My Favorite Part of Nier Replicant? When It Goes Full 80s Text Adventure

As anyone who’s played a Yoko Taro-directed game can tell you, the man clearly likes to play around with the nature of video games. Nier: Automata, most predominately, mixes the 3D action genre with that of a 2D, top-down shooter—though it also becomes a 2D platformer at several points as well. The newly remastered Nier Replicant, also a 3D action game, likewise has an extensive section that mirrors classic horror games with locked, third person cameras in a claustrophobic environment. But that’s not the only way Nier Replicant combines two completely different game genres: At one point it goes full 80s text adventure.

A few hours into Nier Replicant, our player-named hero (who I’ll refer to as “Nier” for the sake of simplicity) travels with his magical book companion, Weiss, to The Forest of Myth. There, the people of the village have succumbed to a strange illness—one that traps them within their own dreams. Worse yet, the disease spreads not through the air or bodily fluids but through words themselves—which Nier and Weiss discover to their chagrin as they become infected themselves.

What’s interesting about the “Deathdream” virus is how it is portrayed in the game itself. When our heroes become infected, they notice first that they can talk fluently with the mayor—as opposed to the halting, cryptic speech they encountered from him upon first entering the village. Then, the text box on screen begins to grow larger. Soon it covers the entire screen and the background becomes mat black—leaving our heroes trapped in a text adventure game from the time before graphics as we think of them today were even a thing.

The creepy-yet-hilarious thing about this change is that Nier and Weiss realize it has happened as well. They, like the player, see nothing but words on a black background. What’s worse is that the words are now narrating their lives in the dreamworld—often attributing to them thoughts and actions not their own. However, should Nier and Weiss fight against the text story (or their own characterization) the plot simply forces them back into place. However, the two are able to figure out that they are the heroes of the story and are able to work within the framework of the dream (by answering a series of interactive riddles) to help the dreamer end it.

After freeing the mayor, Nier and Weiss are able to enter the text-dreams of the two other people in the village to save them as well. One of these is little more than a classic logic puzzle—asking Nier (and therefore the players) to figure out a classic Knights and Knaves logic puzzle where two people are lieing and only one is telling the truth. The other villager, however, is trapped in a dream that goes full Zork.

While the Mayor’s dream is three simple riddles and the Knights and Knaves dream only asks you to choose who is telling the truth, the final person’s dream is an interactive (though simplistic) text adventure. In the dream, Nier and Weiss have to rescue a person from his imprisonment in a castle full of horrific sights. Told in first person through the eyes of the dreamer, you get to choose the path of escape. But here’s the twist: the castle is filling up with water. Make too many moves and you die—and by “die” I mean you literally get the game over screen and have to reload from your last save point.

I’m not going to lie. I actually laughed in surprise after this happened to me for the first time. I laughed even more when, I realized that I was going to need to do something I hadn’t done in decades: I was going to have to draw an actual map by hand.

Granted, I probably didn’t need to. The dream castle is actually rather tiny and the time before a game over is rather short. As long as you pay attention, you can likely remember which paths you have taken before. Of course, I didn’t have any way of knowing the size of the castle until I had beaten it. And, let’s be frank here, making the map was a ton of fun.

Coming out of the The Forest of Myth, I was truly disappointed it was over. The whole Deathdream virus and how it effects not only the fictional world but the gameplay as well was creative to the extreme. Moreover, being tricked into playing around in what is basically a decades-dead game genre in 2021 was a welcome surprise to say the least. I can only hope it encourages a few young gamers to try out games like the original Zork for themselves.

Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… was released on April 23, 2021 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows.