Birth ME Code

You may or may not have heard the term "ontological mystery" before, but if you're the kind of person that reads a blog like this, you've probably already encountered some. An ontological mystery is essentially a story where the characters find themselves in an unfamiliar and often limited setting, and one of the main focuses of the story is learning about and escaping from the setting. I've already reviewed a few of them. Other major questions often include why these people in particular were chosen and who is behind everything.

Birth ME Code, the second game in the ABiMe series, takes this sub-genre and flips it on its head by letting you play as the mastermind and tasking you with ensuring your death game runs smoothly. (Well... Without naming any names, a fair number of ontological mysteries are convoluted enough where it turns out by the end that you were the mastermind the whole time. But Birth ME Code is different because it bakes this into the premise.)

Or at least, it tries to flip the sub-genre on its head. It's a solid ontological mystery, especially considering it was all done by one guy (even if he calls himself "Team" Miracle Moon), and a noticeable improvement from his previous game, Head AS Code. There's a lot to like, and Birth ME Code will undoubtedly scratch your itch if you're looking for games like Zero Escape or Danganronpa, but, along with a few other pitfalls, it never really manages to live up to its central conceit.

Before continuing, I need to make a big, big caveat. I'm about to spend a lot of words critiquing Birth ME Code. But the amount of words I spend describing these flaws shouldn't be mistaken for the size of their effect on the game experience. Birth ME Code tells an intricate, complicated story, so it takes a fair amount of detail to explain exactly what it's lacking (especially while remaining spoiler-free). I'm giving this warning for two reasons. First, I don't want to make people think that Birth ME Code isn't worth getting, because it is. And second, I don't want Miracle Moon to see this review as a wall of negativity and get discouraged. Just because it takes a lot of words to fully explore the flaws of Birth ME Code doesn't mean they are major enough to bring down the ultimate experience.

You play as Pandora, the leader of a group of delinquents known as My Emptiness. The members of My Emptiness operate using codenames based on the seven deadly sins, so they're all anonymous to each other—except for one member that has discovered your identity and is trying to take down the group. So you kidnap all the My Emptiness members inside your school to play the "Kill:ME" game in order to weed out and assassinate the traitor.

Or... something like that. Probably. We're told that we're the mastermind, and that we're the leader of My Emptiness, and that we're trying to find the traitor, but... we, the player, are missing a lot of details. There's a large gap between our knowledge and Pandora's, and it detracts from the setting. We get barely any discussion of what My Emptiness is, or what they've done, or who the traitor is, or what they're trying to do, or how we know there's a traitor, or how we're to figure out who the traitor is through the Kill:ME game.

The Kill:ME game takes place over six hours and requires a death every hour, meaning there can only be (a maximum of) three survivors. The goal of the game is to find a bunch of keycards hidden around the school and kill the mastermind (that is, you) within the time limit. The players can use the keycards to initiate a vote to choose a sacrifice via simple majority decision. The group needs to conduct two votes to fully unlock the school, but otherwise any death counts. This does end up being a fun framework to operate within, but... it's not really apparent how this is supposed to expose the traitor, which is our sole goal in running this game.

As I already mentioned, even though the core concept of Birth ME Code is that we get to play as the mastermind of a death game, this doesn't really pan out in practice. Even if Pandora is the mastermind and we (the player) know that Pandora is the mastermind, we don't know the full context behind the death game or the secrets of the facility. Our goal is to discover the traitor, so we're still trying to find one guilty party among the participants—just like if we were a regular participant trying to find the mastermind. Since we have to pretend to be a regular player, we still have to solve all the puzzles. We don't have any secret controls over the facility, or hidden passages, or concealed weapons. And on top of all that, Pandora realizes shortly into the game that certain things are not quite as she had planned them, meaning someone messed with her Kill:ME game right before it started.

So we're in a game we didn't fully design, without any special controls, without much knowledge on the characters or setting (as the player, not necessarily as Pandora), where we still need to jump through all the hoops and puzzles the game has prepared for us, looking for a hidden, guilty party. In other words, our "mastermind" status is essentially worth squat.

In fairness, that isn't entirely accurate. All the characters are wearing full face helmets, and whenever Pandora finds a moment alone she can hack into another character's helmet to spy on their helmet's audio and visual feed. Unfortunately, a snarky inner monologue and the occasional ability to spy on other characters isn't enough to convey the feeling of being the mastermind. Birth ME Code still functions as a "normal" death game so it's not like the game is ruined (and is actually pretty good overall), but the gap between the idea of playing as the mastermind and how it actually plays out is apt to cause some disappointment.

The plot is compelling for most of the game's runtime, although it kind of frays out near the end. The portion of the game where you're merely experiencing the Kill:ME game is great (even if you don't really feel like the mastermind). No matter which story path you end up on, there will be mysterious happenings, tidbits connected to the greater plot, and a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. On paper, the Kill:ME game is just about solving some puzzles and choosing a few sacrifices through voting, but in practice it becomes much more dynamic and chaotic. Even the voting segments hide a few twists and tricks. (Although, unfortunately, it feels a bit more like the voting segments have one trick that they use over and over again.)

When we get to the final stretch, however, the plot starts to lose its drive. The last act is immediately preceded by an awkward scene dealing with sensitive topics. I wasn't personally offended, but it felt like the type of scene that would definitely put off some players, especially since it's so much darker than the rest of the game. After that, our primary goal abruptly changes to something completely new. And then that new goal almost immediately falls away without another definite goal to take its place. The grand finale basically consists of following someone else's step-by-step instructions without a specifically delineated purpose. When we get to the end, it turns out that this was all basically preparation for something else, so we don't even get to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

In this respect, the ABiMe franchise reminds me a lot of Zero Escape. The first entry in each series has a self-contained, standalone goal that's resolved within the confines of the game. (999 was initially just a standalone game while Head AS Code was always intended to be part of a larger series, so Head AS Code does have more open plot hooks, but it still resolves the main issue it lays out.) The second game in each series is greatly expanded in scope and style, but ends up basically just being set-up for the third game, leaving the plot feeling a bit emptier than the prior game.

The writing is... good enough. The game is generally well-written, but the script feels like it could have used a bit more polish. The biggest issue is that it feels like Miracle Moon got so immersed in the game and knew the details so well himself, he lost sight of which details the player would be keeping track of. Concepts and events are mentioned as if they have already been introduced when they haven't. It's easy to roll with the flow of the narrative, but it's tough to keep a strong grip on all the minor details. And on top of that some of the plot elements are just naturally difficult to keep track of. (I'm mostly talking about the keycards—the group is supposed to find 39 of them!)

While I generally thought the game was well-written, I found one feature of the writing style as a whole a bit awkward and distracting. It's tied into and explained by a major twist (and the writing style itself actually clued me into this twist very early), so I don't want to go into any more detail, but it still detracts from the writing a bit. Another major ontological mystery game did a very similar thing, but it had a certain gameplay feature not present in Birth ME Code that hid the awkwardness.

There was also one scene in particular that is kind of weird, in that even by the end of the game it's not clear how or why it worked out the way it did. Apparently, it was intentional for this scene to be a bit "off," so... the scene works as intended, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a bit off.

Another thing I think the script could have done better is give a better sense of the physical environment. There's a map, but you barely get to see it and I found it tough to read. I wish the game had let us view the map at any time, so I could figure out what was going on whenever the characters were running around.

There's a lot of clever stuff baked into the plot, with plenty of anagrams, hidden meanings, and other wordplay. Unfortunately, we have so much of it dumped onto us so quickly in the end, none of it has a chance to make much of an impact. I think this might be an instance where less would have been more. The amount of wordplay that was stuffed in is impressive, but we don't have the opportunity to marvel at the individual instances.

Despite these missteps, I do like the script. The writing is smart, and there are plenty of pseudoscientific lectures to satisfy your cravings. (The willingness of the characters to go on long philosophical tangents is a bit weird, but hey, being locked up and told to kill your friends can make you act a little funny, I guess.) The lectures are interesting, and explained clearly. The game is also filled with little in-jokes and references to other mystery games, which suits my personal sense of humor.

Like most visual novels, especially of this genre, Birth ME Code has various branching paths that you need to explore to learn the whole story. The system for traversing the different paths is a bit unique, and ties into the "trust" system the game features. Your choices determine each character's "trust" level, which varies from 0% to 99% in increments of 33%. While there are some "traditional" splits where you just have a direct choice, a lot of the branches are instead based on the trust system, where the game will automatically lead you down a certain path based on your current trust levels.

All the various story paths are presented in a nifty flowchart where each node represents a scene in the game. One unique feature of Birth ME Code is that all choices within a given save file are final. Unlike most visual novels, where you can freely go down any path you've visited and can reload and redo any choice you regret, there's no way to redo choices within a given save file in Birth ME Code. After you've made a choice, even if you jump back to an earlier section of the narrative, once you get back to the branch the game will just automatically go down your previously selected path without even prompting you. Fortunately, the game's 24 save slots are more than enough, and deleting a save doesn't erase any progress on the flowchart.

Anyway, back to explaining the flowchart. Whenever you select a node corresponding to a scene that has choices, the game will display those choices. When you first load a new save file, before actually going into the visual novel section of the game, you can select the decisions you'd like to make from the flowchart. The flowchart lists your current trust levels and highlights where you'll end up on your current path, which makes it easy to try out different combinations of choices until you manage to configure the result you want.

However, there is one weird quirk with the flowchart: you can only use the flowchart to select a choice on the flowchart if you've tried out every single option in that choice. So you need to go through the game several times until you can actually freely navigate the flowchart. (The game doesn't signify which options you have and haven't tried yet, but the vast majority of choices only have two or three options, so that wasn't really an issue for me.)

The reason this can be annoying is because... Imagine you've started the game and hit your first ending. It was interesting and you thought things just went wrong at the end, so you just want to try tweaking your last few choices. You can't do anything in your current save, because all the choices have already been made. So you load up a new save. You can't immediately jump to any later nodes, because you can only jump to a place where the choices have been made. So you want to jump to where you were before... but you can't select the first choice on the flowchart, since you haven't selected every option in that choice yet. (You've only played through one ending so far, after all.) So you start playing from the beginning again, but... you also want to open up the flowchart navigation as quickly as you can, which means you need to make a different decision in every single choice you are able—which will naturally land you almost as far from your first ending as possible.

Of course, you're free to just manually make all the same choices until the last segment, but that'll be time-consuming because you can't bypass puzzles until you unlock the flowchart and the game's skip function isn't actually very fast. It's also a really inefficient way of unlocking the flowchart.

I actually think this is an interesting design choice. In a lot of visual novels you can just systematically navigate from one side of the flowchart to the other (plot locks notwithstanding). Birth ME Code, however, encourages you to jump all over the place by making you make totally different choices at every turn for your first few playthroughs. You're forced to see all different facets of the situation before any sort of resolution begins to take shape.

Anyway, now that the flowchart has been explained, let's go back to the trust system a bit, because there's still a lot to unpack there. As a system for creating branching paths based on more than a single, static choice, it succeeds. However, in terms of narrative and flavor, it has a lot of flaws. 

For one, the trust system ends up not really being based on trust at all. The choices related to the trust system are pretty simplistic. Usually you have two or three characters to make small talk with, and the one you choose gets a 33% boost in trust. Even for decisions where it isn't obvious which character will get the trust increase, it's pretty easy to figure out once that choice is unlocked on the flowchart.

But this is a death game where at least six of the nine participants will die and the mastermind is lurking within the group. Earning someone's trust by saying "Hi" and being able to get to 99% trust over a few hours feels incredibly bizarre. And even more weirdly, a lot of branches that require having high trust with a certain character end up in situations that involve not trusting that character.

While I thought the trust system was a cool alternative to deciding paths with simple, direct choices, the fact that branches are based on multiple decisions comes with its own set of pitfalls. The issue is that you can make a choice where Pandora learns information that she should absolutely react to, but to get into the branch where she actually does react to the information, you need to make the right choices in other irrelevant decisions. Basically, Pandora might learn that another character is planning to screw her over, but then won't actually do anything about it because she decided to walk down the hall with the wrong person an hour ago. It's weird, frustrating, and immersion-breaking. There is a twist late in the game that tries to rectify some of these issues with the trust system, but it just did too little too late for me.

The other major gameplay element in Birth ME Code is puzzles. They're generally good, although there's a few bumps along the way.

Puzzles can be divided into two types. The first type of puzzle involves a line or grid of letters and/or numbers that needs to be arranged into a certain configuration. You generally encounter a puzzle of this type when you need to hack someone else's helmet or access a new wing of the compound. Full disclosure: I helped test these puzzles before they released. (I'm in the credits!!) Obviously, my game experience is not comparable to a regular player since I already knew most of these puzzle solutions. But I still had to go through the pre-testing versions and I got to see the final versions, so I can still offer my opinion.

I think these puzzles generally ended up in a good place. The puzzles are meant to be solved within a few minutes, so they aren't mind-blowing, but are usually enough to force you to think for a bit. Each puzzle has two hints, which can help you if you get stuck. A lot of the puzzles rely on just "seeing it" or thinking about it in a certain way, so there will probably end up being one or two puzzles that stump you, even with the hints, but this puzzle will vary from person to person.

The other type of puzzles are "Deduction Rooms," which are escape-the-room segments that will be familiar to fans of Zero Escape. These rooms are fine, but feel a bit light compared to escape-the-room puzzles in other games. Escape-the-room games typically involve finding and using a bunch of items to solve a variety of puzzles. While you still do that in Birth ME Code, rather than needing to manually use items yourself, characters will automatically use items as you investigate. For instance, if you examine a locked container while you have the corresponding key in your inventory, the characters will just unlock the container themselves. If you need to combine or manipulate any items in your inventory, that is accomplished through a prompt when you check your inventory, rather than through your own directions. As a result, the escape-the-room segments end up feeling a bit more like an exercise in systematically examining all the hotspots rather than solving the puzzles yourself. Hotspots glow when you hover over them and you can press a button to make all hotspots light up, so at least there isn't any pixel hunting.

Each Deduction Room has a certain question that needs to be answered to escape. You need to deduce this answer from the clues in each room and actually type it in yourself, so you can't actually just turn your brain off and click everything. The game also does a great job of specifying the answer, so there weren't any instances where I knew the answer but the game wouldn't accept the way I was inputting it. The later rooms also do have additional puzzles within the rooms that you yourself need to solve, which make them feel much more substantive. Even those later rooms still feel a bit lighter than other escape-the-room games, however... But the stuff the game is skipping over is simple busywork like putting keys in locks, so maybe doing those things automatically is fine? Perhaps the game overall would've felt better just if the early rooms had the same puzzle density as the later rooms.

Also, the Deduction Rooms have the only puzzle in the entire game that I think is legitimately bad. The game doesn't give you enough information to solve this particular puzzle. There's some relevant information the game gives you outside the puzzle itself, and it's unclear whether you're intended to use that information or not, but even this extra information not enough to reach the solution. It's easy to find the answer online or brute force the solution, so this puzzle doesn't serve as a barrier to progress, but it's frustrating that you cannot "properly" solve this puzzle.

The characters are varied and interesting; they fit into archetypes without feeling trite or cliche. They each get their own development and time to shine, so you'll get to spend time with whichever character tickles your fancy. (It's not like 999 or the Danganronpa, where a character dies early and gets much less development than the rest of the cast.) While we see plenty of the characters during the main story, a lot of the characters' charm comes from the Deduction Rooms, where we get to banter with them while investigating the various items in the rooms. This is a massive improvement from Head AS Code, where the characters felt a bit constrained by the rigid narrative structure. Chatting and solving the open-ended escape rooms with the characters helps endear the characters to us and make us feel connected.

That being said, there is one character that I think was a bit lacking: ME, your avatar in the killing games who explains the rules and makes announcements on your behalf. ME feels very much like she's trying to be a memetic (MEmetic?) killing game mascot character like Monokuma and Zero III, but we don't see enough of her and she doesn't have enough personality to have the same impact. I think the biggest issue is that most of ME's scenes are just prerecorded messages, so there's no interaction between her and the other characters. She also has pretty limited screentime, since she after she explains the rules she basically only shows up to tell you each Deduction Room's question.

The graphics are fine. The backgrounds are phenomenal, and the Deduction Rooms provide the perfect opportunity to admire them. The sprites are also pretty good. They aren't masterpieces, but they aren't... let's say... 'distracting' like they are in Head AS Code. All the characters are wearing helmets, but the "mouth" section of the masks light up when they speak, which I thought was pretty cool. The helmets also mean that we have no facial expressions, so  personality and emotions need to be conveyed through pose and body language—which I thought the artist nailed. The UI and puzzle screens fit the cold, sci-fi vibe. While there are definitely places where you can see the graphics were constrained by the budget (there's no cool visual sequence when someone is voted to die), they perform their job of giving us a window into the world of the game.

The soundtrack is also much improved compared to Head AS Code. While Head AS Code used royalty-free music, which was okay and sufficient, Birth ME Code has a fully original soundtrack that sets the mood perfectly. I want to give a special shout-out to the puzzle theme, because it never got old, even after hearing it a lot.

So... where do I come out on Birth ME Code? I've pointed out a lot of flaws, and discussed them at length. But as I said near the beginning of the review, the number of words I'm using to explain the flaws should not be conflated with the impact those flaws have on the experience. No, Birth ME Code isn't perfect. But it's engaging, mysterious, funny, tense, clever, and, most of all, fun. This game was a passion project by one guy, which explains and (in my opinion) justifies the couple of rough edges it has. And it's a great jump in quality from his first game, Head AS Code. I think the biggest—and perhaps only—thing holding back Birth ME Code is that so much of the payoff is reserved for the third game. Maybe after the next game is released I'll be able to come back and give Birth ME Code a ten out of ten, but for now, there isn't enough closure to be fully satisfied. Still, this is a fun, exciting death game that every Zero Escape fan should play.

Birth ME Code is available on both Steam and Itch, so take your pick!

(Also, I think that playing Head AS Code first is probably better, but Head AS Code and Birth ME Code were designed to be able to be played in either order. So if you're interested in the series but turned off by Head AS Code's graphics, feel free to dive into Birth ME Code. A graphic remaster for Head AS Code is also in the works, so if Head AS Code's graphics are an issue for you, you can wait for the remaster to get into ABiMe, or you can get Birth ME Code now and the Head AS Code remaster later.)