Game review: 'Changed'
Changed, originally released in April 2018, is a surprisingly-difficult, action, puzzle game made by DragonSnow with background music composed by Shizi. While not overtly sexual, this game is certainly risqué with plenty of fetish undertones as, instead of deaths, your failures result in your transformation into a latex furry. Since June 2020, buying Changed will also give you access to English version of Changed-Special, the still-unfinished reworking of the original game which contains new rooms, transformations and some updated graphics.
Story
In Changed-Special, the feeling of isolation is lessened as one of the characters, originally encountered near the end of the game, talks to you through various computer monitors throughout the facility. This creates a more hostile game. Personally, I am not a fan of the narrative shift as I think the more isolated approach works better and a shadowy, villainous figure on a monitor tends to be a little too cartoony.
Despite the simplicity of the narrative, and the translation issues as it went from Chinese to English, Changed has a very strong emotional core. All the characters are fleshed out with very justifiable motivations and, when the time comes to make a choice between them, it is not a simple decision. You will likely find yourself disappointed with the outcome as well, because, of the several endings, what most would consider the best ending is essentially a hidden choice.
Gameplay
Changed-Special alters the original rooms somewhat and adds many new and varied puzzles. Generally this is a good thing but there are some changes which make certain puzzles worse. In the case of enemies that chase you, there is no extra random movement as in the original game. While that makes it more predictable, this also means that an enemy will get blocked by a single object between you and it and make no attempt to go around. In addition, certain maze puzzles which were originally fairly open have now been closed off to the point where there is only a single correct sequence of movements and no opportunity to try new paths.
Graphics and Sound
Both the audio and graphics are simple, but they do their job. I'm given to believe the sound effects are stock effects, but there is unique background music composed especially for Changed. The music is composed of chiptune tracks that hark back to early video games but successfully build tension during chase scenes and calm you down in the more relaxed areas.
The native resolution is unusually small, but can be scaled up. Despite this, everything you need to see is typically clear. The biggest issue with the display is that sprites (including your character) block your vision of tiles behind you, which can be a problem when trying to solve puzzles that require careful positioning. It can also be tricky to tell in which row certain objects are located, but that's usually a minor issue.
Transformation is one of the major themes of the game and they look pretty good. Most of them occur at the sprite level and only last three-to-four frames or so. It's a little rough, but it all fits the game's style and I rather liked them. Some transformations are done as full screen images with a lot more detail, and you will sometimes get full screen images of the after effects of your transformation. One difference that I noticed between the original game and Changed-Special was that some of the new transformations seemed to include bondage, with your character being restrained by their own tail or latex fusing their limbs together.
Summary
Changed-Special is still unfinished and cannot be recommended on its own. If you have finished the original game though, it's definitely worth checking out. If you want to help support the development of the game, DragonSnow has a Patreon page.
P.S.: In Changed-Special, you can pet the dog!
About the author
Rakuen Growlithe — read stories — contact (login required)a scientist and Growlithe from South Africa, interested in science, writing, pokemon and gaming
I'm a South African fur, originally from Cape Town. I'm interested in science, writing, gaming, all sorts of furry stuff, Pokemon and some naughtier things too! I've dabbled in art before but prefer writing. You can find my fiction on SoFurry and non-fiction on Flayrah.
Comments
A lot of the stock sound effects sound like they are from RPG Marker. I suspect that it's the engine used to make the game. This can easily be tested by hitting F12 in the game and seeing if it kicks you back to the title screen.
Don't have it myself, but used to use RPG Maker quite a bit when I was in college during my free time to toy around with.
You're probably completely right then. I had heard someone in a Lets Play comment that it sounded like RPG Maker sounds, that's why I said I thought they were stock sounds. I wasn't totally sure how the development went. But pressing F12 does take you to the main menu and it is mentioned in the controls so you can skip the transformation scenes if you keep dying.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Last year I was cleaning up the very confusing summary of this game someone added to WikiFur. I was intrigued enough by the plot elements I read to make the WikiFur article coherent that I tried it out, but I lost interest after dying the third time in the first few minutes. It didn't feel like the game was driving me anywhere and I didn't think the atmosphere was enjoyable enough to make just exploring seem worthwhile when the deaths seemed pretty random at that point.
I guess, for the target audience, failure is its own reward.
"I spent so much time making these failure states, be a shame if the player didn't get to experience them."
Perhaps; though given their incremental nature, and all the content on the artist's FA gallery (much of which is NSFW), they may not take all that long to make individually.
Random deaths? I know there are one or two deaths like that but as long as you don't touch anything you are pretty much fine. And you are supposed to die a lot! But I guess it's not for everyone, you could just watch a couple of lets plays on Youtube. One was pretty cool and they don't die all the time. Although most of those playthroughs are on the original translation which was... pretty bad.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
if I wanted a game that just let me be a furry, where would I go?
There is this Antho/Furry tag curation item on stream which tags most of the animal protag games on the platform.
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/24223269-Anthro-Furry-Tag/
They don't do thorough reviews, it's more a breadth over thoroughness of recommending thing, so be sure to look at reviews before making purchasing decisions.
Depends what you are looking for by that! There's various video games of interest to furries on WikiFur. Maybe you're looking for a roleplaying social game like Furcadia, which is still going? It's like a visual MUCK, and they're still going, too.
Or maybe we could, like, promote ourselves and note that Flayrah has an extensive archive with multiple reviews with tags! (For some reason the tag you want is "computer games". We ... we don't want to talk about it.)
This is literally what the anon is asking for, right here. They don't even have to leave the site.
And while I'm here and kind of cranky, this is totally off topic, but speaking of our extensive archive with literally two decades+ of preserved furry history, thanks for the fucking lack of shout-out, asshole!
I mean, he linked Fred's retrospective on furry fandom. I think the focus was on works intended to be historical and/or archives, which is only a small portion of the work posted on a site aiming to offer current news and reviews.
We literally have an archive. It's an archive. We call the "archive" the "archive" because it's an archive. "Current news and review" that is twenty years old is an historical artifact. Which we have archived. I mean, I thought that was half the reason you took over this site; mwalimu seems to have gotten it. Yes, furry needed a continual source of new information, but I thought you were also making sure the old information was preserved.
Our new shit is new shit,but it won't be in 20 years! You fucking went out of your way to also bring in those weird British guy's ... thing. What was the point of that if not to fucking archive it, Green Reaper? Our archives are even full of ... I forgot his name, Assfuck McGee, whatever ... wants. If you read the article, he seems a bit preoccupied with conventions, which we can even argue he may be skewing towards just one aspect of the furry experience (Jesus, that sounds fucking pretentious) at the expense of others, but that's beside the point, I'm off on a tangent, sorry about that, I do that, you know that, anyways, where was I. Anyway, old convention shit. We have a lot of that, is what I'm saying. Maybe not physically, but a lot of information, put out by the conventions themselves. The editor of the site before you was literally a Further Confusion staff member who literally mostly just posted Further Confusion convention shit. It's exactly what this guy is looking for.
Which we don't actually get a lot of any more. The 2010s, not as much. Kind of wonder what happened there. Oh, yeah, you decided to start beef with the biggest furry convention in the world and it's very influential staff because they banned a really fucking emotionally unstable guy from bringing his fucking gun to the convention. THAT FUCKING AGED WELL. See, you made me angry, and now I'm saying mean things about you. That are also totally true.
Why am I having to explain to you what you are doing? Was the entire point of the exercise just to make Sonious feel good about himself? Because, I mean, that's a noble goal in and of itself, but you could just tell him he's doing good, you know.
One of the things is that, because the size and scope of the fandom is so broad, I don't mind one bit about the existence of DogPatch, Global Furry Television, and other such media outlets. Only because when you look at things from a community perspective rather than a individual perspective, you realize that community is better served when you have people working together to cover such things. Even if we are working together separately as it were.
An article saying 'we need more' is good, but I think the way you get people interested is not by asking but by doing and then people will be inspired to do their own thing.
I remember when Global Furry Television was a smaller YouTube channel than my own, and now it's grown beyond it. Also it bears noting while you may hold a grudge about DogPatch's behavior around your past, which is your right to hold, Flayrah and DogPatch are being eclipsed by YouTube furries. Pocari Roo won last year's Ursa for the 'Magazine' category. YouTube is replacing us much more readily.
In a way, we already are becoming history, we don't even have to wait all that long.
Which is why I'm trying to focus more on teaching others "here is how you do good non-fiction writing" rather than trying to push this site myself too far. I'm hitting the age where I'm about to go over the hill, and there is only going to be so much further I can go. The more people doing stuff like this, the better. Especially if they are younger people who will be able to keep it going when I'm gone.
To be fair to GreenReaper, in 2010 convention leaders were probably not used to being questioned by third parties AT ALL. Not in any regularly known forum anyway. So it wasn't necessary starting a beef rather than a establishment of Flayrah as "we are going to present events that occurred and allow people to discuss them" rather then, "conventions get carte blanc unquestioning loyalty." Opening that kind of gate of course is going to ruffle a few exoskeletons.
That is compared to these day, where conventions kind of expect to get questioned for just about any little thing. But people aren't using Flayrah for that, they're using their own social media platforms. So it's more our job to sort through what's going on and present it in an understandable format rather than being the organizations creating the questions and quandaries ourselves.
Social media killed regular convention news. LJ and FA took some, Twitter and Facebook the rest. There wasn't a need for organizers to post here; people who cared could simply post to their own site and put out tweets/posts with a link. Frankly, it's for the best; I doubt we'd want to edit 100+ con newsletters on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, that means a lot of con news is only on con sites, which in many cases aren't preserved. Thank goodness for archive.org. If that goes down, we'll be in trouble.
And yes, Flayrah counts as an archive (for most definitions), but my point was that I don't blame Gamepopper (or Patch) for not thinking so much about us. Being a historical archive is not our primary purpose, unlike those highlighted who were actually trying to write books (tertiary sources which might themselves be based on is as a primary or secondary source) or create series of posts about long-past matters. We're doing a good enough job at keeping up, so far, that he didn't add us to the section on regrettable losses. Nor are we a repository of original fiction or artwork; I might've expected the Yerf Archive there, but it's not that big.
As for what I term 'Flayrah Classic" - certainly, I wanted to keep what was of value (and I brought in content to fill the gaps); but reading back, it's clear that my focus was on preserving Flayrah as a going concern - for its future, more than its past. This is still the case. I'm proud of much that we've done in the decade-or-so since then, and will work to maintain it, but I hope that our future value derives primarily from what we do, rather than what we've done already.
Look, the point is, no matter what we're doing here, Assfuck McGee (I'm just going to ignore you pointing out his real name and just call him that) ... probably would actually appreciate being told, hey, dude, there's like a bunch of that sort of shit over there. I sure he didn't actually mean to diss us, but he did miss us, and, uh, it kind of seems like we might be kind of his thing, too?
But, like, maybe it shouldn't be me who tells him, cause I'll call him Assfuck McGee to his face.
Just, hint hint, wink wink, guys actually still in contact with that group over there. Also, gosh, guys, humility is great and all, but actually pointing out "hey, I do that!" when somebody ask "do you guys know anyone that does this thing?" is hardly over-weening pride, here.
And while I agree with Sonious assessment about diverse voices in furry media (why the fuck you guys think we keep the other guy you're arguing with in the other ongoing thread around?) in theory, in practice, I see Dogpatch didn't update the entire month of July, and if I'm being real I think so much for "most updated furry news source". I think one of the reasons Patch got so pissed at me is because I didn't jump ship with him when he left to make his own thing even though he did ask.
If I recall correctly, his reasoning was that Flayrah was no longer a "going concern" (GR was balls deep in his Inkbunny phase and wait times on editorial were pretty long), and he was ready to ditch it to start a new site. Which, on one hand, yes, I would have enjoyed quicker response times to whatever bullshit I was peddling that month, sure, but on the other hand, why the fuck should I leave for greener pastures when I've got the whole old growth forest right here. That metaphor probably doesn't make sense, but what I'm trying to illustrate is that, at least from my perspective, the value of Flayrah over other furry sources is the archives. Furry News Network was basically just reprints of our articles, but what little original content they did create ... is gone. Weasel Wordsmith was kind of fun but it ... is gone. I hated [adjective][species], but it doesn't matter because it ... is gone. All these little sites, they spring up like weeds, with no history, and they die like weeds to be replaced by next season's. Even the Furtean Times only exists in our archives (also WikiFur News, but given GR's involvement, that's a bit different). And actually I'm expecting GR to break in here and point out that, actually, since he had those sites on the affiliate feeds or whatever they're called, they're actually kind of preserved on Flayrah too, but that only helps my case that Flayrah's main value is as an archive. (Obviously, Mink and In-Fur-Nation are in their own class.)
Seriously, have you seen our Twitter feed? If an article gets 10 likes and/or retweets, that shit's gone viral for us. If you think our primary value is in our new content, and if your goal is to be a major furry going concern, maybe, just maybe, you should look for signs that people actually know we exist. And have a little concern when those signs are lacking.
So, actually, congratulations to Sonious for the Megaplex COVID article!
It's gone ... okay, that's not the right word.
Wait... are you calling me just a diversity addition in my own review? Seems a bit harsh.
And I'd actually agree with you on all the points. I was sad to see a new post on that site because I had hoped it had finally died out and made the world a better place. And I was also annoyed that it didn't mention Flayrah which has a huge historical archive. There's also the ZAFur forum which has a huge history of the South African furry community, for those that are worried about just US sources, and which I wanted to keep going even if only as an archive. (I stepped down from there though earlier in the year but I believe Ivic shares my desire to maintain the historical aspect.)
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I forgot you were South African, which was not what I meant. I was referring to your odd opinions. However, if you thought I was going after your nationality I can see where you're coming from, and it was stupid and insensitive of me to not see that implication. Sorry about that.
However, if you were or are now offended by the implied slight against your opinions, well, that was deliberate, so not sorry about that.
I wasn't going to bring it up, but most of Flayrah's contributors stand on two paws rather than four - mink notwithstanding (congrats to Rod on 2,000 posts!). I'd imagine that provides a slightly different perspective.
Well, at least I know we won't go full Animal Farm.
Twitter is nice to have, but social media referrals as a whole are less than 1.5% of visitors. Inbound traffic comes from search first, direct visits second - in fairness, some of those direct visits may have come from social originally, but we can't tell. And yes, searches go to the archive, in part; but more modern topics tend to do far better in that respect, because they're being searched for right now.
The popular "old growth" is actually Zootopia - not your review or Mister Twister's, but a discussion of localized naming. There's games like Fortnite (and yes, that recent roundup, but the one from 2019 got more in the way of hits in the last three months), a few recent movie releases like Wish Dragon and Tune Squad.
It's great to have old furry news from a historical perspective - but the truth is, not a lot of people are interested in it. Either it has to be something people are interested in now, or it has have a large amount of content; Google rewards in-depth pieces on general topiccs. Like Fred's retrospective, widely linked on various sites, including Dogpatch. The only stories from that era or earlier in the top-50 (51.5% of unique visits) are Chipotle's decade-old (and then-comprehensive) review of furry story sites, and a one-liner about tails becoming a reality (probably thanks to the comments).
This reflects how many people consume content now - as individual pieces popping up in an automatically-curated feed, or as a result of a topic search, rather than them going to a specific source for all the latest information.
I don't think this invalidates your argument, of course. Flayrah's archive is a unique value - and it does get used. But the evidence does not suggest that this archive attracts a majority of current views, nor that it drives a large number of views to current work; people mostly bounce off after reading what they came to see. From a visitors perspective, newer work seems to has more interest than the older work - so it's not surprising if Flayrah is seen as a news site, not an archive.
I don't think the argument is whether or not our primary function is one thing or another; my argument is that it is a function, and therefore probably deserves a spot on a list of things that fulfill that function.
I'm not worried about who is using Flayrah right now; if a clickbait article from a few years ago is helping people understand that their Disney+ is talking English English instead of 'Merican, that's nice and all (and, actually, the Fortnite example is probably less than helpful because those hits are probably searching for information on the current season of Fortnite, not one over and unavailable for nearly 3 years; which I guess now I'm arguing the cons of archiving?), but I'm more interested in the future, where the articles no longer serve an urgent purpose, but as pieces of writing with merit of their own divorced of that original context, i.e. will the jokes I made at Disney and dumb people's expense still work in, say, 20 years time still work, or not, even if Disney+ is no longer a thing, or barring that, at least it now provides a historical insight into a vanished time for future historians.
I.E. THE THING THE MOTHERFUCKER WAS TALKING ABOUT.
You forgot Good Furry News, which lasted about one month, which was disappointing to say the least.
The paradox here is that we have to treat ourselves as a news organization with an emphasis on maintaining what was published so that we 'become' an archive.
As I say in the non-fiction writing panel. News eventually becomes history. People will see it as a value in its history. But that, funnily enough, takes time to achieve.
It's a long game, don't rush it, it'll get here eventually.
Tf is going on in the gameplay section
A latex leopard is transforming the player with a kiss.
I don't know, seems pretty self explanatory to me.
You are correct, TF happens quite often in this game's gameplay section.
One might even go so far as to say it's a theme of the game.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
How do y'all even talk so much, dang
RD
Funny thing, we were kind of just talking about this in the other direction in the only really active comment thread going right now; we don't get a lot of opportunities to talk, so when we get them, we take them.
Also, this is literally the thread I was talking about in that conversation where I said "you do like think of Flayrah as an historical archive, right, Green Reaper?" and he answered "wtf are you talking about, crossie?".
I just hate you. Thanks for joining. Please post again.
Okay, what the hell just happened?
We went from "maybe we should be try and not assume every post here out to get us" just a day ago to this, and I mean, I thought this was kind of what we were talking about?
(Unless you actually already know this guy and either already hate him, or this is some kind in joke, in that case, carry on.)
Okay, just check my reply below LOL
Lmao, I wasn't expecting such a response after sending my first message
RD
Okay, really? That's your first post? My assumption was you'd been here a while and were just shitposting LOL So that's what I did. But it is kind of the ethos of the internet nowadays. "I hate you, now keep replying so I can keep hating! I need too, damn it, and you're all I got!" I'm TOTALLY right about a PRETTY big chunk of the people who still need to do something online but consume drama content and peruse the dying mall.
"Gee, you guys post a lot!" People would've dogpiled that back in the 90's where my old ass is from just because, I'm not even kidding LOL
Turn around and post something because you're like, well, okay, I get it, I should effortpost more... "WTF?! GARBAGE! TL;DR!"
Yeah, probably has a lot to do with why the internet as a whole is so damned dead now.
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