Reviewed on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita
→ December 12, 2013HumaNature’s Doki-Doki Universe stands-out as something different. It doesn’t revolve around shooting guns, or swinging swords, or talking trash to your friends online, and this in and of itself is incredibly refreshing. Instead, it focuses on simulating personal interactions in a way I’ve never seen before while employing personality tests to tailor the experience. But there’s a catch: while Doki-Doki Universe almost exclusively hits unique notes, if often harps on them to the point of exhaustion. It makes what at first comes off as something so appealing and different lose its otherwise well-deserved luster.
There’s an inherent charm embedded in just about every character, interaction, and location in Doki-Doki Universe. Its protagonist, QT3, is a hapless robot abandoned by his owners on a small planet and left waiting for them to return for decades. A phallic-looking green creature, Alien Jeff, finds QT3 (and his only friend, a red balloon) waiting patiently for their return and convinces him to explore the galactic neighborhood surrounding him. With planets big and small, as well as tiny bodies like asteroids, Doki provides a lot of unique locales to explore. Each planet – and those planets’ inhabitants – all share the same appealing art design, one that’s both simple and colorful.
Consoling a snowman.
Upon landing on a planet, QT3 is typically briefed by Alien Jeff about what’s going on around him before leaving him to his own devices. That’s because there’s something special about each planet and its native population, something designed to teach QT3 – and us, in turn – about the nature of humanity and ourselves. Distrust, greed, and even our propensity to pollute the environment are just some of the issues Doki-Doki Universe tackles, sometimes suitably and subtly, other times with a heavy hand that conflicts with its cute presentation and light-hearted humor.
Doki’s gameplay largely revolves around completing what are, in essence, scores and scores of quick side quests for the inhabitants of each planet. None of these quests bend the mind or come toting any abstractness; indeed, if anything, Doki-Doki Universe is outright simple. Using in-game items called Summonables, QT3 can help those around him by giving each person and creature he meets exactly what they want. Likewise, he can scare or hurt these very same entities by giving them what they hate.
For example, one guy you meet might want something hot to eat. You may have found a Summonable from an earlier side quest that gave you a bowl of spaghetti. By calling it forward out of your Summonable list, you can satiate his hunger. But if you give him something to eat that’s cold – like a salad – he won’t take it. Successfully feeding him exactly what he’s looking for will, in turn, give you another Summonable which can no doubt be used in a future task. In many ways, Doki-Doki Universe invokes shades of Scribblenauts, and even David Crane’s A Boy and His Blob, with its emphasis on using items – and your imagination – to alter your environment while likewise affecting those inhabiting it.
Doki isn’t about challenge, but about helping out those around you, learning more about their likes and dislikes, building your in-game level, and strengthening your collection of precious Summonables. Unfortunately, all of this does tend to become repetitive, because even though the Summonables themselves are varied, the act of using them is identical. There’s such little variety of types of things to do, and ways in which you execute those tasks, that it can’t sustain a 10-hour game. Further frustrations tend to mount when characters give QT3 vague clues about what they want, or don’t accept things that seem to fit the right bill.
One such person on a planet I ventured to early on wanted something cute that lives underwater. Naturally, the fish bones I tried to give him didn’t work, but neither did a glistening goldfish, dancing sea creatures, or just about anything else. Likewise, Doki will occasionally “backfire” on you when you select a Summonable, summoning something you didn’t want. I thought at first I’d done something wrong, but no, that’s supposed to happen. Why the designers thought that was a good idea is beyond me, since it comes off as nothing more than arbitrarily manufactured frustration.
You know, that's a really good question.
The greatest piece of Doki-Doki Universe, however – and something that helps redeem it from its pitfalls – is its completely abstract, over-the-top personality tests. They’re shockingly on-point. By taking tests that never, ever ask straight-forward questions, Doki figured out that I like strategy, prefer plot over emotion in fiction, dislike being around kids, and enjoy efficiency in my everyday life. What’s amazing is that this information – which anyone who knows me would deem quite accurate – was garnered by asking me questions like which robot I’d like to hang out with, which airplane I’d like to fly, or what I think one cartoon is saying to another. I absolutely loved this aspect of the experience, even if it did “miss” in accuracy every so often.
As a nice gift to players, Doki-Doki Universe’s three iterations – on PS3, PS4, and Vita – all come in one bundle, so if you buy one, you get the other two free of charge (even with its touch controls, the Vita version runs poorly and is the weakest of the three). Then again, Doki is also fairly overt in its attempt to get you to buy its plentiful DLC from within its interplanetary navigation menu. There’s plenty of content here, so it’s not like I felt shorted, but it’s offputting to get a sales pitch while playing.
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→ December 12, 2013HumaNature’s Doki-Doki Universe stands-out as something different. It doesn’t revolve around shooting guns, or swinging swords, or talking trash to your friends online, and this in and of itself is incredibly refreshing. Instead, it focuses on simulating personal interactions in a way I’ve never seen before while employing personality tests to tailor the experience. But there’s a catch: while Doki-Doki Universe almost exclusively hits unique notes, if often harps on them to the point of exhaustion. It makes what at first comes off as something so appealing and different lose its otherwise well-deserved luster.
There’s an inherent charm embedded in just about every character, interaction, and location in Doki-Doki Universe. Its protagonist, QT3, is a hapless robot abandoned by his owners on a small planet and left waiting for them to return for decades. A phallic-looking green creature, Alien Jeff, finds QT3 (and his only friend, a red balloon) waiting patiently for their return and convinces him to explore the galactic neighborhood surrounding him. With planets big and small, as well as tiny bodies like asteroids, Doki provides a lot of unique locales to explore. Each planet – and those planets’ inhabitants – all share the same appealing art design, one that’s both simple and colorful.
Consoling a snowman.Upon landing on a planet, QT3 is typically briefed by Alien Jeff about what’s going on around him before leaving him to his own devices. That’s because there’s something special about each planet and its native population, something designed to teach QT3 – and us, in turn – about the nature of humanity and ourselves. Distrust, greed, and even our propensity to pollute the environment are just some of the issues Doki-Doki Universe tackles, sometimes suitably and subtly, other times with a heavy hand that conflicts with its cute presentation and light-hearted humor.
Doki’s gameplay largely revolves around completing what are, in essence, scores and scores of quick side quests for the inhabitants of each planet. None of these quests bend the mind or come toting any abstractness; indeed, if anything, Doki-Doki Universe is outright simple. Using in-game items called Summonables, QT3 can help those around him by giving each person and creature he meets exactly what they want. Likewise, he can scare or hurt these very same entities by giving them what they hate.
For example, one guy you meet might want something hot to eat. You may have found a Summonable from an earlier side quest that gave you a bowl of spaghetti. By calling it forward out of your Summonable list, you can satiate his hunger. But if you give him something to eat that’s cold – like a salad – he won’t take it. Successfully feeding him exactly what he’s looking for will, in turn, give you another Summonable which can no doubt be used in a future task. In many ways, Doki-Doki Universe invokes shades of Scribblenauts, and even David Crane’s A Boy and His Blob, with its emphasis on using items – and your imagination – to alter your environment while likewise affecting those inhabiting it.
Doki isn’t about challenge, but about helping out those around you, learning more about their likes and dislikes, building your in-game level, and strengthening your collection of precious Summonables. Unfortunately, all of this does tend to become repetitive, because even though the Summonables themselves are varied, the act of using them is identical. There’s such little variety of types of things to do, and ways in which you execute those tasks, that it can’t sustain a 10-hour game. Further frustrations tend to mount when characters give QT3 vague clues about what they want, or don’t accept things that seem to fit the right bill.
One such person on a planet I ventured to early on wanted something cute that lives underwater. Naturally, the fish bones I tried to give him didn’t work, but neither did a glistening goldfish, dancing sea creatures, or just about anything else. Likewise, Doki will occasionally “backfire” on you when you select a Summonable, summoning something you didn’t want. I thought at first I’d done something wrong, but no, that’s supposed to happen. Why the designers thought that was a good idea is beyond me, since it comes off as nothing more than arbitrarily manufactured frustration.
You know, that's a really good question.The greatest piece of Doki-Doki Universe, however – and something that helps redeem it from its pitfalls – is its completely abstract, over-the-top personality tests. They’re shockingly on-point. By taking tests that never, ever ask straight-forward questions, Doki figured out that I like strategy, prefer plot over emotion in fiction, dislike being around kids, and enjoy efficiency in my everyday life. What’s amazing is that this information – which anyone who knows me would deem quite accurate – was garnered by asking me questions like which robot I’d like to hang out with, which airplane I’d like to fly, or what I think one cartoon is saying to another. I absolutely loved this aspect of the experience, even if it did “miss” in accuracy every so often.
As a nice gift to players, Doki-Doki Universe’s three iterations – on PS3, PS4, and Vita – all come in one bundle, so if you buy one, you get the other two free of charge (even with its touch controls, the Vita version runs poorly and is the weakest of the three). Then again, Doki is also fairly overt in its attempt to get you to buy its plentiful DLC from within its interplanetary navigation menu. There’s plenty of content here, so it’s not like I felt shorted, but it’s offputting to get a sales pitch while playing.
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