Aberration Analyst

Genuinely solid, broken at times. Hope stuff gets fixed with time, but it's pretty atmospheric.

It took a bit to get the feel for things, but once I did this was a lot of fun.

A small fun game but it could use some refinement and expansion. Currently there isn't really that much difference between the professions besides the specialists (who cost a lot more). I'd say if the developer wants to expand the concept they should focus on the hunt (gathering info and more importantly different kinds of info, trying to keep your employees safe from varied smaller encounters that test your team's defensive capabilities) and the actual final confrontation with the target (which could be expanded into an actual battle or at least something where you have to manage collateral). As it is right now the hunt is 90% of the game and it's mostly reading random reports and the final confrontation is just a bring specialist guessing game to instantly win.

I was hoping for something like Daily Chthonicle, and it kinda is. I love the "creepy green pixelated" look the game has. Schmidt Workshops used it in their Cthulhuian dungeon crawler, and it works here as well. I find there's too much random chance in sending agents into potential areas, and it's too much of a guessing game to see if they'll die or—as is most often the case—there's nothing there to begin with and you've just wasted resources. For some reason, after a few days most of my agents died except for 3, and I couldn't send any more in. It also feels a bit buggy, or maybe I didn't get how to play it properly. I'm also not quite sure what era it's set in: the computer suggests the '90s, but based on the images of the people and newspaper, it could be placed anywhere from 1880 to 1960. Not sure if that's intentional. This game has potential, but there need to be more tools for the player to investigate areas. I really want to like it, but in its current state it's not very fun.

While I generally appreciate games of this type, I have decided to refund this one, because it's quite crude and underbaked. First of all, the esthetics of old monochrome monitors was bright green or amber letters on mostly black screen - that is easy to read. However, small black letters on bright green screen is pure pain. The gameplay is mostly guesswork - you get randomized tabloids, you get chaotic police reports, and then you have to decide. If you do it wrong, you have no chance to remedy the situation. There is very little iteration and deduction, and quite a lot of guesswork against dice throws. The uncovered lore is mostly useless. It's not explained how profession contribute to an investigation. When is "photoprapher" more useful then say "shaman"? Then there are various strange inconsistencies - across runs, new people are generated, but some slots stay marked as "deceased" with not explained reasons. The manual contains incorrect information - the configuration file is called "options.cfg", not "config.cfg", and you have to find it yourself - it's not in the installation directory. Contrary to the manual, there is no way to restart a game, you can only "Resume" and "Load" - since you have no way to save a game or have multiple runs, that's a very strange system. Moreover, the implementation of the mouse is wrong, it's difficult to hit the pixel sized cities (using hardware mouse cursor would be much better), if you mark multiple cities in the tabloids, you won't easily find which is which, etc. The game would need more complex, better thought-out game mechanics and design, more immersive lore than the random - "Oh no! A minister/guru/pope/clerk has just eaten a chicken/chair/planet/woman in the garden/shed/hospital/castle". Also, the correct singular is "shaman", not "shamen".

super overlooked and super underrated, very thought provoking gameplay, but it held back by the very engine that introduces some jank, this to me is part of its charm though, along with the digital manual that makes this feel like a classic pc release. pick this up!