Review:
The concept of addressing one's critics through media is not new, nor is it inherently problematic, however I cannot recall a piece of media as incredulous or bizarre as this one.
As with all of SigmaSuccor's works, it is a game which stretches RPG Maker to breaking point, filled with squashing and stretching sprites, and more plugins than one really requires to tell the "story" the game is attempting to tell. Once you're in past the opening dialogue (told through a VN style interface) you reach the meat of the 'gameplay'.
This is where things get weird.
This game is insane. I don't use that as hyperbole, or as some way of trying to praise the psychological depth of the piece: It is actively disturbing that a human being put this together.
The title is incredibly fitting: The game perpetuates a false narrative, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the defensive party chatter, where the author has invented two NPCs who agree with him and his defensive responses to what one can only assume are the criticisms leveled at him by other developers. The format is novel, but the use of multiple characters there to provide the author with a sounding board read more as aspects of a single personality than an actual trio of people with their own thoughts and feelings. At one point Succor (a sort of bizarre Tulpa seen throughout the False X series) comments that 'women don't compare, they accept' - and this stood out to me as especially bizarre.
This tends to be the bulk of what constitutes the (False) narrative - the gang walks through a train and interacts with groups of people, all discussing the actions and behaviour of the author, as well as giving their thoughts on him as a person and his work. These interactions are then commented upon by the party, occasionally interspersed with humour, but more often than not devolving into rants and commentary on community criticism of SigmaSuccor and his work.
One highlight of these conversations was a rant about AI generated images, which frames people having an issue with that technology as a personal attack against the author. Another concerned perceptions of the author's work as pretentious, and his claims of depth (along with another rebuttal against those claims). Then there's the bizarre joy at being compared to more popular (and successful) titles, claiming that the author's work is simply incomparable to other video games.
There are also allusions to suicide; and a heavy implication that any criticism of the author's work could be inferred as mental illness on the part of the critic. Indeed, there is one scene where the party discuss that attempting to take action perceived as critical of the author could lead to suicide. This is obviously unfathomably cruel, given that all of the people in the piece are at least analogous to real people. This is not the first of Sigma's games to use these analogs of real people, or visualisation of the Internet as a "real" place (or even the use of unauthorised snippets of Discord/Forum text concerning the author).
All of these conversations between party members come across as incredibly defensive - and borderline delusional - but it's not the crux of why this piece is disturbing. Among the delusion and self-aggrandising comments about "service" to the community, or how criticism of the author could be a ploy to keep the author creating is something far darker and more sinister:
After reaching the front of the "Hate Train", insulting the person "driving" and demanding that they stop criticising you, and telling them that their issues with you will explicitly lead to their suicide, you start to commit acts of violence towards your critics.
In a moment not unlike a pre-teen making their teachers as wrestlers in some WWE game to beat down for perceived injustice, SigmaSuccor - a grown man - flips the narrative, claims victimhood, and decides that the best way to deal with people being critical of him is to murder them with a sword. This is shown as "cancelling the noise" - wielding his "power and influence" to silence critics.
Combat is simple, and killing an enemy plasters the word "Ban" on the screen where their body fell, so the theme of Internet-As-Reality continues. It's a simple affair and nothing poses anything approaching a threat (after all, why would it). You fight your way to the back of the train and the game ends with a monologue from a man in a tophat insulting someone - either the author or his critics (calling them a piece of garbage, repeatedly saying they'll get what's coming to them, calling them cancerous et cetera).
The subject of this monologue is left deliberately blank, whether for plausible deniability or as a rare moment of self awareness. Given the remainder of the game it's more likely that this is directed towards the "driver" of the "hate train", the person whom Salik has - whether it intentional or not - decided that Internet Drama is worth them taking their own life over.
All in all, the game is short - taking roughly 30 minutes to complete if you read everything, and accomplishes very little in that time. Technically the game is (as always) a marvel, pretzeling the engine into shapes it was never intended to take, but the cloying, self-congratulatory, defensive writing coupled with the disturbing bloody violence towards the author's critics comes across as the ramblings of a man on the absolute edge of sanity. It is a disturbing artefact of RPG Maker Culture, very much of-its-time, and concerning a reality which - for some - is clearly beginning to take its toll.
There is a great irony in that this game was made as a way to address people being critical of SigmaSuccor's games being self inserts, and a greater irony still in the demands that this stop so that all parties can focus on game development. There is a level of hypocrisy here which is either post-modern brilliance, or the kind of thing usually scrawled on an asylum wall in faeces.
Why not give it a half hour and decide for yourself. 2/5