Orion: A Sci-Fi Visual Novel

Не люблю визуальные новеллы и аниме, зато люблю научную фантастику. Решил проверить сочетание этих элементов на этой игре. По-началу было несколько скучно, но потом сюжет меня захватил, анимешную стилистику перестал замечать, а неожиданные повороты сюжета в нескольких контрольных точках затмили скудость интерактивности жанра визуальных новелл. Определённо стоит попробовать любителям НФ, но при одном "НО". ЕСЛИ ВЫ ЗНАЕТЕ АНГЛИЙСКИЙ ЯЗЫК, ибо русского перевода нет. Нужно знать хотя бы на 4 с минусом, чтобы лезть в словарь не за каждым словом, иначе процесс может поднадоесть. С другой стороны - хороший повод вспомнить и подтянуть свои навыки ин. языка. + отличный непредсказуемый НФ сюжет, в который неплохо вписываются ваши переигровки с сохранений. + 9 вариантов концовки, 9-ый откроется только если вы открыли 8 предыдущих + движок игры на питоне - нет стим карт и достижений - нет русского языка - нашёл 2 некритичных глюка [u]Глюк 1[/u]: игра не запускается из стима, но запускается с помощью скрипта Orion.sh [u]Как обойти[/u]: в параметрах запуска игры указать "LD_LIBRARY_PATH= %command%" [u]Глюк 2[/u]: в полноэкранном режиме при переключении на другое окно, в игру уже не вернуться [u]Как обойти[/u]: использовать оконный режим, чтобы можно было переключаться на переводчик, или использовать для перевода смартфон и играть в полноэкранном режиме. CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4765T RAM: 16G SSD: KINGSTON SUV300S37A120G Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4G (nvidia-current) OS: MagOS Linux 2016.64

Well, I can't truely recommend this game, neither I can say that it's bad. Still I give it a thumb down as it dissappointed me, though I'm sure that many ppl would like this game very much. First things first; I love the art style. This game has very beautiful drawings, especially with it's backgrounds. Also the voice acting is very great. In the first moments I fell in love with this game. The story seemed interesting too and thought it would be a vn I could love the whole gameplay through. But here's the big why I gave it a thumb down: The story rushes very fast. It seems like it has a big story which would've needed more time. Characters turned from friends to fiends, sometimes choices didn't matter, in other times you never get to see the character ever again until you start a new run. It leaves quetions open and not in a good kind of way. My first endings were like cut and left me confused. It wasn't a good or a bad ending, it just.. ended. And in a very confusing way. As I'm used to games like the Zero Escape games, I thought I have to find some more endings to go even further but that's not the case. You have to chose the right choices in case you want a real ending and not only a game over. When I play VN I expect them to deal with my choices. But you have to choose them in the right order and if you mess one up, you're game over. I don't want to open a guide for completing a VN and I'm not patient enough to check everything over and over again just to hope that I didn't mess it up this time and this for 9 endings in total. In the end I got one good ending as I followed the guide but that just wasn't any fun at all, so I quit doing this for all endings. Again, I truely wanted to love this game as it has so much potential. And I feel sorry for it that I couldn't enjoy it the way it could've been enjoyable.

I just find it boring? Why? -You probably won't care 'bout the characters -Some of the voice acting,well it sounds hurried and the voice of a character has the same voice as a toxic kid -You get the feeling to jumping through time, in not a good way.It's like you read a book,the jump a few pages,miss some stuff and here you go. -No sympathy for the MC, just a whining kid I played many novels,but i really disliked this one,even though i like Sci-fy with rpg elements. Can't recommend it even for free.

In Orion you play as Sam, an intelligent 16-year-old boy with a knack for computers. Sam lives peacefully with his brother Louca, in Section 6 of one of the many floating cities in Earths orbit. Reoccurring nightmares, however, has made life rather difficult to deal with, and suddenly getting a strange message from an unknown person named Virgil isn’t helping at all. “The setting sun rises as the moon weeps.” I didn’t hate Orion but I didn’t much like it either, and while I prefer to give it a “meh” vote, that’s impossible so this review is negative on the basis that if I could have gone back in time to stop myself from getting it, I would have. The best thing about Orion is definitely it’s art, and the voice acting honestly wasn’t too bad either. However, there are a few things I don’t like about this game. [u]First[/u] – you need to play eight different endings to reach the true ending. [u]Second[/u] – It’s hard to reach any of the endings because if you deviate from the path even once, it doesn’t count so following a guide is necessary. [u]Third[/u] – all of the endings are incredibly underwhelming. The true ending is as mediocre as every other. TL; DR: If you had an hour and thirty minutes of free time and are looking for a fun/interesting Sci-fi VN to play and pass some time… it’s not this.

Good points: -Game UI is rather nice -Great CG art, too bad they coudn't use the same artist for the character sprites. The Bad: -Very rushed plot, it gave us the barebones of what the story is but did not do much to flesh out it's setting or really explain it's plot well. -The true end was particularly rushed. We don't even see how the MC fixed the situation but that it'll be hard and we just see the aftermath. -Characters are not very well fleshed out or well-written. You wont find yourself caring much for them. Overall, I would not bother to get this game at it's price. If you really want to try it out, wait for a steam sale or a bundle.

[h1] Pretty bad just skip it. [/h1]

meh

The writing is horrible. Whatever story this game does have is half-assed and sloppily executed. Some of the dialogue regarding forgiving certain people is so ‘horrible fanfic’ level and terribly unrealistic with how easy the ‘forgiveness’ part is dished out with no tension, conflict, doubt or even remotely trying to talk about the subject at hand before granting the forgiveness. The plot is very rushed, barely giving you the time to get to know any of the characters or the politics of Orion at all, before launching you headfirst into a convoluted story where all of the side-characters refuse to properly explain anything at all. You know, in stories like fantasy and sci-fi, the backdrop is half of what makes the story interesting. Not properly showing it off is a huge mistake. There’s just too big of a difference in skill between the CG artist and the character artist. One makes the characters look like adults, the other makes them look like tall children (or like a ten-year old with breast, you know, that girl bully). It was the CG’s that made me think I was going to play an adult character, only to find out afterwards that the MC is a minor. In fact, I didn’t even realize that the character art and the one in the CG were the same person at first and kept waiting for this boring child to get off the screen so the ‘real story’ could start. I really don’t like young adult stuff, not now that I’m an adult. I prefer to play as an adult, which given the CG art I thought I was getting in this game. My mistake. To be honest, I didn’t care about a single character in this story and started skipping through the story just to get to the endings, which were equally unsatisfying. Not a single ‘ending’ ever showed the consequences of your actions. (Well, maybe the bad ones kind of did, which is why they were only slightly more entertaining than the rest of the story.) This is a huge fail as a writer. You want your readers to stay engaged in the story and connecting to your characters, not skipping ahead and thinking they don’t give a damn if the whole space station blows up right now. Ideally, you also want to write a satisfying ending that shows the resolutions and the consequences thereof (not skipping over them!), whether that ending is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (aka ends happily or unhappily). This game failed on all three. It even failed on the art. Of course, there’s always going to be some differences between the character art and the CG art in a visual novel. But here, the differences were so great that the character weren’t even (or only barely) recognizable between the styles. Do I really have to spell out how bad that is? The bullies suddenly becoming Sam’s friends is some higher order BS. I’ve been bullied, alright? They don’t just stop on a whim, no matter what you say to them. Virgil felt like the author’s self-insert, guiding you along to the ‘true path’ (the ending they wanted), while resetting if you’re on the ‘wrong’ one before even letting you properly see where that path and its consequences would lead. Because of the way the 'endings' were done, it ultimately makes any 'choices' you make feel empty and meaningless, since you're in essence always heading for the 'true' ending and any of the other 'endings' aren't really an end at all. You also don’t want your protagonist to come off as a whiny brat, that generally doesn’t endear them to your readers.

I wish I could recommend this visual novel. It had sone great concepts, the music and sound design are decent, and there was so much potential. The voice acting is also fairly good. I hold a particular fondness for Virgil. But the endings are dissatisfying, especially the true one. Its execution started off fine, and I commend the alternate solution Sam comes up with, but shortly thereafter it rushes straight to the epilogue without showing how things went down, which is just lazy and poor writing and totally anticlimactic and disappointing. Most of the characters felt flat and not very well fleshed out. There also should have been more reflection of the MC's ability to retain memories across timelines, like unlockable extra lines as you finish more endings. I also have a complaint about the artwork. Many, actually. Mari's sprites make her eyes look really weird due to the art style. Sam's sprites make him look way younger than he's supposed to be, in a way that doesn't match how the CGs DO manage to accomplish making him look his age. Also the differing art styles between the sprites and CGs are much more distracting than anything else. The same character looks way too different between the two art styles, creating a sloppy production effect. All in all, this visual novel had too much potential flushed down the toilet due to sloppy writing and execution. I don't regret playing through this but it is not worth full price. Only buy if it's severely discounted or you receive as a gift. Or if you have a huge boner for plots that utilize timeline shenanigans and like sassy AIs who've mastered the art of sarcasm.

Orion: A Sci-Fi Visual Novel is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. This E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this. There's a sci-fi theme to this, so when comparing actual books that this is worse than, we have the entire body of science fiction that was ever published, so that's a mean feat. It really is badly written. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. The poor quality of this E-Book is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak reader number was only 8 readers. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only reader activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality E-Book is to be expected. You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". They're seriously charging $5 USD for a crap E-book that would never be published in print because it's so poorly written. Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games.