The Future is Ours

When I found this game in the Steam store list as a new release, I decided to put it on my story night schedule for my stream, and we played it tonight. The description and the premise had me wondering just how it would play out and to be real with you... I wish I had not given the slot to this game. As a queer woman myself and a strong advocate for information and engaging educational materials when it comes to queer issues, a person who has created content for this purpose personally, I was interested to see what topics it would cover and how it would address those topics. My own higher education included the academic and anecdotal study of queer issues and human sexuality. If it was a successful playthrough, I would certainly have shared it as a possible helping resource for people. Suffice it to say, I will NOT be recommending this title to anyone in its current state. Issues: - You have to look up the guide to know what the difference in the game mode options is, and the guide references "normal" mode even though neither of the options are labeled "normal." After playing for a bit on gamer mode, I am scared to see what the student version is like. - There are only 3 character options to choose from, and the only apparently non-Caucasian character is a borderline racist Black character offering, where the dev clearly took a generic white female character design and turned its skin color to a terrible grayish brown that reminded me of old Tootsie Rolls. - The game represents the characters as being "students" which I assume, based on the conversations had and such, were meant to be high school students... So why is the bus full of middle aged people with poor posture? - From the start, the story is just completely unrealistic. Whether it be the way they talk to each other or what they talk about, it is so unnatural and absolutely not relatable for anyone, let alone student-aged players. - The game topics as presented in the conversations come across like the devs couldn't afford to pay an actual story creator and instead used a checklist of "common" talking points and concerns for the queer community... Or rather, what I imagine a straight white middle aged person would believe are the concerns. The students speak in an overly formal way about topics that are not believable in their presentation, sharing personal intimate details with this unknown new person that you are playing within moments of meeting. - My chat and I debated whether this was a poorly translated non-English in origin game or if it was written by a cheap AI program, or if it was simply carelessly written in English. I lean towards a poorly translated piece of content because not only are the dialog bubbles riddled with spelling errors and words that are not commonly used in casual conversations, but the game also has syntax problems throughout. Before putting this in front of ANY students, I would strongly urge them to revamp this with a qualified translator or editor. - The content is very, very predictable, almost offensively so. The non-binary period broke our chat because we guessed it well before the detail was mentioned. - The terrible visual coding became unmistakably evident when we went to get meds. The convo said go to the counselors but you just go to the bathroom and get it off the shelf... and it was in the darkened room that the Black character skin teased at effect Black face and the collective response was "Oh... Oh no..." - The graphics, colors, etc are generic but very, very blown out. The brightness is crazy and you cannot adjust it. There are 8(?) graphics settings. When trying to help correct the blowout factor, I clicked around, and since I have a higher end rig, I clicked "max" since most games automatically detect and put me at Ultra settings. When I put this on max though? The game choked, became effectively stuttered and unplayable. The visuals left MORE trails than they already did. It was such a bad choke that I struggled to get my cursor to move over to another, lower level of this list. It is clear that it was not optimized well and that there are probably a lot of inefficient code processes. I honestly don't know why I took the time to give this feedback, other than to perhaps discourage people from seeing this as a valid representation of these topics. Even the things that are valid topics generally are poorly presented. Something like this could hold so much good value if done right, but this was genuinely offensive to me. It felt like a parody almost. Even when the game has the opportunity to feature actual literature and resources, like when you pick up the book, for some reason they chose to use something that doesn't even exist. We searched for it. If it does exist, I certainly couldn't find the English version that is presented in the game. If you want to play a terribly coded, stuttering, generic yet somehow also offensive, stereotypical superficial game about queer issues that features a whole lot of middle-aged bodied students that are in conversations written by someone you won't believe is part of the community, this is your game. Please do not use this in its current state to help anyone learn more info about queer issues, it will only reaffirm very common assumptions and misconceptions people have about how life rolls for many of us. I don't understand how a game could be such a tryhard project while also being so clueless about the topic.