Remothered: Broken Porcelain lives up to the broken part of its name a bit too well.
I threw myself back into the Felton house of Remothered: Tormented Fathers in preparation for the release of its sequel, Broken Porcelain. Tormented Fathers, released about two years ago now, has its share of flaws, but overall, offers a steady adventure of stealth and suspense. As a huge fan of the Clock Tower series, I was invested in the development of the Remothered series, so I welcomed the cliffhanger ending of Tormented Fathers and was enthusiastic for the sequel that it set up.
Unfortunately, my excitement has quickly dampened, as I learned that Broken Porcelain misses the mark pretty spectacularly.
The game opens with a prompt that offers a recap on the events of Tormented Fathers. A couple of cutscenes, references to psychological illnesses, and experimental drug treatments later, you suddenly assume the role of a young girl in what appears to be a dark, cluttered basement. As you collect your bearings, a mysterious, dark figure suddenly appears, and with nowhere to go, the dark figure anticlimactically uses what appears to be a sword to make her a human shish kabob. Cue the title sequence, and then more cutscenes that don’t explain what had just happened.
There’s an awkward, disjoint of the narrative like this that persists throughout the entire game. I found myself in a narrative tug-of-war, being pulled between events taking place at one point-in-time as one character, then another at a different time, and so on, until I couldn’t even tell where I was on the timeline anymore. I went into Broken Porcelain knowing that it would have a complicated plot, especially since it was intended to answer a lot of questions from Tormented Fathers, but I found myself utterly confused by information that was presented in a very inorganic and brusque way.
The intentions of characters seemed to arbitrarily change at any given moment—one character brandishes an axe at Jennifer in one scene and then switches to help her escape literally the scene after. This is somewhat explained by the plot, but still doesn’t feel plausible in many respects. It extends into what may be the strongest aspect of the game—the queer relationship between Jennifer and fellow orphan, Linn. I found one scene between the two to actually be quite compelling, but their relationship and chemistry never seemed to be given enough time to progress to where I felt invested in it.
All of this is to preface the most egregious problem with Broken Porcelain: it is buggy as hell. I tried to wait as long as I could before writing this review simply because the developers are still actively adding patches to it that fix basic features, including multiple game-breaking glitches.
There are currently so many bugs in Broken Porcelain that I can’t fit them all in this review. For those unfamiliar with the gameplay of the Remothered series, it’s mostly comprised of sneaking around what are known as “stalkers”, investigating, solving puzzles, and occasionally lobbing a bottle or snowglobe at the stalker if they spot you.
Mr. Felton, the primary stalker in Tormented Fathers, may not have been the smartest murderer, but he at least seemed to possess a brain—stalkers in Broken Porcelain struggle to even make it through doors at times. I actually sat and laughed out loud at one point as I watched one of the stalkers chasing me get stuck behind a door, and it repeatedly hit her in the face, door-smacking-her-in-the-face sound and all, for about 10 seconds straight.
At other times, the glitches give the stalkers unfair advantages. One interesting new addition in Broken Porcelain is the presence of boss fights. These mostly require sneaking up behind a stalker and stabbing at them with kitchen knives and such until they go down. When I would try to ambush stalkers, however, I would somehow be spotted behind walls and obstacles that I was hiding behind, making the process incredibly frustrating.
To make matters worse, though closets and chests are plentiful to hide in, the skill-check minigame has made a return from Tormented Fathers, except it’s now bizarrely difficult. If the killer gets too close to where you’re hiding, it prompts a minigame in which you need to keep a cursor in the middle of a circle, lest you’re yanked out. That may not sound too hard, but for some reason, the sensitivity pulls the cursor out of the circle at an insanely difficult rate, to the point that I literally would need to slam down my mouse repeatedly as I pulled in the opposite direction against it.
When I finally managed to take down the first stalker, and I was given a new objective to head to the lobby of the Ashmann Inn, I was confused to find that the music was still playing that indicated I was actively being chased. I also didn’t have the keys that I needed in order to unlock the door to the lobby. It was then I learned that the game had glitched, that the key had disappeared, and that I needed to restart and go through the process of taking down the stalker all over again. You can imagine my aggravation.
Between the convoluted plot and the broken (irony intended) gameplay, I literally struggled to make it to the end of the game. There came a point where I was constantly questioning if it had glitched out and that I needed to reset again due to the buggy nature that seems to plague almost every corner of Broken Porcelain.
I can see where the developers had attempted to make strides and build off of the foundation of Tormented Fathers, but even those aspects have glaring downfalls. A stamina bar now exists in the top right corner of the screen at all times that is mostly expended when Jennifer sprints. Bizarrely, it only takes about 10 seconds for the stamina bar to be completely expended. This wouldn’t normally be that strange, except for the fact that it takes about 50 seconds for the bar to restore to full again even if Jennifer is standing completely still or in a hiding spot. This means being completely idle or walking at a snail pace for almost a full minute just to regain stamina that gets expended almost immediately.
There is also now an interesting leveling-up system, allowing players to use a currency called “moth keys” which can be found randomly throughout the environment, to upgrade aspects such as longer sprinting duration or diversion item effectiveness. I didn’t find the upgrades to be particularly useful at all, but I can respect that it’s an innovative addition absent from Tormented Fathers.
The best word I can use to summarize my feelings towards Broken Porcelain is disappointment. I was looking forward to the sequel of Tormented Fathers for so long, and I wanted to root for it so badly, but I can’t overlook how fundamentally flawed almost every aspect of the game is. If you’re very invested in the story that Tormented Fathers has established, it may be worth picking it up just to find answers to the questions that it leaves open. Otherwise, I’d sit this one out until maybe it gets a lot more much-needed patches.
Remothered: Broken Porcelain review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Remothered: Broken Porcelain is out now for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.