R?MJ: The Mystery Hospital

1997 | System Sacom | Playstation

While the first person FMV point and click style games were mostly prevalent on the PC in the 90’s, there are a few exceptions to the rule that exceed all expectations for the platforms they released on. One of the more notable ones were Kenji Eno’s D no Shokutaku and Enemy Zero, in 1995 and 1996 respectively, that would break the mold for FMV adventures. It’s a genre that with limited gameplay interaction has, over the years, introduced me to some baffling worlds and stories. This genre has spawned gorgeous design work and interesting puzzle mechanics to boot, whilst maintaining the point and click tradition of obtuse means to progress and finding items that even with context leave a few question marks.

R?MJ: The Mystery Hospital is by all means the most FMV game to have ever FMV’d. It is developed by System Sacom, whom you might know from the live action interactive movie Rampo and the Resident Evil on a boat game Deep Fear, it shows a surprising level of competence when presenting the game’s narrative. We’re introduced to the cast through a hilariously corny slideshow that introduced our hero, Hajime, as the heroic force of justice. In reality he’s just a dude that showed up to a hospital because his friend was in an accident. R?MJ tells the story of a group of people trapped inside of a mysterious hospital after a virus outbreak causes the complex to go into a quarantine shutdown. With the shutters closed and another explosion, the survivors need to find a way out before they get infected with the deadly virus. From here we take control of the main character and explore the eerie corridors for a means of escape. Occasionally you’ll catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure lurking in the corners of your eye, adding to the mystery. Alongside your two friends, Ryo and Tomowo, and fresh from med school nurse, Aya, you’ll explore the central area of the hospital and investigate various objects and find keys and other items to progress in the game. Meanwhile, a sinister plot unravels to develop a superhuman that’s immune to any disease to flood the market with a super serum of ultra powerful and ancient antibodies. To say the plot is a bit of a whiplash is an understatement. After the central area, the group escapes through a secret underground laboratory, where they have to fight off various deadly viruses taking hold of the group. In an even more elaborate bit of plot development, the group ends up in an underground temple where they get captured by the hospital director and his fantastically voiced henchman. What follows is another very extra-feeling escape sequence from a doomsday device as you save your friends from being turned into mindless monsters. The story eventually culminates in an escape sequence through underground train tracks as you’re being chased by a monster that looks suspiciously like Pepsiman.

R?MJ: The Mystery Hospital is a lot to take in. Especially when you consider that the game, at maximum, lasts 3 hours. It’s like you step on a rollercoaster ride, which turns into another rollercoaster, which then turns into a Pepsi commercial (the main monster really looks like Pepsiman). Like a lot of other interactive movie experiences, gameplay feels largely secondary to the story. It presents the player with the option to move down predetermined paths and interact with objects using the circle button. One of the unique mechanics is the Sense mechanic, which represents your senses like hearing, scent and vision. There is also an oddly tense moment where you don a hazmat suit into the virus lab, where the oxygen meter rapidly depletes. Overall it’s a very simple game to interact with and therefore allows the player to fully embrace the spaghetti animations, the random English lines voiced by someone they definitely found on a street somewhere, and relish in the exaggerated complexity of this wonderful title. For as short as it is, R?MJ does a fantastic job at taking you on a thrill ride with the hospital setting working fantastically to give off a somewhat eerie vibe. Empty hospital corridors at night just have this naturally off feeling to them. The people behind the fan translation of the Playstation version also did a phenomenal job at presenting the game in English.
If you have an evening to spare and want to experience an unhinged adventure full of fantastic 90’s FMV faces, then I can’t recommend R?MJ: The Mystery Hospital enough!

PEPSIMAN/10