Patty and Mr. Miles

Patty and Mr. Miles is a Wolf RPG game by BrownSugar translated by cargodin. The main game is a cute, quirky RPG with Harvest Moon-type elements. The premise is all the men in the village have been cursed and now have animal faces. Patty and Mr. Miles travel to the wizard’s tower to see what can be done and there are a number of side quests that involve helping the villagers. 

I came across this game while looking for games comparable to Lisa: the Painful, so going in I knew there was more than met the eye. There is a hint in the library, where Miles finds a disturbing history book, but otherwise the main game focuses on helping neighbors and being cute. While the game is really polished in many ways, aspects of the design nagged me. I enjoyed playing, but the minigames seem far too developed for the amount of plot and I had the distinct sense something was missing. Because it was.

There is an “after story” for players to experience post-game, and this is where things take a turn.

The developer explains that near the end of the development cycle they lost all of their common files, which I took to mean event scripts and dialogue. Since they still had all the assets in the game up to that point, they finished the game with what they had left and created a post-game epilogue explaining how the game was supposed to play out.

Folks, this is one wild ride. 

Bit by bit, the cute veneer is stripped away to reveal a dark reality: a witch is reviled and feared because she is a woman, she is banished and curses the villagers as revenge, Miles’ goofy personality may be the result of brain damage after a magical memory wipe, Miles has PTSD and begins having flashbacks, and the village’s history of bloodshed is revealed. It depicts some of the most disturbing drug-overdose scenarios I have ever seen, on par with the Joy Mutants in Lisa. The drug drives the villagers mad and they become physically deformed. Eventually, Patty and Miles’ neighbors are slaughtered. As Patty is trying to escape the burning village with Mr. Miles, who is wheel-chair bound in a vegetative state, the player can revisit each of the villagers’ homes and witness how they have been transformed by the drug or, in some instances, brutally murdered. Oh, yeah, and Patty gets beheaded.

Take the cute/dark duality of Dreaming Mary and amplify it by 100. Without a full-length game to pace the story, the recap has so much dark stuff packed into a comparatively short summary it’s hard to say if the early cuteness and humor would have adequately balanced the horror that comes later. While I’m sorry the developer’s original vision is lost, because it was one crazy yarn, the depiction of what could have been using the remaining assets is an interesting story in its own right.

cargodin has translated other BrownSugar games, A Vague Story and A Bomb Called Darkipt, it’s spinoff, and I look forward to them. Of note, I had some typography issues with P&MM. cargodin recommends installing MS Gothic and setting applocale to Japanese, which I didn’t realize until after the fact.