Vasilis is a hand-drawn adventure game by Marginal Act. The game acts as a starting point into the universe Marginal Act is trying to create along with other games, namely, the Line, Marginal Act, and Blind Boris.
Where is Peter
Vasilis is the name of the main character. She is an old woman who has lost her husband Peter. Living in a city in riots, Vasilis, discovers Peter is alive again. As she sets out to find her previous dead husband, Vasilis is entangled into the chaos created by the events in the rebellious city center. As the game progresses, the city grows more and more into a dystopian future filled with uncanny occurrences. Reality grows into psychological horror in which the only sane thing to do is search for your loved ones. With everything around her getting more and more distorted, Vasilis needs to survive the revolution in order to reach Peter.
Take a walk
Vasilis is at its core an adventure game. You go and solve certain problems by using items after which you can progress towards your goal. In the beginning, you aren’t allowed to go to many places because they’ve been barricaded because of the riots. This helps to get a feel for the world without making it too big. After completing a certain amount of tasks, a new chapter begins which results in more areas being opened. This idea is great but the main problem is the fact that Vasilis is so slow. To make things worse, there is often not much to do in between some key areas. This makes this game feel like a drag after a while.
Many tasks involve fetching a certain item which can be found on the other side of town. At times, Vasilis, started to feel more like a walking simulator than anything else. The new areas all look more or less the same so the excitement of discovering new areas is kind of lost. The dread of having to walk for minutes to potentially reach a place where you’ll find nothing that helps you becomes tiring fast. The world around Vasilis is often literally on fire but that doesn’t mean she’s making any haste. The map used in the game offers not much help because of the strange ways areas are presented to the player.
Story-driven
Vasilis focuses more on the story than actual gameplay. I’m not against that at all but I found this game doesn’t do a great job at it. I met a lot of characters which tell you something about the story but in the end, had me guessing even more. The fact that these characters keep saying the same lines even after I already dealt with some issues they had, doesn’t make sense. The only way I could make sense of the story was by using the journal. This journal has a resume of what happened and even hinted at what I was supposed to do next. After looking up some info about the game I found out this is loosely based on the Ukrainian revolution of 2004. The sense of chaos and uncertainty is definitely there but could’ve been worked out more in my opinion.
Hand-drawn style
As you can see from the screenshots, Vasilis uses a very distinguished style. The hand-drawn style really adds to the chaos of the whole game. The roughness of the drawings fits the events and has to be applauded. The animations used are all very blocky to further emphasize the chaotic nature of the story. The distortion happening throughout the world as the story progresses also augments the sense of despair. The lack of color works for the mood-setting but often made it harder to see objects I could pick up or paths I could take. At one point I had to look up a long-play because I missed an item.
Conclusion
The sense of chaos a region amidst a revolution must invoke is fully present in Vasilis. A good game in which I am pushed to continue is sadly not present. The game can be completed in about an hour but I found the slow backtracking often so extremely boring I just gave up halfway through.
