"Edna and Harvey, The Breakout" and why you should play it.

[Kaldrak]

This is an unusual game.

Oh, I don't mean the genre. Point and click adventure games are a dime a dozen, dating back from the halcyon days of the 90's where you couldn't take two steps in a video game store without tripping over five or six of em. No, I mean it's an unusual game for a variety of reasons that surpass the limitations of other games of its type.

Allow me to elaborate.

The main character is Edna Konrad, a young woman with amnesia who is locked in a padded cell with only her blue stuffed bunny Harvey for company. She doesn't know why she's there, she doesn't know who she is, and she has no idea why Harvey can talk or why no one else can hear him, but she's pretty sure a mistake has been made somewhere as she isn't crazy...and she can have Harvey back her up on that if she has to.

The two of them are delightfully cracked. Edna's Tabula Rasa is heavily influenced by Harvey's whimsically destructive nature. He claims to be a manifestation of her subconscious mind and that he has the key to her lost memories and it is Harvey who will be her constant companion throughout the game. In fact, he can also send Edna back into her memories in a sort of flashback sequence which he calls 'tempomorphing'.

The first of these flashbacks occurs while they are still trapped in her padded cell. Harvey knows a trick Edna knew once that can help them escape. To the past Harvey!

The flashback sequences have peaceful music and slightly different gameplay from the present. The principal characters are Edna, Harvey, Edna's long suffering father Mathis, an annoying snot of a boy named Alfred, and his father Dr. Marcel, the director of the asylum where Edna is being held prisoner in the present. Huh, interesting coincidence that.

During these sequences you can switch between controlling young Edna and Harvey, who is mysteriously able to walk around on his own now. He cannot influence the world in any way, but he can grab stuff in the background 'save' them as conversational topics to discuss with Edna. This is a neat little mechanic and I immensely enjoyed gathering objects and images for later discussion while I ambled around on Harvey's stuffed bunny feet. These flashbacks are unfortunately few and far between and there is something slightly off about them, which I noticed immediately, but couldn't quite understand the significance of until later in the plot.

You see, it's fine playing as Harvey so long as you are in the same room as Edna, but I grew slightly alarmed when I was exploring places and looking at things Edna could not possibly be able to see and then going back to talk with Edna about them. It worried me a bit, but at first it seemed harmless enough, so I pressed on and tried to uncover the truth of the matter. I won't go into exactly what I discovered, but things are definitely not as they seem at first glance.

Speaking of insanity, I'll take a few minutes to elaborate on exactly what makes this game so much fun to play. Two words: 'object interaction.' Nearly everything can be combined with nearly everything else and you'll get item specific dialogue for almost all of it. Want to find out what happens if you use the scissors you picked up with the flimsy paper cup you have? Go for it! Now try the scissors with everything else in your inventory and find out what Edna says. Now use the scissors on everything in the background on every screen and watch as she vandalizes everything from potted plants to posters on the walls to couches and chairs. Oh, you found a pen? Write 'Edna rules' and 'Edna was here' on various objects within the asylum.

There's no real point to vandalizing almost everything you can find...but you can if you want to.

There are hidden jokes everywhere and the game rewards a patient and meticulous player enormously. I spent the majority of my twenty five hour playthrough combining all of the stuff in my inventory with all of the other stuff in my inventory, all of the stuff in the backgrounds, showing it off to various people I met in the asylum, and getting Harvey's thoughts on everything.

Let me give you a few of the more entertaining examples.

Edna is schizophrenic, so the option 'talk to' has real application almost everywhere. Walk through the halls of the asylum and strike up conversations with chairs, tables, doors, posters, the random stuff in your inventory, light switches, etc. etc. etc. Much of it will respond to Edna's queries, though they are apparently voiced by Harvey, as you can see his lips move when objects 'talk' to Edna. She doesn't seem to notice that he's the one actually doing the 'talking' most of the time though. It's a wonderfully surreal touch.

A short ways into the game I picked up a comic book, which appears to have no practical application whatsoever within the game. However, the adventures of 'Captain Useless' were a source of great amusement to me, read aloud by Edna in a sort of comic book announcer's voice. Try using it on anything and everything you come across and she'll come up with custom panels for Captain Useless and his sidekick, Handy Boy.

I found a fake police badge in a box of cornflakes and was henceforth rewarded with Edna speaking in a southern drawl and calling herself 'Inspector Konrad' whenever she used it.

All of this was so much fun to do, it may have actually ruined most other games in the point and click adventure genre for me. Why shouldn't I get custom dialogue for attempting to combine my bottles of ketchup and mustard that I swiped from the cafeteria? Where else am I going to find the equivalent of the marvelous little duet I was presented with, comprised entirely of the words: 'woodie woodie woo', when I tried to use my croquet mallet with a poster? Edna explained to Harvey that she had no idea what I had in mind when I told her to do the action, so she thought she'd just start singing instead.

There are other fourth wall breaking moments, but they don't feel out of place and they don't break the immersion because she's completely nutters. Sure Edna, suuure. There's a mysterious 'player' controlling your actions. Uh huh. Can we get a doctor over here maybe?

Speaking of doctors, the persistent villain of the game is Dr. Marcel, the director of the asylum. It is revealed very early on that Edna's 'treatments' at his hands directly result in her almost complete amnesia afterwards. It is the main goal of the game to escape from his nefarious clutches and restore Edna's memory...with Harvey's help of course. The plot is for the most part very lighthearted and funny, despite the subject matter. However, there is a gradual shift in tone about two thirds of the way through the game.

As Edna regains more and more of her memories and grows more lucid, she begins to lose patience with Harvey's ridiculous comments and destructive urges. Their relationship becomes strained the closer they get to the truth, and what was once amusingly witty and funny within the walls of the asylum becomes rather sad and pathetic outside.

There are a few moments that foreshadow the twist at the end of the game and I certainly can't say that I didn't see it coming, but it hit me hard, much harder then I thought it would. I had come to care quite a bit about poor, mixed up Edna and her stuffed bunny and the ultimate resolution to the game felt very abrupt. The arbitrary final choice between the two possible endings definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

It's a good thing there's a sequel. Too bad it doesn't star Edna though.

And so, in conclusion, I would urge you to take a look at the game and see for yourself. It's wonderfully funny, well written and voiced, and was an amazingly enjoyable experience for me. I feel my opinion may be in the minority here, however. The game's low metacritic score puzzles me greatly and some of the reviewers' complaints had me scratching my head and saying to myself, "Did we even play the same game?" My theory is that the game has had an overhaul at some point and those reviews are a bit dated, but whatever.

Other complaints are about the buggy nature of the game itself, which is definitely an issue. There are some points where the game just crashes to the desktop when you try to use something with something else, or the dialogue will flash on the screen and no voice acting will be played. There was even one gamebreaking bug which you need to download a workaround off of the steam forums for, but if you know about these issues beforehand, you should be fine going in prepared for them.

The other principal complaints are about the puzzles, (Huh. Annoying puzzles in a point and click adventure game? Never seen that before.) the excessive dialogue, (Really? Really? You're complaining about my favorite part of the game.) and the somewhat amateurish look to the artwork and the animations, so I suppose it's definitely not for everybody.

Whelp, that's all the time we have to spend on this. Come on Harvey, let's get out of here before Dr. Marcel comes back and sees what we did to his desk while he was gone.

....Harvey?

[Kaldrak]

The next segment contains major spoilers about the ending and certain events that happen during the game. Amusingly enough, my analysis of the ending is actually longer then my largely spoiler free review of the whole game. I would strongly urge you to play the game for yourself and see what happens before reading this, but it's up to you really.

Spoiler: ShowHide

I mentioned that I could see the twist coming at the end of the game, right? Well, Edna manages to escape from the asylum and eventually ends up back at her house, which has been abandoned for ten years. No one cleaned anything out. No one removed any of the furniture. Some of the windows are broken and the carpets are ruined. Even the mushroom stew that Mathis was making has been left on the stovetop.

So, to recap some of the major plot points that I've avoided spoiling so far, it is revealed earlier that Alfred, Dr. Marcel's son, died ten years ago. Mathis, Edna's father, confessed to murdering him and was summarily executed. Oh, and Edna was remanded into Dr. Marcel's custody for some godawful reason. Seriously, just at face value, this is such a staggeringly bad idea that it made me stare at the screen in utter disbelief. Oh, you killed this man's son? What better idea then to give him custody of your daughter?

Mathis you fucking idiot.

Mathis is woefully unprepared to raise a child with Edna's issues by himself. To say that Edna 'acted out' as a child is an incredible understatement. She routinely tormented Alfred in a manner that usually resulted in personal injury to him. Alfred himself is genuinely unlikeable, being possessed of a nasally, aggravating voice and delighting in tattling on Edna at every opportunity and getting her in trouble. Alfred was doted on by Dr. Marcel at every opportunity, having a variety of new things that Edna was jealous of. Mathis, unable to deal with his daughter's antics, hired a personal tutor for her and Alfred. As if that weren't bad enough, Edna was routinely punished for her transgressions by being locked in her cellar or locked up in freaking cupboards, which she did her best to escape from.

Add to this volatile mixture the fact that Edna is an undiagnosed schizophrenic and you have the recipe for a real disaster in the making. They just think she's talking to herself, but no. To her Harvey is as real as everyone else in her life. He is her only friend and confidant, due to the fact that her relationship with her father is a punishment/attention seeking cycle at best. She disliked her tutor, hated Dr. Marcel, and had a rivalry of sorts with that unlikeable ponce Alfred.

As soon as I discovered that Alfred was actually dead, I was convinced that one of Edna's pranks had gone too far and ended up killing him.

Unfortunately, this was not the case.

It all comes to a head the night that Alfred died. After present day Edna explores the ruined, moldering house, trying to convince herself that she can fix things up and live in it in peace, she and Harvey 'tempomorph' to the past one final time in her room, to unlock the memories of that night and try to clear her father's name. She is convinced that he is innocent. Harvey however, is not so sure about that....

After a confrontation with Alfred, where she ends up locking him in her room, Edna tells Harvey to explore the downstairs and she'll explore the upstairs looking for Mathis. Harvey is more than a little freaked out about this and for that matter, so was I. The next sequence of events is truly disturbing, as Harvey 'sees' Mathis murdering children. He runs screaming to Edna, but every time she comes to check on what he's looking at, there's nothing there. In a surprising moment of self-awareness, Harvey points out that he thinks he's hallucinating and that Edna probably shouldn't trust the things that he sees without her, due to him being a figment of her subconscious. Edna is truly upset by all of this and the two of them get into an argument.

Edna discovers Mathis talking to Dr. Marcel in the back yard. Proving once again just how spectacularly brain dead he is about such matters, Mathis is talking to the good Dr. about how he feels that Edna might be a good 'match' for Alfred when the two of them grow up, if only she would stop getting into trouble all of the time. Dr. Marcel tells him about a new behavioral correction therapy he's developed that he believes may be the only thing that will help Edna with all of her problems. Mathis agrees to have her undergo the treatment. At this point Edna makes herself known and tries to protest, but her father won't hear of it and he sends her back to her room.

Somewhat dejected, Edna returns to find that Alfred has managed to free himself and worse, he's read her diary and now knows her secrets. He seizes Harvey from her and threatens to destroy him, caustically crowing while he squeezes the stuffed bunny in his hands. Alfred stands at the top of the stairs, apparently choking the life out of Harvey while Harvey pleads with Edna for help. Edna tells Alfred that she is going to be nicer to him from now on and begs him to return Harvey to her, but he refuses to believe her. Finally, she asks Harvey what she should do.

"Push him." Harvey tells her.

And so she does.

The following is my reaction to this:

"Well that's...I...uh. Holy shit, Edna. Really?"

Back in the present day, Edna is overcome by remorse. All of her memories have been returned to her, but where is she supposed to go from here? What is she supposed to do? An escaped mental patient from an asylum, with only a stuffed bunny for company whose destructive voice drove her once to murder. Still reeling from her revelation, she leaves her room to find Dr. Marcel himself ascending the staircase. His glare is accusatory and he acknowledges the fact that she killed his son and that her father sacrificed himself for her crime.

Excuse me a moment, I would like to take another look at the facts here.

Edna kills Alfred. That is truly terrible, make no mistake. Her father Mathis, then decides to confess to murdering him, presumably to prevent Edna from going to jail. Ok, that's kind of stupid, but if you have as little mental capacity as Mathis displays, then I can sort of understand the reasoning here. However, in a spectacular display of sheer fucking idiocy, he grants custody of Edna to the vengeful Dr. Marcel. Oh, she'll be better off in the hands of the father of the boy she killed, yes, that will work.

What she needed was someone to step in and recognize that she was mentally ill. Dare I say it, perhaps a freaking doctor or a mental health professional capable of being unbiased? One whose son she hadn't killed, mayhap? No? I'm the only one who thought of that?

Alright then. I now hate all of you. I hate Mathis. I hate Alfred. I hate Dr. Marcel. I hate all of his flunkies at the asylum who perpetuated this absurdity with full knowledge of what the Dr. was doing to Edna over the last ten years. I'm even starting to hate Harvey. He is not a good voice for Edna to be hearing.

So Mathis is executed for an excess of pure, unvarnished stupidity and Edna goes to Dr. Marcel's asylum for his 'behavior correction therapy'.

I would say that having one's memories wiped over and over again for ten years fits the definition of 'cruel and unusual punishment'. Wouldn't you? Each time, Dr. Marcel tried to remake Edna, essentially attempting to brainwash her into his perfect little puppet and each time she has somehow regained her memories. Why?

Take one blue stuffed bunny guess.

Over all those years, the Dr. never took Harvey from her, perhaps not recognizing the significance of the bunny. You know what all of that is? I'll tell you what it's definitely NOT. None of that is any sort of treatment for schizophrenia that I've ever heard of. Dr. Marcel is an egomaniacal quack, more focused on his personal revenge and final victory against Edna than on anything else.

This time, he believes he may have found the answer. He offers Edna a chance to 'live a life free of guilt'. He urges her to destroy Harvey and submit to his treatment one final time. Harvey however, has a slightly different solution.
Oh lookie. Dr. Marcel is standing right in the same spot where Edna pushed Alfred down the stairs ten years ago. "Go on Edna." Harvey urges. "We can be free if we just get rid of him."

Me:

*stares at screen*

"Why are you doing this to me, game? I thought you were supposed to be a lighthearted, quirky adventure."

I reviewed my options.

Edna is cornered. She can either push Dr. Marcel down the stairs and once again commit murder, or she can accept his proposal, destroy Harvey and get the equivalency of a freaking lobotomy.

Oh goody.

I wanted a third option. I wanted Edna to try to reason with Dr. Marcel. She's not a child anymore and she shows quite clearly by the end of the game that she is capable of understanding the gravity of her actions. How is she supposed to deal with any of her issues if he keeps wiping away her memory of them? Is she just going to stop hearing voices with no memory? It doesn't work that way you giant, Machiavellian asshole. I wanted an option where she could decide to destroy Harvey without accepting Dr. Marcel's treatment, or an option where she could leave without attempting to murder him.

Alas, there is no third option.

I saved the game and promptly knocked Dr. Marcel down the stairs with my croquet mallet. Watching Harvey urging Edna on to murder him almost made me sick.

There were a series of epilogue one-shots, where the fate of Edna and some of the other characters are revealed. In this ending, Edna proves how resourceful she is by evading capture by the police and disappearing almost without a trace. The only sign she leaves behind her are the remains of a blue stuffed bunny which has apparently been torn to pieces. I suppose even in this ending, Edna was finally finished with Harvey.

The other ending is worse. Edna advances on Harvey with a pair of scissors and destroys him while he stares up at her in horror.

The epilogue for this one displays just how twisted Dr. Marcel is. He brainwashes Edna and actually renames her 'Alfredina' after his deceased son. She apparently no longer causes trouble and is the perfect, obedient little servant at the asylum.

Excuse me for a moment while I go puke.

Ok then.

Dr. Marcel's epilogue has him retiring after his final victory and I really didn't care all that much about the other epilogues.

And that's that.

I still love this game. The ending just...hit me hard emotionally. That's the mark of a good story though, isn't it? It sticks with you for a while, long after you've finished reading or watching or playing it. I'll definitely play it again. After all, I must have missed some bits of dialogue and hidden jokes here and there.

It'll be an enjoyable ride trying to find them the second time around.

[Anastasia]

Sounds like a pretty good trip.

I read the spoilered section and it was about what I figured. That sort of setup, well?

Spoiler: ShowHide

It's going to be dark. The ability to get the player right in the proverbial gut is too good to pass up. All the light-hearted humor is prep for that climax.

[Dracos]

Sometimes holding back is all about

Spoiler: ShowHide

That punch you then don't see coming.

Heh, makes me remember but not remember an old anime that did 25 lighthearted episodes only to kill off the two brothers at the very end.

[Kaldrak]

Thanks for the feedback. I enjoy writing these reviews and I played the sequel, but it lacks the narrative strength and originality of this one. I can post a review of that one too, if anyone is interested.

[thepanda]

The second game was weaker as a story, but the endings were better.

[Kaldrak]

True that. The beginning really makes no sense though, even after I played all the way through and took another look at it.

Spoiler: ShowHide

I do feel that the ending of the second game lacked the impact the first one had. More like they were simply rehashing ground already covered here and giving a much needed 'third' option to the already available 'kill Dr Marcel' or 'let him win' options. Also, I kind of missed having epilogues.