Femida

This game looks and sounds like a free to play web game (very 2000s newgroundsy to me.) But, it's on steam and costs money for some reason. The writing and dialogue is pretty awful. Lots of typos just literally everywhere, and trying to ignore that. The content of the writing itself just isn't very good. As the writing is pretty key to this game, this makes it a pretty bad game. If you ignore the bad writing (for a story focused dialogue game,) the game mechanics are also pretty bad and tedious. It feels a bit like they stole some of the game mechanics from other similar games without being aware of what made those games good or fun. Maybe that's why I get the vibe of web game that someone stuck a price tag on. Though the audio very much clinches this for me as it's that annoyingly repetitive type most of these games have (probably free.) I tried giving this game a second chance, then I realized the main mechanic for the court scene was just remembering which dialogue trees make the court angry and avoiding those. There was a few other mechanics but they seemed about as lazy as that. To say something nice, I was fine with the art style, though it did seem a bit like wikihow art. I saw mention that there could be issues from the translation, but I don't think that fits all the issues it has or gives it a pass from criticism (really unsure how it has positive feedback at all myself.) Either way if that's taken to be the case as a valid reason (I'm not going to look further into it as I've wasted enough of my life on this game.) Probably rather than doing a poor translation, it'd be better to pay someone to do it properly and raise the price of the game to cover that I suppose really. Though even with a proper translation the story content itself seemed pretty meh, and the game mechanics were just lame/lazy it seemed to me.

Interesting litigation cases. Non-trivial. I think I was a fair judge. I hope...) The game will tell you ;) And of course, this is not just a simulator, here is a very good main story!

This is a great concept - just not sure how well its executed. The writing is rough and the reading becomes tedious (the font style is a bit hard on the eyes). Would love to see it revamped maybe with some voice acting to add more to it.

Femida is a recent addition to the Steam library of games. Femida is an indie, non-linear game, by developer Art Interactive and publisher Roman Loznevoy, featuring dialogue trees and court cases in a post-totalitarian (or still totalitarian?) world, a year after a revolution that flipped society upside down. You play a man who was just appointed judge back in the main city, after having moved away to a rural town. You left your wife, your kid, and are now in charge of many high-profile cases that will set huge precedents in this new government. With a rustic/noir art style, Femida leads you through a case in a courtroom. The gameplay consists of going through evidence and witnesses prior to slamming down on your gavel to officially initiate the trial. You cross-examine, question, dig, prod, and try to uncover the truth, even when it is messy. Perhaps the pressure of the State is on you to deliver a certain verdict. But will you listen? And that is mostly the extent of the gameplay. A cut scene happens every now and then, where a secondary character or scenario is introduced, and the sequence of choices dramatically impacts the outcome of Femida. (in total, as the game tells you, there are 4-7 endings, “depending on how you count”). Femida is a world of intrigue, conspiracy, convoluted mess, and confusion. Figuring out what is real and not is a complicated task. The risk of an unreliable narrator is brought up every now and again, especially with the constant reminder of mysterious “pills” you take for your headaches… and memory? Like I said, it is unclear, but will more playthroughs of Femida, it might make more sense the picture could be more coherent. When picking out sentences, I did wish the game would explain what certain verdicts really meant – sometimes, I had to look up the legal jargon. Furthermore, a “back” button would be nice, as I sometimes selected guilty vs innocent when I meant the other. There are also numerous grammatical and spelling errors throughout the game which is off-putting, as well as distracting. Overall, the game is simple, is very quick to finish (less than 3 hours, for one play through), and has the promise of a deep, layered story. However, the monotony of trials and the lack of a polish diminishes the game’s potential. If you can get past that, the darkness of the story and the twists and turns the plot takes may grab you. Verdict: 6/10

I recommend to buy it now while it's on sale and play after the issues have been resolved. Voted for this gem when it was going through Greenlight. There are some issues, but the devs update the game everyday. The story is great, but there are few grammatical errors.

Have you ever wanted to dig through paperwork for testimony inconsistencies? Listen to people's stories and judge whether they are lying? You're a judge! But there is also a main story, don't mess up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziZLqlP2v7k

25.02.2020 got some problems loading the saves 26.02.2020 Seems like I'm the only one troubled by this issue. Anyway, I've reached one interesting ending.

Came for the busty statue, stayed for the story

Femida is a "Papers Please" style text reading decision game. You're a judge in an alternative post WW2 type society and you're presented with various cases as part of an overarching story and you must read documentation carefully to make decisions that influence the overall story... like a badly framed Choose Your Own Adventure, but formatted like a 1998 browser/Flash game. Yeah, a poor idea implemented poorly... this has no real value for gamers as a serious PC game. This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static images... it might as well be a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 7 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Femida has the preposterous price of around $10 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. The price is a bit of a joke here. [quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]

Veni, vidi, vici - крабовые палочки