[quote][h1]TL;DR[/h1]
[spoiler]This game feels like it belongs in [b]Early Access[/b] for at least another year if not more. It may or may not get great eventually but in its current state I cannot possibly recommend this to anyone.[/spoiler][/quote]
[h1][i]»This has to be a dream... right?«[/i][/h1]
[i]Parachronism: Order of Chaos[/i] tries to combine the farming and social sim aspects of the [b]Harvest Simulation[/b] genre [i](Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley)[/i] with an ancient Chinese setting and a third-person [b]Action-RPG[/b] with similarities to [i]Dragon Nest[/i].
While that premise/intention is interesting enough and has a lot of potential in theory, the game, at least at the time of writing this, sadly fails to deliver and feels not only unpolished but also unfinished.
[h1]🎮 Gameplay[/h1]
The core gameplay aspects in [i]Parachronism[/i] are [b]dialogue[/b] with the various NPCs, [b]farming[/b] and [b]combat[/b] but each of them are held back by an unintuitive UI and unnecessarily complicated controls - not to mention the various game-breaking bugs. Sadly you cannot reassign the keyboard commands. Worse than that, there isn't even a way to quit the game unless you count [Alt]+[F4]... also, while I'm at it, I'd like to point out that it takes around 30-40 minutes to first get an opportunity to save the game, so if anything happens that prevents you from progressing (and it probably will), you can start all over.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1951752198
[list]
[*][b]Dialogue[/b]
The dialogue system in [i]Parachronism[/i] is pretty by the numbers but even with this I have some gripes. You get some selections that can occasionally steer the conversations in certain directions and other than that it's mostly decently written text-only dialogue. What holds this back, though, is the aforementioned UI, as you cannot progress the text by any means except for clicking a small sphere in the bottom right corner. While this is really just a small quality of life thing, I would've preferred to advance the text by pressing the spacebar, enter key or just clicking anywhere inside the dialogue box. What also makes the game feel a bit unfinished in this aspect is that some rare lines of text are actually voiced but there simply isn't any consistency involved. The amnestic protagonist isn't voiced and when you first encounter voiced dialogue it feels very much out of place, the volume isn't consistently normalized and not even that character has all of their lines voiced. It's just one more aspect of the game that feels like it should be in a pre-alpha build but nowhere near a "finished" product.
[*][b]Farming[/b]
This is where the game feels the least incompetent but once again the UI and the controls make it less than perfect. Much like in the aforementioned [i]Harvest Moon[/i], [i]Stardew Valley[/i] and other games in the genre, you plant your seeds, water them, watch the plants grow taller until the fruit has matured and can be collected. To plant a seed, you approach a tilled tile on your farm and hit the interact key (Enter) to open a selection interface of all the different plants. Sadly, this interface doesn't tell you what and how many seeds you actually possess. Choosing a seed you do not have will close the interface and tell you that you lack the seeds, so you either have to check your inventory beforehand or get there via trial and error. To water your seeds/plants, unless you have a bottle, you need to interact with a nearby well to fill up an invisible bucket with water, tell the game that you don't want to keep the water in a bottle (since you don't have one), open your inventory, equip the bucket, walk over to the tile you wish to water and press Enter. If you accidentally equipped the bucket, you may discover that the equipment screen doesn't allow you to simply unequip it again. Instead you have to close all menus and hit the [noparse][U][/noparse] key - which you cannot possibly know unless you chose to play the tutorial and also memorized the key, since it's nowhere to be found in your UI. Also, since one bucket holds enough water for two tiles of farmland, you'll be repeating those steps [i]a [b]lot[/b][/i].
[*][b]Combat[/b]
Yes, there is combat in this game, but it sure ain't pretty. When you start the game, you'll find yourself unarmed in terms of both weapons and magic. Gaining experience requires you to defeat enemies, so you'll start by fighting them with your bare hands. The problem is that the attack animations of most enemies are hardly existent and you just find yourself flashing red periodically upon touching them. Another problem is that the basic attack is mapped to the 0 (zero) key, which is counterintuitive to say the least. And then there's the animations...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1951734180[/list]
[h1]📖 Story / Presentation[/h1]
Without spoiling anything, the story in [i]Parachronism[/i] is rather simple and only serves to get the protagonist launched into a strange world as a POV character. She wakes up in a Chinese village in ancient times and is a member of a royal family for some reason. While she retains her name, gender and age, she is now a part of the community there. It's a bit like the premise of [i]Graveyard Keeper[/i] only everyone seems to remember the protagonist here... and it's not as funny... and it's not voluntarily funny most of the times it is funny...
[h1]🎼 Soundtrack[/h1]
While the soundtrack isn't offensively bad in any way, the village loop gets old very quickly and is what you'll be hearing most of the time. My suggestion, if you desperately want to play this for some reason, would be to turn the game's music down to 0 and play the [i]Wenjia[/i] soundtrack in the background - that is, I would recommend that if you could change any settings in this game... oh well.
[h1]💻 Graphics / Art-style[/h1]
You can easily see what kind of aesthetic the developers were going for and I desperately wanted to like it, because I am very much into Asian decor. Sadly, what could've looked like the world of [i]Kung-Fu Panda[/i] looks bleak due to a low polygon count in the environment, washed out, low-resolution textures, too starkly saurated colors and a nearly total lack of shaders and other "advanced" effects. To make things worse, the camera often clips through walls, especially when you're inside one of the few open buildings, and the UI is a total mess as well. Where you can advance dialogue by clicking a small orb, similar orbs on tutorial screens are purely decorative and you need to close them with the [Esc] key.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1951758888
[h1]💰 Business Model[/h1]
[quote][u]Classic:[/u]
Buy the game, play the game.
No paid DLCs, items, lootboxes.[/quote]
[h1]📋 Conclusion[/h1]
[i]Parachronism: Order of Chaos[/i] is a nice package of ideas executed absolutely pathetically. If this game was marked as [b]Early Access[/b] as it should be, I would wait for it to improve before giving my judgement but it just isn't. Selling this game as a "complete" product, without any word of warning, is a scam. Should this game be finished at some point, I will give it another chance, as I enjoy the ideas behind it - until then: [b][u]Avoid![/u][/b]
[quote]This product was reviewed using a free key provided by the developer.[/quote]
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/37072886][quote]If you're looking for more quality reviews like this, follow our curator page, [b]Devils in the Detail[/b].
