Distress: A Choice-Driven Sci-Fi Adventure

Distress marketed itself as drawing inspiration from Mass Effect, Silent Hill and Snatcher and in some ways I can see that but in other ways it falls a tad short. It can certainly have some creepy vibes from the monsters you encounter that make me think of Silent Hill but sadly we don’t see much of them or interact much with them much. The game has a rich lore you get introduced to, lots of planets and colonies mentioned but it is mostly in passing. You don’t actually get to go to these planets, get any flashbacks to the lore, or interact with the colonies. I keep going on about what the game doesn’t have but let me mention what it does have. It has a solid story to it that I think has a lot of potential for prequels. It has a great vibe to it, I love the unsettling locations and the bits of mystery and suspense the game is able to create. The cast of characters are all interesting and make me want to know more about them but sadly not much info is given. The soundtrack is great and puts me back into 80’s era sci-fi which is my childhood and I love. The choices you get to make are decent but do have one big flaw I dislike: false choices. Some choices mean your death and the end of the game. You have to reload and choose differently. My issue with this mechanic has always been that a choice that makes you reload and pick differently isn’t really a choice. There is no voice acting in the game but I don’t count that as a negative. I’d rather have no voice acting than poor voice acting. I played the game on Linux. I used version 1.2. The game never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors or glitches. The game does have one issue in that it launches on the wrong monitor and I have to manually move it over to my main monitor. There is nothing in the config area to choose monitor. This isn’t a game issue however but an issue with the Ren’Py engine itself. I have seen this on various Ren’Py titles before. This issue was fixed in Ren’Py version 7.2.1 but Distress uses version 7.1.0.882. Either way not a huge issue. While playing the game my GPU usage was 2-10%; my VRAM usage was 635-822MB; my CPU usage was 1-3% and my system RAM usage was 2.8-3GB. The game uses just 202MB of disk space. It also supports manual saving whenever you want and has 54 save slots available. I finished my first playthrough of Distress in just 46 minutes. I finished my second playthrough in 35 minutes as I had already read some of the text and could go faster. It isn’t a long game by any means but I think the story is worth it. I paid $6.78 CAD for the game and feel that is good value for what I got. If you enjoy visual novels I would recommend Distress and can also recommend some of the developer’s other work “The Right Side of Town”. My Score: 7/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.3.4 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 19.0.0 | Mate 1.22.3 | Kernel 5.5.2-1-MANJARO

Enjoyable writing, loads (and I mean loads) of choices, and character depth that unveils itself naturally through multiple playthroughs as you see the characters put through an ever surprising wheel of stimuli. It’s like choose-your-own-adventure version of The Expanse with a playful and humorous edge. I love the focus on dozens of unique playthroughs instead of one impossibly long one, so instead of competing with my dozens of gaming and reading obligations, it can complement them in between.

This is an amusing sci-fi visual novel. My first playthrough ended in the vacuum of space due to an improvised weapon performing a bit too well. Next playthrough went a bit more smoothly and showed that this visual novel has a plethora of choices with vastly different outcomes. If you like a bright, comic art style and quirky characters then I would recommend this game.

Writing is decent in Distress. Good graphics. Nice cast and personalities for this sci-fi visual novel. Feels like there are meaningful choices as things you decide affect the station as a whole. Could use better foreshadowing of what those new events will be. My main annoyance was that the characters only have talking poses facing one direction - which means that a right-facing sprite will often stroll in from the right side of the screen... Again, that's just the idle poses; there's a good spread of action poses for each character. Combat boils down to choosing among different tactics and it flows well. I'm glad I was able to keep my crew alive. Would be great if there were Steam Achievements to keep track of such things ;)

-> Szacun za rozgałęzienia, zakończeń jest DUŻO, ci giną, ci zostają, innych spotyka jeszcze co innego - w bardzo różnych wariantach. Rozgałęzienia nie obyły się bez baboli [w pewnym momencie gada postać, która po danym wyborze zginęła XD], ale da się przeżyć. -> Postacie sympatyczne, taka rodzina z wyboru na danym etapie życiowym - chociaż z czasem w epilogach jedni idą w inną, inni w drugą stronę - i to też jest okej. -> Fabuła oryginalna nie jest, to takie best of różnych tropów i motywów - ale i tak pogrywało się przyjemnie. -> Stylowo miła odmiana od yassification. Może nie było tam nic takiego, co by było distinctive [raczej takie basic sci-fi], ale Imo pasowało to do tej fabuły, która także była miksem różnych sajfajowych motywów.

I was pleasantly surprised with the story and how your choices can increase the time it takes to play through or decrease it. the longer the more you learn about the narrative as well. the downside? well after playing for 100 minutes I've gotten multiple endings and am left longing for more. the characters well pretty well developed for how short it is. That's the downside to the game, im not a great gamer and i blew through multiple endings quickly. for the price i still recommend it, its a nice little distraction, but dont expect a long story arc or hours upon hours of gameplay.

Nice Game :) after some trying i found my favorite Way. Infiltrate the station throug The Myrmidon. Descend into the metro. Don't intervene. Let the mysterious woman out of the pod. Follow the stranger's lead. Help the stranger. Help Lenore destroy Nova-8. Hear her out. Tell her to stick it where the sun don't shine. Surrender. Focus fire on two, while Nyles zaps the others. Go! Stop her once and for all. Promise to hide Lenore. Maybe.

I love this game, I love the story and i love the characters its great and amazing. I only have 2 small complains 1 in the discription it says You’re responsible not just for your own life, but the lives of your crew as well. but only 1 of them can die everyone else is always save it would be better if other characters could die depence on your choice/consequences. My second small complain is no matter what route we choose no matter what we do or say or whatever the story always leads us to a confrontation with that woman with that weird ugly haircut they always have different varients but its still annoying that you cant ignore her and do and go somewhere else. But i still love this visual novel i only found like 8 endings some bad ones so am curious how i can find the other 72 endings:D

This is a fine little science-fiction visual novel. It's very tropey and pulpy but you may like that sort of thing.