Asbury Pines

Asbury Pines is an interesting experiment in non-linear storytelling with a sorta-kinda idle game-inspired gameplay loop... That is completely let down by the horrible handling of resolution of its central murder mystery. In the sense that it's not actually central, much as the game's narrative will, towards the end, try to convince you that it is and in the sense that the final plot twist is bad, bordering on downright infuriating, on multiple levels. Specifically: [spoiler]The perpetrator of the murder is a time paradox clone of the victim, who is convinced to kill her past self by the inhabitants of a future utopia founded based on the writings of her husband and son. She then manages to convince her past self to let herself be murdered horrifically (it involves her body being hacked to pieces with an axe). We're told this is necessary for this utopia to come into being.[/spoiler] Why is it necessary? [spoiler] F**ked if I know. The future utopia is based on the writings of the murder victim's son, preserved by his descendants through multiple different types of apocalyptic events. And now you might think 'Oh, so he must have been deeply affected by her death and it must be an important part of his writings for her death to matter that much.'[/spoiler] And that would certainly be what you'd expect if the narrative was competently and coherently written, but... [spoiler]No, actually most of the writings her son wrote concern things his father said about his favourite archaeologist. To the point that the movement the son's descendants start and the nation they found are named after said archaeologist. And how much does the murdered woman, the mother of the person who wrote their foundational texts, figure into this? Well the society based on his writings doesn't have a damn clue who she is, her own son apparently mentioned her that little.[/spoiler] All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the murder victim is clinically depressed. She struggles with feelings that her very existence doesn't matter and the hack who wrote this bullsh... nonsense probably believes they wrote story that proves that she was wrong and that she actually mattered very much. But if that was the goal... [spoiler]Making the central conceit of the narrative that the best thing she ever did, besides having a son that her husband could imprint his love for his favourite archaeologist on, was die completely ruins that.[/spoiler]

It says I've played this early access for 21 hours but alot of that was idling. The game concept is great, I'm in with all ten toes as my grandma never said .... as far as I can tell, the set up for this game is that you are rebuilding a historical file but also somehow "living the life" of the townspeople and thus able to control how history unfolds (I think)... via your actions in managing the town. The story is all over the place - mundane slice of small town life mix with authoritarian dystopian fiction mixed with Lovecraftian horror. Managing the town, though, means you are starting long tasks (hence the idling) to build up resources which allow you to learn the townspeople's lives... hard to explain the game loop but the closest think I can compare it to are those desktop games where you rebuild a computer's memory or, in this case, a town's history... OK. so that all just said this game seems SERIOUSLY bugged. ♥♥♥♥ ain't making any sense. [Did Steam censor the first word of the previous sentence. Teehee. - ed.] I have townspeople who die in the story and the character stays alive and able to go scavenge or pump gas? I have characters who are listed in their meta data (the card data) as dead but they can still produce resources. Or maybe I'm not understanding a game mechanic. Its hard to get into the game when you see this. Why is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Wilma still pumping gas? IS she a ghost now? Is that part of the story? I've already pointed out that the story seems to want to go in multiple directions. I get it, you're early access and this looks to be a hard game to fully playtest but... seriously, if anyone is reading this please fix as I really wanna play this game. I am unfortunately for now - NOT recommending the game.

Bought this on the promise of "Twin Peaks idle mystery game," which is was not. If anything, it's closer in scope and scale to 100 Years of Solitude idle game," surprising with a multi-generational story. As a game, this is a bog standard idler with very little innovation. As a narrative tied into an idle game, it's pretty fresh. Some of the later jumps are a little far fetched (sna-hail), but because you're waiting for them, you're invested. I enjoyed my time with it, and probably liked it more in this form than if it were a novel. 3/5.

I enjoyed this game a lot. I think anyone that enjoys piecing a story together will enjoy it as well, because that is a requirement - the game will hand you story beats and you need to stitch them together (although there is a 'Quests' menu that will collate things together, but it's.. massive because it encompasses everything from everywhere). Over a 20+ hour playthrough, I understand now why it bounced between eras, why there were so many characters.. and I don't regret the playthrough or purchase because it was, ultimately, very satisfying. The "final" story piece especially was poignant. As far as gameplay goes, this was fine as well. I don't know when they were added, but the ability to set the game speed higher than 1x seems cool, and having the ability to "skip ahead" 4, 8, or 12 hours is neat. I played at 1x speed but used a bit of skipping to get the final achievement I needed to get that was related to resource production. The game is not perfect - there are typos sometimes, graphical problems, but nothing that was critical or game-breaking - but it is actively being worked on. The last developer roadmap post indicates some systems are going to be significantly reworked, and that may make the gameplay experience even better. Long review short: if you're curious, are okay getting a drip-fed story, and want a hybrid playstyle (active to prioritize short-term things, idle for longer researches), this is a great game for the price.

I don't quite understand the hype for this game within the genre. It certainly has good bones and the idea of an unfolding storyline is quite good; other idlers have tried this to some success, especially in the time-loop subgenre. However, Asbury Pines inevitably becomes a game of scrolling, and you aren't really incentivized from an interest POV to invest in the storyline. A lot of it isn't relevant and more of the "writing exercise" variety, and your interest in reading things kind of dwindles when you're spending so much time scrolling back and forth and dealing with weird artificial bottlenecks in resource production. As I write this review, I'm only midway to an achievement of producing 10 million snails, and I've given up on playing at 1x. Even at 4x, it'll probably be another day before I get there. Resources like hides and plastics are bottlenecked heavily in the late game, and the feature of having resources from earlier ages transfer to later ages seems finicky at best; many don't seem to transfer at all, ever, or only do so randomly. Research times are also a little off. The final government tech, for example, gives an enormous discount to building new workplaces, but by the time you're researching this, you've already built everything, so this doesn't actually offer you a benefit. All that said, I probably would continue playing this if it had a prestige/NG+ mechanic of some kind. It would work really well with the time travel components of the storyline. Alas, no such thing. As a result, I don't recommend this unless it's heavily discounted. A lot of labour went into it, so I understand why the price is what it is, but from a consumer viewpoint, it's a premium price for the genre and the gameplay doesn't fully match up with what you're paying.

Pros: The soundtrack and art are both pretty good. The story is fairly intriguing as far into it as I got. Cons: Gameplay is extremely dull. It lacks both meaningful choices and the pure numbers go up satisfaction that comes from some incremental games. Playing the game mostly ended up just feeling like a chore you have to do to unlock more story than a compliment to it. When playing actively you unlock a piece of story every couple of minutes, which turns out to be a very bad timescale. It is slow enough that you can't really play actively, but fast enough and requiring enough attention that you can't really just put it on a second monitor and let it sit either.

客观而言，除非具备扎实的英文能力，否则并不建议在暂无官方中文的状态下体验本作。本人游玩过程中借助汉化补丁，暂且不评判补丁翻译水准，玩家自发无偿制作补丁的行为已然值得肯定。 我本身同时偏爱放置玩法与叙事题材游戏，本作融合两类玩法，原本让人倍感契合喜好。但实际体验下来，游戏的放置模块趣味性不足。倘若放置玩法的定位是为剧情内容铺垫服务，那么本作的叙事表现同样不尽人意。人物故事脉络零散，不同时间线的剧情关联度偏弱。 查阅更新记录可知，制作团队计划在正式版中调整内容，并上线简体中文支持。游戏整体基础素质尚可，后续发展值得期待，待正式版本更新后，我将重新体验游戏并补充评测内容。 注：本次叙事相关评价均基于汉化补丁体验得出，并未对照英文原版内容，观点仅作参考。 I am fond of both idle gameplay and story-focused games. This work combines the two genres, which initially suited my tastes perfectly. Nevertheless, the idle segments fail to deliver sufficient fun in actual play. If idle mechanics are meant to lay groundwork for the plot, the narrative of this game also leaves much to be desired. Character storylines are disjointed, and plots from different timelines have loose connections. Update logs show that the development team intends to revise the content and roll out official Simplified Chinese support in the full release. The game has decent basic quality and enjoys promising prospects. I will replay the game and supplement my review after the official version is updated.

I bought this game purely on a whim because the reviews for it were pretty great, and promised a great story that I'd have to piece together and think about for a bit. But unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it at all. The problem is that the story the game tells and the way it tells it aren't very good. In order to avoid spoilers, I'd just say that once I was done with the story, the overall feeling I've had was "well that was a complete waste of my time". The reason as to why everything happened and the way it did is some of the most unsatisfying things I've read in my life, and it's only made worse by the fact that the game presents it in a very self satisfied way, as if the writer smiled to himself and said "yeah, this is some profound stuff, right?". When in all actuality, if you're anything like me, you would go "okay, but why? this doesn't make any sense." To be clear, I understand what the writer was going for with the story in terms of the overall message and themes, I just think it was done in a pretty awful way, especially the ending. Now, the second part of my issues with it, is the way the story is told through gameplay. Based on reviews, you would be forgiven for thinking that you might have to think and piece things together by yourself and really think about what goes on. You don't need to do any of that. In all actuality, the story itself isn't very complex or deep once you finish it, the main issue with it is that it is told in a non linear way, which means, you advance a certain characters node to a certain point, which will unlock additional characters, animals, plants and so on but sometimes they are from different periods, and then you continue doing that until you're all done. It gives the impression of some depth, but no actual depth. While progressing nodes to unlock story snippets, you can also do a few other things, such as scavenge, work and explore nature, as well as do research into three different disciplines: Science, government, Religion. The gameplay loop basically consists of "advance stories, use characters to get items for advancing the stories through scavenging, work and nature exploration, repeat until done". The thing is, there is no real point to the gameplay. You scavenge for resources, sure, but oftentimes you can idle the game for a night and you will have obscene amounts of resources to complete a significant portion of character nodes which means you don't really have anything to do with hundreds of thousands of resources you have to spare. You don't have to use them for research, or anything else, really. Research is another thing that bothered me, because in many other idle games, research is a significant part of boosting your production and improving your resources, but here, they are pretty much optional for completion, and I haven't even completed half of them by the time I was done with the game. There is no strategy or decision making about anything in the game. So I asked myself, time and time again, why was this story chosen to be told in this particular format, of an idle game, despite not doing anything with the gameplay beyond the bare basics? And I really don't know. It doesn't really take much time to unlock new characters and nodes, it doesn't take much time to get the resources you need to advance, so it just feels like most of the time you're just waiting until the story gets unlocked slowly. This would work better as a visual novel, it still wouldn't be a particularly good story or a satisfying one, but at least it wouldn't add unnecessary gameplay where it just gets in the way of telling its story.