It's hard to say if this game is bad or just not "for me," but I didn't really get enough fun out of my initial playtime to want to come back for more.
Everything about the presentation(sound, music, graphics, animation) feels extremely generic, like I am playing a bottom of the barrel browser game, so nothing there really sparks joy.
The writing is short and generic, and too much of it just feels lolrandom. lololol lmao ice cream truck in desert sports. That kind of humour. So the jokes fall flat and there's no drama or character development to care about.
Mechanically there is a conceptually interesting game, something very along the lines of Quest of El Dorado(a board game), but due to being singleplayer, instead of being able to challenge the player with competitors, you're instead challenged by RNG, and you're often making relatively blind moves. Oh, yes, there's a BLUE EVENT here where a BLUE CHARACTER might help and then a completely BLUE character only has a 20% chance of a success and an 80% chance of a crippling drawback.
But, you know, I could somewhat live with that if the turn-based combat livened things up instead. But the problem is that it's both almost 100% deterministic(only a few things have a possibility of different effects or missing) and very simple(physical attack, speech attack, special attack for each character's options, and their stats usually make one type of attack an obvious pick over the others) in a way that means barring completely freak incidents like 80% hit chance attacks missing, every fight is determined by your stats and buffs going in, not really by any decisions you make during.
Once again, I could possibly have lived with this if the game was short, snappy and lent itself to quick restarts and playthroughs, but unlike FTL, where everything has a minimum of embellishment and is primarily text, here everything needs to be accompanied by fanfares, menu popups and overwrought, repetitive attack animations, which slow everything down.
Mostly this just made me want to play Quest For El Dorado again. Anyone up for some board games?
