Okay, so this is going to be a long one because there's something in here that I love. I have a long history with point-and-click adventure games, grew up with The Curse of Monkey Island, and I'm always looking for a game that holds up to that experience.
Graphics and Visuals:
The best thing about this game is the character designs. Not only are they full of life and personality, but the art style works really well for this game. The environments don't always match up to the style of the characters, which would be a huge plus if they were, but it's not jarring. I understand this is likely because the doing the environments in the same style as the characters would've been far more time-consuming.
I will say that the environments can feel very empty at times. I think back to games like Monkey Island and The Longest Journey and there were always more things to click on. Each zone had several things to investigate, many of which weren't necessarily important for puzzle-solving, but they helped the world feel alive. I would also say that there aren't quiet enough environments, but this will tie into gameplay more so I'll leave at that for this section.
I also want to talk about the lack of character animations. When you look at other successful point-and-click games with a 2D art style, you'll see all of them have more lively animations for every character. Check out the Deponia series or Curse of Monkey Island (Do I sound like a broken record yet?). It's scope, I know, but it would be a massive improvement to have character's mouths moving and have their animations change to showcase their emotions.
Lastly, let's talk about the UI, because while the style of the game otherwise is on point, the UI is probably the worst thing about this game. I'll be blunt: the choice of font, design of dialogue boxes, and the menu are all very hard to look at and make this game feel a lot cheaper. The UI could certainly be stylized, but what we have here isn't stylization, it's fourth-grade Microsoft Power Point assignments. I'm sorry, that's really harsh and I know it's not great to hear, but UI is a much bigger deal than many might think, and it's an easy-fix too. I think for future games, you should definitely do some research on other games to come up with a higher-quality UI, a better font choice, and stylized icons including for the mouse pointer. It would take such a small amount of time and would have a giant impact.
Audio:
I love this soundtrack and would call it a hidden gem. It fits the style and theme of this game really well and sounds great. There's a part of my brain that's telling me some of the soundtracks overlapped at pointed, but I might be remembering things strange.
There is something to be said about the lack of voice acting. Again, I know it's all about scope. Voice acting means you need recording equipment, hiring a voice cast, and more man hours to ensure all the voice clips go to the right places. For this genre, character and personality is really what helps sell your games. If you absolutely can't hire a voice cast for future games, you can add voice SFX at the very least. I'm talking about when characters speak in games like Stardew Valley or Undertale. There's no voice acting in Undertale, and yet the characters each have their own unique voices because the sound effects that play when they speak are so different. That's a much smaller scope idea that could make a big difference if voice acting simply can't be done. For this genre, though, I would put it somewhat high on the priority list in future titles.
Gameplay:
As a whole, the gameplay of Escape from Pleasure Planet is passable. It's not great, but it's not bad either, and there are high points and low points. There's a lot to unpack here though, so let's break it down.
First, I would say there aren't enough zones in this game. I mentioned this briefly in the visuals section, but many puzzles take place in 1 or 2 rooms. This feels very claustrophobic in most situations. I think something like the Deponia games would feel really good here. Those aren't quite as open as the Monkey Island games, but they're spacious enough to give you some room to breathe. While size is important, you could also be more creative with your environment space and fill it with more things to do. Be frugal here, but try to not be too stingy either.
This ties into puzzle-design. I would say that puzzles are often either way too simple or way to complicated. This game breaks puzzle segments into chunks, especially when you go into people's fantasies. Everything you'll need is in there and everything you get will be used before you leave. This is fine for the most part, but it has its downsides. It's too easy that every item you need you can pick up almost immediately. Often times in other point-and-click games, a lot of the tools you need are gated behind other objectives, like the cabana boy in Curse of Monkey Island demanding a club membership from you before you can have a towel. This does a lot of good things for these games: It creates more steps needed to accomplish the task at hand and helps guide the player into knowing what they can do and cannot do at each step along the way.
As for dialogue, I found the characters to be charming and have a lot of personality, but I felt their dialogue trees were too brief. I want to be able to talk to characters more about their backgrounds, ask them more questions, and spend more time with each one.
There were a few puzzles that I found to be unreasonably complex. The minigame where you had to propel yourself through space was very unclear about what direction you were facing and what direction you needed to go. There were also some "reality bending" puzzles, such as the guards for the first founder, or the entire process of talking to the third, that I wasn't prepared for. While they're clever, I feel like you need to show the player that the game recognizes that behavior in the first place.
Story and Theme:
So I believe there are a few things I missed in my playthrough, and also feel I'd need to play it again to really get some details on the story, so I can't be too critical about it at the moment. Overall, I liked the structure of the story--of needed to find each founder to access a new pod to shut off other pods and sniff out Brutus. I feel confused about the "secret" of Arcadia that drove each founder away and feel like I need to replay the game to understand more about that.
I feel that the game markets itself as this sexy fantasy, but felt that the execution was far tamer. I was expecting more Leisure Suit Larry where you can get some NSFW scenes with different guys such as the Archadian, Brutus, the couple from the second fantasy. I do like how the game has a positive take on gay characters and isn't just fetishizing everything, but I personally would rather have the style go all the way, or not be there at all and just have really strong, gay characters.
Conclusion:
All-in-all, I would say this game feels like a project done by a handful of game design students in their free time. I can feel the small scope, limited budget, and time constraints that hold this game back. There's also the fact that this game is a little buggy and doesn't even run very well on Mac (I tried and switched to PC). There's a tall grocery list of high-scope things I brought up, and I can understand why that's not entirely feasible, but if all of those things were added in future installments, I could easily see myself paying $40 for a higher-quality product. It's also something I'd love to write for myself, if given the opportunity. There's something I love about this, and would love to see this series become much bigger in the future.
As a side note, can we return the Arcadian and help him recover? The most heart-breaking things about this game was having to leave him in the asylum. All I wanted in the end was to at least rescue him and add him to the crew.
