Nocturnal Visitors

Developed by Miguel H. Death and published by Ratalaika Games S.L. Nocturnal Visitors is a kinetic novel disguised as an rpg and at time of writing an incomplete broken mess of a game due to various bugs. In spite of its custom sprite set and interesting visuals, the games story and writing is unoriginal and tedious which when combined with the numerous typos, spelling and grammar errors places it as a tech demo level quality game and feels like something someone learning how to create a game with their tool set would create. This should be a free game on Ratalaika Games website and not on Steam for any price. [h1]Story [/h1] Progressing extremely slowly due to repeated reiteration and trivial minutiae, the plot consists of Jamie a 16 year old young man transported to another world know as Aliorbis where science and magic intertwine. Though magic seems to be the dominate force as science is hardly presence and the characters state they are stealing ideas from “our” earth, not that this really matters as the world building is poorly thought out, with various illogical plot holes hand waved away or just outright ignored. A particular favourite was that the other worlders have no concept of religion in spite of the conversation happening on a holy day where they thank and praise their creator the “Entity” (which might of inspired tales of god in our world), in a church and a character is addressed as a priestess moments later.. This is just one of several infuriatingly inconsistent issues with the setting before even addressing the characters, the man character Jamie frequently behaves like an 11 year old leading to confusion of the characters age whilst playing who fails to spot the numerous inconsistencies with the other characters statements and spends the first few chapters thinking he is in a dream, an overused and obnoxious story telling mechanic. The rest of the cast are no better and are quite unlikable often acting in a frankly stupid fashion but easily can be broken down into various tropes and stereotypes: Locks: Self absorbed Detective unable to commit to relationships be it a long term partner or adopted daughter. Sam: Overly friendly, loud, comic relief with no social graces or restraint, every moment he spoke was painful to read and he spoke often. Jake: Mysterious quiet type, who you may know from your past but you never just ask.. There's others but the sake of brevity I’ll move on, but overall the story consists of frequent long tedious conversations filled with casual small talk and references to things that the player or Jamie hasn’t encountered yet often reiterated a few scenes later. In the two hours or so of playing the key plot elements discovered before the game breaking crash were: • There’s two worlds, one magic one not, Some people can slip between them and they are called visitors. They are rare and ones that can travel freely even rarer. • Everything in the magic world was created by the Entity, he treats them like puppets and actors, he got bored of nice stories and created drama through war and disasters before leaving. Pretty much like the average Sims Player. • The Entity has recently return, people don’t seem to acknowledge that he caused all the disasters. He intends for Jamie to have a large story role. • A law enforcement group called SEEK (formally know as CHASE) hunt for people misusing magic powers and trying to jump over into our world. SEEK can pull visitors (primarily kids) over from our world into theirs and hires them as members. • CHASE and possibly SEEK put their recruits under “Physical and Psychological training” implied to be non consensual tortuous boot camps. • Wishing to leave the agency will have you pursued as a Criminal for knowing sensitive information. • [Questionable due to source] CHASE at some point in time also acted in a similar role as an inquisition, murdering people for doing acts. • [Questionable due to source] The main villain is a former member of CHASE and is seeking to other former members call EXILES from a location called the ABYSS using blood rituals. Now there's some quite predictable routes the story can take from this point on, Jamie isn’t present to learn all of these fact but he is around for enough of them that I gained the impression he was a moron for staying a moment later than he had to. All of this is also undermined by frequent spelling error and grammar issues for basic words like “beginning” and “cloak”. Miguel H. Death also frequently does self inserts at the start of the game via an author foreword, then credits then a reference in game which by this point it had become obnoxious and extremely amateurish. That’s it for now, the game crashing prevents any further progression until its fixed. [h1]Presentation[/h1] The character and background artwork is a drastic improvement over most shovelware rpg maker games, animations are common for fire and important interactive objects. Actual gameplay presentation then its simply serviceable but basic object scale is somewhat nonsensical and its hard to discern characters gender or species due to the simplified blob avatars. There’s a lot of bad things to be said about the outright stupid interior designs in some location and the few maps you get to walk around are bland and boring. The music and sound effect quality is surprising decent but not always appropriate to the scene. There's the additional issue of large file that the animated backgrounds and music bring to the game with the two elements making up most of the 1 gig size of the game. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] Initially interesting but quickly growing tedious, the lack of player interaction or agency makes the entire game a kinetic novel with the majority of play consisting of “10 minute character introspective, walk 3 steps, 10 minute character conversation, repeat.” No real player decisions are available (apart from two abrupt endings for achievements which currently don’t work), there is a brief sudden rhyme game that appears with no instruction or warning out of the blue with no benefit for success or failure. (Which is good because I failed it before I knew what was going on). Practically every scene is a chapter to itself which is terrible for pacing and serves to slow down the gameplay even further and its only benefit is for the auto saves. The developer does state that the autosaves are for emergencies as the story is broken (trying to make a pun on the title) but in reality the game is unstable and buggy and prone to crashing. The sad fact is that often a player cannot save during the frequent long conversations so it makes the devs warning both pointless and irritating whilst also further proving the point that the game should have been created as a visual novel. In addition exploring areas and character conversations are made even more tedious by the fact that: 1. There is often a 1-3 second unskippable delay at the start of each sentence and between them or when its loading emotes. 2. Most objects have long winded over explanatory descriptions of what they are or why they can’t be interacted with. 3. The characters converse with pop ups next to them forcing lots of short sentences with no way to review previous text. The cynic in me almost believes that this a purposeful design choice to drag out gameplay for as long as possible and its nothing more than a ploy to stop refunds. [b] Pros: [/b] - Music and sound effects are actually pretty decent. [b] Cons: [/b] - Unoriginal plot with poorly thought out world building and unlikable characters. - Gameplay grows very tedious and repetitive due to repeated reiteration and trivial minutiae. - Painfully Slow Progression with little player agency. - Large for an RPG Maker Game - Expensive for an RPG Maker Game - BROKEN ACHIEVEMENTS - CURRENTLY UNFINISHED DUE TO BUGS - Provided support email doesn't work.

Funny, spooky and interesting! Looking forward to the upcoming games! More gameplay here: https://youtu.be/rvJBF7_4jQI