everybody dead, whodunnit? not only is this a question regarding the story of [b]inexplicable deaths in damipolis[/b], but it also applies to the game itself. everything is pretty much broken, and I guess people mentioned in the credits dunnit. they had one whole tester, which explains a lot, and I'm sure kickstarter backers are ecstatic about the result.
the gist is, 12 guests die at a mansion, you're one of them and somehow come back to life(ish) to figure out what happened and why, made all the more difficult by the fact that you can't remember anything. and the game being broken, but that shouldn't be part of the deal. guests are all represented by dummies (or maybe in this world dummies are people), and they're annoyingly referred to as dumans.
the only way to escape is by finding four totems, one of your own self, plus a bunch of tarot cards, then decide which cards to assign to which totem, followed by placing the totems where you think they should be placed and opening a chest for some reason. there are [b]6 chapters[/b] to go through and reach one of multiple endings based on decisions.
there have been [b]4 patches since release in mid-december[/b], supposedly fixing all sorts of issues, including a [b]major language mix-up[/b], but the first thing the game asks you is to choose a language and even that is buggy, it's partly what you chose, partly spanish. text in general falls into 3 categories when choosing english: [b]actual english text, spanish text, or 'placeholder'[/b], which is an english word at least.
[b]controls are a mess as well[/b]. in true 1st-person puzzler fashion you can walk around with wasd, look around with the mouse and interact with left click, and that's about all the properly working things in the game. [b]no mouse cursor anywhere[/b] (except a crosshair while walking around), only mouse wheel to move the selection, which is incredibly uncomfortable, plus left click to select and right click to cancel.
[b]keyboard is even worse.[/b] no prompts anywhere, and if they do make a rare appearance, they're only for controllers, so I [b]had to try every key to find out the non-rebindable and incredibly unintuitive control scheme[/b]. in the main menu only arrows work, wasd doesn't, enter or esc don't do anything anywhere, you can press 'e' or 'f' to select something in the main menu itself, but once settings are brought up, only 'e' works, plus the very convenient and logical 'b' to close the settings screen, and nothing but left click works for starting the game proper.
while in the game, 'i' is inventory, only closable with right click, 'm' brings up a few icons that can only be navigated by the arrows and selected with 'f'. inventory is one of them, tarot for the cards is another, plus notes (collectible pieces of lore), and settings can be brought up from here as well, which is good news, except now only 'f' works if you want to change something. the game is nothing if not consistent. [b]all these should have hotkeys and proper mouse controls.[/b]
and not only do you need [b]multiple keypresses to bring up a simple pause menu[/b], the control scheme is only shown for controllers, either in spanish or with 'placeholder' everywhere (funnily enough, the same thing is fine when it appears as a loading screen), and if you go back to the main menu, the entire opening monolog has to be skipped again, sentence by sentence. going back there doesn't save progress, but there's a [b]save and exit option, leading back to the desktop[/b] instead of the more reasonable main menu. so while saving anytime is technically possible, it's done in an unacceptable way, nicely matching the rest of the game.
settings would be mostly fine otherwise, if only they worked without issues: separate volumes, brightness, contrast, languages and graphics detail, but no resolutions or windowed mode, nor axis flips for the mouse or field of view settings.
same goes for the game, it could've ended up being something cool if at least a few half-competent people were on the development team, but it remains to be seen if this is as good (i.e. catastrophic) as it gets or we'll get to see the game's real potential, which very well might be just that, a relatively good idea executed badly even with the kinks ironed out. needless to say, until then [b]stay very far away from this steaming pile and the people behind it[/b]. I've seen some messy launches, but this is definitely up there with the worst of them. oh, and while messing around, I managed to get the same achievement about 5 times. definitely unlocked that one.
