MetaDude

Genre: Visual Novel / Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

MetaDude is a Visual Novel with some light Puzzle elements released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game, presented as a digital comic book, follows the adventures of the titular superhero as he fights to defend Meta City, a digital city within a computer.

One of the best things about MetaDude is this game’s wonderful comic book-style artwork,which seems far better than one would expect to find in a game that only costs $2. This art is backed by an atmospheric soundtrack that changes as the plot progresses. All in all, good stuff.

Unfortunately, the story here is an absolute mess. Scenes and locations suddenly change without any rhyme or reason, there are numerous spelling errors and what appear to be outright translation issues from someone who has English as a second language. Characters suddenly appear without introduction, and we’re given no clue as to who they are or what their motives are. If one were feeling generous, they might suggest that MetaDude reads like a comic book story where half the pages were ripped out, leaving readers to try to figure out what the heck they missed.

To give you an idea, one “issue” of this six-issue digital comic book has MetaDude coming across a Kingpin-style whale-themed mob boss pressing a woman for protection money. MetaDude is discovered and repelled with a jet of water (a power this villain never demonstrates again), and upon picking himself up… we cut to MetaDude meeting with a French-speaking thief. Uh, okay… so I guess he’s going to work with the thief to expose The Whale’s wrongdoing? Well, no… just a few frames later, MetaDude shoots the guy in the back for working with The Whale, after which The Whale ambushes him. What?

Ah yes, that brings us to MetaDude’s weapon, the “undigitazer”. It’s never really indicated just what makes this weapon so special (it is repeatedly referred to as some sort of ultimate weapon), nor what happens to those villains he shoots with it (which is almost everyone). Is he killing these people and cracking jokes about it after? Are they being transported to some alternate dimension? It’s not clear if even MetaDude knows the answer to this.

I suppose there is one bright spot in all this horrible mess of a story – MetaDude’s nemesis, as much as he has any, is a villain named Money Man, who wears a Riddler-style outfit with dollar bills instead of question marks, and uses a gun that shoots money. Throughout the comic, even in stories where Money Man isn’t present, citizens wonder aloud if the latest plot or danger they face is something created by Money Man, and just the notion that such a ridiculous villain could be seen as a criminal mastermind is delightfully stupid.

There is one other elements I should address here. At the start of each “issue” of the digital comic, players must first solve a tile puzzle where they rotate the tiles to create a picture. There’s nothing clever or interesting about these puzzles, and all they really seem to do is slow down the game’s progression. You could get rid of this element completely and nothing of value would have been lost.

In the end… look, for $2, I suppose it might be too much to expect for a Visual Novel to be something truly profound, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that it at least be coherent. MetaDude fails as a story, and makes things worse with puzzles that do nothing but slow everything down. At the very least, the artwork here is excellent, but if that’s your only interest you can find countless better alternatives online. Even at $2, this game isn’t worth it.

tl;dr – MetaDude is a Visual Novel presented as a digital superhero comic book, and while the artwork is excellent, the story is pretty scatterbrained and at times incoherent. In addition, the puzzles that start each of the “issues” of the comic aren’t interesting in any way, and only serve to slow things down. Skip this one.

Grade: D+

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