Smile For Me (PC)

Smile For Me might have one of the most pleasant main goals of a video game, that being to simply cheer people up.

This isn’t even a simplification of the game’s objectives either. The player takes on the role of a flower delivery boy who has checked themselves into a place called The Habitat where people who are feeling sad or depressed head in the hopes of receiving treatment from the eccentric Dr. Habit.  However, it becomes extremely clear early on that Dr. Habit isn’t actually interested in treating the residents, instead trying to keep them down in the dumps until an ominous sounding event he has planned later down the line. However, the player ends up taking treatment into their own hands, moving about The Habitat to talk with people, learn what’s bothering them, and look to make things right so they can cheer the patients up to the point they’ll check themselves out.

The game doesn’t really go deep into the nature of depression or anything heavy like that, but you do find characters with a variety of problems that they can’t solve on their own. A woman who feels she missed her chance to be a star, a clown who pines for his ex, a businessman and his father who grew distant from each other… a guy who really wants to smell like pickles, a little girl who wants to be a superhero, a photographer who wants a picture of someone’s butt… The nature of the problems rises and falls from relatable realistic issues to the deliberately absurd and silly, all without ever really straying from a general level of whimsy and happiness to the affair. The character designs help with setting the tone surely, everyone extremely stylized and colored oddly to immediately make it clear things are a little weird and often very goofy. Characters are paper cut-outs essentially that do still have a range of expressions but don’t really move around, speaking in text boxes while gibberish voice sounds play to indicate they’re talking. The Habitat itself can be just as weird too, with the apartment complex having a carnival with games run by more literal paper people, odd motivational pictures plastered haphazardly on walls, and images of Dr. Habit and random creatures are plastered on walls in weird areas.

This weirdness to the habitat does stray from the air of delightful oddity at times though, especially when Dr. Habit realizes you are cheering people up. The game is divided into days, there being no actual time crunch to get things done but the player needing to go to bed at the end of every day or things will begin to get strange. Missing your curfew will lead to unusual live action videos deliberately made by Dr. Habit to make you feel uncomfortable with staying out at night, but it never seems to dip into full on horror. Dr. Habit does definitely get more upset with your behavior though even if you get to bed on time, the daily announcement he makes taking on the form of live action footage with scanlines, distortions, and even a puppet of the doctor himself speaking with you. Serving as our main antagonist, he gets irritated as you help more and more people, but he’s clearly unhinged himself, even speaking in deliberate typos and not ever getting any of the variations of the word “your” right when he says them. While definitely a creepy character, his presence and behavior add some stakes to the whole affair as well as a proper climax to it all, with multiple endings based on if you can truly figure out what’s bothering the doctor.

The patients are definitely where most of the fun of the game comes from though. As you cheer up more and more of them, you’ll open up more of The Habitat to find new quirky characters to talk with. Thing is, the player character doesn’t really talk so much as listen, your way of interacting with the 22 upset characters mostly taking on the form of shaking your head yes or no. You play in a first person perspective, meaning to do this you actually move your mouse back and forth or up and down to answer, and while sometimes it takes some doing to get it to read your head movements, characters do at least patiently wait for your answers and I never encountered a case where it misread the head shake, it just sometimes needed a few tries to register. Characters will react differently based on your answers to questions, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to completely doom your chances of cheering them up. Some characters do require a lot more work to make happy, but seeing that smile finally come through is very rewarding, especially after you’ve spent some time to hear about who they are and what’s bothering them.

Your head shakes are rarely the means of solving their problems though. For the most part, you’ll be relying on your flower bouquet, that being where you store other items such as a boxing glove, a teddy bear, garden shears, a camera, and more. Cheering up people in the Habitat actually most closely ties to the style of play you’d see in a point-and-click adventure game, where a puzzle requires the right items to solve. Here though, those puzzles are people’s problems, and things aren’t just as simple as giving the right object to the right character. Some like the boxing glove can be used to hit things, the camera can take photos of any resident, and you can make mistakes like plant flowers in the wrong place, although you can always get your misused items back somehow to use them properly. Some can be used just to mess with people or learn more about the place, every character having reactions to things like pictures, a kiss, or the optional airhorn item. Most problems do require more than item delivery, The Habitat having many spaces where you might need to use items well with the environment to open up the right solutions to people’s woes. Even when you get some really off the wall solutions to problems like making a steak out of a painter’s palette, it manages to work surprisingly well within the context of this delightfully warped world thanks to the behavior of the cast and the writing that makes that solution clear without just giving the whole game away.

Contextualizing all of your puzzle solving as helping fun characters out definitely makes even the more difficult or finicky problems enjoyable to solve, and Smile for Me does have a few things in place to try and make sure you are never totally lost. If you talk to characters across a few days while they still have a problem up in the air, you’ll see them begin to give hints on how it might be solved, never seeming to really lay it out flat but speaking in such a way you’ll get a few clues on what to be looking out for or trying. If that doesn’t work, there’s even a fortune teller you can show items to for a more clear explanation of their use, and you definitely get a wide variety of items over the course of the game to use. The variety in design and item use means you rarely hit a point where just trying everything you have proves fruitful but the solutions are never so abstract that such an approach feels required. The “what” is often clear, but the “how” is what you’re going to need to figure out. The game even makes sure to usually put a batch of characters in front of you at the same time so that if one is stumping you, you can move on to try and help another, the solutions to the one stumping you possibly emerging after you’ve helped another person out or gotten an item from them. The fact very few solutions feel similar too just helps cheering up every character feel more personal and tied to the character you’re helping, it being incredibly satisfying when you have all the creative and quirky characters you spent time laughing at and getting to know finally smiling.

THE VERDICT: Beneath the fun, quirky cast, first person perspective, and the delightful goal of cheering people up, Smile For Me is essentially a point and click adventure, but it’s one that has managed to make its puzzle solving feel much more personal and interesting by tying it all to helping out people exclusively. Your inventory items exist for fun interactions with the characters you get to know or as diverse solutions to the issues they need fixed, a smile from these kooky characters being a wonderful reward for figuring out what they needed. The mild horror elements tied to Dr. Habit are interesting on their own but a bit odd juxtaposed with the rest of the game’s silly atmosphere, but Smile For Me still does a great job of making social interaction into puzzles without it feeling like a facade, the problems characters face feeling unique to them and requiring more thought than just thrusting the right object into their face.

And so, I give Smile For Me for PC…

A GREAT rating. While inventory puzzles, interactive environmental objects, and shaking your head is how you’ll handle most of the gameplay in Smile For Me, the concept of the game and your goals in it really help to make it feel less like it’s about the puzzles and more about the people. Funny, silly, and sometimes sympathetic, the 22 characters who all need their frowns turned upside down aren’t just a checklist but cast members who are fun to chat with and whose problems need different approaches to suit who they are. Some may know exactly what they need done, others are looking for the answer to a problem, and a few aren’t even immediately apparent until you pay attention to what they don’t even realize they’re asking for. When things click in Smile For Me, your puzzle solutions are rewarded with a nice change from a down in the dumps version of the character to someone more true to themselves and light-hearted, and seeing The Habitat lighten up more and more manages to turn things around from the dour enforced depression Dr. Habit tries to keep in place until his big event. Dr. Habit is perhaps the most strange element of the game due to the less serious tone of your interactions with other characters, but he never strays too far into the horror elements he evokes to really pull this game away from its pleasant main objective and the wacky behavior you can expect from many of his patients.

Smile For Me is certainly a game that can make the player smile with its weird and wonderful cast of characters and the strange problems they face. It doesn’t completely dive into the absurd either, allowing the sadness of the Habitat residents still feel like something you’re helping with rather than an informed characteristic. Sure, some don’t seem very sad such as the little girl trying to be a superhero or the birdwatcher who wants a pet owl, but others face issues like a unrewarding career, estranged families, and broken hearts. This fun and fanciful take on helping people even mixes in a lot of interesting problem solving and interaction so there’s more to enjoy than just the writing and world. Your goal in the game might be to cheer up characters, but it seems like, even despite its mild horror elements, Smile for Me is trying to cheer you up too.