A Shallow Cyberpunk – Anno: Mutationem (Switch) Review

I love when a piece of art wears its inspiration on its sleeve. We’re all inspired by so many things every day, and when you can see exactly where a series gets its foundation from, it can often be inspirational in its own way. Signalis took Evangelion’s flair for big text and flashing frights and Silent Hill’s foreboding dread and turned it into a heartbreaking story of love being crushed by capitalism. Undertale fused Live a Live, Touhou, and MOON to create a story that resonates with millions to this day. It’s not a bad thing to have inspiration, but if you don’t build on that base, if you just slap things from a website you like onto a flimsy plot and hope nobody knows what you’re referencing so you seem more original than you are. You get something like Anno: Mutationem.

Anno: Mutationem is the debut game of ThinkingStars, a Chinese developer who made quite the splash when its first trailer dropped. The aesthetics are gorgeous, with some of the best pixel art backgrounds I’ve ever seen. After playing the demo during a Steam Next Fest, I was pretty excited for the game. The combat was interesting enough already, and I could tell more layers would be added over time, and there were some cute references to something I have a bit of a (slightly embarrassed) enjoyment of, the SCP Wiki. You fight one of the more popular SCPs, “Hard to Destroy Reptile” in a VR boss fight! That’s fun! One or two things like that are cute and aren’t going to ruin an entire game. The demo also had a few typos here and there, but it’s not finished! This was a game in development. I was forgiving, and ready to see what the complete package provided. 

I waited for the Switch Limited Run release to finally play the game, which should explain how belated this review is. What waited for me wasn’t much more than what the demo offered, both in concept, as well as in how much it leans on outside sources. The story is nothing more than a stapling of Ghost in the Shell, a variety of SCP documents, and a cyberpunk world that posits no questions on its own existence, or how such a world affects the people who live in it. There’s almost no social commentary, no new ideas here. It’s other people’s work dressed up in a fairly solid combat system and great art. It’s like putting jewelry on a cardboard cutout. There’s some pretty stuff to look at, but when you recognize what it’s being put onto, you quickly see that it’s flat and lifeless.

I need to stress how hard Mutationem leans into SCP. The short version is that almost every important character save for the main character’s family is a character from SCP lore. I’ve read a few reviews praising the originality of the characters in this game, but if you have even an inkling of information about the SCP universe in your noggin, you’ll quickly see that anyone beyond the main character and her family are just taken from that horror fiction collective. A character randomly says he has to leave a scene because of “a zombie outbreak caused by a guy in a plague doctor mask.” An ape is able to speak and is respected as a scientist with zero explanation, but I know it’s because the amulet it’s wearing contains the soul of a doctor who shows up a lot in the lore. So much of the plot is just SCP Wiki content, so my knowledge makes me specifically upset since I recognize it all. Even the inciting incident of the cyberpunk landscape, a disease that turns people robotic, is, you guessed it, based on an SCP.

There’s a thin layer of obfuscation over these references, however. None of the characters or SCPs are referred to by name, and all logos have been removed. This makes the story feel less like a gun with the serial number filed off and more like someone trying to cross it out with a marker then letting the area get wet. Anybody who knows can see what it is, you’re not fooling me. 

On top of all of this, the writing just does not land. Part of it is the translation, which has an egregious amount of typos and very stilted speech. This was present in the demo, which was easily excusable, however this game has been out for years now, has gotten patches, and it’s still riddled with run-on sentences and broken English. It feels like it was machine translated, but there’s no way for me to know for sure. Funnily enough, the writing is so blatantly poorly translated that oftentimes the voice actors took it into their own hands, delivering less stilted lines that don’t match the subtitles. Spoken dialogue is usually far easier to digest because of this, but when your voice actors are seemingly live-editorializing your dialogue, there’s a major issue here.

Even setting aside the quality of the actual words that make up the story, the writing itself is lacking. The worldbuilding is so flat! There’s plenty to see around the multiple locales you can travel to, but none of it says anything about how people feel about living in these cities. How did they come to thrive or fail in their systems? What does the average day look like in this world now that millions have been turned robotic, and millions more are being pushed around by corporations and shadow governments? None of that is touched on even a little. The main character, Ann, is presented as somewhat middle class. Early on, the player is shown a luxury car, and she mentions that it’d be hard to afford it with her meager pay. After about two hours of gameplay, you can buy one from grinding a bar tending job for a short while. There’s nothing connecting the characters to the world they live in!

They don’t even properly integrate the SCP aspects of the story into the world, so it feels like cyberpunk exists on top of the science fiction, instead of alongside it. So often the weakest explanation is all we get to how this society has been formed. There’s a vtuber mission, where you’re tasked with digging up the identity of a famous idol that you can spot around a few of the areas. Instead of tackling any sort of commentary on the vtuber scene, its fans, or the industry it exists in, it goes for the laziest, least interesting option: Making a joke about the cute anime girl being a fat guy in a VR headset. This is the level of commentary you can expect from Anno: Mutationem, for the rare times it even tries to have any.

Pretty much every side quest is like this, as well as the sparse non-SCP ripoff NPCs. Why is there a man with corn for a head who sells you corn-based health items? You’d think I’d love something goofy like this, but due to the stilted translation and weak dialogue, it’s just a non-sequitur. Maybe he could be used to highlight how hard to come by farm items have become thanks to the robot illness or overly sprawling cities. No, he’s just a guy selling corn, because that’s a random enough thing to be a health upgrade. It’ll be a meme for sure! There’s also a few cameos from another cyberpunk game, and all it did was remind me that if you have purpose behind your writing, you can straight up have an obvious George Costanza parody as a character in your game and it’ll still stand out as excellent if you have actual THEMES.

I’m only as frustrated as I am because there’s an inkling of something here. There’s a passion flowing through Anno: Mutationem’s gameplay and artstyle, passion that was crafted by a group of people who you can tell adore what they’re doing. The combat can be genuinely fun, with a good amount of options and new weapons regularly being added to your repertoire. It’s a 2D juggle-fest a la Odin Sphere. It’s not as varied as Odin Sphere, but the echoes are there. Exploring each new area involves platforming and hack-and-slash gameplay, which works well in each 2D environment that is traversed.

There’s small Metroidvania aspects, mostly just backtracking after you unlock a new skill, but it’s all near the end of the game, so you don’t get to play with your new powers very much at all. Same with weapon types, which only open up around 60-75% of the way through. It rules having a lock-on missile barrage and dual-wielded swords, but it’s less cool that I only have it during the final stretch. I had a blast with the boss fights, even if they are a little generic. There’s an armor breaking mechanic, and it’s a great way to reward getting up close and personal with your foes, leaving them weakened after hitting them enough times and giving out extra damage. 

The moment to moment action of Anno: Mutationem is fun. There’s enough in the gameplay to carry the length of the story. The plot is just not worth carrying. It’s a parade of references to a website, and not even very good ones at that. Anything that isn’t from the SCP Wiki is trite and makes zero cognizant commentary. There could’ve been something special here if there was a drive to tell a story and not just list off what stuff the creators thought was cool. There needed to be more to this game, a better, fleshed out story, a world that feels lived-in, commentary that isn’t just the most trite twists known to humanity, and capitalization on art that really kicks ass. There could’ve been something special, memorable, and unique here, but instead, this is a list of neat ideas that feels like a series of unfinished notes and references to far more popular things instead of a complete package.