Mutazione (2019) [PC]

When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching — they are your family. 

-Jim Butcher

There’s a reason that “small town drama” is a genre in and of itself. Big cities have more people and thus more opportunity for things like messy break-ups, con artists, dirty businesses, and general scandals, but the issue with big cities is that drama doesn’t affect much. Someone laundering money in their cafe? The big city won’t blink when it shuts down and something will fill the gap in a month. In a small town where everyone knows everyone and their grandmas, a little whisper in the right ear can crack the entire foundation. 

Small town drama is explosive.

Small town secrets are ruinous.

Welcome to Mutazione. It’s a very, very small town.

Made by Die Gut Fabrik, Mutazione has you arriving at and exploring this tiny village as all the drama that’s been simmering is about to come to a head. It pitches itself as a “mutant soap opera,” which is highly accurate. The drama bomb is sizzling and you’re about to be caught in the middle, like it or not. With such a small town, the question as the countdown timer runs out is, “Will Mutazione survive?” There are already so few tethers to the rest of the world here. Their only connection to the outside is a single boat that sails to the nearest city for supplies. Nursing their own scarred history like war wounds, the loss of even one person could bring the whole community crashing down. Trying to see your own family through that one potential loss is exactly why you’re there. But the question is, did you arrive soon enough, and are you, in the shoes of a city-bred teenager, smart enough, brave enough, and caring enough to disarm the time bomb before everything falls apart?

The 8-Bit Review

Narrative: 9/10

Kai is a teenage girl who is not looking forward to her summer vacation. She had plans of swimming practice and maybe some light awkward flirting, and then her family gets a letter: her grandfather is dying, come quickly. But Kai’s mother is a busy woman. As the sole breadwinner for a family of three, she can’t just leave her job and it would be a mess trying to pack up Kai and her little brother. Kai, however, is old enough to make the trip alone. Our heroine sulks aboard the next (and only) ship bound for grandpa’s home: Mutazione, population 12 (give or take a few dozen tribal Dots and some anthropomorphic sausages). 

Mutazione isn’t just a normal small town with normal people, though. Long before anyone you meet was alive, a meteor crashed there, taking out the city that existed before. The remnants weren’t destroyed, though, but were reclaimed by the trees and plants and swamp and creatures. The skeletal ruins of shopping malls and broken cars haunt the scenery. Just as the memory of the world that was still lives, so too live the people of the land, though they’re not quite…normal. Most of them are mutants, from strange mixes of human and creature to slightly off humans to not remotely human. Mutazione is a haven for the people who sprung up from the wreckage of the meteor as well as a few average humans who for various reasons decided to make this place their home, including Kai’s grandfather.

When Kai gets off the boat after a strange ride with stranger dreams, she finds that her grandfather isn’t the only one dying here. The great Papu Tree, the enormous tree that shelters the little village is also failing, according to a curmudgeonly bug-man and his overly entrepreneurial sausages. They’re working overtime to try and stop the Papu Tree from reaching the end of its life, and now, so must Kai. Her grandfather’s life and the life of the tree are intertwined, just like the lives of everyone in the village. As the first newcomer in twenty years, she might be the only one who can fix everything. She just has to come to terms with the fact that plants sing to her, a beskulled crowman haunts her dreams, and she may be slightly magical. Plus, well, there’s all the drama, secrets, and unspoken regrets, and it’s all about to come to a very messy head. Mutazione is a game that will make you want to break out the popcorn and watch the drama unfold. Just be sure to clean your hands before using the controller.

Gameplay: 8/10

Seriously though, you could break out a bowl of popcorn, because this isn’t a complicated game. A little point-and-click, a little narrative adventure, a little farming sim, you spend most of the game on a cozy set of rails. You have a diary where you track what you’ve been told to do, and you do that. The final one of each set of tasks, often talking to someone, progresses the day and the story. Each part of each day, you’ll have your goals, as well as the freedom to wander around the town, talking to everyone you can find to get more story and searching for seeds growing in the wild. Why seeds? Because Kai’s grandfather is the shaman of Mutazione, nurturing both the people and the land with care and understanding. Due to his failing health, there are a number of gardens that need some TLC. With Kai’s inherited plant magic and a little mystical drumming, she’ll coax the seeds she plants into lovely gardens of your own design, fulfilling the needs of the villagers with the results. Botanists and other plant lovers should love this part, as some of the plants are based on real ones, while some are very much new breeds. 

While it’s a relatively small game in both time and world size, my biggest complaint is the speed at which Kai moves across the screen. Unfortunately, her pace matches the game’s: slow. That’s not a bad thing for the game, but for the character it can be unbearable, especially once you have the freedom to explore outside the village. The game encourages you to backtrack to find plants that have grown enough to harvest for seeds and lore points where Kai has a new observation. When it takes you a minute to cross a single long world screen, it almost feels like it’s trying to stretch the game time. 

Visuals: 8/10

Simply put, this game is gorgeous. The concept of mutant everything allowed the graphic designers to play with so much more than just the average human, and even then, the few who are average are varied. Even the various sausages look different enough to tell one from another, and they are literally just sausages with arms, feet, and entrepreneurial spirit. Despite its simplicity, the world is filled with things to see and explore, and many corners are filled with little things that enhance characterization and worldbuilding if you just stop and look around. 

 Replayability: 5/10

Based on the linearity of the game, there’s not a whole lot of reason to replay that I can see to change the overall story. You can pick different conversation topics and see where they go, perhaps discover a few more details on those dark little secrets, but the overall story won’t change. If you’re an achievement hunter, you’ll find yourself doing at least three partial replays due to achievements based on what foods you choose when meals are offered (omnivore, vegetarian, and the challenging vegan). These seem to pop partway through the game, though, so you’re not required to beat it over and over. Overall though, it seems like there’s one story to be told, and once you’ve seen it, it’s done.

Themes: 8/10     

There’s no hiding that the main theme of this game is “Family”. Lost families, found families, old families, new families, the families you’re born with and the families you choose. That’s the sort of feel you get in a small town, really. When there’s not many people your age around, all the local kids become your siblings. Every mother is an aunt, every father an uncle. Everyone has a role to fill, both for the community and the family that’s built around it. Mutazione beautifully demonstrates this while making you feel properly like someone intruding on that family. You’re left wondering where you can fit in, and gradually, finding if there is room for you at all. 

 Challenge: 7/10

Mutazione isn’t one of those point-and-click games that has you pixel-hunting just to find the small thing you need to progress the story. Most of the time, all you have to hunt for is the very obvious person to talk to next or a few very obvious plants that you were directly pointed to. If you want to go everywhere and click everything for the seeds and lore, then there’s nothing stopping you aside from a few closed doors at certain times of day, but it’s not remotely required. This game is about as simple as you can get, but completionists will be somewhat challenged to find all the seeds and lore spots around the world.

Uniqueness: 9/10

It’s hard to think of any game that’s quite the same as Mutazione. It’s not exactly a point-and-click, more detailed than a typical visual novel, not entirely a farming sim, but it takes elements from all of these and beautifully blends them into a story that will keep you going back to that popcorn bowl. 

Personal: 8/10

Once upon a time, I was from a small town. One of those places where my mom would drive me around and point to almost every house and tell me who used to live there and how they were connected to our family. I went to the same high school my mother and her mother went to. Some of the same last names were in my graduating class as theirs. I’ve long since moved away to a much bigger city, but that longing for a small town home full of history is still there, occasionally nibbling at my memories and asking to go back. Of course, I can’t. That small town I grew up in isn’t so small anymore, and all the houses are gone or occupied by different people. But for a few hours, Mutazione took me back to something like it, reminding me of family meals, hot days lost to swimming, and running through the woods around my grandfather’s house and dreaming of magic. It was cozy. For a while, it satisfied that quiet longing. I only wished I could have spent more time there.

Aggregated score: 7.7

Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.