Laplace's Demon (SNES) Playthrough [English]
323A playthrough of Vic Tokai's 1995 survival horror game for the Super Famicom, Laplace no Ma (ラプラスの魔).
Since the game was a Japanese-only release, I'm playing the game using Aeon Genesis's excellent English translation patch. If you are interested in playing the game yourself, you can find the patch at https://www.romhacking.net/translations/308/.
Laplace no Ma, "Laplace's Demon" as the patch calls it, is a game unlike anything else you're likely to play on Nintendo's 16-bit console: it combines the mechanics of (what we would eventually come to call) "survival horror" with the flavor of a turn-based RPG, and the entire adventure takes place in a world straight out of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. (I mean that quite literally - they straight up plagiarize a lot of his work here!)
The story takes place in the fictional town of Newcam, Massachusetts in the early twenties. (Newcam is essentially Lovecraft's Arkham with a different name) Benedict Weathertop, a local man with an unhealthy interest in the dark arts, recently murdered his parents and set a horde of undead creatures free in the family's mansion. Two local kids who snuck into the house have been killed, a third is missing, and the people of Newcam are terrified. As the would-be hero, you volunteer to venture into the house to find out what you can about the missing girl, Benedict, and the dark secrets of Weathertop Hall.
Once you've chosen your class, picked up a few allies at the town bar, and spoken to the townsfolk, it's time to step through the front doors and begin the adventure.
(During the intro, doesn't that house look an awful lot like the Splatterhouse one?)
Weathertop Hall is a huge place, and you're free to explore as you see fit. You can make a beeline for your objective or you can snoop around, and I recommend snooping. There are tons of things to uncover by searching the furniture and fixtures, and many of the undead are happy to interact with you, and not always in the ways you might expect. Some will attack, but if you're character has enough charisma, you might be able to avoid violence by starting up a conversation - a lot of these guys will share useful info if they like you enough. If nice manners and a winsome smile fail, you can always run.
In fact, you should run most of the time since you get very little experience and no money whatsoever from fighting. You'll want to complete tasks given to you by NPCs for experience, and you make cash by taking photos of enemies you fight and selling them to the guy that runs the motel - make sure you have a journalist with you since everyone else sucks at using the camera!
The sprawling layout of the house (and the areas it eventually leads to) and the emphasis placed on solving puzzles and avoiding fights makes Laplace no Ma feel a lot like the first Resident Evil game - or maybe even Sweet Home thanks to its party system. It looks like a JRPG, but the game feels totally different from the likes of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy.
(Fitting since it's originally the work of Hummingbird Soft, the makers of the Deep Dungeon games. )
The game isn't hugely successful at anything it does - the fights are easy, the environments are bland, there's tons of backtracking, it's often difficult to make progress even when you've being super thorough in your exploration, and it takes too long for the story to pick up, but I'm willing to cut this one a bit of slack.
The developers made some bold choices here, and though they don't all pan out well, I respect the effort. There is a lot of fun here for anyone that enjoys this sort of dungeon crawling, the enemy and cutscene art is great, the top-down view is a big improvement over the Wizardry-style first-person movement of the computer and PC Engine versions, and the story... well, it's Lovecraft. If you like his work, you'll probably enjoy how this plays out. And yes, there are tentacles.
As if you needed to ask!
Laplace no Ma is one of those games that I expect many would turn their noses up at, but if you're able to get it into, it'll make for a pretty memorable experience.
(And in case you were wondering, I named my character after Tex Murphy, the detective from the Under a Killing Moon series.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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