Mothmen 1966 (Retro PC Pulp Cryptid Horror)
Yo I dig this. My first experience with computer games, other than a brief sampling on a friend’s Commodore 64, was the Apple IIe. Now, granted, I only played Lemonade Stand at the time, but always dug that green/black color scheme, the boxy look, and the booping speaker from inside the harddrive, not to mention there were some pretty stellar games made for such PCs back in the day. Though not unique in this regard, Mothmen 1966 takes the aesthetic of the era and manipulates it into what the devs call a “Pixel Pulp,” essentially a visual novel. Does it do what it sets out to do, namely present retro horror for modern fans in a cool sort of way? More like cryptid sort of way, because you’re going to feel like you’re having a sleepover in the 1980s and debating the existence of things that don’t exist. Nice.
Revolving around the “Mothman” urban legends, Mothmen 1966 takes place in said year and revolves around four primary characters who by fate, and a meteor shower, end up at the same gas station out in the middle of nowhere where shit’s about to get cryptid. With a presence like a mid-20th century pulp and graphics and sound out of the early 1980s PC rush, the feeling of this one is just awesome. With a number of unlocks it provides rare replay value for a visual novel, and in spite of the current lack of auto-save (at the time of this review), the speed read feature and self-save enables the player to fly through earlier parts to discover things missed, including parts of the plot. As with any visual novel, it’s essentially a one-time deal you’ll likely never come to again, but for the fair price and wonderful storytelling (seriously the writing is ace), not to mention the variety of ways in which the story itself is told, it’s totally what a cryptid freak would need in life.
Written by Stanley, Devourer of Souls
Mothmen 1966
LCB Game Studio (developer), Chorus Worldwide Games (publisher)
4.5 / 5
