There are a few games out there that have been seared into my memory from my younger years reading gaming magazines. Every once in a while, I’ll stumble through a used game store and be taken aback for a second by a cover I haven’t seen since I was ten years old. Steambot Chronicles was one of these games. An open-ended mech-building romp where you can play in a five-piece band? Released back in 2006? I had to grab it. This was gonna be a trip. And, oh boy, was it. In many, many strange ways. Ways I could have never predicted.
A Tale You’ve Probably Heard Before
Steambot Chronicles has you take the reins of Vanilla, a boy who washes up ashore right next to a shipwreck. You’ve got amnesia. You’re found by a girl named Coriander, your Kawaii Love Interest. After crawling around on the beach for a while, you find an abandoned trotmobile, a mech suit that you’ll be able to customize throughout your adventure. Girl-thing misses her bus. So you give her a ride on your mech to a city. Then she’s performing in a band. Then bad guys attack. Then you stop them. Then they- Okay, look, if you made it through that barrage of cliches, then I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now; Steambot Chronicles has a terrible story.
There’s nothing here for you if you’re looking for a narrative. Plot points are just brought up and dropped on a whim and the twists have no lead-up or pay-off to them. You very rarely have any reason to go somewhere outside of a plot-relevant character just telling you to go there. And oh god, character dialogue. Character interactions, in general, are just alien. There are barely even character archetypes in this game. Steambot Chronicles‘ world is one made up of wallflowers and extraterrestrials. You’re able to pick dialogue choices throughout the game and it just makes the main character come off like a fucking psychopath. It doesn’t matter what vile thing you choose to say, Vanilla will use the same chipper cadence for everything. Then brace your neck for the tonal whiplash when he says something about friendship and world peace a second later. It’s surreal.
As Good A Reason As Any
In Steambot Chronicles, you shape the kind of person you want to be. “No two Vanillas will be the same,” they would probably tell you. But that’s a lie. You can try and be as unique as you want, but you still have to stay within the game’s guidelines. Like I mentioned before, there are dialogue options, but their inclusion is strange because choices in general don’t matter. No matter what kind of character you try to frame yourself as, the story will continue in its intended way. There was a moment at the end of the game where the villain fishes for sympathy before his defeat. After twelve hours of this, I was out of patience. I told him I wasn’t having it. Apparently, my nearby friends thought I was Hitler for doing this. They chastised me and said that I “ruined the moment,” which is kind of a dick move to pull at the end of the game. But they quickly forgot about it once it came time for the teary closer.
The entire world of Steambot Chronicles is limp. There is a point towards the end of the game where you can join up with the “good” or the “bad” guys, which could have been a neat choice. The problem is that up until thirty minutes before your choice, these groups didn’t exist. No one talked about them, there were no signs of their involvement in the story. Then you’re given two text boxes of exposition apiece to decide which one you like more. It ends up being really contrived. The general impression Steambot Chronicles gives is that the game doesn’t care much about why you’re doing things and neither should you. Are you wondering why every single character hates this Mallow kid and wants to kidnap him? Because the game doesn’t care. And the sequel released on the PSP definitely doesn’t care. There are no answers. Just play the game, idiot.
On The Road Again. And Again.
Oh, but it’s time to talk about the main attraction. Steambot Chronicles is a somewhat open-ended title where you’re free to get by however you can. However, your trotmobile is going to be what you spend the majority of this title inside. You’ll use your mech to deliver materials from place to place, mine for ore, and, most importantly, fight other mechs. You buy or find pieces that you can use to augment your machine. You can change out the legs to give it more mobility or slap on some long-range weaponry. There aren’t that many options available to you, but trying the different parts out is still fun. Trotmobile combat is the best part about this game, but the controls do take some getting used to. You control your direction by using both analog sticks together. That frees your fingers to use the shoulder pads, where all the action comes from, but it’s still awkward for the first couple hours. The best way I can describe it is as a combat-centric Katamari Damacy. It’s not a bad system though, and you’ll get used to it fairly quickly.
The areas that you traverse are pretty basic, with your standard grass and desert lands. But even though there aren’t that many places to explore during your time with Steambot Chronicles, you’ll damn well explore them. Frequently, you’ll be backtracking to older areas to go talk to an old character or deliver cheese or some shit. And the only reliable form of fast travel in the game, namely the train stations, connects exclusively to one other town. Which somehow always happens to be the one I don’t need to go to. So you’ll be doing a lot of walking in this game. You’ll get to a point where you’re just boosting across the desert for the twentieth time, ignoring enemies and just watching your fuel trickle away. This is the fucking worst. Story missions constantly send you back and forth across the entire world and you’ll see the same areas again and again. It kills any pacing the game ever briefly threatened to have. And even though I didn’t give a single shit at any point in the story, I did want to get it done quickly, so this became increasingly irritating. Steambot Chronicles is the ultimate podcast game. You don’t need to put all your attention on this game. Just throw on some background noise and do some learning while you play. May I suggest Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History?
They’ve Got All This Machinery But They Don’t Know What Oil Is?
Besides trotting around the world, what else is there to do? Well, everything, really. You can shuffle into a dingy bar and shark some guys out of money over a game of billiards. You can go out into the quarry and load up fossils to take back to the struggling museum. Steambot Chronicles is a game that will appeal more to an Animal Crossing mindset. There are tons of things you can do solely for the satisfaction of doing them. You don’t really get anything out of these tasks except more money that you’ll invest back into rent, food, and fuel for the next day. It’s not a very in-depth life simulator, but it’s still pretty easy to zone out and enjoy the grind while playing. The musical instruments deserve a special shout-out through. There are a wide swath of instruments you can collect and each one has a different way of playing them. And oh boy, are some of them are harder than others. The first time I decided to try out the accordion, the game practically showered me in tomatoes. The rhythm minigames are fun but you do have to listen to what sounds like bad early-90’s easy-listening every time you play. So your mileage may vary here.
There’s also a dating mechanic in this game. I have to bring it up, I just have to. And it’s getting its own paragraph for just how weird it is. You’ll run into three possible lovers throughout your journey. Now, say one of them catches your eye. You want to get close, but you don’t know how. What can you do? Well if you’re Vanilla, you give them lipstick many times over the course of the game. Once that slab of foreplay is done, then you invite them over to your house. After talking for a bit, maybe even making them cook you some food, your bond strengthens evermore. After a few of these sessions, it’s finally time to take it to the next level. So you lean to your lover and whisper those magic words: “Would you mind cleaning my ears?” Out comes the Q-Tip you always keep in your pocket and she gets to work. Then it transitions into sex. Steambot Chronicles is a magical world, some would say. And in such a fantastical world where mechs are driven around like cars and people named Vanilla exist, Q-Tips act as the ultimate aphrodisiac.
“Son Of A Fisherman… Pimpin’… And Romantic…”
Steambot Chronicles is a game that I’m incredibly torn on. On the one hand, I don’t think it’s fun. I don’t think the story is engaging. And I think that trying to finish it was the most mind-numbing thing I’ve done in a while. But then, I can see the good in it as well. The amount there is to do in this game is impressive. And even though it’s not refined at all, it is fun to be able to customize your trotmobile. This is a prime example of the experimental PS2-jank game. A game where the developers tried to throw every cool idea they had at it and the execution of those ideas was secondary. This is certainly not a perfect game. And it hasn’t aged very well at all. But if you can get into the mindset, this could be a great stinky cheese of a game to spend a bit of time with. Just avoid the main story like the plague. Please. You don’t deserve that.
If you want to make your living busking next to the bus stop, you can grab Steambot Chronicles here. It’s really pricy, but if you still think you can get your money’s worth out of it after reading what I think, then I say go for it. Maybe try a good second-hand store first though.