What Happened is an unusual title, yet a fitting one for this unusual game. Though the question you’ll be asking yourself more will be “what’s going on”, particularly during the earlier parts of this 5-6 hour adventure which sees you play as a young man names Stiles – a high school student – who finds himself going on an emotionally jarring journey within himself after tipping a bit too far in the wrong direction from an acid trip.
I might be being a bit reductive in that explanation, as actually the game explores Stiles’ fragile mental state and his relationships during this difficult period, but essentially it is doing this through the colourful haze and terrifying hallucinations after he has taken drugs. The game is a horror in essence, though there’s nothing really to fear other than where Stiles is taking himself.
The game is very much a walking simulator. You walk the corridors of the school as they shift in shape, following the direction of your ‘mind’ or the apparitions that guide you. There’s no puzzles other than the odd ‘find a key’ or ‘pull a switch’ fare. The only times the game gets more creative with its mechanical game design is in navigating maze-like environments or avoiding some enemy types – for example, hands that burst from walls to pull you into another area if you don’t dodge them, and then a couple of sections where you must flee from pursuers. The dialogue and visual experience is mostly where the game tries to capture the player’s interest.
While you spend most of the game in the same school, the shifting environments do a surprisingly good job of making each return to familiar ground more interesting. You start the game walking the corridors which are busy with invisible people – only made noticeable by their floating backpacks and when Stiles focusses in on some mundane action (a floating apple being eaten or a bit of paper tossed in the bin) – and then as the game progresses you see the school switch states, becoming frozen over, overgrown with trees and plants, or a dilapidated environment with chairs and tables thrown all over the place. Each has its own feel and objective in Stiles’ ‘path’, but also individual areas separate from the school.
It’s in these individual areas that we see the more interesting gameplay. The game gives way from its walking through corridors to offer sequences and events with more of an angle. A forest chase from wolves, an underwater chase from a shark, navigating a maze of books and scrolls, and – the most interesting of the bunch – changing your perspective to perform a sort of paper puppet show. These are curious ideas which help break up the game and progress the narrative in a more interesting way. I wouldn’t say any of these sections were exceptionally designed though, and unfortunately this decreases their effectiveness. There’s even an achievement for getting killed by the shark 20 times, and this isn’t a difficult thing to unlock – the timing required in this section in particular is so tight to avoid the shark that it feels more like a trial and error challenge (your mind shouts “turn left” at you and you have a second to react before the shark eats you). The other sections mentioned aren’t as frustrating as that, however the game’s intrinsic clunkiness becomes more apparent during them.
The game proceeds with this dynamic throughout and unfortunately for every cool visual effect, creepy area or narrative development, there are bland pointless rooms, nauseating camera wobbles and cringe-inducing dialogue. While you can explore the school more fully than the ‘objective path’, there’s often not much reason to do so. You may find a note lying around, but otherwise the classrooms hold nothing of interest. It’s an easy trap to fall into with this kind of game, where you want the game to have areas to explore, but there’s nothing specifically designed in the environment to reward this.
What Happened is clearly also trying to make a point with its narrative. I’m not averse to games trying to offer other perspectives or to get serious about difficult issues, but where some titles succeed in implementing these effectively within the game design or narrative presentation – games like Hellblade implementing hallucinations within its mechanics for example, or Life is Strange portraying young people with their accompanying issues – What Happened’s writing and dialogue delivery is too poor to be convincing. I don’t want to be too harsh if the developers’ intentions were honest, but it’s a pretty ham-fisted job of exploring these sort of issues.
If you can move past that, as difficult as it may be, at least What Happened shows some signs of potential for what it could have been as a psychological thriller or horror game. Some of the scenes were excellently crafted – artistic in their presentation, creepy, or just unique – and these moments leave you wishing that there was more like them throughout. Something I found really interesting was that if you are caught by protruding hands, which make themselves known early on in the game, you don’t just get a game over screen, they actually drag you to another area which you must get out of in order to get back to the main game. When the game closes you can also choose to replay to attempt different endings (3 in total) and while I don’t think they clarify anything more about the story, they do offer intriguing cut scenes which are entertaining to watch, at least just for their visuals.
But would I recommend this for the nearly £20 that they are asking at present? No, I wouldn’t. While there are the few instances of interest, these don’t outweigh the overall slog of the game. The majority of the gameplay is simply dull and there isn’t enough going on mechanically to make this enjoyable to physically play, and the narrative struggles and ultimately fails to deliver an affecting experience – and judging by the game’s final written line and pre-credit screen advertising suicide hotlines (this isn’t a spoiler for what happens at the end of the game), this feels like a bigger deal than it might usually be.