Chaos;Head Noah/Chaos;Child Double Pack Review – A delicious double-dose of delirium

MAGES, the minds behind the highly acclaimed Science Adventure series, have always been pretty good about making sure that their Western Audience hasn’t missed out on what they’ve been working on. We’ve gotten the Steins; Gate games and both Robotics; Notes, and we even got Chaos;Child! But, for whatever reason, their very first Science Adventure title—Chaos;Head—never ventured Westward. And, I mean, that’s kind of weird that we got the sequel but not the first title, right? Sure, you don’t need to play Chaos;Head to enjoy Chaos;Child, but I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t heighten the overall experience. Fortunately, we’ve finally gotten the chance to dive into the updated Chaos;Head Noah with the arrival of the Chaos;Head Noah/Chaos;Child Double Pack. And, after all this time, I’ve gotta say that it’s pretty great! Well, mostly pretty great, anyway.

Folie à Deux

I mean, it MIGHT be a little late for that.

Hoo boy! So, I’m going to start out by saying that both of these games get fairly complicated and convoluted rather quickly, and there’s no way that I’m going to be able to explain everything succinctly. But, hey, I’ll at least give it a shot! Right—so, first, we’ve got Chaos;Head Noah. A massively expanded version of the original Chaos;Head, Noah follows the story of high schooler Takumi Nishijou. Given the hauntingly poetic cold start, the almost seems to be setting Takumi up as someone wise beyond his years—but that is hardly the case. Good ‘ol Takumi is a quintessential otaku. He lives in a storage container on top of a building (technically you don’t have to do that to be considered an otaku, but whatever), he barely goes to school, and he spends all of his time either playing MMOs or obsessing over anime figurines. Oh, and his personality is about as endearing as you’d expect. Anyway, all Takumi wants to do is live a quiet and peaceful life doing what he loves—and he does do that for the most part. But a strange string of murders called the “New Generation Madness” has Shibuya (which is where he lives, by the way) captivated in a way that goes beyond simple curiosity. And the fact that he always feels like he’s being watched isn’t helping him at all, either.

Taking place six years after the first game, Chaos;Child‘s centers around one Takaru Miyashiro… who also happens to be a high school student living in Shibuya. While not the shut-in that Takumi was, Takaru has his fair share of personality quirks—primarily his “Right Sider/Wrong Sider” fixation. However, while things seem to be going just fine for our protag and the rest of the gang at his school’s newspaper club at first, the re-appearance of the New Generation Madness murders spurs them into investigative action—and, boy, are they ever in for a scoop.

Try to keep that excitement level up!

So, the first thing that you might notice about these two titles is that there are a lot of parallels between certain characters. I mean, just look at the artwork for the Double Pack itself—it literally looks like it’s just the same two characters on there twice. Initially, this might seem a little lazy—and, normally, I would agree with you. Given how creative this series is, creating new characters in a sequel that are borderline-clones of one another would be an extremely lazy decision… if that’s what were actually going on, anyway. But, as you start to play through them, the differences—both subtle and obvious—begin to show themselves. And I’m not just talking about the protagonists and their pink-haired pals, either. Even as far as visual novels go, both of these games are very long and require active player engagement. While the stories don’t ever get to the point of being overly convoluted or anything, they are complex. And that, combined with their slow-burn approach, means that you’re not going to get any kind of a payoff for a long while. But it’s absolutely worth the wait. So long as you’re willing to kill a good 60+ hours, you’re guaranteed one hell of a ride twice-over… so long as you’re okay with a bit of censorship.

Yeah… this version of the game is censored. And, no, it wasn’t the publisher’s doing—it was MAGES. Despite the game being M-Rated (or whatever your region’s equivalent is), the version of Chaos;Head Noah was the toned-down version that was released for PS3 and PSP a while back in Japan. I have no issue saying that censorship really gets under my skin—but something as simple as, say, lengthening a girl’s skirt or changing a character’s age from 16 to 18 isn’t anything that really bothers me. What does bother me, however, is when you remove a significant portion of content from one of your endings—say, enough content to potentially misconstrue what’s going on? Unfortunately, that’s what happened, here. The fact that I’ve been wanting an official translation of this game kept it from being a deal-breaker for me, personally—but I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t leave an extremely bitter taste in my mouth.

If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It!

Looks like things are about to get REAL bad REAL fast.

Visual novels are about two primary things—reading and looking at pictures. Because of that, there isn’t really a ton of room for “gameplay” in the traditional sense. And, that’s completely fine! VNs don’t need gameplay, really. All you need to do is give players the chance to make a decision or two occasionally and we’ll be fine. And, what do you know, both of these games do just that! But not necessarily in the way you might think. Both Chaos games utilize something called a “Delusion Trigger System.” In lieu of allowing players to make specific decisions for characters, the Delusion Trigger System quite literally allows the player to space out and enter a realistic delusion of either Takumi or Takaru’s creation (it’ll make more sense if you actually play the games, I promise). Essentially, these delusions allow the player to act through best- or worst-case scenarios regarding whatever’s going on, and they’re always blown massively out of proportion. “Positive” delusions generally end up somewhere in ecchi territory, with your character imagining them scoring with whichever girl they’re with (these games do lean into the harem trope pretty hard, after all) and might net you some kind of risqué CG. “Negative” delusions, on the other hand, often find themselves veering off-course into guro territory—something which, in my opinion, is much more befitting of these two games.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the Delusion Trigger System. In theory, it’s really cool. You’re basically having your character space out so hard that it affects how the game plays out. Unfortunately, it’s a little more muddled in practice. The game doesn’t really explain to you all that well what’s going on—with it being surprisingly easy to not even realize that they’re happening in Chaos;Head. Furthermore, while the whole “pushing your delusions into reality” thing is neat, it’s kind of hard to actually have a firm grasp around them. For instance, there’s one Delusion Trigger in the first game that, depending upon your choice, will either have you fantasizing about getting intimate with your little sister or watching her choke to death in a puddle of her own blood. Both of those are certainly *ahem* entertaining in their own right, but how does any of that relate to the overarching plot? Or maybe it doesn’t! Maybe it’s one of the several choices that don’t matter—but chances are you’re not going figure that out on your own without replaying the game into the ground. Yes, there are plenty of easy-to-access guides for these games, but my point still stands that this concept is a bit too nebulous for its own good.

A (Semi)Di-Visive Di-Light

As upset as I am about the censorship thing, I still can’t help but love everything that’s going on overall. The Chaos;Head Noah/Chaos;Child Double Pack is an enthralling, terrifying, and occasionally humorous double-dose of Science Adventure goodness. You’ve got to take the bad with bad with the good, and trust me when I say the good outweighs the bad by a considerable amount in this case.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available on: Nintendo Switch (Reviewed), PC ; Publisher: Spike Chunsoft; Developer: MAGES, 5pb. ; Players: 1 ; Released: October 7th, 2022 ; ESRB: M for Mature ; MSRP: $49.99

Full disclosure: A Chaos;Head Noah/Chaos;Child Double Pack code was provided to Hey Poor Player by the publisher.