Uh...
Well, there's ambition and an obvious vision, I'll give it that.
The main appeal for me, aside from the undeniably clean art with its own style to it, is the apparent wealth of choices and the little hint of click-and-point elements in the form of the option to click on stuf in the environment for a reaction and... building of some lore base, apparently? Didn't actually find it, but then again I didn't look.
The voice acting is... awful, honestly. Mostly for Aliya herself. She's just so ridiculously monotone, it's as if her voice actress recorded *one line* and some AI from "2006" made the audio files for every single other recording from that. The very first game I actually bought, played, *and* reviewed on Steam on this account is a porn game called Helping the Hotties, with voice acting as underwhelming as you'd expect for a porn game, and I can confidently say that HtH's porn-not-even-star voice acting (except for Stacy's) is much better and has more emotion than Aliya's is. I hope I keep this in mind the next time I pull HtH up; Aliya's given me newfound reason to onlook Violet's tired and Emily's rushed voice actresses.
The puppet animation is very smooth- satisfying much of the time, but also clearly with the limitations of AI. This is more a feature than a bug in the hallucination scene, but outside of that, seeing Aliya's jaw distort while she sways her head around talking takes a bit of the intended organic effect out.
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I can say that the 'meme' humor takes the wind out of my sails for this one. In this seemingly mystical fictional town inspired by a melting pot of ancient cultures' visual motifs yet with a flare its own, there are anachronisms all around to throw the mood off. Some modern slang here, Victorian attire there, a stuffed monkey that comes to life and pulls out a *video game controller* after being fed a drugged banana, and a ridiculous rap track- *rap*- in the credits. I think it's in the trailer too, actually.
It's like this game doesn't really know what it wants to be. Or the creators' vision just involves taste too eclectic for me.
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Addendum: I have changed my mind. Apparently the "creators", if they even ought to be called that, want AI to make *everything*, or close to it - which explains a lot. So much is soulless, from the writing, to unlockable pictures, to the horrible monotone voice. It feels wrong, wrong, wrong.
