The music changes with each location, which helps to provide a feeling of immersion I found it appropriately dark and bizarre, and even somewhat catchy. Unfortunately there’s not much to interact with, so the effect is more like flipping through a comic than exploring a world.
The environments are sprinkled with bizarre props that can easily be categorized as “strange,” including hulking gothic furniture, bug-eyed monsters, giant mushrooms, a talking spider, and plenty of skulls and cobwebs. This distracted me, especially compared to her much smoother appearance in the game’s handful of rendered cinematics. Although background elements have smooth outlines, Emily herself is noticeably jagged around the edges. The limited color palette does make for somewhat drab backgrounds, but they’re well drawn in a cartoon art style that’s consistent with the Emily the Strange universe. The protagonist and her cats look just as they should and many of the game’s locations are depicted in Emily’s trademark colors of black, red, and gray. My experience with Emily the Strange is mostly limited to her clothing appearances, so I can’t say if the game’s locations and storyline jive with her more recent comic book outings, but the art style is certainly authentic. There’s only one save slot, so each save overwrites your previous data. You can also save your game at any time via the scrapbook. None of this information is necessary for progressing through the story, and I actually forgot about the scrapbook for most of the game. In the scrapbook you’ll find additional elements such as a diary (a write-up of what’s happened so far), achievement stickers that are awarded when you reach various parts of the game, and a tutorial. The touch screen shows Emily in her environment and contains icons for accessing the inventory, Emily’s scrapbook, and the four cats (grayed out until you rescue them). The top screen displays statistics such as the number of cat treats and Oddettes you’re carrying (more on these below), your point count and location, and your current objective. The +Control pad doesn’t work for navigation, but you can use the A button to clear dialogue lines in place of a screen tap. Only a few objects can be interacted with on any given screen and there are no hotspot identifiers, so you’re stuck tapping anything that seems interesting and, occasionally, getting a response. The interface is stylus-driven: you tap the floor to make Emily walk, objects to look at them, and other characters to speak to them.
It’s a fairly basic storyline that mainly exists as a framework for Emily to explore the world and stumble upon the Professor Layton-style standalone puzzles that make up the bulk of Strangerous’s gameplay. Once she’s found her feline friends, her focus shifts to their cloyingly cheerful abductor, who is threatening to paint Emily’s gothic-styled world pink. The first half of the game is spent searching for them, starting in Emily’s strange bedroom and around her strange house, then branching out to other strange locations that include a carnival, a twisted garden, a school attended by cat people, and a ghost pirate ship.
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The combination of a license I love and a genre I love seemed like a match made in heaven, but sadly this puzzle game ended up feeling strangely familiar.Īs Strangerous begins, Emily wakes from a nightmare (her favorite kind of dream) to find that her four black cats-Mystery, Sabbath, Miles, and Nee Chee-have been kidnapped (err, catnapped).
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A moody teenager with dark hair, dark clothes, and a dark expression, Emily’s claim to fame back then was a series of stickers and baby-doll tee shirts sporting slogans like “Bad meaning good,” “I want you to leave me alone,” and “Emily doesn’t get mad, she gets even.” Fifteen years later, the cynical character’s unlikely empire has expanded to include comic books, an upcoming feature film, and now a Nintendo DS game, Emily the Strange: Strangerous. I first became acquainted with Emily the Strange in a funky clothing store adjacent to my college campus in the mid-1990s.
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