DRAPLINE Lets You Raise an Adorable Dragon Into a Town-Eating Catastrophe
Yes, DRAPLINE really does let you raise its adorable little dragon girl into a people-eating catastrophe. More importantly, the game doesn't just allow it because somebody thought it would make a funny Steam screenshot. Eating people can actually make her stronger.
Which creates a parenting problem I don't remember seeing in any of the books.
Coo is a newly born Divine Dragon. You have one year to raise her, feed her, train her, teach her skills and prepare her for the catastrophes coming her way.
You can do this properly.
Feed her normal things. Help the villagers. Raise a well-adjusted dragon child who respects authority and presumably doesn't regard the local butcher as a packed lunch.
Or you can start noticing that the inhabitants have stats attached to them.
And that's where DRAPLINE becomes considerably more interesting.
If DRAPLINE has made “please stop eating the village” feel like a perfectly normal parenting problem, there are worse children available. Best Games Where You Play As A Monster is where the custody hearing really falls apart.
Yes, you can actually feed people to your dragon
Coo develops between two personality extremes: RULE and WILD.
Raise her responsibly and she becomes more obedient. Encourage her WILD side and things start drifting away from responsible parenting and toward the sort of situation where the army normally appears on television.
Animals can be eaten.
People can be eaten.
Buildings can be eaten.
Eventually, whole settlements can be eaten.
And the awful little wrinkle here is that doing this can make Coo stronger.
So suddenly you're no longer making a simple good-or-evil decision. You're preparing for another difficult fight, looking at Coo's stats and then looking at Dave standing outside his shop.
Dave has a family.
Dave has hopes.
Dave may also contain Strength +12.
I don't like where this is going.
The villagers don't magically come back afterwards either
This is the part that sold me on the whole system.
If Coo eats somebody, that NPC can actually disappear from the village. Whatever they were doing for you disappears with them.
That means eating people has an economic cost.
You can't just hoover up half the population, collect the stat bonuses and come back tomorrow to find everyone standing in exactly the same place because video games have decided murder becomes legally void after a loading screen.
You ate the shopkeeper.
There is now a shopkeeper-shaped vacancy in the local economy.
Which means the game has somehow managed to turn cannibalism into resource management.
That's magnificent.
Now you're weighing short-term power against everything that person provides. Maybe eating them helps Coo survive the next fight. Maybe you've also just removed somebody useful because you treated the town square as an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Morality has become accounting.
Some poor bastard is getting turned into character progression because the numbers looked good.
Wild Coo gets stronger, but also starts becoming a problem
Pushing Coo toward WILD doesn't simply make her the objectively better dragon.
It can also make her less obedient.
Which feels fair.
If you've spent months teaching a dragon that rules are optional and villagers are portable protein, you don't get to suddenly become surprised when she ignores an instruction.
"Coo, use this attack."
No.
"Coo?"
She's eating a house.
"Coo, we talked about this."
You absolutely did not.
You've essentially raised a giant supernatural toddler by rewarding every tantrum with livestock and municipal infrastructure, then turned up at the apocalypse holding a clipboard.
The interesting thing is that this stops WILD from being an obvious power route. Yes, you can gain strength. You're also making Coo harder to control.
More weapon.
Less handle.
That's a much better evil mechanic than simply giving the naughty choices bigger numbers and some red visual effects.
Apparently raising one adorable biological catastrophe wasn’t enough. You Don’t Kill Heroes in Dungeons, You Farm Them takes the next logical step and turns invading heroes into renewable dungeon infrastructure.
DRAPLINE is willing to follow the idea much farther than expected
This could easily have stopped at "haha, cute dragon eats NPC."
It doesn't.
There are actual endings built around what you've turned Coo into.
One established route involves letting her consume enough villagers or nearby settlements that Morgentiana eventually decides this has probably gone far enough.
Which is a wonderfully late moment to discover regulation.
Apparently watching a Divine Dragon eat several members of the population wasn't quite enough paperwork, but once neighbouring settlements start disappearing somebody finally stamps the emergency form.
You can fight Morgentiana.
You can win.
And Coo can eat her as well.
That leads to the New Catastrophe ending.
At which point I'd argue the original catastrophe has been somewhat overshadowed by the one you've personally been feeding since infancy.
There's also an ending where Coo eats you.
And really, you can't complain.
You've spent an entire year demonstrating that inconvenient humans are edible.
Eventually your dragon daughter looks at you and realises you are:
human,
nearby,
and almost certainly made of food.
That's not betrayal.
That's homeschooling.
The brilliant part is that being horrible isn't free
This is why the whole thing works.
A lot of games technically let you be evil, but evil mostly means clicking the nasty dialogue option.
"Give me your money."
NPC gasps.
+5 EVIL.
Everyone goes back to work.
DRAPLINE's version has consequences attached to the actual systems.
Coo can become more powerful.
She can also become less controllable.
People you consume can disappear.
Useful village functions can disappear with them.
Her personality changes.
Her endings change.
Your lovely little dragon daughter gradually becomes something you are responsible for creating.
And that's considerably nastier than just playing a monster.
You didn't find Coo like this.
You raised her.
You bought the groceries.
Somehow, this is still presented as an adorable raising game
That's probably the funniest part.
DRAPLINE doesn't look like a game where you're going to spend much time contemplating the nutritional value of civilians.
Coo is cute.
The art is cute.
Raising her is cute.
You're feeding her, watching her grow, improving her abilities and helping her become the best dragon she can possibly be.
Then she asks whether she can eat somebody.
And you have to think about it.
Not because you're roleplaying Satan.
Because there is a boss coming.
That changes the whole tone of the decision.
A dark fantasy RPG asking whether you want to massacre a village barely registers anymore. We've all been there. Usually there is a skull icon and somebody wearing suspiciously expensive shoulder armour.
A parenting sim asking whether your daughter is allowed to eat the village because it might improve her combat stats is different.
That's a conversation.
"No, Coo. We don't eat people."
Strength +14.
"...which person?"
Still prefer games where you are the reason somebody should probably call the authorities? Games Where You Play As The Villain collects the ones that genuinely let you become the problem, rather than giving you black armour before sending you off to rescue twelve farmers.
The actual villain fantasy isn't Coo. It's you saying yes.
That's what I like most about DRAPLINE's darker side.
Coo is obviously the creature doing the eating, but you're the one shaping her.
She asks.
You decide.
The game remembers.
Push her far enough and eventually you're no longer raising a powerful dragon who occasionally has behavioural issues.
You've created the behavioural issue.
And because the game ties that into actual strength, obedience, NPC availability and endings, the whole thing becomes far more interesting than the silly premise first suggests
.
You can be terrible because being terrible sometimes works.
It just starts sending invoices afterwards.
That is how evil choices should work.
Otherwise you're not choosing evil. You're just selecting the red skill tree.
DRAPLINE gives you a cute dragon daughter, an approaching apocalypse and the growing suspicion that Steve over there might be worth more as protein.
Poor Steve.
He probably shouldn't have had such excellent stats.
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