Parasite

the embarrassing state of proud AI sloppening

Honestly, a really interesting game that's incredibly fun. The progressive evolution of your parasite as you build your nest and find out what you really are is just so fun. I found myself getting a bit attached (in both senses) to my particularly good hosts who I managed to make last longer than 5 minutes. Maybe it's my own personal bias, but I found my adventures as my little octopus to be a whole lot of fun before I eventually get violently gunned down by the people hunting for me. My only gripe with the game thus far is the lack of any immediately obvious methods of interaction with those around you, as well as a few seemingly useless skills/knowledge groups such as "Shopping" and "Smoking" that have yet to have a purpose assigned to them. Buildings in most areas aside from the research labs (great work on those, btw) are fairly bare bones and only serve to block line of sight, which bothers me because I feel like with better utilization of them we could avoid problems like the first mission involving us picking up random sheets of paper and books off the floor all over town. An expansion on your ability to interact with other people once we evolve to a state where we can keep our origins as a horrific brain octopus on the down low would be appreciated. The first thing coming to mind would be being able to enter into a restaurant and buying yourself a meal, thus giving you a one use consumable to restore some energy within your host. Expanding upon the item system, allowing us to buy and order things with our host's money, a deeper deception aspect when it comes to trying to hide or cover up your existence, and overall just making the game feel prettier and more alive. I also think that there should be more variety when it comes to hosts. Sure, there are different sprites but overall most hosts hardly have any differences about them. They have randomly assigned stats and skills (massively disappointing when I found out the scientists were all as smart as the average street joe) while the cops and The Group members have a few weapon skills assigned to them. On top of that, we only get one selection of animal host in the form of a dog, without any abilities aside from being a quick and easy host to grab in order to extend your life span. I would like it if there was more variety in animal life within the game, with some special abilities given the host and/or learnable mutations from them. While I haven't quite tested it out, I assume dogs are faster and have the innate ability to bite people, which at the moment is enough (although I would like to be able to bark and act cute to try and draw unsuspecting victims into an alley way). Touching into the mention of The Group taking care of supernatural, paranormal, and mythological threats, it'd be interesting if labs and secret facilities (obtained from probing the minds of Group Members) contained captured and imprisoned creatures of paranormal origins that had special abilities unique to their body. It'd be incentive for building up your nest and capturing special host bodies that could be used to have a fighting chance against the attacks from the Group, which does bring me to my next point Combat needs a bit of adjustments. Aside from sometimes finding myself unable to fire guns at seemingly random times, I find that one turn of shooting a guy is a lot less effective against 4 guys shooting you all at once with assault rifles. At the very least, I would like it if we always had the option for an emergency take over, since combat is essentially decided by whether or not you can take over another host after one of them have been gunned down and I'd like to at least have a chance. Although, I suppose I'm viewing combat through the lens of somebody who can't consistently fire a gun due to bugs, so I might be biased. You honestly have an amazing game in the works here, and I'm excited to see it live up to it's fullest potential!

Game is decent, but now they are using ai art for a lot of stuff :C

I hope you're still working on this, dev

UI is terrible. And despite being quite simple, easily mapable to a controller, thats not done by the dev. Such useful additions such as "affinity" which supposedly suggests are stronger connection to the host, but is ultimatly useless. sure, you can theoretically "talk" to the host, but that system is a useless mess, and ultimatly affinity just costs your parasite (and ever generation afterward!) permanent health. Loosing bases aswell. And you need to build bases to fullfill later missions. And bases atrackt your enemies to destroy them. This game is a jumbled mess, with little to no rewards, and the rewards you get ingame often are outweight by their ridiculous downsides. Control system is also terrible. Sure, some resistance is ok to have, but you get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over by hosts you have high control over constantly. And the detection is also a joke, even fully evolved cmouflage gives you only a neglible bonus. Note to the dev*Challenge* is not synonymous with *terrible game design*. Updates at glacial pace. Oh and the latest update? almost entirely AI slop instead of improving the game.

A fun game definitely worth the price although personally one aspect I am not a fan of the "Group" (Your main threat) just seems to appear from nowhere often feeling like it doesn't really give you a chance to develop your habitats and play into the development of the parasite. I feel like this wouldn't be so bad if you had certain locations like for example the uninhabited regions being a lot harder for the group to locate your habitats but with the downside of having to travel so far to get hosts adding its own risk. That aside this is great game which I will look forward to playing more and more.

It's a good game, lots of potential to be amazing!

Really cool concept! Tricky at first but gets real fun once you get the hang of it.