HOLY ♥♥♥♥, STAY AWAY. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.
(TLDR: This is a VISUAL NOVEL that does not disclose it includes PERMADEATH that erases your save file (virtually unheard of in this genre). Even worse, permadeath can EASILY be triggered by a pointless & repetitive QTE that interrupts you continuously throughout the story. And while that story is reasonably entertaining, it's also pretty forgettable, and nowhere near good enough to justify putting up with everything wrong with this game.)
This game had some serious issues when it was released into Early Access that prevented me from recommending it. Now that the game's been finished, and the devs responded to my original review claiming they had fixed the issues I talked about, I thought I'd give it another try.
Boy, was that a mistake.
Not only did they not fix most of the UI & accessibility issues, they added a whole new level of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the player over. This is a visual novel. You play it for the story; hell, calling it "playing" is a stretch, it's mostly reading. But for some reason, the devs thought it would be a good idea to add in some pointless busywork you have to do WHILE reading to constantly interrupt you, distract you, and generally get in the way of being able to enjoy the story.
And, because they clearly hate their players, they put this annoying distraction on the arrow keys. So you have to click through dialog with the mouse, which most people will do with their right hand, and at the SAME TIME, hit the correct arrow key on your keyboard when prompted... which you would also normally do with your right hand. But you can't have your right hand in two places at once, so either you're quickly moving your right hand back and forth, or awkwardly stretching your left arm across and bending your wrist at an unhealthy angle. Either way, it's uncomfortable and the constant interruptions make it hard to get into the story.
To add insult to injury, if you miss a few of the pointless arrow prompts, whether due to the awkward key bindings or because you were busy trying to ACTUALLY READ THE VISUAL NOVEL YOU PAID FOR, it's game over with PERMADEATH. That's right, PERMADEATH in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ visual novel, due to what is essentially an annoying & repetitive QTE that has no other affect on the game. There's no restoring from a previous save or restarting the chapter... The chance to finish reading your story is just ripped away from you with absolutely no recourse, making all the hours you've invested into it a complete and utter waste of your time.
You have to go back and re-read the story you literally JUST read over from the very beginning. And the story was decent... But not good enough to re-read a couple hours later and not be bored AF.
WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. ♥♥♥♥. were these people THINKING?
I don't think I've ever encountered a visual novel that is so actively hostile to the player experience. It's like the devs are going out of their way to prevent you from enjoying what they've created.
I should have refunded this instead of waiting out Early Access just because I thought there was potential. Not only have they not improved the game, they've made it so much worse than it started. I am honestly so pissed I spent money on this.
What an absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ waste.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
Seems like this story has potential, but I can't recommend purchasing it in its current state.
First, the overall user experience is really rough to the point of being incomplete, with even basic fundamentals like a settings menu missing. That means there's no way to adjust the music volume, text speed, controls, or anything else. While those were only an annoyance for me in this case, if you have accessibility needs relating to these features, this game is probably unplayable.
I also found the use and placement of choices awkward. 9 times out of 10, there are no choices, just a "continue" button that you have to hit after every line of dialog to the point that it starts to become a rhythm on autopilot. But when there are choices, they appear in the same place and look exactly the same as the "continue" button. Because of this poor UI design, I know there were a few choices that I didn't realize were there until I had already clicked... some choice. While none of the choices seemed to make much difference that I could tell, I sure hope none of them turn out to be important later.
On a similar note, the "interactive" comics generally contain one decision you have to make, and in the second comic this required making a choice by clicking on one of two comic panels. The problem here is these panels did nothing to communicate what you were actually choosing, so the one I clicked turned out to be totally opposite to what I intended. Having unclear choices is bad enough, but the issue is compounded when the developer chooses to omit any sort of rollback or save slots option, making it impossible for the player to fix any mistakes caused by the poor UI design.
Second, the game defaulted to an unknown language when it first started. Not a big deal, I was able to spot the English button easily enough, but I've never seen that happen before on any other game. I don't know if other games are able to detect this from the player's Steam profile or if games just default to English because Steam is an English-oriented platform, but either way there must be some best practice the developers failed to follow.
Additionally, there are some confusing word and formatting choices made (like referring to what appears to be a grown woman as a "young girl," and using double quotes for the protagonist's thoughts, but not for spoken dialog) that give me the impression this story may not have originally been English.
Finally, I understand this game is being sold at a discounted rate because it's only the first 3 episodes of a planned 12. So when I loaded in and saw three columns of missions to unlock, I figured each column must be an episode. Each mission only takes a few minutes to play through, but with three whole episodes made up of 3 or more missions each, I figured that would be a decent amount of starter content. It would at least give me something to do for the evening.
But no. Each mission is what they consider an episode. Those 3 columns aren't episodes, they're "acts" of the whole series. Only the first 3 missions that make up Act 1 are live right now (plus a couple brief comics that bookend the actual game play), so there are only 40-ish minutes of game play. Is $4 a reasonable price for that little game play? That's not a great value, especially when the game play is this rough.
This game is in Early Access, but the description gives the impression it's finished through the first 3 episodes. It doesn't feel finished, unless these people have just never made a game before. I'm holding out hope that they'll fix some of these glaring issues alongside the promised content updates, but for the time being, given the roughness and lack of content, I can't recommend this game, even at the discounted EA price.
