The long walk.
The walking simulator has often resulted in some fantastic gaming experiences. From Dead Esther, Gone Home, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, to the more horror-influenced Amnesia series. While The Dead Tree of Ranchiuna is certainly a fit for the genre, it lacks any significant offering in anything that resembles a satisfying experience and while its trailers set it out to be packed with multiple ways to interact with its world, it’s a barren and boring experience that you’ll forget the moment the credits pass.
The story is built around a man named Andre as he returns to his hometown after attending college in Bucharest. Upon returning, he meets up with old friends and a love interest that stayed behind as he attempted to make something of himself in the city. It’s unclear as to who we are playing as; however, as we visit the decaying and long-abandoned village long after these events and then, for some reason, take a long hike around the countryside. During this walk, you’ll take in nature and discover the secrets that lay in wait surrounding what came of Andre’s return. While there is promise in the idea of what this game offers, the execution is painfully poor with an English translation that is as disappointing as its dreadful voice acting.
The Dead Tree of Ranchiuna offers up the most simplistic take on the walking simulator I have ever seen with almost no gameplay moments to speak of, apart from a few interactive moments that are, and I am not kidding, all shown in the trailer except for the final few. As this unnamed character, you’ll find the village, head off in the only direction you can, and keep on walking until you eventually end up back where you started, but filled with information regarding just exactly what has transpired here. Along the way, you will hear a narrator spouting various platitudes as if a series of fortune cookies have come to life. These often will illustrate some connection to the story, but many of them are so loosely connected it feels like they were added in to break up the almost complete silence that most parts of your walk can contain.
While the musical score can at times be rather pleasant and well put together, the script itself is often over-written and the dialogue feels completely unnatural. Rarely anything the characters say sound even remotely like something someone would put together to form a real conversation, and the voice acting present here feels pulled from the days of the original Resident Evil. It also appears that much of the recording was remote in some way as the sound mixing and quality of each voice is wildly inconsistent and some conversations sound recorded at different volume levels. There are also several moments where characters will react in a way that needs to drive the plot forward but do so in a way that just doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Nearly 95% of the game has you walking forward through various areas that often funnel you down tight paths, through caves, and while the visuals are mostly ok, I had at least a third of game not load some of its rock textures, and my character got stuck in a rock and forced me to restart my game, loading me almost 15 minutes back, forcing me to listen to the painful narrator spout off about whether or not a dog thinks about if someone is guilty or not. Occasionally, you’ll encounter a puzzle, but you’ll never really know what you’ve done to solve them as you’ll just spam the interact button on a series of switches, or find a crank 20 feet from where you need to use it. There is no problem solving or anything that requires any sort of thought and you’ll never once be stuck. I also found several doors that had a key icon present, but I never found any keys that would open them, yet some doors don’t illustrate this same symbol.
There are also a few moments where I wondered if I was playing as Andre in some sort of fever dream, as if I was reliving my past in some way. I say this because at one moment in the game, I found myself at a cliff’s edge and with nowhere to go. Despite no indication to do so, I jumped off it. While I expected it to be the wrong thing to do, the game flashed white and suddenly I was on the back of an elephant. I am not joking. This caused me to stop playing, put my head in my hands, and started to question just what the hell was going on. This was further backed up with several additional nonsensical cuts to bizarre scenarios of lighting candles in a room, to pushing over a series of stone gargoyles. While the latter has some significance in the final few moments of the game, It felt like the developer purchased a series of assets from the Unity store and wanted to make good on including them all.
I feel that with a better script, more experienced actors, and some actual gameplay mechanics, The Dead Tree of Ranchiuna could have been an interesting mystery to unravel, but as it stands, it’s a boring trek through the countryside where nothing really seems to happen for long stretches of time. The game is only around two hours long, so it’s not going to waste too much of your time, but It’s just not something I can recommend in the slightest. With character turns that are laughably unbelievable, several of which felt like I was reading a script written by an AI, I can honestly say that this is one of the worst games I’ve played in years, and that is unfortunate as I feel there is a fantastic adventure here that just wasn’t executed on to its fullest potential.
Developer - Tonguç Bodur. Publisher - Eastasiasoft Limited. Released - February 1st, 2022. Available On - PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Windows. Rated - (M) Blood, Violence, Strong Language. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.