[h1]Stupid[/h1]
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3653257859
[i]There will be a TL;DR at the end.[/i]
~
I am a massive fan of [i]Star Trek[/i]
I am also a massive dork that loves all sorts of nerdy things.
I am a fan of the [i]Roguelite[/i] genre
And, above all, I am absolutely hilarious with an incredible sense of humor. (shut up)
I got this game on deep sale and was looking forward to a silly little adventure with some strategic elements, something that I could get into and have a good time geeking out about my own [i]Star Trek[/i] nostalgia.
I can tell you a few things: it’s funny, it’s over the top, it’s charming, and it’s a fast little adventure.
It is also not worth a second playthrough and there is no skill, strategy, or enjoyment to have beyond this - especially if you’re staring down the barrel of having to pay full price for this short-lived experience.
You certainly will get a few laughs, raise your brow a few times, and generally enjoy your first opening moments with the experience - however, there’s no way around the speed at which the content is chewed through and eventually repeated. There’s just not enough juice to make the squeeze worthwhile over time.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3653272422
I did have a good chuckle - some of the situations truly explore the creativity of the developers and get kookie in a hurry. There’s a certain level of honesty that the game has in its portrayal - it’s adorable, clever, creative, and unashamed to be itself.
The problem comes with the amount of investment the game demands, the content running out, and the overarching “gameplay”, and how these factors devolve into veritable uselessness by the end of your experimentation with the game - with emphasis on “expirimentation”.
What the game truly “demands” of you will be your time - you have to wait for transitionary screens, slow movements, and a lot of text. The dialogue is quippy, interesting, and overflowing with outlandish situations. What ends up happening is part of your brain will turn off and these things will fade into the background; the dialogue will become something to skim, even though it’s really the premium content of the game. The writing is really what you want from this - and it’s entertaining to be sure, the problem comes when you start seeing the same random encounters, distress calls, planet exploration, and other encounters start repeating with the same lines; the brain gets lulled into a fugue state where the eyes simply glaze over the repeated content, and the potential outcomes become insubstantial. It will take too much time and the narrow spaces of fresh air will get sucked out and away.
The content itself runs out rather quickly - especially in comparison to other titles. While you can be a masochist (like me) and truly push beyond - it doesn’t get you much more value from the product overall; the experience runs out of steam after the initial hour and there isn’t a lot to reward you for continuing afterwards. Over the 5 realms you can traverse, you essentially run out of content by the 3rd.
“Gameplay” is very simple: do basically nothing. That’s it. Yes - you get to make choices, and hedge your bets, but the RNG is too much of a major factor to make choices very reliable. Outside of choosing where to go and - in the most surface-level aspects - what to do, the overall results and methods are outside of player control. The fun comes from reading the content, not engaging with it - and your choices, while they start with an interested spark, quickly devolve in quality due to the circumstances.
The experience devolves as the player "Experiments" - the more you do, the less you’ll care. This stems from how the RNG unfolds: the only thing that matters is your points in the corresponding skill, and as the game progresses, the RNG becomes increasingly biased against the player, which must be overcome by hedging your choices more aptly - which means, players don’t actually have choices later on, they simply choose the choice with the corresponding skill to maximize their chances of success … when there is a choice in terms of resources, choose the one that sacrifices the one you have most of, preserve the one you have the least of / gain what you have the least of, don’t go for ones that give what you already have plenty of.
The entire experience becomes algorithmic after some time - you stop reading, because you’ve already read almost everything - and it becomes a practiced dance of choosing the “safest” options, going for the most “valuable” resources, and letting the story generally play out on its own without much input on your part. You can do everything correctly and RNG will put your run to bed … and you can intentionally make mistakes and the game can serve you the W on a silver platter. There’s no telling, especially at the end when the game is evidently more malicious in its gameplay.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3653284204
[b]Orion Trail[/b] is basically a [i]choose your own adventure[/i] book.
That’s the short and long of it.
After a little while, you’re not showing up to be strategic, creative, or interesting on your own - but only here to read about the strategic, creative, and interesting musings of the writers.
Once you get the taste in your mouth though, the writing is a lot of disjointed and meaningless nonsense. It’s not valuable or interesting in any honest way, it’s not much more than a bundle of colorful keys to jingle to keep your restless brain engaged.
And that, in more or less terms, is the sell - and also the drawback. If you’re looking for an hour or so of cute, meaningless space fantasy storytelling that borders on teenage [i]Dungeons & Dragons[/i] homebrew, this is a good title to get on sale.
If you’re hoping for anything more than an hour or so of reading overimagination in print, give this title a pass. You’re not missing out on much aside from some silly micro-stories and gambling.
It’s stupid, and that’s kind of the point - which is why it doesn’t have enough fuel in the tank to get you sailing past the initial hour, but also why you might find those first few stories worth the investment before you uninstall it forever.
~
[h3]TL;DR[/h3]
[b]4/10[/b]
[i]Orion Trail[/i] is a [b]#Sub-Par[/b] game.
It does its job as a choose-your-own-adventure book, and if that’s all you really want then it may be worth taking a look.
If you’re hoping to find something more than an hour's worth of jokes deposited via slot machine, you might as well give it a pass.
