Root Letter: Last Answer for Switch

What did I do today? Well, I went to a small town in Japan, checked into a hotel, met a strange old bloke in the communal baths, had a meal in a nice restaurant and discovered my fortune in love at a local shrine. Not in real life of course (I wish), but in the game Root Letter: Last Answer which I found in town today at a very nice price. It came in a box with some nice artwork too.

It’s an interactive graphical novel. I expected that the graphics would all be hand drawn, but that is not the case. Instead there is a lot of photography, plus a smattering of video. The locations look like lightly processed images of real places and all the characters are all pictures of different people. I’m not sure if the production process actually involved going to a town, taking pictures of the library, museum etc etc along with local postmen, chefs, bartenders and creepy old men, but it looks like it could have been.

The plot is rather slow moving, but for me it is all about the journey anyway. You do get a quite nice glimpse of Japanese life along with the gameplay. What you do affects the outcome, so I’ve already decided that a few dodgy decisions that I made at the start of the game may have doomed me a bit, but I’ll be happy to come back again and have another go. You can save your game progress at any point, so you can always save before a momentous conversation and then re-do things. You can’t really compare the gameplay to that of a fast moving video game, it is more like reading a book or listening to a play on the radio (does anyone do that any more - you should).

For the price of entry I reckon I got a good deal, and I’m looking forward to finding out just what happens.