The Archipelago

The Archipelago is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This garbage e-book works as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book (which also aren't games). Choosing different tea lets you encounter different versions of the authors imaginary girlfriends/boyfriends throughout the garbage E-book experience. Just as the writing is incredibly painful to read because it's so cringey and pretentious, so to the horrid retro pixelcrap visuals assault the eyes... indeed if there is such a thing as "art" in gaming, this is the opposite of it. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. While this E-book is "free", you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games.

i really enjoyed brewing loads of different tea flavours and getting to know the characters and their stories by doing so!! hopefully there will be a continuation, i would love to learn even more about this world.

[h3]A dialog not a Game[/h3] I forgot to save my draft in notepad, so I'm writing this review all over again. It's still a negative, but now I am more certain. As to why. 2 things: 1. It's not a game it's a very short dialog. You do not really get "choices" that matter, the choices are not really polar. 2. The teas combinations are endless, you can make thousands of different ones but you only get to choose 3, so learning what they do before the game becomes boring is impossible. It's just text based, which in itself is not bad, but the writing does not flow smoothly, mainly because it relies too heavily on you making sense of rather confusing events in the game. [h3]Social Commentary[/h3] You are basically a barista, but you make different teas, you choose the tea for each day. The dialog is all about how people drift apart. [h3]Floating Islands and floating events[/h3] Much like the way the islands in "The Archipelago", the dialog floats and often fractures or splits. It left me hanging a bit often, and I have to say is still a good commentary on real life. The only thing that bring us together are disaster events in our lives, things that touch all of us. Those events bring us together. And much like the Archipelago, these events bring us together, in our sadness. And that's about the extend to the message in the game. If you enjoy reading text in speech bubbles, then this will be a fun game for you, for me, it goes into missables : https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41773079-EmpathyGames/list/114936/

A very calming game. Like the art style.

"Saves every day" but it doesn't. I hate when games remove manual features and just lie like that.

what a neat little game with lovely graphics and an intriguing story line! its small indie games like this that keep my love for gaming alive <3

tea :)