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.
