Mad Father: Does It Still Hold Up?
Mad Father made recent headlines at outlets and the PLAYISM Game Show when a remake of the game was announced for PC and Nintendo Switch. With updated puzzles, animations, decor, and more, fans of the original game have much to look forward to. In light of this news, I wanted to dive back into the original before the remake came out, to see if it holds up from its debut back during the holiday season of 2012.
My first run-in with Mad Father was during my Tumblr years. When my dashboard, at the time, was full of bleak and grainy photography behind angsty quotes, YouTuber simping, and a ton of senseless teenage drama amongst users. As much of a hell-hole Tumblr was in 2013, one of the gems from being on there was finding a photoset from a video Markiplier made playing Mad Father. It was developed by Sen, a one-person team based in Japan, who just so happened to make another fantastic short horror game, Misao; Published by Playism, a company dedicated to localizing regional treasures from Japan and making them accessible for the rest of the world to enjoy, and vice-versa. The game being free at the time, made it so that a teenager with not a whole lotta means in her wallet could enjoy this 6-hour adventure, after a day full of grade school drama and homework assignments. I downloaded the game, finished it, and loved my playthrough from what I remember, but honestly, I forgot I even touched it until I saw the news that it was being remade. I decided that it was about that time to revisit my Aya, her creepy dad, dolls with baby bonnets, and sound effects that jump scared me into oblivion.
Mad Father is set in the middle of nowhere Germany, where you play as Aya Drevis, an 11-year-old girl with a white fluffy rabbit named Snowball. Growing up, she had her mother Monika, her father Alfred, and her father’s assistant, Maria, to keep her company. As Aya got older, she noticed strange things were happening; her mother was growing ill, the relationship between her father and Maria was getting suspicious, and there were screams and chainsaw noises coming from her dad’s “doctor’s office.” Aya wakes up one night to her family’s mansion full of animated corpses of past victims from her father’s experiments. Running around a home full of dead bodies seeking revenge, she is greeted by interesting side characters like Ogre, a spirit from another world, and “the blonde boy”, a sweet victim who wants the best for Aya. The player battles with themselves to save the father that you promised to love forever, or to let him go. With puzzles that’ll make you yell, a spine-tingling soundtrack e, and charming design, I found myself upset that I forgot about such a fascinating treasure.
One of my favorite things about Mad Father is the number of puzzles you run into. From hide and seek sessions with killer dolls in cute bonnets and setting traps, to gathering materials around the house where you have to use your common sense (unless you’re me and have none of that) to combine things together to set a fleshy mess of a monster on fire, there are so many little mysteries that, without a doubt, will make you feel so stupid for being stuck on them for so long.
The game’s dialogue is something I’m still not too sure I can critique much, as this is a game from Japan and direct translations from any language going into English are bound to lose some of a culture’s living words. There were three cringy minutes of text talking about mom’s steak, interactions that felt unnatural and dry coming from an 11-year-old girl, and the list goes on, but again, is this the fault of direct translations hitting different than it does in Japanese, or is it just the lack of knowledge of how people act in the situations these characters are forced into?
Mad Father has multiple endings which makes it the perfect game for theorists, like myself, who like to make up their canons, take small pieces of stories, and run with it. You have two bad endings in which where Aya doesn’t survive, one “true” ending where you peak at her future, and one “what if” ending that raises questions of, “Was the father always like this? Was it the mother that actually drove the dad to kill people for experiments? Is Aya going to follow in her dad’s footsteps?”
So, does Mad Father still hold up? Yes, I absolutely love it, and I’m still kicking myself for forgetting it existed. Playing as Aya and going through her turmoil of conflicting feelings for her dad as she faces and listens to the stories of his victims reminded me that short games are still so underrated. In completing every ending and taking in all the puzzles, this mere 6-hour game made me yell in ways 20-50 hour games simply can’t. Safe to say, I’m very excited about this remake and all the yelling that comes with it.
