Kathy and Emma, high schoolers in a small snowy town, go out into the woods on the 24th of December. Kathy, injured by a bear attack, dies of shock in the hospital the morning after. Emma is nowhere to be found, and time is ticking as Matthew tries to pick up the pieces and learn just what happened that night, in hopes of finding his classmate before it’s too late.
Mizzurna Falls is a mystery adventure game by Human Entertainment, most notable for their work on the Clock Tower series. It’s a surprising game for 1998 on the PlayStation; an impressively detailed American town you can roam freely on foot or in your car, NPCs with daily schedules you can follow from work to home if you wanted to, and a day/night cycle that will ruthlessly steal the truth from you if you miss crucial scenes. Despite featuring an American setting, it was never released outside of Japan until fan translators picked up the mantle decades later. I used the translation by owl for my playthroughs: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=32523.0
Consistently, I was impressed with how far above its weight Mizzurna Falls punches. Aside from the typical adventure gameplay, there are a few 2D battles and special scenarios, like fleeing from an angry dog or a car chase. There are even a couple of on-rails “shooting” sections? None of these moments control particularly well, including the really stiff tank control movement and a camera that will freely clip through every wall it comes across. It’s a game that didn’t really have a blueprint. You need to see beyond the implementation of everything to appreciate how ahead of its time it is. The closest game I could compare it to is Shenmue, and that came out a whole year later!
.png "This is the default camera you get when going from the hospital's second floor to the main floor. The camera does not care one bit.")
Unfortunately, that ambition is also a big hindrance to completing it as an actual game and solving the mystery. The game has a constantly running clock from 10 AM on Christmas Day to the end of New Year’s Eve during which you need to see certain crucial scenes to avoid a bad ending. This means being proactive with calling places on your phone to see if the person you want to talk to is there before wasting time driving there, being curious and driving to places you have no immediate need to go to, and honestly just a lot of trial and error. Being good at driving the car and not careening into snowbanks will help too. In fact, it is possible to get your car very stuck via poor driving. There’s a garage you can call to reposition your car, but if you don’t take the flyer out of your mailbox you wouldn’t know that.
.png "I don't think the car's moving out of there.")
And the game loves not giving you your basic tools. The in-game map is something you have to find on the floor in the police station, and your notebook that automatically fills in character profiles and phone numbers is tucked away in a drawer at Matthew’s place. He won’t let you pick it up when you start the game, so you’d better remember to go back for it later! Although personally, I wrote down every number I came across on a notepad instead of relying on Matthew’s. I feel like these seemingly minor hindrances are really unforgiving in a game where wasting time will lead to a bad ending hours and hours later.
So I did two runs of Mizzurna Falls. In my first run, I took notes. I wrote down tasks to meet at later times like a quest log, added thoughts on certain possible actions that might be worth investigating, and I staggered save states like crazy, trying to fit as much investigating as I could in each day. For the most part, this approach was incredibly rewarding. Following up on clues and seeing scenes that are easily missable thanks to paying attention and good intuition feels like a mystery game done RIGHT.
.png "On the left: diligent note-taking. On the right: paranoid save-stating. Both were incredibly helpful.")
The problem comes from when crucial scenes are missed irreparably, and sometimes these are scenes you wouldn’t really stumble across naturally. Crucial scenes are the type where, if you miss them, you’ve officially lost the opportunity to see the good ending of the game. An early example of a crucial scene would be finding a way to join in on the bear hunt on the second day. There’s so much resistance from other characters against letting a high school kid in on such a dangerous operation that I originally assumed that you’re not supposed to join the hunt. From that point on, I was locked out of the truth and had no idea. The game continues on, and scenes will play out as normal. I was simply missing a piece of evidence you find during the hunt that would lead to crucial scenes later on, and there was no way I could correct course or even know that I’d made such a big mistake.
.png "This guy won't let you join the hunt. If you've actually done the steps required, he'll have to take a leak and you can slip past him, but otherwise, no amount of pestering will work.")
In my second run, I very closely followed this guide by residenteevee: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/574993-mizzurna-falls/faqs/71515/introduction
This guide really opened my eyes to how strict the timing of events can be. There are a healthy amount of optional scenes mixed in with the crucial ones, so if you really want to see them all, you need to focus! The guide is rather front-loaded for the first five days, leaving little to nothing to do on the final days, but I don’t know if that’s the game’s design at fault or a little of both that and the guide. In several cases, it’s possible to encounter a nasty bug known as “event layering” where two scenes want to take place at the same time and overlap in a way that may end your chance at uncovering the truth. You could be horrendously unlucky! I always think about this one line from the guide which spells out how unassumingly easy it can be to miss a crucial scene:
“12:55, Anywhere but the hospital
Samuel will phone Matthew and tell him that the results of the drug testing are in. Don't miss the call, and stay away from the hospital or the game will bug out and Samuel won't phone you at all.”
I also had an annoying situation where a call I was supposed to make to progress the story simply wouldn’t connect. Had to redo an in-game day’s progress over that one.
So the progression clearly has issues, but I believe there are solutions out there that could have made this game better. I’ve been brainstorming on how it would be possible to make a game as open-ended as Mizzurna Falls have enough structure to not lock you into a bad ending several days before the end actually happens. The first method would be to outright tell you that you’ve lost track of the truth, like what happens when you miss a case deadline in Dead Rising. That method is rather heavy-handed though, and it could lead to having to redo days over and over like I did. It would mean however that if you’ve made it to Wednesday for example, you have all the information and tools you’re supposed to have by that point. Many of the scenes in Mizzurna Falls don’t actually rely on a specific day, just the time of day. A player could have any degree of crucial completion going into a day, and that is a recipe for schedule-based disaster.
The second method would be to allow the player to find clues in a secondary non-missable way after the more interesting way has expired. This one would be kind of messy I think…but I have a good example of a way this game stumbles without design like this: The first day starts you at the police station at 10 AM. If you hustle and make it to Emma’s house by 10:50 AM, you meet a mutual classmate there, Winona. During the following scene, Winona tells you that Emma was reading a philosophy book from the school library. Armed with that information, you can learn where the philosophy section is from the librarian (Matthew never steps foot in this place so he has no idea) and eventually find the book. With that, you have a missable piece of evidence that isn’t crucial, but opens up a conversation with another character later. It’s also food for thought! Is this book important? Why was Emma reading up on it? Who is Emma, really?
.png "This is the only way to learn about Emma's book.")
The problem with this scene is that even if you don’t immediately get to Emma’s by 10:50 (something the game doesn’t nudge you into doing at all) you will still frequently find Winona wandering the library in later mornings in your playthrough. She will mention a book that Emma was reading that she’s looking for, but you can’t ask her about it, and the librarian is no use either. Actually finding the book yourself won’t let Matthew examine it, so you get this distinct feeling that something in the game’s logic is broken. You see what needs to be done, you know how to do it, and yet nothing works. In this scenario, the secondary method of gathering the clue could be from talking to Winona at the library and actually asking what book she’s looking for. It would take more effort to design the game around these secondary methods being viable but I believe it would be best in the spirit of Mizzurna Falls. Let the player’s curiosity and reasoning reward them!
.png "She will not elaborate further.")
It’s an impressive game to me, but also quite frustrating. The attention to detail with this town genuinely surprised me at many points. Mizzurna Falls even has a movie theatre, a steakhouse, a computer shop and a bank you never go to, but they’re in town to make the place feel complete! It’s just that the critical path of the game is so easy to lose sight of. I don’t regret doing my own playthrough first but I believe it’s impossible to see the game through on your own without any guidance because of how strict and unclear it can be at times. It’s a flawed gem, and I love it. I guess you could say it was like a stained glass window… Beautiful, but fragile.
.png "It's a cheesy line. I had to use it.")