Video Game / Mizzurna Falls

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Mizzurna Falls is a Japan-Only Mystery Horror Adventure Game by Human Entertainment. It is, for all intents and purposes, a Spiritual Adaptation of Twin Peaks, albeit with markedly less surrealism. The game is also notable for being one of the first Wide-Open Sandbox games ever made. It was released for the PlayStation on December 23rd, 1998.

On Christmas Day, 1998, at 6:13 AM, a young girl named Kathy Flannery is found unconscious and injured near the outskirts of her hometown, Mizzurna Falls, which is located in Colorado near the Rocky Mountains. If that weren't enough, another young girl, Emma Rowland, has gone missing during the night. The local police quickly comes to the conclusion that the two incidents might somehow be related.

The same morning, the local teenage boy named Matthew Williams is phoned and informed of these developments by Sheriff Morgan, as he had previously been in a relationship with Emma, and he might have been the last person to have seen the her alive. This piques Matthew's interest in the case, and he decides to try his hand at playing an Amateur Sleuth and look into what's going on. Over the course of his investigation, he ends up making several startling discoveries about his small town.

In 2010, the game got somewhat of a Spiritual Successor, in the shape of Deadly Premonition, which is also overtly inspired by Twin Peaks (though where Mizzurna Falls downplays Twin Peaks's surrealistic and supernatural elements, Deadly Premonition embrace them wholeheartedly).

As of March 31, 2021, a full English Fan Translation of the game was released.

Mizzurna Falls contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: It turns out that Father Barton was responsible for the marks on Kathy's neck, as he tried strangling her for defying his will.
• Adaptation Amalgamation: A Downplayed example. While the game is primarily heavily inspired by Twin Peaks, the whole subplot surrounding the nightclub singer, Isabella, is at least partially inspired by another famous David Lynch work, namely Blue Velvet. Isabella even shares her first name with Isabella Rossellini, the actress who played the role she is an Expy of. Matthew, meanwhile, also seem to borrow some of Jeffrey Beaumont's character, being a pretty ordinary teenager who decides to play at being an Amateur Sleuth and stumbles over a greater criminal conspiracy in his hometown as a result.
• Artificial Brilliance: If you spam the same one or two moves in the fighting mini-game, the AI will eventually pick up on this and attempt to dodge and counter your moves if you continue to spam them, encouraging you to switch up your attacks.
• Bears Are Bad News: When Kathy is first discovered in the woods by Cohen, she is found severely wounded, leading to the presumption that she was attacked by a bear. If you join Sheriff Morgan's search party on December 26th, Matthew will eventually run into the bear near the tree where Kathy was discovered, which bats aside Cohen and forces Matthew to make a break for it back to a cabin with a shotgun. Matthew is then forced to shoot the bear in self-defense as it breaks in, killing it.
• Bald of Evil: The local notorious criminal known as "Bonehead" probably got his nickname due to being bald. He even combines it with a (somewhat downplayed) Beard of Evil, as he also sports a small soul patch.
• Caught Up in a Robbery: If you talk to Morgan on the 28th, he will invite Matthew to hang out with him at the diner for lunch for some much needed R&R. Upon doing so, a pair of armed robbers bust in and demand all of the cash from the diner's registers, as well as Matthew's wallet. Talking to Lorraine afterwards causes her to accidentally give up that Mel engineered the whole thing to pay back a debt to Bonehead, which Matthew can confront him about if he follows the robbers all the way back to the Farm Workers' Lodgings.
• Closet Shuffle: Matthew can invade Mel's room on the 25th, which will allow him to pick up a note written by Mel indicating that he is supposed to go to the motel at 9 PM. However, Mel returns home before Matthew can leave. Matthew can hide in the closet, where he will eavesdrop on a phone call between Mel and Bonehead; before Mel can open the closet door and bust Matthew, Dennis calls him away, allowing Matthew to escape scot-free.
• Composite Character:
  • Matthew is primarily based on James Hurley, mostly in how he had a close relationship with the two missing girls, mirroring how James was close with both Laura and Donna, and decides to investigate the case based on this, much in the same way James and Donna team up to get to the bottom of Laura's murder. Interestingly though, Matthew also draws quite a bit on, not another Twin Peaks character, but a character from another prominent Lynch work, namely Jeffrey Beaumont of Blue Velvet; much like Jeffrey, Matthew's attempt at playing an Amateur Sleuth leads him to discover a criminal conspiracy in his home town, which involves a drug trade, a local crime lord, and an attractive, but troubled nightclub singer.
  • The local psychiatrist James is by all appearances a somewhat odd combination between Twin Peak's eccentric psychologist, Dr. Jacoby, and the straight-laced and serious Deputy Hawk. He has Jacoby's background of being a psychologist and having been giving Emma, the game's stand-in for Laura Palmer, mental health counseling in secret, while he has Hawk's generally serious demeanor, and being an expert on Native American folklore and spirituality. And when revealed as the true Big Bad, he even turns out to also have quite a bit of Windom Earle in him, being a Diabolical Mastermind hiding behind a Mask of Sanity and whose goal is to use an arcane ritual to give himself ultimate power.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Sheriff Morgan is clearly modelled after Reginald VelJohnson in his role as Al Powell in Die Hard.
• Did I Mention It's Christmas?: Due to the tragedy, the fact that the game starts on Christmas Day is seldom mentioned by other characters, and the holiday mostly passes without so much as a Christmas tree or gift giving taking place whatsoever.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • In the Backstory, the man who killed Barbara's little sister eventually shot himself.
  • If Matthew uncovers how Father Barton strangled his daughter, they briefly hold him hostage while ranting about how they shouldn't be blamed for their actions, as they were "following God's will". They then shoot themselves in the head.
• Driving Question: What happened to Emma on December 25?
• Expy: Quite a few characters are openly inspired by characters from Twin Peaks. Emma is perhaps the most obvious one, as a stand-in for Laura Palmer; she was noted to live a double, kept a secret dairy, and her mother's name is Sarah.
• Game Mod: "Mizzurna Falls: The Chilling Cut" is a mod made by Darkaniod1997 whose sole purpose is to quadruple the length of an in-game minute from 5 seconds to 20 seconds. This significantly alleviates the incredibly tight time restrictions of the base game and allows the player to properly investigate Mizzurna Falls without needing to follow a guide to not miss everything.
• Game Over: If you lose any minigame sequence that you must otherwise win, you will be met with a Game Over screen. Luckily, you are given unlimited continues, so go ahead and keep trying until you win.
• Good Morning, Crono: The game starts with Matthew being woken up by his phone ringing.
• Government Conspiracy: In the past, the military took an interest in the Death Journey Ritual, resulting in the creation of "Project Mizzurna", where they attempted to replicate the ritual. Most of the test subjects naturally died as a result, but not all.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Suffice to say, it is nearly impossible to figure out exactly what you should be doing on a moment to moment basis without having a walkthrough pulled up at all times. The entirety of the game runs in real time, and every event in the game is time-based, meaning you need to be in certain places at certain times to accomplish certain tasks. The game does not tell you how you should be going about this other than occasionally pointing you in the general direction of your next major objective. Furthermore, the time windows available for certain events are astonishingly tight such that if you don't know exactly the locations you need to hit and in what order you can outright miss several events, and a large portion of the events in the game are mandatory in order to achieve the best ending.
  • There are two extremely important key items that are mission critical for trying to keep tabs of Mizzurna Falls and its residents, the Map (which keeps track of your location and the location of known places of interest) and the Notebook (which keeps track of named NPCs and known phone numbers). The game doesn't tell you either of these items exist, and not picking up either of them at the soonest possible opportunity will make the entire rest of the game extremely confusing and difficult. While the Map is found in the police station you start the first day in, you need to go all the way back to Matthew's shed to grab the Notebook, since the game is completely on rails during the Prologue and does not let you take it while you're there at the start.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The plot starts on Christmas Day, and Matthew has one game in-week to get to the bottom of the mystery, meaning that the climax of the game is set to happen on New Year's Eve.
• In-Universe Game Clock: One of the most brutal clocks known to adventure games. Time passes in real time at a rate of 1 in-game minute every 5 seconds, and only pauses in cutscenes or during specific game events. Every character and every event is tied to this clock and the game's date, and you need to be in certain places at certain times to activate certain events. Furthermore, the entire game is a Timed Mission, as Matthew only has until the 31st to solve as much of the mystery as he can.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Bad Ending has Matthew lamenting if only he could go back in time and do things differently, nudging at the game's intended design of playing through multiple times to learn what you should do.
• Local Hangout: Bar Wolves, a somewhat seedy little bar where all manners of people from Mizzurna Falls go at night to lounge about. Matthew learns of the place from James, and later learns that Emma was a regular despite being underage and even brought Kathy along at one point. Matthew can learn a substantial amount of critical information by checking back to Bar Wolves every night, including juicy info tied to a conspiracy or two.
• Made of Iron:
  • In the shooting Quick Time Events, your targets can take a LOT of punishment. And bullets.
  • In one case, the shooting minigame is followed by a fistfight with the very same person you just pumped full of lead. Supposedly, they were able to endure all that since they were hopped up on Epoch.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Unlike Twin Peaks, which had explicitly supernatural events overlaying the entire ordeal, Mizzurna Falls is more ambiguous as to whether or not the events involve actual supernatural phenomena, or whether they're simply myths that certain people believe in which influences their actions. In that sense it has more in common with the 1st season of True Detective.
• Mini-Game: There are two major minigames present throughout the game that you will be forced to engage with to progress.
  • The first of these is a brawling minigame where you duel an opponent in a crude 2.5D fighting game. You can punch and kick your enemy, dash with a double input, duck to evade (even kicks) and string together a basic combo by alternating your punches and kicks. You get a few opportunities to practice early on where they do not affect the overall outcome, and if you trigger a certain event on December 26th, you can unlock sparring with Old Man Perry in the park between the hours of 11 PM and 1 AM daily, who will allow you to spar with him for free (and partially refill your car's gas tank if you win) or play against a second player using any of the game's characters.
  • The second of these is a shooting minigame, which essentially boils down to Press X to Not Die. You will receive a series of button prompts, which must be hit within a short time frame with no misinputs; if you succeed, you will deal some damage to the enemy, but fail and Matthew will take damage.
• Multiple Endings: The game has several depending on what you did, and if you managed to solve the mysteries of what happened to Kathy and Emma. If you get a Bad Ending, the game tells you to go back and try again. In general, the ending is determined by 1) whether or not you managed to figure out what's going on by the end of the year, and 2) whether or not you managed to find enough evidence to deduce who the real Big Bad is (Matthew doesn't actually put the pieces together himself if you do, but the ending still changes so you end up confronting the Big Bad instead of being ambushed by them).
• Mutual Kill: The good ending has Matthew and the Big Bad shooting each other at the same time during their confrontation, with the game ending as Matthew lays dying in the snow. However, during the credits it shows Matthew in the hospital making a recovery.
• Notice This: Whenever dialogue a character mentions to Matthew is a relevant clue to the case, a unique jingle will play to indicate that the player should pay attention to it.
• Potty Emergency: On December 26th, going to Barrows Forest at 7:00 AM will cause the cop guarding the entrance to complain about needing to use the restroom. If you back far away enough from him, he will assume the coast is clear and leave his post to take a piss behind the police car. You can then get Matthew close to the entrance, which will cause the cop to start running back, but if you can make it all the way across the bridge and meet Nozz and Morgan, Nozz will convince Morgan to let you join the search party for the bear that maimed Kathy.
• Present Day: The game was released on December 23, 1998, and the plot of the game kicks off on December 25, 1998.
• The Place: The game is named after the town it's set in.
• The Rival: Throughout the game Matthew repeatedly comes into conflict with Mel, a local high school "bad boy" with ties to a criminal gang who seem to be at the core of what happened to Emma.
• Save Point: Resting in Matthew's bed in the shed behind Captain Nozz's is the only way to save the game. You must also skip a certain number of hours when saving, and must choose between resting for 1 hour or sleeping for 5 hours of in-game time.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Mel is the son of Dennis, the richest man in Mizzurna Falls.
• Soulless Bedroom: Emma's bedroom evokes qualities of this, as its most noticeable feature beyond standard furnishings is that it is completely white in every aspect.
• The Sheriff: Morgan is sheriff of Mizzurna Falls.
• Tank Controls: Matthew controls like this, which can be an issue as getting caught on any solid object will cause him to stop dead in his tracks. The car thankfully does not control like this, but it has its own problems with collision.
• Timed Mission: Matthew is given seven in-game days to get to the bottom of whatever happened to Kathy and Emma.
• Trespassing Hero: Surprisingly averted; Matthew generally needs permission to enter locked rooms or residences, and must do so by first knocking on the door. Even then, Matthew won't always be allowed in as the NPC may just converse with him outside. The only location Matthew consistently barges into without question is Mel's room, since Matthew doesn't respect Mel anyways and key items critical to the investigation tend to wind up there one way or another.
• Try Everything: The game intends for you to exhaust almost every possible option by traveling around town and following up on potential leads. The idea is that you do this across multiple playthroughs to piece together the mystery and slowly deduce what needs to be done during what time frames, but the open-endedness and lack of real direction means that this mostly devolves into Trial-and-Error Gameplay.
• Twisted Christmas: The terrible thing that befell Kathy and Emma took place during the transition between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and Matthew and the player is given an in-game week to solve the case, meaning that the game wraps up on New Year's Day.
• Video Game Stealing: Generally averted; in most cases, Matthew will refuse to take anything without permission, and anything that he picks up that an 18-year old probably shouldn't have will usually have some sort of justification, such as needing to acquire cigarettes to give to Barbara. The one time Matthew does steal something is a lighter from Captain Nozz's as Nozz will otherwise stop him from taking one unless he's out on lunch break, and Matthew will still pay for it.