Ino was a game I was quite excited about at first. I voted for it on greenlight the day it was added there, and I waited for it to be finished. I even shared it with a few friends saying this looked like a pretty quality game for an rpg horror game and recommended that they vote for it. Some of them said it looked like it was not actually going to be quality and that it was probably actually poorly made and generic. And it makes me sad to say this, but they were right.
Starting with the goods, Ino actually has some neat graphics and mapping. The soundtrack isn't particularly great (I'm pretty sure most of the music is pre-bought, which is fine) but it isn't horrible. The art is pretty great and stylish, even though some bad coding gets in the way (more on that later). The story seems interesting [i]at first[/i] but ultimately turns out to be disappointing (again, more on that later).
The gameplay itself is sort of generic. You collect keys and items that unlock doors that lead to more keys and items. There are a few chase scenes, ''find the password'' and block pushing puzzles thrown in but those aren't anything new either. There is one puzzle which I liked, though I forgot what it was now. I just remember it had something to do with colors and numbers.
Anyway, one aspect that really drags the game down is the coding (or eventing would be more accurate since this is made in rpg maker). The game is [i]filled[/i] with bugs through and through. For example, you can break the game in the last scene with the bloody knife if you try to leave the room. There's also a corpse which changes graphics when you interact with it (a result of the event not being set to ''direction fix'' in the editor) and there's objects that you can interact with even when you're not facing them, especially near the beginning. The character portraits are below the light effects layer making them look sort of weird and sometimes even get cut off by tiles. Speaking of light effects, if you press F12 and then try to load the game, it will crash. The light effects script being used is to blame for this.
Another really bad aspect of the game is the story. Like I said earlier, it starts off interesting and mysterious. There's some sort of project going on in a hospital. There's multiple characters and as you play you keep wondering how they all tie together. Spoiler, they don't. The story leads absolutely nowhere. It is FILLED with plot holes and doesn't explain ANYTHING. It delivers a generic twist which is really out of nowhere, and again, makes absolutely no sense. Not to mention there's loads of grammar issues in the dialogue (I'm ok with grammar errors in games but this game is asking for money for ♥♥♥♥♥ sake, get a proofreader.)
The characters are all boring and no one is really likeable. They're all just sort of... there. Especially that red haired dude you play as in the prologue and third chapter. Seriously dude, who the ♥♥♥♥ are you exactly?
I mean, I didn't bother getting the true ending or bad ending and just left after the good ending, so maybe it gets explained, but I doubt it.
I've said ''generic'' quite a few times in this review, and that's because it describes Ino well. The story and gameplay is generic, the characters are generic, even the bugs are generic as they're found in a lot of other rpg maker games too. While it's not exactly expensive I still wouldn't really recommend buying Ino.
