About A Game: Addie no Okurimono (PSX)
Addie no Okurimono: To Moze From Addie (アディのおくりもの, “Addie’s Present”) is a pretty late release for PS1 in 2000, developed by addie software (also written as “+d” aka “add d”) and published by Sony Computer Entertainment themselves. It’s a strange combination of two genres, in a way that makes the two parts feel very disjoint. The end result is still a very good game that I would recommend, but with some caveats.
On the one side is a nice and calm old-timey adventure with watercolor-inspired visuals about the friendship between three children, a music box, and a quiet seaside town. On the other side is an often very difficult logic puzzle based on the “LogLock”, a fictional mechanical drum which can change symbols in certain ways in order to go from one word to another. While there is a thin story thread connecting these two aspects, it often feels like I’m switching between two completely different games.
Originally it only came out in Japan, but thankfully a fan translation was released in 2023, made by EsperKnight and Cargodin: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7083/
The game starts on the night of the 9th birthday of Addie, the girl who’s our main character. Her friend Emmy comes over with a present, a puzzle device called “LogLock”. Later, Emmy’s brother Moze knocks on her window with another present. He gives Addie a broken music box that was the first gift from his father to his mother. We learn that their parents have separated, and the two siblings will also move apart to live with one of their parents. That night, Addie puts the music box onto a shelf at the head of her bed, and when she falls asleep, she has a strange dream…
In the dream, Addie wakes up in a forest; as she wanders about, she comes to a tower, and inside at the top she finds a cage with somebody locked in it. It’s a boy who looks exactly like Moze, but he doesn’t seem to know Addie and claims that his name is Joka. He’s trying to solve a LogLock puzzle, and since Addie has some experience with that, she does it for him. We use the LogLock to change the word CAGE to BELL, which also transforms Joka’s cage into a large bell, and he falls out of the now open bottom and is free. As a thank you for freeing him, he takes us on a tour around his quaint little seaside town, where the game takes place.
This is the main mechanic with which we’re interacting with the game: At certain locations you get a puzzle to transform a word into a different one, and when you solve it, the same transformation happens in this dream world. The LogLock itself is a kind of drum with several rings that can be rotated, set with “coins” as the game calls them, which have letters on them. Each coin can also be rotated, and mirrored horizontally. The coins use very stylized characters, so that the rotated or mirrored letters more easily match other letters, like E becoming M, 3 and W, or g becoming 6, 9 and a. Usually adjacent drums will rotate together, but you can temporarily take out a drum to both preserve its state and also to break the connection between the left and right groups of drums; later there are also special drums with additional rules.
Every LogLock puzzle also has step limits, and they can be very strict. If you solve the puzzle under the step limit, you get bonus points for your global score counter, and getting over the limit will deduct points from the global score. If your global score reaches zero, it’s game over, so it’s important to do well on puzzles to give yourself a buffer for later, more difficult puzzles. The global score is also used as a currency to buy optional skins for your LogLock. These skins (or “decor kits”) are entirely optional, but still pretty fun. They change the design of the LogLock, the menus, and all the sound effects, with different themes like “construction”, “military” or “denim”.
These LogLock puzzles are often very difficult, and I was already somewhat stumped on one of the early tutorial puzzles, struggling to do it in the required number of steps. They very much feel like “pure” logic puzzles, in that they are pretty much separate from the game world and only about the puzzle itself (whatever the opposite of “diegetic” is I suppose), and because of their difficulty they take me out of the game’s world for a prolonged period of time. I’m just sitting there with my little LogLock, trying to think several steps ahead, because you can’t really solve the puzzle step-by-step most of the time, if you want to stay under the step limit.
This might sound pretty negative, but I don’t think I really mean it like that. It’s just an aspect of this game that kept standing out for me, that in this gentle and cozy adventure game, you frequently have to solve these rather difficult logic puzzles that seem like a completely different game. For most puzzles, I did try to put in a reasonable amount of time to solve it by myself, but when it took too long or seemed too hard, I just referred to a thankfully very good walkthrough that exists. This guide is by ZeoKnight, who I even mentioned in the past because they also upload videos about interesting obscure games on Youtube. You can find the guide here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/576865-addie-no-okurimono-to-moze-from-addie/faqs/80258
When you’re not working your LogLock to solve puzzles, you explore the little town and follow the happenings there, performing various mandatory and optional tasks for the townspeople. The main plot follows Joka’s exploits, as he commits various pranks on people that we have to clean up, and also generally seems to be up to something. We also meet Emmy’s alter ego Eliza, three boys who run a laundromat and talk like they’re from the mob, the head of the library who is called Mr. Buckethead and is appropriately wearing a bucket, and other quirky characters.
The transformations you’re being asked to perform are also often rather silly. Some slacker asks you to turn a DONUT into a JEWEL, and later back when he’s hungry. For the laundromat we’re turning COAL into SOAP, a CREPE into a SHEET, and later a TARTE into DENIM. There is a fruit and vegetable seller who gives us increasingly deranged tasks, like turning a BOMB into a KIWI and a bar of GOLD into CORN. Someone misplaced their BROOM, so we make a new one from a nearby SNAKE. For a concert in the town’s bar, we have to undo Joka’s pranks and turn MELON to VIOLA, (toilet) BOWL to DRUM, and a YAM to a SAX.
The game is presented in watercolor-painted fixed camera scenes that look very nice. The character models themselves are in 3D, but your own character additionally has a painted representation to the side, mirroring some of your actions like running, thinking, being angry and so on with more expressiveness. The music also does its part to make this a gentle and cozy experience, with some very relaxed guitar and piano pieces. In general the game’s style reminds me of old children’s TV programming, mainly anime from the World Masterpiece Theater series, like Heidi or A Dog of Flanders. It uses soft pastel environments, and also tells gentle slice-of-life stories about the characters.
Towards the end of the game, it takes an additional turn towards the surreal. Through a previously locked door we get access to a meadow where the landscape is peppered with large gears and mechanisms. We enter a large, half-mechanized tree and end up inside the mechanisms of a giant music box. It turns out that this whole dream world is one big music box. This was already slightly hinted at by the game; if you look out from the town’s cliffs, you can see a gigantic structure that looks like the golden “tines” of a music box, but the game never comments on it at all.
In the core of the music box, Addie finds Joka trying to repair the mechanism. Him stealing a big silver gear is what made us chase after him in the first place, and now he wants to use the stolen gears for the music box. But there is still one gear missing, and so he asks us to turn him into the final gear. Addie refuses, but Joka insists that he has to do it, because he was supposed to keep his parents together. So Addie relents and turns him into a gear, and sets it into the music box.
We get to do a last walk around town, talking to people and solving unsolved optional puzzles. When we return to the place in the forest where the game started, there is a tomb that asks us to engrave the name of the “departed”. There is no clear answer shown, but as far as I can tell there are two valid options, and by solving the LogLock puzzle with one of them, the game ends. There are two different ending sequences depending on the last solution. If you enter “JOKA”, Addie wakes up, finds the music box repaired, and meets up with Moze to give it back to him. This ending has a positive and hopeful tone. If you enter “MOZE” instead, the music box does not seem to be fixed, and Addie meets Emmy outside, to learn that Moze has already left. This ending is more sad and somber.
If you can’t get enough from the LogLock puzzles, there is post-game content with more of them. By loading a completed save slot, you can return to the town and find invisible points at important locations to let you do new puzzles, like APE to MAN, SLAVERY to FREEDOM or CONTACT to DIVORCE. By getting a high enough rank on all puzzles, both in the normal game and post-game, you can unlock the Music Box on the main menu, which lets you listen to all music of the game. I went to the effort of doing all the puzzles by the walkthrough so I could unlock it, because most tracks aren’t stored as CD audio and so couldn’t easily be ripped. Check out the full music box here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6DYLcUu-TY
I also want to highlight the very good and thorough walkthrough by ZeoKnight again, which not only has good solutions for all puzzles, but also has some trivia about the game itself: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/576865-addie-no-okurimono-to-moze-from-addie/faqs/80258/
My playthrough of the game on-stream took almost 17 hours, you can check it out here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Kux3qFE6nY&list=PLorAgM9Rd_jUf0FX5MRDarRGnCUJjeQh_&index=1