Cosplay Maker (PC) Review

There is more to cosplay than going out on the stage, and Cosplay Maker focuses on some of the less glamorous parts of the hobby. Every single aspect of a cosplayers life, from working part-time in a fast food chain, to financing the materials, to weeks of sewing the costume to perfection in time for the next competition, are explored to create a realistic view - but that is where the good things end. To understand why the gameplay is horrible here, it is important to first grasp which parts of cosplaying are magical and enjoyable. It's the creativity, crafting, and performing that captures people into the hobby. The aspects delivered to the gamer though is stress, boredom, and the feeling of doing a chore. While certainly realistic for the periods in between designing the costume and the finished products/competitions it is certainly not enjoyable.

What is fun in cosplaying, is finding a character and making the costume to act out as them and maybe finding clever solutions to making it. This is by no means captured in gameplay that is all about planning the week and watching a long cut-scene with some catchy background music running for a couple of minutes, and then repeating again, and again, and again, until the costume's completion - and note that these cut-scenes are almost as if they are designed to be as annoying as possible.

One thing the player might at first try out to bypass the long waiting times in between planning the next week ahead, is to close down the window for a couple of minutes to read the mail, watch a funny cat video, or maybe start playing a more enjoyable game - returning, though, shows that the cut-scene has frozen on an "event" that occurred when the character was working, or watching TV during the evening. It can be everything between finding an unexpected difficulty, to a show was fun and thus inspired the another cosplay. While this might seem like an attempt at some storytelling, the result is that the player will always have to watch when their little rookie cosplayer is sewing, working or watching TV with no way to avoid it, focusing much of the game time on these boring, undesired aspects.

Just like when doing the real thing, focus must be kept. However, unlike real cosplaying, there is no convention at the end of the tunnel, nor any fun and inspiring costume designing. The way costumes are designed is that the character gets "inspiration" for a costume during their everyday life… and that's it! No designing at all is offered. The costumes are also extremely few for being in a game about cosplaying and they are all bad rip-offs of existing characters to get away from copyright.

All of this could have been justified if the contests that all the hard work was leading up to were fun and offered a change of pace, but guess twice what the contests are like? Yes, the very same kind of cut-scenes like the working sessions, with the exception of getting a score based on the quality of the cosplay used, and sometimes a little story section with some of the characters in the game - which are, with the kindest words that could be saved for them, more shallow than the shallow end of the baby pool, and with less personality than Cleverbot.

Sadly, in trying to capture the essence of a cosplayer's life, it was all but lost in Cosplay Maker. There are very few enjoyable parts (and those are far in between), and even they grow stale after a short while. Not much fun can be had with this title, and if it does it will be reliant on a deep love for the cosplaying scene. It's a product that everyone but the ones who are truly interested in the behind-the-scenes lives of cosplayers should keep a distance from, as it lacks most of what makes a videogame enjoyable, yet has everything which might make one unpleasant, like loading screens and repetitive gameplay.