Watcha Playin’?-My Lovely Daughter
My Lovely Daughter is an alchemy sim by Toge Productions. You play as Faust, an alchemist with so far unexplained amnesia. You find yourself in a house you don’t really recognize and eventually stumble upon a room where a young girl’s body is sitting alone and a strange oven hosts a soul orb. Faust is still confused, but concludes that his daughter must have died and he was trying to bring her back by feeding the soul.
He remembers just enough of his alchemy to know that he needs to create homunculi and sacrifice them to feed the soul. This is how you get into the main conceit of the game. Using different materials (wood, iron, clay, meat, and iron) you create homunculi that have different affinities (joy, sadness, fear, and anger). These affinities get fused into the soul when you sacrifice them, and they need to be in the correct proportions in order to bring your daughter back. Affinities also effect the work homunculi do in the town you travel to.
There are two ways to make money: hire your homunculi out to villagers to do jobs, and taking on ingredient requests from villagers which have a set deadline to deliver. Getting the ingredients requires sacrificing homunculi, especially higher quality ingredients since higher level homunculi produce higher level ingredients when killed.
The homunculi are destined to die no matter what, and that’s really what I’m struggling with in this game. Honestly, the storyline seems pretty predictable. As you go through and have different interactions, Faust starts to remember things and his magic journal becomes filled out with story beats. It seems likely that Faust made a dark bargain (not like the name gave that away…) that cost him his daughter and he did something terrible to try and bring her back. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a story of doing bad things thinking it’s for a good reason, but will inevitably end up proving that he was a monster all along.
But it really sucks getting there. When they’re made, you’re forced to name the homunculi. You also have to keep their affection for you up by giving them presents and spending time with them, or there’s a possibility they’ll run away. They’ll sometimes write you letters talking about their interactions with villagers, their sisters, or thanking you for taking care of them, which adds to my attachment. The worst part is killing them. Depending on their affinities, the homunculi will react differently to you coming to kill them, but all of the death scenes are really gruesome.
My real issue with My Lovely Daughter stems from these scenes and Faust’s relationships with the homunculi. The game emphasizes over and over again that Faust doesn’t care about the homunculi on anything more than a functional level, but at the same time clearly wants you the player to care about them and feel bad when they die. The two sentiments feel really at odds since again, I’m fairly certain it’s going to be revealed that all of this will be for naught and you’ll just be a cruel monster in the end. It doesn’t seem like much of a plot twist since I already feel like a cruel monster as I’m playing it now. If/when the big reveal happens, I’m not going to be shocked, because it’s already so apparent. It’d be one thing if the game made it seem like the homunculi didn’t have feelings, or used Faust as an unreliable narrator to convey that, but actively showing that they’re basically people but also treating them as disposable isn’t really doing it for me.
Despite of, or maybe even because of this issue, I’m intrigued to see how the game ends, even though I’m pretty sure I already know what the twist will be.
Image courtesy of Steam.
