Chulip Review
Love is in the air, but recently in Oklahoma, it’s more like bitter wind and rain in the air… But no worries, come and warm up with your favorite game developers this Tuesday.
That’s right, the Game Developer’s Association will be meeting on Valentine’s Day, February 14 for our week five general meeting. We’ll be talking about the obscure Playstation 2 kissing game, Chulip.
The developer of the game, Yoshiro Kimura, loves working on small games and loves the indie game scene.
My feeling is that you should have a spirit of freedom. And now, everybody – big companies and small companies, and even junior high school-aged people and university students – everybody is fighting in the same place, now. So the most important thing isn’t being an indie – it’s about having freedom in mind and spirit.
Chulip is a small, delightful, but sometimes frustrating game.
It follows the story of a young boy who dreams of kissing a girl under the Lover’s Tree. He then wakes up in a moving truck with his single dad.
After moving in, your dad encourages you to go out and meet the neighbors, who for some reason do not like you because you and your dad are poor.
Even more surprising-but-not-really-surprising, you meet the girl from your dream. Of course, you attempt to kiss her first thing which ends up in rejection.
You go back to your dad, who tells you to write a love letter. But after delivering it, a little man who looks like a potato on legs tells you it sucks.
This man, named Mr. Suzuki, teaches you that to win someone’s love, you must find the right time to kiss them, write the ultimate love letter, and have a strong heart.
Thus you go about town learning about the residents and kissing them to get a bigger heart, while learning how to write a love letter. It’s a bizarre concept, but in a really charming way.
This game is wildly strange, yet tells a grounded tale. It’s a simple story about love told in the weirdest way possible.
Over the course of the game, you’ll go about your day learning about the townsfolk of Long Life Town. There is a day and night cycle, which means that every town person has different schedules.
Much of the game plays out like an old point-and-click game combined with Animal Crossing. You’ll learn the schedules of the people and through that, try to solve problems in the game.
This includes getting a letter back from an angry dog, clearing your family’s name of the crime of blocking the railroad tracks with a boulder, or simply learning when to kiss the residents.
All of the citizens are very fun and quirky, and I don’t mean that lightly. There is a whole underground town that helps the people above live their lives, with many wacky residents to learn about and kiss. The dialogue adds to the fun, with it having a weird writing style that adds to the weirdness.
While learning about and kissing the residents is fun in concept, this is where Chulip shows some of its age and translation problems. Chulip can sometimes be frustratingly vague at times.
While I did not complete the game in time for the writing of this review, this was due to most of my time being spent wandering around town aimlessly. And even though the town has a lo-fi and handcrafted aesthetic, it can get tiring walking around when trying to stumble upon the right time and right place to kiss someone.
On top of that, the game’s translation is charming, but confusing. I am not sure if the writing is as vague and open-ended as in the Japanese version, but some of the dialogue that was supposed to be hints did not seem helpful at all.
Many of the solutions are also not obvious at all, due to the strange tone of the game. In order to fix the button to cross the sidewalk, you have to ask Mr. Suzuki, how his day is. Make sure to talk to everyone!
On top of that, Chulip has a health system. The boy you play starts off with a weak heart, which means five heart points.
If you try to kiss someone and they are not ready for it, you get slapped and lose some points. Sometimes it feels more random, such as one of the underground residents, who is a telephone pole with a face, who will kick you if you go too far from the town.
While it is funny to see yourself get a game over from picking up a pile of chicken poo, it can also lead to frustration due to the game’s save system. Your save state is by using the bathroom in your home, which sometimes I didn’t do for a long time.
When I died from playing on a jungle gym, I laughed and said “What?!” because I had to restart my whole day.
After doing some research, I found that back in 2002 when the game came out, it included a manual that had a literal walk-through of the first couple hours of the game. So finding that manual or walkthrough may be the way to play it today.
However, all of these annoyances pale in comparison to the sheer charm of the game. The art style is cozy, the writing is funny and full of heart, and the music is catchy.
The music is also composed of acapella songs that play when you walk around town, kiss someone, or just stare at the dog on the title screen. It wonderfully matches the bizarre tone.
The story itself, while out there, tackles some interesting topics. It covers everything from classism, workers rights, alcoholism and of course love.
Chulip is one of the stranger games I’ve played, but I won’t stop thinking about it any time soon. It may sound like most of my time was frustrating, but I walked away pleasantly surprised.
Rachelle Phipps, the Graphic Designer / Newsletter Manager for the GDA, would agree. She said about the game:
Chulip is an outstanding game. It goes where other games are too afraid, too timid, and too un-innovated, to match. At its core, Chulip just wants to tell a beautiful story about a young boy who finds the love of his life—and of course, wants to kiss her. But, the difficulty is that, as a new young poor boy in a strange town with your father, your heart isn’t strong enough. So with the advice of your father, you decided to write her a love letter, and with this love letter, you profess your deepest desires. Chulip as a game gives such an impact to one’s understanding of love and how to express it. Especially while kissing nearly 50 residents around the town.
To be serious, however, Chulip is also an interesting, dare I say a bit, uh, frustratingly strange puzzle adventure game. The game has many systems in it that although make sense in theory, can sometimes confuse the player too much. For example, each character has a set schedule they follow and in order to correctly achieve their kisses, you must study or be aware of these schedules to progress the story. Added to the fact you cannot progress until a certain section of the game if you miss a character’s schedule well…you’re a bit out of luck. There are also little hints throughout the game with details on how to get the kiss for different residents, however, these hints seem more like passing glances, throwaway lines in dialogue, than something to remember. Despite its drawbacks, Chulip has a unique art style and approach to its graphics, giving each character an individual look that gives insight into their character and development. Its comedy is in between the lines and is enough to give you a chuckle if you’re ever stuck.
Although it has a strange presentation, Chulip is quite heartfelt and a hilariously fun game to watch or play with that special someone to get some good laughs. So if you want your Valentine’s Day with the person of your dreams and are having second thoughts about how to engage that first kiss…I’m sure Chulip can teach a lot about…love.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, Chulip offers a unique game that has such heart. You can’t help but smile the whole time you play. It has a lot to say without being too loud.
The game is only available on Playstation 2 for a couple hundred bucks. Or you can get it on your PC through… unconventional means.
Or you can learn all about it by visiting the GDA general meeting on Tuesday, February 14 in Gaylord Room (TBA ROOM NUMBER). See you then!
