PARKSIDE: DECAYED SOUL MANIPULATION

Dev decided not to put in a basic manual save menu feature. No intentions to add one either. Would not recommend.

The game feels like it's an early access title. Problems already come up in the settings menu before even really getting started on playing the game. The sliders for audio volume- and camera speed tend to not work. Sometimes they don't let themselves get dragged around, and occasionally don't even change anything until you exit the menus and move them again. This makes things like getting a comfortable camera speed more tedious than it already is. Speaking of which, it'd be great if those would show the number value for the speed next to the slider, or maybe even have a "snap" for the sliders so that it locks to every 5th number like 60, 65, 70, 75 or whatever to make it easier to have a consistent desired camera speed. Another thing that immediately stood out is the game failing to load custom keybinds from the get-go. Whenever I load into a mission I'm forced to rebind a random action for it to load my set of custom keybinds. The game also lacks proper description of what it is that you're doing when interacting with things. In the first mission for example there are these little robot doggos walking around, and interacting with them lifts them up and alerts all forces around you, which then resulted in a quick death that felt undeserved and cheap. Not a good first impression to say the least. I assumed it'd open a little dialogue like with any other NPC that I've so far interacted with. This wouldn't have happened if this action would be properly labelled in the HUD with text like [TALK], or [PICK UP] or whatever. And in the mission after it when entering the PC shop and taking an item from the shelves, it too immediately alerts all guards. I mean in this case it makes sense since it's stealing. But a [STEAL] text would've made this feel a lot more intentional and make the player think twice before just taking stuff. Something else that I found strange is that for some reason the game is locked to 52 FPS, and I could not find an option to fix it. The graphics opitons are in general pretty lacking. There's only 3 presets to chose from and none of them describe the changes they make. The shading in dark spaces leaves a lot to be desired too. For example in the first mission there's this drug den house with a saferoom upstairs. To reach it I climbed over some trash to reach a small stair-room. Everything there in that small stair-room just looked flat and grey, even the angry drug addicts that were chilling upstairs and then ran towards me inside that little room. Everything there is covered in this flat grey color. At the end of the tutorial map there's a bus standing on the opposite side to the tutorial exit, and that too is covered in this weird layer of grey, although not as dense as the drug den stair room. I know first impressions aren't everything, and with only 65 minutes of playtime I've probably not gotten to the best or most outstanding parts of the game yet. But for a full game release it still feels rather underbaked. However I can see the potential, the inspirations, the passion and the effort that went into this game, and I really do want it to succeed, but with issues, some of them pretty big, like this, in a 1.0 release, ... idk, that's a pretty rough start imo. I'm definitely continueing to keep an eye out for this game. In its current form I don't feel like Parkside is ready to be fully enjoyed yet.