Incel Syndrome

Incel Syndrome could have been an awful game but in many ways was saved and elevated by the things it did right. That being said it could only be elevated to mediocre but that’s a far cry from awful. I was expecting it to be some hit job on incel culture but surprisingly the developers actually tried and put in an effort to make an interesting story. They just fell short and certainly didn’t provide the “interactive story” they promise on the store page. The characters were my biggest issue in that they seem like cardboard cutouts. It’s almost as if the developers researched incel culture and had a checklist of tropes that these characters would have but without the understanding of what they had researched to make these characters seem genuine. If I give someone a physics textbook and get them to read it for a few hours I’m sure that they can regurgitate some info back to me but I doubt they really understand much of it. The real shame was the dialogue was a strong point of the game. It was incredibly well written, just the facts and events the dialogue person had to work with seem forced. The descriptions of places as well as the conversations had a great flow to them though. I had said that the developers had failed to make an interactive story and I will explain that. You have zero dialogue choices in the game to make. You get to choose at different points to see the past or present for Sam but it doesn’t really matter. I picked present for all of those choices and after that was done it ran through all of the past story anyway. So really all you get to pick is what order you see the story in. The past sections were really well done in that they did a good job explaining how Sam got how he was and it was very relatable. The epilogue was just strange to me. I almost don’t believe that is the ending because it makes so little sense and ends so abruptly. I was hoping that the Sam was lying and it was just setting up something else but it never happened. It wasn’t sad; happy; shocking; or anything really; it was just there. The music and art were both very well done. The music had a lot of variation and always matched the mood of the writing. The character models as well of the backgrounds had a fantastic art style to them. I played Incel Syndrome on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. You could manually save whenever you want and there are fifty four save slots. Alt-Tab didn’t work. Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.4.1439 Graphics API: OpenGL Disk Space Used: 514 MB Game Version Played: 1.0 GPU Usage: 4-22 % VRAM Usage: 424-799 MB CPU Usage: 3-10 % RAM Usage: 3.2-3.4 GB Incel Syndrome isn’t a bad game but it’s also not a good enough game to recommend. It has enough things I liked about it to make me want to check out other work by the developer but despite this game being free of charge I would give it a pass. I finished the game in two hours and twelve minutes. My Score: 6/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | Gigabyte R9 270 2GB | Mesa 22.0.4 | Garuda Soaring White-tailed-eagle | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.17.9-zen1-1-zen