The Princess Factory

I'm very much on the fence about this game, and it is not because it is a bad game. I hope very much that the creator of this game sees my review, so that whatever the creator identifies as, they might take something from it. I am someone who enjoys horror games. I enjoy horror movies and horror stories. Normally, I am not easily unsettled. I was not unsettled here, but I wish I was. The gameplay is simple, and it looks like a Flash game from the mid to late 2000s, so it feels a little nostalgic for me, having grown up in the era of Newgrounds.com. However, when it comes to the story of this game, I really enjoy how the story is portrayed. You get most of the story through the anomalies you're trying to prevent from getting into the park. While some of the story is presented to you between the days that you are working, most of it comes from the anomalies themselves, mostly from the data cards and the audio files that the animatronics have. Speaking of story, I'm not going to say that the story was some kind of masterpiece. It was not. But I'm also not going to compare it to something like the first Silent Hill, which had large groups of people working on it and giving feedback, when this game was made by one person. So as far as the basic themes of the plot go, for what it is, it is simply serviceable. Not bad, but serviceable. The gameplay is simple as a point-and-click game. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that for what it is. Yet the experience has left me wanting. I am not fully satisfied with what I have with this game. I would have liked so much more. It feels lacking in content. I feel like this is the kind of game that, if it had a larger budget and a bigger crew, could have gone deeper and could have been a lot more interesting than it already is. The fact that I enjoyed it, even though it left me wanting and did not unsettle me the way I had hoped such a simple horror game would, says something. Most games of this nature would simply be played once and then returned. But I'm not going to do that. I would like for this person to keep my money and hopefully put it toward another great project, or even an expansion of this game. I really feel like the whole evil animatronic thing has been done a lot thanks to Five Nights at Freddy's, a game series that I proclaim as only having one good game, but this is done in a much more bizarre fashion. This game has a lot of undertones that really deserve to be explored further than they are in the game. I can understand having certain elements of a game be vague, but I don't think we get enough information. In terms of stability, as far as I am aware, there are only two glitches. One glitch I know about because I read the developer's comments on a video on YouTube, which is how I found out about this game. The developer said that a player could get killed when it was not supposed to happen. The other glitch is one that I discovered. If you exit to the desktop, the game just stops working and you have to close it out and restart it. I went back to my desktop because I had forgotten to close Discord. Once I started going back to the home screen, the game was simply not functional. The audio was still going, and options were still being highlighted, but I could not click on anything. Overall, this was a fun time, and I wish that this was a slightly bigger project. Sometimes, something that leaves you wanting is compliment enough to show that something with great potential is here.