htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary (PS Vita)

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary is a beautiful little game with a cute hand-drawn art style and an atmospheric post-apocalyptic world, individual images of the game both showing its adorable side and its ability to present more haunting and eerie situations. Take the aesthetic of something like The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince and dip it into some borderline horror and you’d know what to expect from this game’s appearance, and the tone definitely plays on the melancholy of isolation and being stuck in a hostile world you don’t understand.

And that about ends everything good I have to say about this game.

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary is a game as messy as its name. For convenience’s sake I will refer to it mostly as The Firefly Diary from now on, but if you are curious what the jumble of letters and a hashtag mean, it’s apparently an ugly stylization of Hotaru no Nikki, the game’s Japanese name which, when translated, means The Firefly Diary, so it’s name would literally be The Firefly Diary: The Firefly Diary if you try to extract the surface level meaning from it. The game follows a white-haired young girl with antlers named Mion as she wakes up in a scrapyard with no memory of who she is or where she is, but two fireflies appear to assist her in moving forward and away from the dangerous part of the world she’s found herself in. The Firefly Diary uses almost no text and absolutely no voices in conveying its plot, the text mostly just there to provide tutorial messages and introduce Mion as well as the fireflies Lumen and Umbra. Most of the plot is conveyed by playable scenes in event chapters between certain stages that are rather inexplicable unless you search the levels of this 2D puzzle platformer for the playable isometrically-viewed memories that show Mion’s history, and even with the extra details from these sometimes obtusely hidden or hard to get collectibles, it’s pretty easy to keen where the story’s direction is going early on and there’s not much substance to it beyond its basic ideas. No stances taken or greater messages, just a set of events to interpret so you can understand what’s going on. It’s not bad, but considering The Firefly Diary definitely needed something to keep you invested beyond its looks, it comes up short and could have done with more depth or a more involved story-telling method.

Once we begin to look at the gameplay instead though, we will begin our sharp decline, one that matches the game’s general pace. When you begin this puzzle platformer, it’s mechanics seem a little gimmicky but potentially nifty. Your two firefly companions are each controlled by one of the Vita’s touchscreens. Lumen is controlled by touching the actual game screen, the player having no direct control over Mion and instead leading her to areas of interest by dragging the freely-moving Lumen to your intended destination. Umbra, on the other hand, is controlled by the rear touch pad on the Vita, and its movement is limited only to the shadows, the player often needing to set things up so it can make its path to some object only Umbra can interact with. The early stages are simple and this design direction seems clunky but tolerable, but very soon the game stops holding back and everything starts to snowball into an absolutely abysmal experience.

Umbra is perhaps one of the biggest factors in this. The PlayStation Vita’s rear touch pad is underutilized in most games for a few good reasons. It’s not as natural to use as the screen you can actually see, you’re likely to accidentally use the touch pad at times since touching the back of your handheld system is a natural way of holding it, and there is usually a more natural or responsive control method that can be used instead such as the two control sticks the system has but The Firefly Diary doesn’t utilize. These issues are all pretty much part of your play experience with The Firefly Diary. You need to tap the back of the Vita to switch control from Lumen to Umbra, so while you’re doing other things in the game or just trying to get comfortable in how you hold your system it’s easy to accidentally trigger control of Umbra. Luckily, time stops when you’re in control of Umbra, so the shadow-traveling firefly is both free to move or free to immediately switch off of if it was accidentally activated. Moving it around the shadows turns out to be inconsistent though, sometimes shadows have to be incredibly close to allow travel between them and other times you can clearly fudge the space between them, but only if it’s within the arbitrary and constantly shifting range Umbra can travel away from Mion. Umbra will constantly be called on with no visual indication that it’s required too, meaning sometimes you’ll be in a new area with a puzzle that seem unsolvable because you didn’t know to switch to your shadow firefly and trigger a mechanism during the few seconds your firefly can actually reach it.

If you get the timing wrong in The Firefly Diary, expect excruciatingly slow returns to that moment and ridiculously tight windows that will lead to your death if you don’t time your switch to Umbra right. Sometimes it seems like there’s even a delay in activating Umbra, meaning your sometimes split-second windows might pass you by and you’re forced to kill Mion and repeat often slow and difficult sections again to get to that make-or-break spot again. Mion herself is already slow to follow Lumen when you’re guiding her around, making many parts of the game needlessly drag and sometimes leading to points where you are outrunning something like a shadow monster or approaching hazard and the timing is made just so that you can’t afford to have Mion dawdle for a second. Other times, you might need to do something with Lumen without having Mion move, and while you can tell her to sit and stay still, this can take a few taps to register properly, just like when you’re trying to navigate the many identical doors in a door maze that can lead to your death if you don’t have Mion standing in the perfect spot to turn the doorknob when you tap them. Other times, getting her to sit would waste precious time so you have to just juggle her brainless pursuit of Lumen with the actions you need to take elsewhere, some as simple as just trying to see what’s ahead because the screen will only move when you drag your firefly towards the screen borders.

Continuing on with Lumen problems, there is a visual feature where the position of the firefly will cause the shadows to bend and grow appropriately. This could seem like a nifty way to give Umbra new paths to travel, to get around dangerous foes, or make your own solutions to puzzles… but the moment you switch to Umbra, all the shadows lock back to their predefined positions, meaning that Lumen’s movement only obscures your ability to see the actual areas Umbra can travel through. What’s worse, since most of your enemies are made of shadow, Lumen can make their shapes shrink or completely disappear, but they’ll still be able to touch and instantly kill Mion even though they are no longer visible in the space they apparently still occupy. You aren’t always able to move Lumen around freely because you might lead Mion to her death, so sometimes you just have to know there’s a shadow monster in your path and hope the often tight and dangerous spaces you have to slip Mion through will be kind to her.

Some objects need to be activated at the right times as well, and almost all of them have a small delay before activating. So, if you’re working with conveyor belts, fans that blow Mion upward, or other gimmicks where things are constantly in motion until you alter them, you need to accommodate that small issue with how you use your fireflies. If Mion is required to activate it herself you need to accommodate her snail-like speed and finicky perfect positioning requirement, and this is before we add in some strange new gimmicks that had potential if not for the awful controls. There are plants that shoot sharp projectiles that can be used like cannons to attack shadow monsters, but they are activated by and follow Lumen’s movement. They often need Mion to be close enough to start firing at all, so she’s almost always guaranteed to be bumbling nearby, and a single shot will instantly kill her. However, the shots will ricochet off walls and ceilings and end up not killing the shadow monsters sometimes, while this doesn’t seem to be taken into account for Mion since they’ll virtually always kill her no matter how much they have bounced around.

There are segments where you need to fly Lumen through large mazes of electrified walls that could have been interesting if it didn’t require you to obscure your screen with you finger and the mazes weren’t so tight that sometimes the firefly literally only has the circumference of your fingertip to safely occupy as moving parts work to crush it. The mushroom that reverses your controls is practically a breeze compared to how often you need to make sure Mion doesn’t go an inch too far while she’s been nudged from the side by wind or trying to maneuver into the perfect spot without getting shredded, eaten, shot, fried, electrocuted. Her awful movement really becomes a problem during bosses, the first a chase where the mechanics are simple enough to understand but Mion runs slower than some people tiptoe. A single bit of hesitation will force a death and restart at a checkpoint, and while some checkpoints are generous, others like a level full of conveyor belts and split-second actions you need to take puts you back at start if you screw up.

The second boss introduces another major problem with The Firefly Diary, and that’s if, even if you account for your atrocious character speed, messy controls, and the unforgiving time windows of the puzzles… there are random factors involved. The second boss is hurt by dynamite, that you need to sluggishly push towards it and set it up to accidentally ingest. The boss’s shifting attack patterns may decide to destroy the dynamite before you had a chance to set it up, or it might do its chomp before you can position the explosive safely. There are also objects that fall in from above that land in random positions, meaning you can die when you literally can’t move away safely or you might not have the protection you need for when the boss readies his instant death attack that of course has only a small window to sabotage. Regular levels feature things like these random drops as well, such as an elevator where crates and dynamite drop in from above and you have to hope you have the time to put them in the appropriate place or aren’t in a doomed spot when the falling rocks tell you the dangerous drops are incoming. One of the levels with a maze of obnoxious identical doors also might screw you over if the movement pattern of an enemy offscreen lines up just so that you exit the door and touch them immediately, the fact that these enemy patrols run constantly in the background perfect for sabotaging puzzles that can’t afford to have such unpredictable moving pieces. Playing the barely interactive wordless memories is practically a break from having to deal with so many flawed systems and failures that either require luck or information that you’ll only glean after a few trips to your repeated doom.

There are some bosses that are surprisingly basic and thus not much of a detriment to the experience that already has plenty of detriments to make up for those serviceable fights, but the final boss of the normal ending might just be one of the worst final bosses I’ve ever faced. While there is a more palatable final fight for the game’s true ending, you will have to do the normal end boss to unlock it, meaning it’s pretty much unavoidable. Without giving the story details it is associated with, this final boss is a grueling gauntlet that takes an already agonizingly slow game and adds a drawn out fight with tons of down time between rounds and repetition. The fight consists of alternating rounds, one about trying to spot a barely visible pose between curtains and matching it to the right option of four and the other basically magical cups where you need to watch the right square and pick it after it is shuffled around with a few others. Things start challenging but innocent, but as it keeps going, the viewing area for seeing the pose shrinks and the figure moves absurdly fast, to the point many people recommend recording it and playing it back frame by frame to even have a chance of making it out. The magic cups gets to an absurd speed as well, my uncanny knack for it sparing me what will no doubt lead to more suffering for other players. This just keeps dragging on and on with no end in sight, the only sign of any degree of progress being the insane increases to speed and the gradual restriction to how much time you have to view the pertinent data. If you make a mistake, the screen will distort as well, making it even less likely you’ll be able to identify the necessary information properly. There are checkpoints in the fight to make it possible, but it’s grueling, poorly conceived, and obnoxiously hostile towards a player who isn’t given the right tools or controls to deal with it adequately… so in other words, the perfect encapsulation of The Firefly Diary’s many problems in one terrible package.

THE VERDICT: Do not be lured in by the beautiful art or haunting world of htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary, for this Vita game is truly a poisonous flower. The controls are clunky and a poor fit for the game world’s design, especially since so many of the puzzles depend on perfect timing under threat of slow agonizing repetition. Random factors can sabotage you if they feel like it, some puzzles have unintuitive solutions they punish you for not gleaning before you even had time to take them in, and many mechanics feel needlessly complicated by how Mion’s movement and the fireflies work. With a final boss that seems designed almost explicitly to make the player suffer in a game that’s already irritating in how unfit the player’s inputs seem for interacting with the world properly, frustrating difficulty ends up dominating an experience that doesn’t even have a complex plot to make it worth pushing through to the end.

And so, I give htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary for PlayStation Vita…

An ATROCIOUS rating. I tried to hold onto hope early on that this game wasn’t as bad as it seemed. I waited for the moment the firefly mechanics would click, or maybe the awful difficulty and unfitting gimmicks just had to be pushed through to get to the good stuff. Maybe at some point the story would show it had more than a simple idea at its heart and motivate me to stay interested in that side of the game. Perhaps it was just a rough start before the game found its stride with more creative puzzles… but no. The game continued to go downhill, a snowball of annoyances as systems that barely worked and cruel design decisions like Mion’s slow pace and the reliance on random factors kept interfering more and more. The art design is wasted on a game that doesn’t value the player’s enjoyment, repeatedly straining an already obtuse mode of interactivity by asking for skilled performances that would be difficult even if you did have full control of the protagonist. There are other games where you guide a character along instead of controlling them directly that don’t make the same mistakes, so having Mion be slow, dopey, and prone to messing up just because the tap wasn’t precise enough feels inexcusable when Sega Genesis games with similar gameplay concepts handled it better.

There is a PC port of htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary, and one reason I won’t completely say that this game is doomed to be absolutely horrendous is because of the potential such a system transfer has for improvements. A simple option to switch between Lumen and Umbra is already an enormous improvement over the back touch pad of the Vita and a mouse is much less likely to interfere with the maze sections since you won’t be obscuring parts of the screen with your physical finger, but that’s not enough to truly scrub the taint from what could have been a moody and stylish puzzle platformer. The awful final boss is unchanged, the control concepts are still relied on far too much despite their flaws, and the puzzles still have the awful reliance on randomness, hidden information, and variables that move too fast in a game that otherwise keeps the action at a horrendous crawl. Unrewarding, uninviting, and downright unkind at parts, don’t let The Firefly Diary charm itself into your Vita library, and it’s likely best you stay far away from its PC port too.