Mega Mall Story

[h2]It's kind of rough[/h2] I loved flash games like this when I was a kid, and I'd been looking for some of the old ones I'd used to play, or any modern ones in the same vein, but nothing, this is the closest thing I ever found going by the trailer, so I decided I might as well get it in the hope of recapturing the feeling of playing those games as a kid. Unfortunately, either I've grown up and am no longer capable of enjoying the same type of games I used to, or this game just didn't capture it for me. When playing this game, the most suitable descriptor I could think of for it was "an idle game that doesn't want you to idle", and that's not because there's anything of interest going on, it's just pop up after pop up after pop up that you have to click through to get the game to continue. I like some linear progression, I really do, I think it can do wonders for a game when it's done right, I think it can be a great vehicle for storytelling, it can be useful for natural power creep as a game goes on... This game does not do linear progression well. This game feels like sitting around and waiting until you can do anything else, and the worst part is, you don't even unlock the fast game speed until you've pretty much beaten the game, you don't need it by that point, so you've got to just sit through it all at normal speed. There are 2 big things that jumped out to me upon starting the game, as far as I could tell, on the main menu there's no settings button, there's 2 buttons that look a bit like they might be settings, no, just opens some steam tabs while you're trying to play, pretty sure they're to do with whether you're using a keyboard or controller, and try as I might, after pressing one to try and change my settings, it'd only ever tell me the buttons to do things for a controller, meanwhile I'm playing on keyboard and mouse, so I just have to experiment and figure out what the hell the button is on keyboard, and if you open the settings there's no "keyboard/controller" setting, nope, there's some useless stuff but nothing actually useful in there. The font was the other thing to jump out at me, you don't typically think about a game's font unless they've done a bad job with it in some way, or you work with fonts or graphic design outside of gaming. This game does a bad job with it's font; I don't want to go too hard on them for their choice of font, doesn't seem like a natively English speaking time, fair enough, but it really doesn't help the case, it makes the game look so much cheaper and more like some slop pumped out for a quick buck. The other games in this studio's catalogue do not help their case at least in appearance, countless reused assets, the same font, reskinning the same game under a new title multiple times, it really makes me worry that those games I used to love aren't made anymore, or if they are, they aren't made out of love or passion, or just for the fun of creating something, maybe I'm wrong, I hope I'm wrong, I hope all their other games are bangers, I hope they all actually iterate on what came before, learn from it, and don't just reskin the same game and call it something new, but that doesn't look like the case to me, which saddens me because I can see the potential in games like this. I probably will give the second "Mega Mall Story" a go, in the hope that I'll witness some positive changes within it, learning from this game and their others to create something better, but I worry that may be futile and I'll just be wasting my time; still, I've wasted more time in worse games, this one at the very least didn't bombard me with microtransactions or have endless achievements unattainable without wasting months/years of your life or spending hundreds of $/£/€. If you really see something in this game and want to try it, the only thing I can say is get it on sale, because as cheap as it is, there's not enough to justify the price, I got it for 64% off and I still feel like I spent too much on it.