The puzzle design is good, the art style is appealing, the music if pleasant, and there are no game-breaking bugs aside from one challenge room which has a softlock. All that said, the story and characters are such massive pitfalls in comparison that I really struggle to recommend the game even with those other good aspects. Being a "killing game" type setup, there are 15 characters, including the player, and unfortunately almost none of them are anything close to memorable or fleshed-out. This isn't because the character concepts are bad, you just spend next to no time speaking to any of them at all. Even the optional dialogue sequences you can have with them are frustratingly short, oftentimes only a few sentences long and usually revealing only shadows of the character's actual personality. It felt frustrating to me when I was playing, as I was trying to get to know these characters better so I could be invested in them and care for them, but it felt like the game was just refusing me every time, trying to railroad me back onto the puzzles. The puzzles are good, but without time spend getting to know and care about the characters, a killing game setup fundamentally does not work. I felt nothing watching the brief cutscene in which a few characters die because I basically knew nothing about them despite being several challenges deep into the game. You don't even get to see the characters' reactions to their teammates being killed, and the cutscene it happens in is maybe 5 seconds long. It's practically a footnote. It should *matter*, but the story basically treats it like it doesn't, and if the story doesn't even treat its characters dying with any importance, why should I, as the audience, care? It feels very mismanaged.
The overarching lore spread throughout the story is interesting but utterly impenetrable. Terms are thrown around and barely explained at best and not explained at all in most cases. Having gotten the game's true ending I can't even tell you more than, spoilers, [spoiler]it was a simulation designed to test... something involving resistance to "The Mass". The people you were with might not have even been real, and the "girl" you spent the whole time trying to find was apparently just an invention of the simulation's creators to coax you into breaking free. A "it was all a simulation" twist can work, but when your characters are completely unexplored, the lore isn't explained properly, you spend the whole game being confused, and the singular driving force of the plot is revealed to have been made up, what exactly are you left with? Nothing, really.[/spoiler] There are a lot of good ideas here, I just really wish they were executed better. I don't think the game is beyond saving, but that would have to happen via a content update that alters and adds things in the middle of the game as it as, as opposed to tacking something on at the end as a "part 2". Side note, Kickstarting a project (which I backed, for whatever it's worth), developing it for nearly 8 years, and delivering a product with a story this poorly executed with a vague promise of a "part 2" later instead of delivering a finished product is, at minimum, in poor taste, even if done without malicious intent.
I do genuinely believe there are a lot of good ideas here, but as it stands, the game needs a major rewrite, with a substantial amount of character-focused time inserted, ideally in-between challenges. I don't take too much issue with the level of dialogue that's present within the challenges themselves. Keeping it short and to the point there seems fine to me. But outside of that, there needs to be scenes where the characters actually talk to each other. Not optional 3 sentence monologues when you walk up to a character and press "1". Real, actual [i]scenes[/i] that give me something to latch onto. Even without being given much, my curiosity is already piqued regarding many of these characters, their brief interactions leaving me wanting for more. The game is obviously inspired by Danganronpa, and while there doesn't need to be that degree of dialogue focus, there's a reason why I can remember the names of those games' casts and I can hardly remember the name of a single character from this one. There [i]is[/i] material to work with here, the character concepts have enough fuel in them to start a fire, the developer just unfortunately decided not to light it. I hope they reconsider and try making the game better in response to my and many others' negative feedback. I would love to see it.
