
Dysfunctional Systems: Orientation is a kinetic novel and a prequel to Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos. It uses text, sound, and illustrations to tell a story and follows Winter Harrison during her first week at mediator school.
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Languages: English**languages with full audio support
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Reviews
Themes across 44 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
I recommend this game for the €1.30 I spent on it. It took me exactly 90 minutes to play through this game (no choices so little replayability), so if you want you can just refund it afterward. The game is fairly enjoyable, however, and introduces some new characters. The art is different, but after five minutes you're used to it. Quality OST and dialogue as always. If you've enjoyed Juniper's Knot and especially Dysfunctional Systems 1, and this game is on sale, then go for it.
The story is quite an interesting premise. Really short, 2 hours for me and I take my time with games, so a $5.00 price point is kind of up to you if it's worth. The interface looks quite pretty.
In context, this prequel is something I, as a reader/player of Episode 1, absolutely needed to satisfy much of the craving Episode 1 left behind. From the beginning, Dysfunctional Systems engrossed me with intriguing world-concepts and memorable third-dimensional characters. Orientation builds off Ep1 in a way that satisfies much of my curiosity about Winter's home-world/plane. To keep it short, if you enjoyed Ep1, then you should buy Orientation. Although it is short, I am ecstatic to see this story get a proper expansion. My enthusiasm will spike-higher if more episodes are created in the future. For the time being, I am finally happy with what we-readers have been given, and I would love more. PS: If you are wondering how long Orientation takes to read, I would say about 2 hours on average. Unfortunately, I am slow with reading-and-comprehension, so I took a little over 3 hours to complete it.
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Hours played at review time, across 44 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
A short kinetic visual novel. For the current price (75% discount), totally worth it, for the full price, maybe not so much. So, this is an out-of-the-blue prequel to the previous Dysfunctional Systems VN (Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to manage chaos). Most of what it does is world-building. Since it is a kinetic VN, there is no branching, hence the replay value is nonexistent. Art is serviceable, but not great. Music is not annoying but not particularly memorable either. Writing is a little stilted compared to the first installment, but it's fine for what it is (i.e. exposition dump). The philosophy it kind of tries to push is slightly annoying, but probably that's the point [spoiler]since it gets subverted by the end.[/spoiler] Overall, this is at the same time encouraging and disappointing for the fans of the first installment. It's a mediocre kinetic VN set in an interesting multiverse, but here we mostly get to see the boring parts. Overall, if you're interested in anything I described, it's a fine 1.5-2 hour read. But it's not something you'd really want to read unless you're somewhat invested in the first game in the series. This does make me hope that other (hopefully more interesting) installments will happen eventually, so I'll give this a slightly begrudging thumbs up.
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