WTF is Project Makeover?

 A mistake

What is it with me and stumbling across a really weird, borderline perverted, game in the Youtube suggestions and just researching the heck out of it? Why can't I just be a normal person, shake my head and purge this thing from my mind? Where do I get off thinking myself the singular authority on deciding what has a reason to exist and what doesn't through my insipid investigations and judgements? When will the day come that I reach the inner peace to let the fetish games exist in their obscurity, the day that I'll grow to be accepting of all grossly uncomfortable titles. And how can I safety do all the research in this blog without anyone knowing about it? Incognito mode keeps it off my history bar but I don't even want my ISP knowing about this. No one can know what it is that I have done! Phew. Have I got it out of my system? Released all those demons that were building up? Good- now let me introduce to those out there lucky enough to have missed it: The absolute state of modern mobile games.

Now if you're like me than you'll have come from an age where mobile games had only just slipped out of that experimental phase where everyone was trying to squeeze more content out of their flip-phone's OS than a handheld console (and failing miserably) and just graced the days where Smartphones became powerful enough to host real games, but are rarely fortunate enough to have any made for them. That isn't to say that there isn't a stupidly huge selection of games to download onto your phone, just that the number of them with even the slightest amount of original design thought put into their construction equals easily less than a percent of the larger mobile library. When I swore off of mobile games, every game was a kingdom builder pseudo-MMO with the exact same progression trees, building archetypes, 'tactical depth', narrative complexity (or heavy lack thereof) and, of course, store front to offset the obnoxious time gating. I even went online and found the template to make my own of these games, it was on the first page of Google. And it's not even as though this model was unique to mobile games, I remember a cowboy themed browser one I used to play back when I was truly hopeless with my freetime.

Since then I'm happy to say that by-and-large the medium has changed! Has it gotten much better? No. But at least things are different. Nowadays mobile games jump from a mix of poorly copy the trending games of the hour, which means bad Fortnite clones for days, to making games that are the exact same type as the one I've discovered today. Games that are conceptually simple, but disguise that simplicity beneath a simply bonkers and sometimes oddly perverted ad campaign that just demands you pay attention long enough to find out more. Today that game is Project Makeover, tomorrow it will be another name with that exact same premise. They're a dime a dozen and it's something of a winning formula with the frankly gross amounts of money the lucky ones make. Oh, and I've picked one of the least horny ones from this pool of games, because if I'm opening this can of worms I'd rather sample slowly at my own pace, rather than tip it down the ol' gullet, full chug.

Adverts for Project Makeover go like this, invariably. Some big eyed generic animated brunette is faced with some sort of event or situation in which they feel the need to dress up, from rebounding after finding their generic man animated model cheated on them to- surviving the arctic winds blowing through their wood cabin window in the middle of, presumably, Siberia? (I feel there are other potential problems there than just a need to get dressed up, but that's just me.) Also, bizarrely, the lady always starts with just an unreasonable amount of hair, I'm talking Disney princess discount Rapunzel locks, which sometimes gets lopped off during the, usually unsuccessful, makeover period. These ads are always telling a story, one only transiently linked to the act of actually playing a game. That is their strength, you watch the full ad because some primal part of your brain needs the story's conclusion, and then the ad's narrative prematurely cuts short after the makeover and you're left hankering for more. Maybe enough to actually play the damn thing.

Of course, one of the most jarring takeaways from these ads is that they're never consistent. From Mafia City to Lily's Garden, they vary in narrative, visual presentation and sometimes even in telling you what the heck the game even does. Project Makeover seems to be pretty good at that last point, thankfully, making sure you know it's all about picking an assortment of clothes, hair, and 'solution appliances' (Razor for hairy legs etc.) in order to dress up our 3D lady over here, and there are wrong answers. Only... wait a minute; in some of the ads she isn't actually 3D. Yep, at least one of these adverts has a 2D rendition of the same woman. (Did I mention it's the same woman in every ad? She really has a lot of fashion disasters in her day-to-day.) Another demonstrate a simply ugly 3D animated style that pails in comparison to their peak 3D ads. There are presentational inconsistences here, is what I'm trying to say. And you might be left wondering what else it is that this game has been wavy with.

What about with telling you what the game is even about? What these adverts tell you you're getting is a dress-up makeover game, presumably with these high quality 3D model story inserts here and there giving you the lead-in to the problem and results of your solution. Only, if you've played any of these current waves of mobile games before in your life, you know that's not what you're getting. There is some dress-up, the core character model is indeed 3D, although not exactly high quality, and the bulk of the gameplay is a match 3 tile game. Seriously. The core gameplay loop is actively ignored by all of the trailers, and do you want to know why that is? Because half of these stupid ad-bait mobile games are match 3 tiles games. Either that or city builders. If you lack the questionable talent to rip-off the latest big title from the real games industry, you're pumping out one of these two games and hiding their true nature out of what I can only assume is embarrassment.

With titles like these, it's much more interesting to look at the frankly dishonest marketing behind the game and studio who make it. Heck, on the official Apple page, they still fill up the screenshots with their not-in-the-game quality pre-renders until for the very last three pictures where they have to show the actual game. I assume it must be somewhere in the TOS that gameplay must be presented on the game page, otherwise they wouldn't have even presented that. And what of the people actually behind all of this? Magic Tavern are a development studio who seem to have harboured a heart for high fantasy, given their name and proclaimed mission statement to create "Enchanting worlds and stories." But somehow or another that has led to them making Mobile games over and over, as well as one VR title back in 2016. Somehow the formula of 'make a game which is really just a thin veil for a match three tile game' has been with them almost the whole time, and it has shown them just gross levels of success.

Project Makeover is the tip of a development ship that is emblematic of the mobile industry. It's a shallow as a puddle but draped in obfuscations, misleading ads and a glitzy presentation. By their example it's totally okay to go pilfering the game model of one of the single most profitable games in the world, Candy Crush; slap character's nicked from 101 Dalmatians and just call it a day. And the worst part of it all? It works. It works for Magic Tavern and all the countless other mobile developers who set up grifts like this every other month, because the mobile market holds and enforces absolutely no standards. What is Project Makeover? A basic matching game with a money store attached to it, and don't let their silver tongued marketing convince you otherwise.