The Repairing Mantis

Even if you are an enthusiast in terms of grotesque and experimental media, "The Repairing Mantis" will probably still be on the higher ranks of gutwrenchingly cruel, poetic and surreal experiences.

It is a short (

first off, the warnings are justified, please read them carefully. As a mantis, you go around the place, help other animals achieving their dreams and make decisions. Playtime is about 1 - 2 hrs; 2 endings.

i love how dialogues work in this game, which is you choose what other characters would say. It gives you a sense of emotional manipulating others to achieve your goal. I think it's quite genius. I also like how the game makes me feel super uncomfortable and heartbreaking when making impactful decisions, especially at the end of ending 1. Overall, the game mechanics fit the story really well.

i enjoyed what the story offers: well represented themes, organic storytelling and clever (but a bit too on the nose) metaphors. Now lets discuss about my fav character in the game: the gator. imo they represent the know-it-all outsiders, ignorant of others' dreams, thinking dreams are stupid and painful and should be destroyed out of misery. All because they dont have a dream themselves. Thing is, hopes and dreams are what keeping people alive. Recognizing and following your own dream, figuring out what to do next after achieving it, appreciating what you have, not giving up. That is life.

my only feedback is maybe making it not boring to navigate through the map. Some of my suggestions are adding more shortcuts into the island and polishing movement mechanics. Its still a game afterall.

my experience with the repairing mantis is bleak but comforting, grotesque but beautiful.

Holy mother of peppered cookies.
This is not a horror game, it's an atrocious game. It's not scary,
it's profoundly disturbing and upsetting.

Fully recommended, at least if you are emotionally and mentally stable.

Interesting surreal horror experience - this game reminds me a lot of Eraserhead. Definitely worth a play if you're into artistic/conceptual games, but bear in mind it's a short experience and asks more questions than it answers!

Most of the somewhat cheap horror games on steam fall short but this one was good brain food.

jesus christ what the hell have i just played

This is a great first game for a small team.
The thing that stands out the most for me is that you choose the NPC dialogue instead of talking to them directly. It was an experience that I'm sure people who struggled a bit in life would relate to some degree. Dreams are stupid, but they're also nice, might as well try to achieve them since I have nothing better to do.

pros: good story
doesn't overstay its welcome
effective uses of it's theme

Cons: a faster way to traverse the world (or making it smaller) would have been nice. i got lost once and the slowness of the run didn't helped.

Recommended.

But please do heed the warning at the intro.

Okay wow. First of all, I do like the narrative, and it's very thought-provoking, but I have to give a content warning, which is very strange because I never felt that way about the game. The game is super heavy on animal sadism, even though it's more of a mirror for people - I am sure the devs don't hate the flying squirrels. It's very into the suicide themes, and it's not subtle at all. You have to willingly harm characters and watch them suffer, so it can be a little uncomfortable. That said, having some experience with these issues, I don't think the game misrepresents the problem at all, it's all very close to the heart. Even better, the game also has some genuinely funny moments, which made me feel very bad for laughing, my god, that alligator dream.

Unfortunately, I think 'The Repairing Mantis' has one of those deceiving 'trash game' trailers, you know those Steam releases that look like easy attention grabs, with no actual effort behind them, but it's not that for sure, you can actually explore this game and hunt for various achievements. They clearly put some effort into it, and overall I don't really mind the aesthetic, PS1(ish) feel to it, kinda reminds me of 'Stars Die' a bit. It took me 2 hours to find both endings and all 8 achievements, I see some people were faster than me, but I would say 90 minutes to 2 hours is about the most you can get. I enjoyed the narrative, I think the dialogue is very clever, and you can even pick the responses from the perspective of the character you are talking to - that is odd, never seen that in a game. The game jumps between reality and a dream world as you try to satisfy the desires of 3 squirrels, it can be a bit confusing, just pay attention to where you at because sometimes you need to advance to the next stage.

The narrative has several multiple choices, I assume that is what triggered the 2 endings - the save no save deal, but I am not 100% sure if that was it, it's not very clear if I actually helped anyone. Some of the interactive elements were pretty interesting, and by that I mean the game forces you to do very sketchy things like cutting the flesh or hurting someone with interactive gameplay. After all, it's a psychological game, I guess it's to be expected, I like the creativity and just the fact that game can definitely make you uncomfortable.

Pros:

(+) It has a unique take on the dialogue system, the responses you choose are not yours, that is what the characters will ask you, so you have to look at it from their perspective, your dialogue looks like $#%$#$&. The game has multiple choices with some events if you can spot them, you will have to play the game twice to get everything. I thought the achievements and 'puzzles' were pretty unique, not much there to compare it to.

(+) As disgusting as the game is, if the goal was to make me go WTF is this game, it was successful in doing so. Very uncomfortable, forces you to do all kinds of bad things. In general, I think the narrative captures the themes of depression and lack of purpose very well. It may not be the most visually striking low-poly game, but what it had with the foggy island and creepy music worked for the story.

Feedback:

(x) I believe there is a potential softlock with the middle squirrel, do not choose "I need to go", it seems to remove her dialogue options which you need to advance. I found the narrative a little confusing because of the event order that you follow, you can only access some characters during a specific segment which really confused me. Also, the game kind of implies that you want to save characters, but I am not even sure what 'save' in this game is, I did get both endings and I didn't feel that I helped everyone.

Overall Thoughts: 7/10

I thought the theme of lacking purpose and falling into depression was very deep, it feels genuine and I can relate to it. It's a bit more complicated than I expected with 2 sides of the world and some 50-50 choices. Still a pretty disgusting game overall, but I had a few laughs too. Yea, it's an experience for sure, would not recommend it for everyone lol.
Seriously though, I love that alligator hat.

Review by: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ 

I cannot lie. This game is not for the faint of heart. It is a wonderful story of a mantis going about and reaching their dreams..And helping others reach their dreams. You do this in absolutely wonderful ways starting with your meat bridge and ending with smashing a flying machine made of wood. The visuals are unique as well. But behind all of the gore and mutilation, this game has interesting undertones of depression, suicide and what it means to dream and reach your goals. It has multiple endings to. I clapped after the ending and I cannot recommend it enough. So for better or for worse, if you can stomach the blood and gore, you will LOVE this game and its various themes.

You can see my hour long playthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDFMA2pSENQ

What the fuck

Very enjoyable game about pretty heavy and dark topics. The aesthetics work well to both soften and enhance the impact of the things that happen. Normally when I can see the emotional strings a game is gonna play on I can pretty easily separate myself from the game and not 'feel' it. Don't know why exactly but I couldn't do it with this game though and I appreciate it for that. It was nice to see something horrific and not just stare at it coldly. It's been fun to think over what different things mean or represent as well.

Do please heed the content warnings. There's a lot of squirrel gore and you're often very close to it.

I came into this game expecting to be Bob the builder the mantis...

I came out this game questioning my hopes and dreams.

very depressing game...but in that good way where there's a message and whatnot...

its super trippy and unsettling, though...

I spent a good while trying to think of a way to review this game, but the only words that keep coming back to my head is that 'it's an experience'.

Nonetheless, I appreciate any game where you can be a mantis. Even if you have to get a little choppy-choppy on some squirrels.

I'd love to have the opportunity to hear from the games developers on the thought process behind many of the game-play decisions.

What if Eraserhead-era Lynch made a PS1 game

A hidden gem of sorts. The creators found a good way to explore the themes of suicide and depression. This game is actually dark, surprisingly dark. More scary than many well-established horror games.

However, there are certain problems with playability and vague goals in this one. In two attempts, I still haven't found a way to *complete* this game, and I'm not even sure if it's supposed to be completed. Graphics are, overall, very good, but giant bubbles appearing out of nowere don't aways look good. There are better ways to attract player's attention to certain places.

this is a weird one. ... who'd ask a praying mantis for help in the first place? those things are monsters!

Good, depressive, weird game. Am a big fan of squirrel guts.

The Repairing Mantis is a horror game where you play as the horrifying creature, causing despair wherever you go... Since you are the horror, you cannot escape! This puts the player in a very uncomfortable position and makes you do things you don't necessary want to do, but it's all part of what makes this game genius.
Ultimately, this is the first game from this studio and I feel like they can do even better, especially environment-wise, but it's a very promising debut.
Verdict: If you can bear the dark themes of this game, it is an interesting 1-hour game to try if you want something fresh in the horror genre.

This is the video game definition of "Enargeia" (“Bright, Unbearable Reality.” ). An experience both sad and horrifying on an existential level, but with a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel.

Great for a deep philosophical afternoon.

Made my hair grow
10/10 would depress again

Super weird. Leaves you alone with a bad feeling and confusion. Still, a very original masterpiece. Definetly not comparable to any other game I saw or played before. That's what I like about the game.

The ambience is incredibly gloomy and sinister. I love that too. The gore elements did not bother me. Still, I would not recommend it to people who struggle with gore elements.

I was thinking recently and I'm pretty sure that this game played a part in me deciding to drop out of college a few months ago. Lol thank you

This game made me cry, which is rare for a horror game. it's fantastic and terrible in it's simplicity and beauty. Truly a heartbreaking masterpiece.

Well, let me just start off by getting the cliché out of the way. There are no games quite like this. I mean, certainly, games like "Pathologic" or "This Strange Realm of Mine" exist and they both capture the same level of surrealism and unease that this title does... But they do so for different reasons and in incomparably different ways.

Think about "Doki Doki Literature Club". It's an unassuming visual novel that deals with depression, suicide, and feelings of helplessness. And, up until I had played it, I'd not had any gaming experiences quite like it. It's rare for a video game to be that unforgivingly and unapologetically hostile to its own player. There's no reward for the player at any time - there's no safety net. You're stuck with an utterly sickening feeling of dismay and hopelessness past a certain point. You know that no matter what you do, you can't save the day. For once in a video game, you aren't the hero and you aren't allowed to be. You're put in a situation where all odds are against you. Call that an allegory for life, why don't you?

In a medium such as gaming that's so deliberately filled with copycat shooters and slapstick storytelling that gets recycled over and over again, it's reassuring to be reminded that products can push the envelope every once and a while. It's refreshing to know that storytelling in gaming isn't dead.

The "Darkwood" approach to horror is prevalent here. There's no need to concern yourself with jumpscares when the very nature and atmosphere of something is unnerving enough. There's no cheap tricks here, and I'll say it again, it's refreshing.

For what it's worth, Erupting Avocado, there's a degree of catharsis that can be felt while playing through this title. I don't quite know how this game made me feel, but it made me feel something. So, thanks for that. I was streaming the game to my good friend while I was playing through it and we both came to similar conclusions about it. It made us confused, unnerved, and somewhat disgusted with ourselves in knowing that we were so undaunted with the tasks that were expected of us. And I think that's it. That's the game's superpower. Hitchcock's power was making the mundane terrifying. "The Repairing Mantis" has the power of reminding its audience that people do fucked up stuff all of the time and don't even think twice about it. And if they do? Well, screw it. Teleological ethics and all that.

So, once again, thanks for making this and letting people play it. It was an amazingly worthwhile experience and for all of the right reasons.

The Repairing Mantis is a ~2 hour hidden gem, and well worth the buy.

I think the mantis said it best:

#&%@4/9{%]

This is not a game I'll play again in a hurry, nor is it for the faint of heart. But it is absolutely worth playing if you like surrealist horror. This game is not just bloody and shocking. It has compelling writing, something I'll admit I was not expecting. Expect themes of futility, depression, and identity. Heed the content warnings, they're not kidding. This game is pretty short, but I'm shocked that more people aren't talking about it. I have never played a game like it. It is thoroughly unique, and absolutely horrifying. If you can stomach the gore, play it. It won't take you too long, but it will definitely stick with you.

It's a shame I'm writing a negative review for this one as it's the kind of game I'd normally enjoy. Unfortunately, I ran into problems. First of all, performance. It made my desktop window manager use an insane GPU percentage, 50% or more as well as high CPU usage from the game. Which I was baffled by because it's a walking simulator with PS1-style graphics.

Regardless, I knew I only had a couple of hours to judge the game before deciding whether or not to refund, so I just tried dealing with my laptop sounding like a jet engine (despite being very high-end) but unfortunately it froze for about thirty seconds every five minutes or so. It was quite grating.

I did actually play a fair amount of the game and I'll get to that later in the review. One of the major problems for me is the lack of a save system. I don't know whether this was some kind of artistique design choice or it was done to mitigate unjustified refunds. Anyway, it caused a big problem for me, because after all these problems and I felt forced to investigate the issue, By this point I'd already used most of the two hours I had for refund eligibility and now I couldn't just continue where I left off after I was done troubleshooting.

I did in fact fix the issue and when I went back to test the changes, I wasn't getting the lag. I think that the game was trying to use the Intel GPU of my laptop instead of the dedicated GPU. I disabled the integrated graphics in the device manager and that did the trick. The game definitely triggered the issue. Never faced it before and it occurred when I started playing the game. I wouldn't say it's a Unity thing as I've been playing a lot of Broken Reality which was also made in Unity. So I don't know, just thought the developer might want to know.

So that whole lag ordeal soured my experience playing the game. But what do I think of the actual product? It's simple, not necessarily in a bad way. It's very linear which is common for a walking simulator. I like the way that dialogue is sort of flipped. You're choosing what you feel the NPC should be thinking. There is an apparent level of choice in the dialogue but I think it's mostly implied. Most of the time your dialogue choices don't seem to do anything and it doesn't matter how much or how little of an NPC's lines you've read. Maybe some of the key choices will impact the ending later on, but otherwise the choice doesn't matter. At least that's how I understood it.

There is no music which is okay. It's the style of the game. The 32-bit visuals are a nice touch. However, I think the amount of fogging is more of a hindrance than a benefit to the atmosphere. I missed one of the first squirrels so I was completely lost for a while. Turned out I went right past it due to the poor visibility. I get why it's been designed that way, but even in walking simulators it's possible for players to lose their patience because of things like this.

Sometimes you'll be able to find NPCs by the large speech bubbles when they have them. Other times you'll just have to hope you run into one. After completing the tasks you're not greeted with a different habitat for the squirrels. You're instead sent to the exact same place as if you're in a time loop. I get how this has been done creatively. Some things change in the environment that help progress the narrative, which is interesting. But I'd have definitely preferred new environments. Maybe that happens later on.

That's the game mechanics, graphics, performance and sound (or lack of) out of the way. Finally, the narrative is good. It's a weird idea but it's very thought-provoking which I believe is the whole point of the game. You might wonder which choice might lead to the most suffering for the NPC. Almost feels like the shopping cart theory. But rather than your decisions about shopping carts making you a good or bad person, it's whether you're making these innocent animals have harmful thoughts.

In short, nice concept and nice graphics. Performance issues. Some questionable design choices (e.g. no save, high fog), interesting story which I unfortunately won't be seeing more of.

Personally I can't recommend the game, but going by existing reviews I can see that my circumstances are unusual. What a pity.

I'm not /comfortable/ with how hard I relate to this dopey-looking alligator that makes weird noises, but I'm definitely impressed.

Real talk though. at multiple points in my life I've thought most of what these characters have to say, and it would have hurt less if I'd known someone out there really understood. The aesthetic and design perfectly capture the feeling of despair that hangs off your mind and body, like clinging tar or sloughing skin.

...Thank you.

The description on the store page says it all. This is a deeply disturbing, surreal journey where you are continually compelled to perform actions you find abhorrent. To add to the other-worldlyness of the whole thing, when you engage with the anthropomorphic flying squirrels and crocodile of this place, you don't actually choose your own dialogue options. Rather you choose what they say to you. And your responses are strings of indecipherable nonsense. The game continues to force your face into the tragedy of the characters, and in the end there is no redemption. This is horrific through and through.
Highly recommended!

A strange game about depression, squirrels and the meaning of hope. Not a feel good game, in fact you'll feel like shit but it is still a beautiful and worthwhile experience.