simple visual presentation. Opus excels when you're simply out-and-about exploring and looking for pieces to help build your rocket, the slow movement of John as you amble through the wide, empty cities littered with desolate, rusty cars and the wailing pleas of the dead - wondering when you'll be done with building the engine or if their son will be home soon - as well as the general well done ambience (this game has to be played with headphones or you will miss out on what I'm stressing here) more than makes up for the games minimal presentation. But it's in the world and exploration that Opus also suffers.
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| (Credit: SIGONO/IWalkthroughHD) |
Opus' world is, despite what you may be currently imagining from my description, actually a set of well designed spacious looking corridors - especially towards the end of the game. Opus could be laid out into zones, with intricate narrow lanes connecting them together (see below picture for reference). In each zone lies corridors of various sizes that allow for John to either move forwards or backwards, only appearing to give you the sense of the ability to move side to side. Sometimes you'll come across a slightly square plaza but it's more often than not simply there to give you the appearance of space. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's how most linear games play out, however games like Bayonetta have the benefit of being a 3D game, operating in a area that allows for greater illusions of space such as a skybox or backdrop whereas in Opus what you see is literally what you get. If you try to see if you can explore that building over there John will furiously bounce off the walls or clumsily continue to walk into them. Even worse is when you are unable to tell whether that gap in-between the trees is actually a gap and not the snow on top of the trees because the game will sometimes, without malicious intent, allow you believe that it is really a gap or that there's space to manoeuvre as sometimes there is. Opus will have dead ends that may or may not have treasure at the bottom but it's almost impossible to tell due to the perspective the game runs with making the snowy locations' ground and top indistinguishable. Other times it'll appear you can squeeze between that gap in the fence, or that even the fence can be cut down because it looks like a similar one you cut down/squeezed through earlier, but it's more often than not that the level designer has forgotten to align the fence with the edge of the map. Sometimes you simply can't tell if John can fit through the gap you're wanting to go down and end up brushing John up against a wall like a cat against a scratch post.
Another problem is the lack of detail within buildings. Sometimes this works, like with the chemical plant which has exploded inwards and lies in ashes, but most of the time when you enter a house there is nothing there. Instead the game opts to have the roof of the building you're in to fade out slightly, as so not to obscure your view of John but also revealing that there's nothing in there - usually just a ghost or two. A ghost will often either give you something, like cloth, or indicate that there's something to harvest, like nails but apart from that there's nothing. This is most obviously due to the games' scale and scope, I can't be realistically expecting houses like the Long Dark or Generation Zero as they're very clearly not the same kind of game but somehow I feel like there was somewhat of a missed opportunity here to give personality to the building you rummage through.
If you're not playing the game in handheld with earphones, you'll have a awkward time as there is no way to adjust sound, so unless the you'd like the irritate the neighbours by having the TV blast John's footsteps you'll have more or less a jarring silence as music very rarely plays out during your exploration phase and you can't hear the footsteps or other ambient sound effects - I genuinely cannot express how different your experience will be if you do not play with headphones or very good surround sound speakers.
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| A layout of the zones that make up the basic overview of Opus' map. |
But these can be overlooked as minor annoyances if you're willing to accept that this was made by a small indie team with more experience in the story-telling aspect of gaming than the world/level design. I personally didn't mind these as over a period of four hours you learn the layout of Opus' zones very quickly and it becomes a straightforward game of mapping of your preferred route the way you do for getting home or to work. But I can appreciate that John's tank-like movement plus linear pathways might not be for all. However, if you have it within you to look past these then Opus' has a story that is honestly worth telling. In a bloated medium such as gaming, where good worthwhile stories are as rare to come across as decently written gay characters (please don't harass me it was a simple joke), Opus shines as a standout story that will resonate with even the most hardened of people. Because it applies to something that's innate in all of us: the drive to accomplish something great. Yes, I'm aware that's vague but hang on, I'll explain soon.
This is the final warning for those who are sensitive to the trigger warning listed before the review started: I will be from here on out exploring the theme of death in great detail so be warned.
You see Opus reminds me of the stories I'd dream up as a kid, pretending I'm not aware of my home life or the silent coughing that's rousing from my troubled lungs, casting my gaze out towards the dwindling stars above and how I'd wish that maybe one day I too could be among them. The vastness of space seems to create this sort of longing inside me, it's quite a physical response, and I've been aware of it ever since I was little and realised just how truly impressive space actually is. But it also makes me aware of just how small and insignificant life on Earth is in the grand scheme of galaxies and our universe etc. Space ironically is a great way to ground yourself; it makes you think about yourself, your place and what you want to do about it. It's actually quite a sobering thought and maybe a lot to take in at once, especially if you dedicate anything more than a fraction of a second to really think about it (which is really hard because who would willingly invite existentialism into their souls) but there's nothing quite like death to really make you pause. Death is like this cruel joke where someone close to you dies, your heart will swell with pain like a bruised knee and you want to grieve but the world just keeps going - just keeps moving on it's axis, indiscriminate in it's feigned ignorance, your pleas for just for time to stop so you can cry completely unnoticed. And that's what's so amazing about Opus, it actually gives you that time. Wondering around these desolate cities with nothing but the sound of your feet crunching the snow underneath you helps build this atmosphere that, coupled with John's slow movement, gives you the necessary time to grieve - whether that be for the games' world and characters or even people in your own life/yourself. Opus makes you think, the way any good game should, about how it relates to you and your current situation.
The story of Opus, in a single word, would be unique. The idea that there are a select few who are the only ones who can send the dead off into space peacefully via a rocketship is both bizarre and yet it's somewhat hopeful. But Opus is surprisingly grounded in the realism of it's characters, leaving behind the typical silly 'XD' humour that has infested the sci-fi genre lately and opting for more nuanced and relateable personalities. Character growth is given enough time that when towards the end, during the climax of the story, both Johns' and Feis' big moments feel deserved and satisfactory. Set two years after Fei and Johns initial meeting and twenty-five years after the plague, story progression is unlocked via dialogue after each new part of the rocket is complete and cutscenes that are activated upon reaching new areas or picking up key items. Opus allows for visual storytelling to be your guide with well placed titbits of information scattered across for you to collect in your own time if you want to that will provide clues as to what happened before and after the plague hit. The story of Opus gives way to explore more of the themes and the characters than it's background, and so if you're looking to play a game primarily about sci-fi elements you won't have as much of a good time.
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| (Credit: SIGONO. Honestly the artwork for this game is simply stunning sometimes!) |
Opus uses it's unique premise to instead talk about themes like death, the past and of human relationships and how hard it is to cope with all these things. Both characters have to deal with how the past can possess you, control you and haunt you. Fei is crippled by the fact that the last remaining witches told her to 'return them', to send them off via a space burial. The witches were aware that they were going to die due to the plague and at least one of them needed to survive in order to help the dead who would soon pile up once the space burials ceased, this being Fei Lin. This pressure thrusted upon Fei debilitates her, to the point where she has a breakdown due to the intense pressure of her burdensome task of essentially burying the planet's entire population on her own - the Elder Witches' words, with intended cruelty or not, plague her night and day as she feels responsible to honour a promise she didn't really make, for a task she didn't want in the first place. The implication of words and conversations can massively impact you in ways you may not even realise, and no not in the 'they will remember this' type of way.
John is in a similar hell, haunted by literal and figurative ghosts of the past, unable to deal with the loss of his parents and watching one by one as everyone he loved and knew die around him. He is asked day in and day out by the ghosts who haunt him whether the rocket is done, when'll they leave and in some cases whether he'll help them find someone or something. Often John is left fulfilling ghosts' final wishes by finding and fixing artefacts they've left behind or can't let go of. It's an interesting insight into an aspect of saying goodbye to someone or thing that's not often explored: how personal belongings and material goods effect us more than we realise. We leave things behind that either mean something to us or to others when we die, perhaps a something that encompasses you or what you meant to someone and at times that can become a burden, perhaps unintentionally not allowing someone to let go and say goodbye despite you having already gone, because in a way you're still here. Now imagine being bombarded everyday with said objects, having to fix or finalise these items for ethereal beings that can't really talk to you properly. John is overwhelmed with the idea of not being able to let go of the past and move on, to be able to say goodbye to someone and that really be it. I could personally resonate with this narrative, having just lost someone precious to me in my life and being crippled with the pressure of high expectations in a world that sometimes feels like it doesn't care - but here's where things get slightly complicated.
Sometimes stories in media can come around at the right time, I can easily point to several games and films that are just like that for me personally such as Persona 3. I discovered P3 when I was at one of my truly low points and when I played it the story of friendship and death/rebirth was just what I needed. Opus is another one. I just lost my grandmother and am at a point in life were I'm not sure where I need to go from here, crippled by the past actions of myself and family - so Opus came across as if it was made for me. But unfortunately I can see the flaws within Opus that makes this a hard game to give a full score to. Opus' writing suffers from how often most of this is, what I have written in the previous paragraph, implied or not written effectively enough. Something as heavy as this relies on the believability of it's writing and characters. This is where Opus hits that fifty/fifty split mark. One is remarkable and one is unfortunately lacklustre - this might not make sense initially but let me explain. When writing a character moment, Opus is at it's best. Some of the greatest scenes during Opus takes place in the more reflective moments, when Fei or John are thinking back on past events or on their own feelings. Moments where we see into the mind of John as he struggles with balancing his tired and increasingly more fragile sanity are delicately written and never come across as preachy, more along the lines of Hellblade than Night in the Woods. The tension and inevitable reconciliation of the two protagonists is overall brilliantly told, in my opinion, and their relationship evolves in a realistic way as they become more and more aware of just how much they need each other for survival but more importantly for friendship.
But what often sucks about Opus' writing is how often it would devolve into the same argument, back and forth. Some discussions could easily be summarised as:
'Hey John, it'll be fine.'
'No Fei, it won't be fine, it'll never be fine!'
'Trust me John it'll be fine.'
'That's what you said last time Fei, how can I trust you.'
Scene ends.
It's this level of awkward first-time fanfiction writing that often leaves me slightly underwhelmed at times but never quite put off. What I have garnered from the game comes from what felt to be my own interpretation rather than what I was actually reading or seeing. This is fine if it's intended to be that way, like how games will leave you with enough small pieces of information for you to build up your own theory of what happened, but I can see that this isn't the case - it's mostly just down to very simple writing. This may be because the game is translated from Taiwanese and therefore may suffer from simple localisation problems, such as not having the equivalent phrase or word thus losing it's meaning in translation. The writing is never quite as bad as a certain VNs but it can be quite irritating when you're trying to immerse yourself in the story and can think of better lines than what's being spoken.
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| (Credit: SIGONO. Yeah, this is what it breaks down to sometimes.) |
You might be wondering, well dne you've gushed so much about this games narrative how do you like it so much when the writing sounds kind of shit? The overall presentation of this game helps. Massively. The simplistic artstyle with it's minimalist UI helps suck you in, with the mix of absolutely incredible soft piano tracks by the brilliant Triodust and ambient sound design like the crunch of boots against freshly laden snow immerses you into Opus' sad, lonely world. It's non-intrusive gameplay and method of story-telling allows you to just sit back and take it all in. The way the world is designed, giving you little bits of information by having a ghost alert you to the presence of a newspaper that tells you of the reaction to the military blocked set shortly after the plague begun, to the way a ghost will cry that it wasn't their fault near the site of a crashed train - is just some of the best show-not-tell it's-there-if-you-want-to-look storytelling that I can't get enough of it. Almost non of the character dialogue is exposition, and whilst it might be repetitive and irritating at times at least they never talked at me, desperately trying to tell me what's going on like I'm four - if you want to learn about the world then you can, Opus gives you the tools necessary to do so and if you want to just play the game without too much exploring for narrative nuggets then go right ahead. And for once I feel like the character moments with John and Fei developing relationships were actually deserved. The progression from being stubborn and unwilling to open up about how they feel, to slowly realising that they need help to them actually reaching out and receiving help from each other felt so deserved that the often lacklustre day to day conversations didn't manage to overshadow the overall story for me personally. And honestly, when it came time to big important scenes the writers at SIGONO really pulled through and through the directors commentary (unlocked after completion) shows just how dedicated they were to telling the story of two characters lost within themselves and the world. Opus lets you learn about these characters and care about them over four hours, that felt much longer (in a good way), in a style that doesn't interrupt gameplay or detract from the story for silly unimportant side bullshit that games nowadays are often mired in. Opus tells it's story in just the right amount of time in the most simple yet effective kind of way that it's hard not to fall in love with it.
I've mentioned throughout this review/analysis that Opus is a hopeful game, gives you a reason to believe again. And that's because despite what I've written about death and the inability to let go Opus reminds us that we're not alone. In a world that's essentially a small rock floating through space endlessly Opus reminds us that there are others just like us, that feel the dread of both life and death just as much as we do. John despises Feis' enthusiasm and wants to be left alone, often in a fit of rage screaming at the voices of the ghosts to leave him be - when in reality John wants nothing more than to be loved and surrounded by support, a sort of want to be lonely but not alone type thing. Fei wants her struggles to be acknowledged, for her efforts to be rewarded but mainly to be supported during her journey. Both want to accomplish something greater than themselves, with both John and Fei wanting to launch a successful space burial knowing it's the right thing to do but also that basically yeah it's a pretty cool thing to do. When they look up to space, they don't want to see the existential dread that is loneliness but rather they look to the stars and see it for the endless possibilities it holds. Both characters come to the conclusion that space and space burials are a means of figurative rebirth, and when they finally launch their first successful space burial it makes them realise that together they have something to believe in again - they have hope amongst what would to most look to be a insurmountable wasteland filled with death, destruction and impossible odds. Opus' narrative is ultimately hopeful, positive game about the benefits of a loving support network and how whilst it may appear we are alone there is always someone who is looking out for us.
Let's just briefly mention some of the more technical aspects: there were no glitches or crashes during my four hour playthrough. I had to charge my switch during the end of the game so Opus is a good game for those concerned about battery life for playing on the go. The presentation is superb, with aesthetically pleasing art that is both minimalist and expressive with music so incredible I bought the OST from Triodusts' bandcamp upon my completion (linked down below). Something that might be a technical issue but I couldn't really think of where to put it was the bizarre choice to repeat brackets of text after you've accomplished a task. For example, when you cut a whole in the fence every time after you pass through that fence it will repeat the phrase (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'I can move through here now because I cut the fence down'. This is only irritating at best but I felt it should be mentioned regardless. (Refer to the image depicting the Restaurant pictured above and now imagine every time you enter the restaurant the same message appears.)
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| (Credit: SIGONO/Triodust) |
Opus may mean more to me than I could ever have predicted. Perhaps I'm biased, I can't help feeling that way as I wrote this review, singing high praises that has surprised me as I'm usually quite negative. Perhaps it's because it's one of those games that I believe I stumbled upon at the right time but I also genuinely believe there's something so special about Opus that has not been matched for me in a very long time. It's the perfect blend of gameplay and narrative serving each other in complete harmony to deliver a unique and memorable experience that's becoming increasingly hard to find in a over-saturated market of sprawling open-world collectathons designed to grind you down until your wallet withers away in defeat.
For an entrance fee of £6.99, Opus delivers both a satisfying narrative and gameplay experience that may at first appear to be a sombre tale of death and despair but ultimately lands on a hopeful note, giving us a reason to cast our gaze once more to the cosmos and believe in ourselves and in love.
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Important Links:
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/742250/OPUS_Rocket_of_Whispers/
Prologue Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/910460/Rocket_of_Whispers_Prologue/
Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/opus-rocket-of-whispers-switch/
OST Bandcamp: https://sigono.bandcamp.com/album/opus-rocket-of-whispers-original-soundtrack
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/opus-rocket-of-whispers/id1199291635?mt=8
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sigono.heaven01&hl=en_GB
SIGONO Homepage: http://www.sigono.com/