by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Disaster Report 4 Summer Memories 
• Developer: Granzella
• Publisher: NIS America
• PS4, Switch, PC

What kind of person would you be in a disaster? Would you take advantage of the situation for your own gain? Or would you act with kindness and help those around you? Those are the fundamental questions at the heart of Disaster Report. After a prolonged development cycle, surviving cancelation after the Japanese Tohoku earthquake, and an uncertain localization, Disaster Report 4 Summer Memories is finally here–just in time to launch in the midst of another crisis. 

Disaster Report 4 is full of signs of its troubled development, with a frame rate that fluctuates when seemingly nothing is happening, and plenty of archaic design decisions. It’s a game with a PS3-esque presentation and a PS2-era design sensibility. It’s a strange technical mess, and often a boring one as well. 

Yet despite that I found myself enthralled with it. Disaster Report’s poor technical presentation is met with a fantastic sense of art direction. The summer heat comes through in bright, almost overexposed, outdoor areas. The harsh grays of the city are splashed with highlights of violent color, and the debris of its broken cityscapes act as natural framing devices for its compositions. Disaster Report is full of compelling shots, with tons of implied personal stories and moody environments. I spent a lot of time with it simply exploring in first person mode, observing the personal and environmental wreckage the earthquake left. 

Small moments act as opportunities to check in, asking your reaction and bringing an emphasis on roleplaying and reflection. An early highlight has your character sit down after escaping a bad situation, with dialogue choices that ask how you feel about the situations you experienced, backed by a quiet vocal theme. 

The writing isn’t exceptional, but it gives you a wide range of reactions to express yourself with, including some bizarre and inappropriate ones. You can take the time to listen to others’ troubles, console them, or belittle them for it, or sometimes even flirt with them. Certain situations allow you to manipulate others for your own benefit, but the emphasis is generally on showing empathy and recognizing others’ troubles amidst a crisis. It goes so far as to make this point  by awarding you heavy handed “Moral Points” for empathetic actions. 

In a less compelling game these design choices would detract from it, but here they form part of its charm. Disaster Report captures a very specific mood and design sensibility. Buildings are collapsing, and the country is sinking into the ocean, but everyone’s lives still continue and their concerns don’t disappear. It gives off the same vibes as a Yakuza sidequest–bluntly written, but often filled with humor and sincerity. 

Mechanically, it follows the same old world design. Survival means monitoring basic needs–hunger, thirst, stress and bathroom breaks–but there’s none of the scrounging and crafting common to modern games. Your needs are more there to keep you checking in, looking for rest stops and buying food and drinks for the trips ahead. Navigation is more adventure game like, gated by finding the right person to talk to, the right item or keeping an eye out for passages created within the wreckage. It gives you a small sense of familiarity with each area before moving onto the next. 

The PS4’s VR mode contributes to this, allowing you to revisit areas from the campaign in first person, with a Myst style navigation that moves you from hotspot to hotspot, allowing you to pick destinations by looking at and warping to them, then walking on rails within them. Thankfully the game’s framerate problems don’t appear here, where it could easily induce motion sickness in the viewer. Areas are overall more lifeless in VR, but it gives another way to build familiarity with each area, and works way better than expected. 

Better than expected is often the verdict for Disaster Report 4 as a whole. So many things work against it, and in every way it’s uneven, unpolished and messy. But in some ways that almost feels appropriate about a game about surviving a disaster, and within that mess are enough earnest, funny, and scary scenes to keep it compelling. 

Disaster Report 4 is a portrait of humans in the wake of crisis, in a way the modern rash of apocalypses fail to capture in their lavishly written melodramas. It offers the simple fact that life continues after a disaster, then asks you, “What now?”