This is a game about kissing people. As many people as you can really, with the goal of working one’s way up to kiss the dream girl, as such things are built towards through practice and reputation building, all the way from bad teenager to handsome boy and beyond. Going up the incline involves methods, as people kissing can only be done at the opportune moment. This is where the gameplay comes in, as Chulip asks that the player observe what is going on, and deduce when someone is happiest from there. This comes in two forms: hint interpretation and general observation of the person in question. See, Chulip is set in a fair few cutesy Japanese town diaramas, which by the way, make for a great setting for the walking and deducing, and within are townspeople with daily schedules. So you follow them around, learn what they get up to, and try to piece everything together. This game is one big puzzlebox.
Some things make it less approachable than it should be, so advice towards anyone wanting to give game a shot would be to do so in a way that enables savestates and speedups. Anyway, you have a number of hearts, which serve as health points and increase as the kisses accumulate. Completely broken hearts lead to death, and a return to the last savepoint, which are few and far between, as public toilets tend to be. This isn’t good when the game is based on the testing of things, and when it’s incredibly easy to mistime kisses, resulting in violence and the heartbreak associated. The hearts serve a similar purpose to Fallout New Vegas’ cazadors, as play will necessarily involve heartbreak; progression is therefore locked until the heart has been strengthened enough.
You play as named teenage boy; I called him Abe because that’s the name that came to mind, and you’ve just moved into the cheapest house in Long Life Town with your dad, as you both form a family, that while close, is also incredibly poor. The dream girl, quite literally as that is the content of day dreams drum atop the moving truck, lives in a concrete pipe across the street, her name for our purposes here being Petunia. I said before that the town is quite cutesy, and it is, as things are delivered up close to the screen, with simple shapes and recreation with a hint of the weird. Game is bizarre, for reasons that will be obvious for anyone that has played it and which I’ve decided I won’t mention here, as surprises would be spoilt. Rest assured that the headscratchers are quite engaging, which is good because of the puzzle angle.
Though those headscratchers aren’t built equally, and what I mean to say here is that a few of the puzzles follow the old adventure game logics, which when tied with how unapproachable some of them are, make my brain wander off to Gamefaqs for the walkthrough. However, the narrative intrigue is quite nice, the hints of the weird found about town themselves hint at some hidden goings on, and anticipating and experiencing just what that could be is what makes for the most engaging headscratchers.
It is also a game that says things. It has a perspective and views it would like to get across. Couple of examples:
The music, while sparse, is very good, mostly made up of a cappella and jazz joints that will often serve as variations on itself. Walking around Scarecrow Fields at 4 am to suddenly hear the jazz piano storm in is quite a mood. As is handing the busker a few coins so as to hear a single guy’s serenade.
Here’s the Japanese cover for the game, and I absolutely love it to bits. The town is recreated faithfully, both in how stuff is where it should be, and also in how the art evokes the feel of the town quite nicely. Nine times out of ten I find the Japanese covers for games to be much nicer than the rest, especially when it comes to the older PS1 and PS2 era titles.
Finished up and didn’t get all the kisses, but most snogs were had and it was overall quite nice, despite being a sour mix of frustrating and time consuming when it comes to the gameplay. It might be trying to make a point about how you need to know the town really well, as the twenty questions also demonstrate; hence why you spend so much time walking back and forth at different times, but I think it takes things a bit too far. A game worth playing for the everything else though, as this was obviously someone’s passion project for a while, and the level of creativity and artistic sensibility on display is not to be tutted at.
* Project Managers get to manage things like “the bricks”, or “the concrete bags” whilst doing the work of bricklayers themselves. The section that is populated entirely by managers are doing the exact same things as the sections populated by lower ranking employees are.
