A Place for the Unwilling

This one's a shame. I was really interested in what the store page boasted here, with the devs and a few reviews comparing it to some of my favourite games (Sunless Sea, Majora's Mask, and especially Pathologic from one reviewer). However from actually playing the game and investing around 6 hours in it, I had to request a refund; not only because the game itself was disappointing, but because it feels buggy and unfinished in almost every aspect. The premise is that you have 21 days to explore and learn about a 'mysterious' city, and why exactly the friend that asked you there has recently killed himself. It's a nice concept, but in premise it ends up very hollow. The difference between APFTU and the games it tries to ape is that in those games, the settings are interesting and lively. In Majora's Mask, you have a hectic schedule full of citygoers and citizens to keep track of, most of which have some interesting questline or at least a quirk to hook you. Here the majority of characters are flat, with little to outline them beyond their occupation. Sure, they have backstories you can ween out of them if they like you, even six hours in it felt more like chatting to your hairdresser rather as opposed to solving a mystery. More so, the city itself is devoid of character, just bland grey street after bland brown street; more often than not you have to cross several screens to get from area of interest to the next, with zero to see or do inbetween, aside form the shadowy passersby who never have anything to say to you. By comparison, each building in Pathologic is a potential risk/reward resource, and everyone you pass has something to offer, either strange and alluring dialogue, or something to trade. I got to Day 6 of APFTU's 21 day span, approx 1/4 of the way through, and I still didn't feel like I'd taken a single step further into the game's actual story. No new clues or leads to investigate, just the occasional thread cropping up, only to bury itself again without providing any new insight. The game also feels unfinished and unpolished. Walking around is a chore as you seem to snag on every available piece of scenery, and the game's secondary 'mechanic' after the exploration, buying and selling goods between the game's handful of shops, seems totally tacked on. Even leaving buildings is a problem, since you can walk right through the doors and into blank space if you hit them at the wrong angle; I had to restart the game early on after being trapped outside of the map because of this. Certain paths the game presents cost large amounts of funds, which pairs poorly with the meagre profits I was able to make each day. There were occasions where the game locked me into paying for something I didn't want for one questline, leaving me too poor to afford to follow the story that actually interested me. It feels like you're encouraged to spend money to make money, but then it plonks a cash barrier in front of you after you've emptied your pockets. The game also crashed right at the end of one of the days, which due to the game's selective save system meant that I had to repeat that whole day's progress, which further emphasized how little intrigue each day seems to bring. The walking is also made more agonising by the fact that some NPCs appear in different locations depending on the time or day, but the game gives no indication of where they could be! It might say they're in 'The Poor Quarter', which is unhelpful at best when that takes up 1/3 of the map and dozens of empty screens. If you want something akin to Majora's Mask with an interesting setting, scheduled events and bizarre characters and mystery, please go play Pathologic 2. Or if I'm missing a trick here, PLEASE let me know, because I was so ready to dive deep into this game, but ended up hitting the bottom of a shallow pool...

This is a fun game and I had fun playing it. However, I have to give it a thumbs down for now because of two significant issues: - No controller rebinding - The King in Yellow play is BROKEN. Many players cannot enter it at all after purchasing tickets. Many people coming to this game because of its Lovecraftian tag who read this genre will be very disappointed to learn that one of the game's main attraction points is broken. Someone on the dev side with access to their debugger could figure it out in a few hours if they sat down. Or, hell, give me access to your debugger and repo, and I'll fix and recompile it for you free of charge. It's frustrating because the game is fun, but it needs another patch or two to weed out some of the technical shortcomings. Should the developer return to this game for some hotfixes, I would happily change this to a glowing thumbs-up review.

So this one is really jarring. I was attracted to this game by the authors' claim that it was inspired by my beloved Pathologic, and through this claim they even managed to get a recommendation from Ice Pick Lodge. But it seems that every time I get lured into the game for this very reason, it turns out to be absolute garbage. Well, as they say, when two people do the same thing, it's not the same thing. And Place for the Unwilling, at first glance, really looks like Pathologic. It takes place in one city for 21 days and the main thing is supposed to be drama between the characters. You, as a player, come to town after your childhood friend committed suicide and bequeathed his money, property and status to you. In a somewhat unoriginal dream part, he asks you to take care of his mother and wife, find some keys to reveal the secrets of his death, and tell you that the city is not what it seems and that its inhabitants, both the "important" ones (that is, those who have names) and the insignificant ones (they are depicted as "shadows" in the game) will be very important to you (here, by the way, I would like to ask why dream sequences in games so often take the form of pieces of buildings and the scenery hovering in space; I've never had a dream like that in my life). From the first moment you will probably notice that although the graphic stylization, which could be described as "cartoon Lovecraft", is really good, as is the soundtrack, which is not especially original, but nicely underlines the environment of England during the Industrial Revolution, which the game tries to evoke, APFTU radiates strong amateurism, and I certainly don't mean it in a good way (for example, the dubbed intro sounds like it was written by a teenager in high school and at the same time it is recorded from extreme proximity to the microphone, so it sounds like you're listening to him in a coffin). In general, if the story is interesting and the characters are believable, I don't mind dealing with bad game design. Here, however, I experienced both bad game design and perhaps even worse storytelling and the level of writing in general. The person who wrote them was probably a supporter of the classic beginner illusion that more text also means higher quality of writing and overall I would compare it to the level of dialogues from Fallout 1.5: Resurrection. For example, many objects in your house are interactive, but interacting with them brings absolutely nothing interesting (for example, by interacting with the table with tablecloth on it, you will learn that it is a table with tablecloth on it). The characters then speak in extremely flowery phrases every time they want to tell you anything, which is usually all the more irritating, because they never tell you anything interesting. They all sounds like caricatures, and in general any interaction with them is martyrdom (for example, the local bookseller acts more like a sixteen-year-old teenager who wants to sound smart after reading Divine Comedy, than someone who's mentally sound). Probably the worst aspect of the game is the absolute incredibility of the characters' behavior and the way the story is told here, which is a pretty big stumbling block in a game based on characters and story. After your initial arrival to the city, you are written about in the newspapers and in the eyes of the inhabitants you are connected to your deceased friend, but absolutely no one talks about his death with you and they all instead ask you to fulfill nonsensical quests that your character has zero motivation to do and which are going nowhere - for example, to remind local children that they have to do their homework or to slander local trade unions among the middle class. Probably the most annoying is the local mayor, who urgently invites you to his residence in his letters, just to spend half the dialogue with you talking on the phone (which is probably meant to be funny, but is not) and then wants your opinion from you on something irrelevant and you have no option to say that you have no opinion. During each day, you only have limited time to complete the assigned quests, and later you do not have time to do them all, but it really didn't bother me, because there was hardly one among them that I was motivated to complete. From the time allotted to you in one day, you are expected to spend some time trading. It consists of running around the shops in the city, where you can buy around ten types of goods and sell them elsewhere as prices change. However, the only role of money in the game is that some story tasks require you to have enough money, nothing more. So you have to spend half of the already uninteresting gameplay writing the prices on a piece of paper to compare them and overall this aspect of the game looks like it was added to the game so that there is something to do between boring quests. Not to mention that in a game that presents itself as a drama, running around the shops is probably the last thing I want. The rotten icing on the cake is the weird controls, which, allegedly in order to differentiate the game from point and click adventures, introduces some own invention in the form of movement using arrows and control of inventory, diary, etc. using WASD. The authors' obsession with gender issues is similarly strange. In the first five days, I was reminded about four times that the inhabitants of the city do not believe that what a person has between his legs determines their value, but this topic did not figure in any other way in the story or in the game world. My overall impression of this game is that its author had some vague vision of a game set in an open city and subconsciously wanted to flash their education in the humanities, but they didn't think much about what the game would be about, how to create some tension and what game design is even all about. Real pity.

Visuals are pretty and the idea of this game is cool, but the way it throws you straight in with about a billion things to do, no tutorial, with a day time limit and not being able to freely explore without feeling like you have to be running around trading or even getting to know the characters properly. The quests that the NPCs ask you to do are irrelevant to the main plot so it mostly feels like it's all pointless, personally this is the reason why I never felt attached or motivated to move forward in it.

Played for awhile now and the game isn't bad but holy ♥♥♥♥ the UI. For whatever reasons the devs didn't [i]want[/i] a normal UI to 'stand out more' and actively made the worst ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ UI I've ever seen. Where MS-DOS games have clunky UI this is just purposefully unintuitive. Movement is arrow keys, and everything else from journal, inventory, and interaction is wasd. People already press I for inventory why wouldn't you do that? People already press space to interact why wouldn't you do that? The idea of purposefully avoiding well known, almost instinctual knowledge for a gamer, UI just for the express purpose of being different is idiotic at best. The idea of avoiding point and click controls to avoid being associated with such games is childish at best. I'd hazard a bet that the head of the team are writers and artists first before being developers, sacrificing what should obviously be there for their 'vision' because behind the stellar artwork and great writing is a mechanical mess that so far is only beaten by the complete ineptitude of Yandere Dev So unless you're like me and willing to slog through awful UI for an interesting story, which I expect most people aren't, you wouldn't like this game until the promised lands of a rebinding option patch comes along.

This looks like an amazing game that I would love to keep playing, but the weird controls are KİLLİNG me. I won't return this game and hope for a key rebinding update, but I can't recommend this game until it arrives.

A lot of promise but fails to deliver. I started the game and was really enjoying myself, but the plot feels like it goes nowhere. The game has charming visuals and opens with a great premise. The time management system feels like it will be important when decided who to please and displease and how efficiently you can make money, but as time goes by your days end up empty and you have nothing to do. I won't go into how much the ending I got annoyed me for spoiler reasons, but it made no sense that the ending I got happened based on who I talked to and now how I treated them. Also for a game with a fair number of endings it feels as if it wants you to replay it, which would be great, but the time invested to get those endings just does not feel worth it given the emptiness of the game. I went into this very optimistic with zero prior knowledge and feel like it could have been heavily improved upon post release, but as the game stands I cannot recommend it unless it is deeply discounted.

These controls are horrible and real ruin the game completely. Out of almost 7,000 games on steam I won this the second time I have ever felt the need to request a refund due to game play issues being bad enough to just forget it. I mean at least let me know what does what, let alone just dump you in with a very unintuitive interface. Good idea ruined by poor UI execution.

It's an intriguing story, beautifully illustrated. however I would not recommend it to others because it's buggy and frustrating to play. The default controls are terrible and counter intuitive for a PC gamer as WASD are menu, select and cancel buttons not movement, leading to so many instances of me trying move but bringing up the menu instead. there is no option to remap the keys. for some weird reason the all the directions are diagonal so if you want to move up you have to press up and right, making it hard to move where you want to. in my first 10 minutes of play this lead to me getting stuck behind a shelf with no way to move leading to me having to just restart the day. overall while i think there are solid conceptual elements to this game, the gameplay is more frustrating than fun.

Es la primera vez que escribo una reseña de un juego, y la verdad es que lo merece 100%. Me lo pasé hace unas semanas, y he estado alargando este momento para encontrar las palabras adecuadas y plasmar todas las opiniones como debería. Es un juego al que llevaba meses siguiéndole la pista, hasta que no pude contenerme más y terminé probándolo. Os puedo garantizar que, por toda la dedicación en todos los sentidos que explicaré más adelante, el juego merece la pena enteramente. Es una de esas novelas visuales que se te quedan dentro, y te es muy fácil recordar muchos momentos de la trama, junto a los personajes a los que terminas cogiéndoles cariño. En cuanto al apartado gráfico, el juego es bastante llamativo, en el buen sentido. Acompaña muchísimo a la estética que pretende plasmar la historia, y se entrelazan a la perfección. Todos los personajes están muy bien construidos, con unas personalidades muy marcadas y diversas opiniones formadas sobre las ideologías de la época. Hace críticas muy claras (las cuales no especificaré para no estropear la sorpresa a nadie), de las cuales sería imposible esperar de una sociedad de la época en la que transcurre la historia, consiguiendo que todo sea más llamativo y lograr dar más personalidad todavía a los personajes del juego. Todo esto además, haciendo guiños a otros juegos, novelas, etc... (Entre los cuales, el maravilloso H.P Lovecraft, El Rey Amarillo, y otras entregas que no pondré para que las descubráis por vuestra propia cuenta). La BSO y los escenarios están muy bien logrados también, se nota que se le ha puesto mucho cariño y tiempo al juego. Todos los detalles acompañan y crean una inmersión total desde el primer momento. Tiene 10 finales, así que ya imaginaréis la cantidad de horas que podéis echarle por delante, por no hablar de las mil variantes que os presenta la historia a lo largo del juego. Digamos que cualquier acto que tomes, será relevante para el final que descubras. Llegados a este punto, simplemente puedo decir que me alegro un montón de haber dado con una obra como esta, y que ojalá se hicieran más juegos así. Si os gustan las novelas gráficas, os lo recomiendo 100%.