Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

LIT arrived on WiiWare last week, and after clearing out some Wii memory space (what fun! let’s keep doing this, Nintendo!), I jumped into this intriguing horror-puzzler.

The game begins in medias res, which is to say that I never saw any kind of intro movie. I don’t know if this was intentional, or if I simply hit the A button too many times and skipped it. Either way, I was glad I did my research beforehand, because in addition to no cutscene story setup, this game also has no tutorial.

LIT takes place in a school that has been overrun by some kind of evil shadow death spirit force. Everyone is missing (or turned into demons) and the school is a wreck. As the sole survivor, you have to escape by doing what your mommy always told you would banish monsters… by turning on the lights.

Each level is a single classroom, initially blanketed in pure darkness, but strategically sprinkled with lamps, computer monitors and TV sets. Using a slingshot and a flashlight, you need to puzzle out the correct means of illumination to inch your way towards each room’s EXIT door. If you touch the dark at any point, the shadow beasts drag you down to your demise and the level resets.

But wait, there is one other survivor…

Sure, lots of Wii games use waggle as a crutch to seem all progressive and interactive and “Wow!” says Matt Lauer, “It’s like you’re REALLY BOWLING!” But not as many games leverage the Wii Remote’s greatest non-gyroscope-related feature: the speaker. In LIT, every few levels there’s a ringing phone somewhere in the room. If you get to it in time, you’ll hear from your girlfriend, who is lost somewhere else in the school. And guess what, all of her audio samples play out of your Remote speaker. Freaking awesome. I hold the Remote up to my ear and talk back to her. “Stay frosty, baby. I won’t let no evil shadow dudes kill you!”

In my First Thirty, I made it through five or six of the game’s thirty levels, including a boss fight against the English teacher. There is a ton of trial-and-error, as you instantly die whenever you mess up and step into a shadow. It is also completely possible to squander your resources and render the level unwinnable. For example, most of the first classrooms require you to smash windows, which lets in the moonlight… but you only have limited ammo for your slingshot, so if you break the wrong window, you’re screwed. Restart.

There’s some other weird “gamey” decisions that break the horror illusion. For example, there are oscillating lights. As if somebody mated a desk lamp and a portable fan. I get why that’s neat inside the scope of the game, because the field of safety is constantly moving, but what kind of crazy crap is that… an oscillating desk lamp?!? Seriously.

LIT is cool about letting you change your viewpoint, so you can switch from third-person to first-person. There are multiple angles on the third-person view, so you can cycle through to find one that you feel best presents the level. The use of the Remote-as-flashlight to dynamically light the scene (regardless of your current view) is very slick.

The graphics are pretty low-fi. It looks like a PS2 game, but then again it’s also only $8 and lets me pretend I’m on the phone with my vapid high school girlfriend.

So far, it reminds me a lot of Sokoban (Boxxle if you’re nasty), where you had to shove crates out of the way to get out of each room. LIT just adds a nice Fatal Frame/Silent Hill vibe to that basic concept.