Depersonalization

Before you read this review, I will say that my playtime listed at the time of review does not reflect my true playtime, as it is more accurately about eighty hours of so of playtime at the time of review, because of a bug I had regarding my saves transferring over to the Steam Cloud. To begin, I will say this; Depersonalization is a game I absolutely loved as someone who partakes in many homebrewed TRPGs/Play-by-chat games with my friends over Discord. It truly scratched an itch that not even Baldur's Gate 3 could, and that's a very well renowned game. If I were to say how much I enjoyed the game [i] subjectively [/i] , it'd be a 10/10, for sure, because it caters to almost everything I seek in entertainment I like. However, it is not a game for everyone, and for every good thing about it, there's a flaw here and there in return. I'll go over what the game does well, and where the game suffers. [h1] THE GOOD [/h1] 1. The art is nice. The areas you explore, the UI, items, and characters are pleasantly designed. Assets are not reused too often in between official modules, and when they are, it is done smartly and for small things, like a car design or for a few generic NPCs, so each module feels fresh and unique in visual design. 2. Character customization is really quite fun. The game gives you a good variety to work with at the start and it quickly expands as you unlock more traits and mythical items from completing modules. Choosing which stats you want to prioritize can make a mission play out differently. 3. Overall, the storytelling is great. In the case of Lies and Frauds & Cursenday's Black Carnival, peak even. Play for the story. The nature of the game being made up of a bunch of different modules (think of it as not one continuous storyline, but a bunch of different disconnected episodes where your investigator is fitted into the timeline to stop some unknown calamitous event that will happen without your interference), really gives the writers the freedom to make each of your choices matter. It's not some game where you have 'choices' but they're all superficial and have no repercussions down the line. And as modules are meant to be replayed a few times, you'll see different sides to the same story. 4. For a $20 indie game, I think the playtime is a rather good bang-for-your-buck, as on a low ball, I'd say you'd be playing for about forty hours or so before you're done with all the official content and actually reading the story and doing a few replays to see some of the alternate endings or paths you can take. 5. You can tell the developers are real people, they try and they care. ^_^ 6. If you want, there's always the option to jump into some fanmade modules, which are of questionable quality, but still enjoyable and it means that Depersonalization always has room to grow as the community grows. [h1] THE BAD [/h1] 1. The game is buggy. While you'll rarely come across a severely gamebreaking bug, you'll find quite a few translation bugs where the game uses Chinese text instead of English text despite there being an actual translation for that line, and there was a bug at the start where the game used the save on my laptop rather than the steam cloud which caused some issues with the save file. (I kept playing for a while and figured out how to fix it with some help, but it does mean I missed out on some achievements and my true playtime is not revealed). Otherwise the only other notable time I've encountered bugs are when two bosses had their mechanics work inconsistently, and in a high quality fan-made module called Janus Spiral. 2. Speaking of translation, though it's massively improved by now, there is the occasional time when the translation is poor, mostly where obscure traits are involved or in wee bits of modules that haven't been entirely polished yet. It's never so bad that you can't understand what it does or what's going on, though. 3. The art, while I praised it previously, has inconsistent quality. A few characters get attack animations, most don't. In the tutorial, shopkeepers have a dedicated large legs-up sprite and background, but this isn't kept through to the other modules in the game. The developers are also working on new sprites with spine-based animation, which I find don't quite match the artstyle the game has presented to us so far. 4. Some stories don't make much sense until you replay it multiple times and get most of the endings, which means that your first play through a module can be quite confusing and something will happen and because you did do X and don't know the context or you didn't do X and don't know the context, so you end up feeling that some things are quite contrived as a result. It's not so bad that it kills the game, and the overarching story does become more enjoyable as a result of understanding every single little moving part. It's just that your immersion might be a little broken here and there when things get a little janky. I'm looking at you, Soladnit and Moonshade Monolith. 5. The combat is honestly not that deep. While there are certainly ways it can be made interesting, the truth is that almost every encounter can be boiled down to a DPS check, with a few exceptions. It's only that the means in which you do damage is up to you. Some encounters will be more puzzle-y or have mechanics (mostly immunity to certain types of damage or while an ally is alive, but they've done other things too) that make them harder to just shoot down, but even they can be killed before anything happens with the right setup [spoiler] (The boss of Far Hope Park, which is absolutely meant to be a puzzle boss where you need to collect all three Memory Shards to overcome them because they have complete damage immunity and use an AoE instant kill attack every turn, CAN BE DEFEATED IN ONE TURN USING A DRILL AND A LOT OF PEW PEW TO REMOVE THEIR IMMUNITY AND KILL TURN 1 [/spoiler] . Though I suppose that last part makes does give you a bit more creative freedom, but even so, it's just being able to apply the same strategy to win about every encounter with most other strategies, mostly ones involving status effects, feeling very subpar. Sanity and luck management CAN be important in some missions though. This is not thaat egregious of an issue because combat still serves its purpose well enough and stays enjoyable for the length of the game's story content, and can stay enjoyable in replays if you simply try not to min-max that hard. Just know that you won't be playing for game for just combat. [h1] AND... THE LESS BAD (my nitpicks). [/h1] 1. Unfortunately, the eldritch gods are all turned into anime girls, so as a bisexual man, I do feel a biiiit disappointed in that aspect. There's plenty of cool guys otherwise, especially in Cursenday, so don't think there's a lack of notable male characters though. Just no hot Outer Gods. 2. While a part of the game's balancing, once you lock in an ending for a certain Investigator, you can't bring them to that same module again to get more endings. There's a mod that lets you bypass this, but it breaks the game's balancing, since modules are a sort of permanent progression for that character but most modules have pretty consistent difficulty, outside of Cursenday, which is the biggest and most recent module as of writing this review. 3. The side content is very limited. There's no way to replay the game's soundtrack in the game (you have to go on youtube and find some videos where the video extracted the soundtrack from the game files, and those videos were only uploaded recently at my request), and there's only one mini story. 4. Sadly, the game's English community is small. There's not many guides or content made by English fans, and good translations to English are slow (though there are people in the community doing translations on their own, allowing English players to use the Workshop to play modules faster) Overall, 8/10, would rec to TRPG enjoyers.